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The sunrise is just starting to lighten the sky, shadows easing into gray-blue brushstrokes, when Ava hears the patio door creak open. She smiles. Of course Beatrice has found her, as she always does.
A few moments later, the softness of a blanket wraps around her shoulders, then the warm security of Beatrice’s arms around her waist. Ava sighs and leans into the warmth, is struck as she always is by the luxury of familiarity. To have been given time for things as simple as this to become familiar. And even though they’ve gotten older, this - this has never gotten old. Not now, not in this life.
They stand together silently against the railing lining the patio, breathing in the slowly waking forest around them. They’ve been to these mountains before but it’s the first time in this particular cabin, with this particular view, at this particular point in time of her life, and Ava finds herself falling in love with it, like she does so many things, still.
Like mornings. Mornings had only become Ava’s favorite time of day in her second life - she will readily admit that she’d hated it before. She used to curse the morning in her first life, young and hopeless and alone, wishing desperately to be dead, to not be forced to live through what she did. But she did, and died, and now she is alive - again, again - and she takes in each morning with gratitude and awe.
She feels Beatrice rest her cheek against Ava’s temple and hears her yawn, long and heavy. Ava smirks. If Beatrice is feeling it - “How bad do you think everyone’s hangovers are gonna be?”
Beatrice lets out a soft sound: a laugh, exasperated, fond. A sound Ava’s heard many times over the years, one she loves deeply. “Well. Considering that someone made everyone take 5 rounds of shots in less than 30 minutes -”
“Hey, everyone agreed to the game!” Ava pulls back to catch the roll of Beatrice’s eyes. “It wasn’t my fault that Paula Deen says ‘butter’ every other word.”
Beatrice chuckles into Ava’s temple, doesn’t bother arguing. Not when she’d been right there with Ava in pouring shots, in goading Lilith and Mary on (neither Camila nor Yasmine had needed prompting). Ava grins, snuggles even closer. She’d spotted some pancake mix in the pantry and some bacon in the fridge; they’ll forgive her. Eventually.
Their mirth fades into quiet and they watch as hints of gold start to appear in the sky. “Did you have a good birthday?” Beatrice’s voice is soft in that gentle way she still has after all these years. It reminds Ava of falling through stone, of waking up in strong arms instead of atop cold concrete, of coming back, alive, to love.
‘How lucky I am to have her, to have this,’ Ava thinks as she turns the scant millimeter it takes for her lips to meet Beatrice’s cheek. “Best birthday yet.” It’s a call and response they do every year and the novelty of the routine has yet to fade. Not when Ava can still remember the emptiness of being dead; not when the simple truth of being alive still moves her.
The gold in the sky has melted into warmer tones when Ava finally speaks again. “You know,” she says, lightly to belie the weight of the thought; knows Beatrice will know. Continues anyway: “Technically I’m nineteen for the second time.”
She feels Beatrice breathe the statement in, steady in the face of all the things Ava brings - mischief and chaos being chief among these gifts - accepts it all for who she is. Beatrice shifts, presses her words to the crown of Ava’s head. “How does it feel?”
Ava takes her time in answering. It’s a simple question, with a simple answer. The last time she’d turned nineteen, she hadn’t lived to see the sunrise. She hadn’t known, then, what it felt like to run free on the sand, or to be stabbed, or how it felt to fall thirteen stories and break onto concrete; how it felt to fight knowing she was going to die. She hadn’t known, then, what it felt like to say goodbye to someone she loved who was still alive.
It’s the longest she’s been alive, now. Here, now, with each breath she takes, she’s outliving herself: her first life by one day, her second life by nearly two decades. She’s not sure if she died when she’d reached the other side but coming back felt like a third life and so she counts it as such. Plus, it lets her say “Third time’s the charm!” to everything, which is true in every way. ‘Charmed’ is exactly how she’s felt since returning, how she’s felt since she’s learned to live again.
Charmed as she is, it hasn’t been easy. Fighting is one thing, a hard thing, painful and terrible and terrifying; living in the aftermath has been another thing entirely. Not exactly the opposite (because let's face it, some bugs are just as terrifying as demons) but part of her hadn’t expected to survive, had been fully prepared for this third life to be the last. But Ava had already lived a life of sacrifice, knew now how to bite fiercely at Death’s hand when it dared come too close.
They had defied the odds, despite them not being in their favor: they had won. Now, they owed nothing to no one; their lives were now their own. To have and to hold, to grow old and older with.
And they have.
“I can feel, for one,” Ava answers, cheeky and matter-of-fact as she reaches down and squeezes Beatrice’s ass. “I’m hotter too.” Beatrice hums, slips her thumb underneath the hem of Ava’s shirt to swipe at the sensitive skin at her waist. Ava shivers, barely holds back a moan.
It takes her a moment for her mind - and her hands - to get back on track, to recall how it felt to look at herself in the mirror this morning. The face in the reflection hadn’t been all that different from what she remembered seeing at nineteen. There’s a sharpness, yes, but it was pretty much the same: pretty, with the same smile, a couple more laugh lines than before. Her eyes are still good (though part of her wants to get one of those fake glasses because she knows she could rock that look; plus, her and Bea could be a glasses couple) so are the rest of her senses; all her limbs intact, the metal in her back mostly dormant but keeping her alive through all the activity she fills her life with. She feels stronger, in body and mind; softer, in heart and soul combined; fiercer with what she calls ‘mine’; kinder with all that she knows now.
The biggest difference is joy. She’d known joy, sure, but there’s a stark difference when inspecting the two major halves of her life. Her first nineteen years had been full of despair, of making the best of the scraps she’d been given. Her second nineteen years have been a veritable buffet - of vocabulary in different languages, of cooking different dishes to varying degrees of success, of being awed by the wonders of the world, of being awed by the wonders of family and love.
“I feel so much more now. Everything, and more,” Ava finally whispers, morning on full display around them - warm and bright; so much life. In some ways it feels too little too fast when she looks at how much she’s done and how much she hasn’t yet. How one day she’ll die again without having done everything. But not the important things; not this time.
She sighs as Beatrice’s arms tighten, knows that neither of them will be letting go any time soon.
Thirty-eight. Who knew it’d be possible for her to live this long, to live at all. The girl who had nothing, now with everything, and more. It should be impossible to be even more in love - with the world, with Beatrice, with this life, with being alive - and yet here she is, charmed and changed and charged with the impossible: to live a life full and long.
She’ll take it. She’ll take everything she can. And more.
Ava turns and nips at Beatrice’s jaw. “Wanna help me make pancakes?”
Beatrice draws back enough for Ava to see the slight furrow in her brow. “Is that a euphemism?”
Ava throws her head back and laughs and thinks: ‘I fucking love being in love with this woman.’ Breathes in an nearly begins to cry: ‘I fucking love being alive.’
She laughs and loves it all, says in the midst of her own laughter, “It is now.” Ava waggles her eyebrows, tugs Beatrice back in and kisses her with all that she has: everything, and more