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“Would you look at that,” Raven says to herself. “You can do a little braid on your hair now.”
She’s looking at Irene’s reflection in the mirror. Irene's lips tilt up slightly. “Is that so?”
Raven nods, still mostly to herself. She resumes brushing her hair, now aware of the length. It used to be so short when they first met, but that had been a few years back already. Now her hair is down to her shoulders. So odd.
Time passed so strangely for Raven. This mutation, it didn't just slow it—it seems like her mutation hit a point where it just stopped her aging. She has been looking like this for longer than she can remember. Same hair length, same skin, same everything. But now…
She’s faced with the fact that Irene's hair still grows.
It shouldn't hit her out of nowhere, that her beloved's mutation didn't also include some sort of immortality. Time stops for Raven now, with her left hand on Irene's hair and the right one holding the brush. She'll keep aging, and Raven will keep being the same.
It's the most terrifying thought that has occurred to her.
“Is there something wrong, Raven?” Irene asks. Raven knows, just from the tone, that Irene knows the answer already. She's giving Raven a chance to decide to talk about it, or not.
She appreciates the choice, because she doesn't know how she feels about this yet. She resumes her brushing.
“It's alright,” Raven replies. “I got caught up in my thoughts, that's all. Do you want a small braid?”
Irene smiles again. She takes a second to note the skin, the smoothness of it. Perhaps one day beautiful lines would show when she smiled. It's as terrifying as it is comforting.
“Would it look good?” Irene asks.
“Everything looks good on you.”
“Oh, charmer. Then yes, I would love one.”
Raven shakes off the fears, leans forward, and presses a kiss to the back of her neck. “As you wish.”
“You have one gray hair,” Raven points out.
Her tone might sound a little harsh. She doesn't mean it to be. It just—it caught her off guard, that's all. Revising their plans while brewing tea for both of them, she had simply looked over her shoulder when Irene was talking. And she spotted it there.
Irene turns her head to her direction. “Do I?”
Raven reaches out, ready to pluck it out, but lowers her hand immediately. She turns around to pour the tea in their cups, instead.
“You do,” she confirms. “Have you been stressed?”
Irene laughs. “My dear, I always am. But I'm forty now. I have to say, it was about time.”
Forty? Raven freezes again. That couldn't be. It was only yesterday when they celebrated her thirty-second birthday, it couldn't have been—
How is she forty?
Worryingly enough, how old is Raven?
“Time passes by strangely,” Raven says, just to fill in the silence. She sits next to Irene and is helpless to smile when her partner gives her a grateful cheek kiss. “Makes no sense that you are forty.”
“I imagine you haven't aged a day,” Irene muses, hands wrapping around her cup. Raven checks again, just to see if there are lines on her skin now. There aren't. Or, well—there aren't any yet. “Always, in my visions, you look the same. I often wondered if it was a trick of my mutation or if it was simply like that.”
“It's simply like that,” Raven confirms. Looking inside herself, she finds traces of bitterness. But over what? Over herself not growing old? Over Irene doing the opposite? “What can I say? Good genes.”
Irene shakes her head, laughing, and ah—Raven can see the beginning of lines when she smiles. It breaks her heart as well as warms it. She leans in and kisses her unexpectedly, taking Irene by surprise, but not unpleasantly.
“You looked pretty,” Raven says as an explanation. Her eyes focus on the single gray hair on her head. More to come, for sure.
“Why, thank you. I will be sure to look like this every day.”
Later, Raven finds a mirror and looks at her hair.
Perfectly red, as it always is.
She barely holds back from smashing the glass.
“I'm just saying it makes you look old,” Raven reiterates.
“Mom, come on. Ah'm not a child anymore!” Rogue proudly announces, much to her fond dismay. “An' ah look like Destiny now.”
“I can't confirm that right now, dear, but I am taking your word for it,” Irene comments from the kitchen.
“She’s being honest,” Raven confirms. If Rogue kept dying her hair white, well, it would not be different from Irene’s.
She turns to look at her lover again. Her hair is white, long, and there are more wrinkles than before scattered across her skin. She smiles. It fills her with adoration, to have seen Irene’s hair slowly turn white, to have counted her wrinkles as they came out. And yet—it gnaws at her, the tell-tale signs of aging. So inescapable, so unavoidable.
Raven hadn’t fixed the world like she hoped to do by now. Irene’s hair had been short and a dark brown when they first met, almost bordering on black. Then it grew back, flowy and soft and beautiful. And then it started to gray—and now, not a single dark hair could be found in her hair. She had lost count on the amount of time they had been together; but she should have achieved something by now. Shouldn’t they?
Her eyes divert to Rogue. Rogue isn’t something to achieve, she’s their daughter, and now she’s seventeen. Soon, she’ll also be a victim of aging: she will also have the urge to leave home, she will begin showing even more signs of the years passing by. She kisses both Irene and Raven on their cheeks as she runs off on her mission, and Raven watches her go.
Everyone changes, everyone grows, but she’s still the same.
“Did it actually look bad?” Irene asks once Rogue leaves. “What is she doing to her hair?”
Raven waves her hand around. “Teenagers. I don’t get them. She has two white streaks now. I suppose she feels rebellious.”
Irene smiles, “Isn’t that why you love her?”
God help her, it is.
“I hate it when you’re right,” Raven says, smiling back at her. She goes to where she’s standing behind the counter, slides in next to her, and rests her head on her shoulder. “She’s growing up too fast.”
“Existential thoughts, my dear? It’s normal for every parent. I have them, too.”
“Do you? You can see into the future,” she muses, “I imagine you have already let her go.”
Sighing deeply, Irene reaches for her hand, interlacing their fingers. Raven takes a look at them, at her unchanging hand and at her lover’s hand a little wrinkly, still soft, still as beautiful as the first time she held it.
“It’s true,” Irene says softly. “I have let her go, and I have lost her more times than I can count. It should give me an advantage, and I had truly hoped it would.”
“Sounds like it didn’t.”
“It didn’t. It only makes me more aware of every second. Knowing when you are going to lose someone makes you treasure every instance with them, but also makes you painfully aware of all the seconds you have left. Yes, I’d say it might be worse to be aware of it.”
Raven kisses her hand, hums. “Have you lost me yet?”
Irene shakes her head. “You’re the only one I never lose.”
“Do I lose you, then?”
A beat of silence passes between them.
“Raven, I love you too much to lie to you.”
Raven smiles humorlessly. “So I lose you, then. Can I get a date?”
“No,” Irene answers firmly. “You cannot get one. Don’t put yourself through counting down the days, my love. Foresight is not for everybody.”
She takes a good look at Irene. She leans in and kisses her, not wanting to be occupied by the thoughts that one day, life will claim her. She could not outrun the inevitability of death, even when Raven could. Her killer will be the passage of time, and Raven has no means to defeat that enemy.
She would have to learn to be okay with that information.
She doesn’t want to.
In the end, Irene’s killer is called David Haller.
When Irene opens her eyes again, Raven holds back from pinching herself.
Her black hair. Her skin—almost looking wrong without the lines, without the wrinkles. Her face, as if she’s looking at an old photograph from the thirties. Irene Adler, wholly alive, having defeated the inevitability of aging.
“Welcome back,” she says, with the certainty that what they have is immortal.