Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

1989

Clues that Matthew had managed to ignore or dismiss as insignificant all fell together when his eyes landed on a small announcement in the newspaper.

On page three, in a box with a thick, dark border, stood a notice about the upcoming annual high school reunion. With the local high school being so small, they hosted one joint reunion event every summer for all the graduating classes with a decennial anniversary. He would have filed that away as interesting-but-irrelevant, except that one of the listed dates pinged his memory.

Folding the newspaper carefully so that the announcement was on top, he stood up from the kitchen table and made his way out into the yard where his wife was at work in the garden.

"Judy, you graduated in '68, didn't you?"

The broad straw hat she wore wobbled as she looked up, tossing a weed onto the pile in the red wagon next to her as she did. She'd been at work all morning and had managed to clear most of the onslaught of weeds that arrived with a surprise burst of warm spring weather. The vegetable seedlings germinating on the porch wouldn't get transferred into the ground for a few more weeks yet, so only a swath of churned dirt showed her efforts.

"Sure did. Why?" The shadow from the hat's brim darkened her face, making her blue eyes appear brown.

Matthew waved the newspaper at her, even though she doubtlessly knew what it said. "High school reunion this summer. Looks like they're planning to have it down on the Frederick's farm, probably in that barn that gets rented out for weddings sometimes."

Judy's cheek twitched. She pulled off the gardening gloves, dropping them with finality on the weed pile, and pushed to her feet with a groan. "Again? I really thought I'd made some progress with getting the planning committee to consider other options. The VFW will be done with its renovations by then, and there's always the shelter in Memorial Park — though I suppose the mosquitoes will be a problem."

"Planning committee?" Matthew inquired. "I thought you were the planning committee?" Judy usually was, if not by choice, then by default. Very little happened in town where Judy didn't play a decision-making role.

She huffed a laugh. "Not this year. Old Man Butler graduated in '18 — he's the last one left from that class — and his grandkids wanted to be sure he'd have one last party before he shuffled off."

Matthew nodded thoughtfully, working through the math. He'd served with Leroy Butler in the Great War, in one of those coincidences of Immortal life that often criss-crossed them through the lives of the same people and families. Though, he hadn't learned of that particular connection until Judy's last high school reunion, long after she and Matthew had married and moved back to her home town.

"Why don't you finish up and come inside. I think we need to talk."

Matthew poured them both glasses of sweet tea from the pitcher Judy kept in the fridge, then started pondering how he was going to broach the problem. He'd told her about his Immortality shortly before they were married — he could not in good conscience expect someone to take a vow of "until death do us part" without understanding what the vow included — but they'd rarely spoken of it since. It mostly hadn't been a topic they needed to speak of, aside from the stray reminders as to why he didn't need to go to the doctor or dentist, and that there was a reason he couldn't be the decision maker about whether their daughter's injuries and illnesses required medical attention.

A few minutes later, Judy slipped in through the sliding glass door in their great room and headed to the bathroom to clean up. When she emerged, she'd traded the straw hat for a banana clip that pulled her hair back off her face and neck. Her skin was flushed from exertion, and she accepted the glass of tea gratefully.

"That's a pretty serious expression you're wearing," she pointed out. "Everything OK at work? Did one of the deputies quit?" She leaned forward, peering deeper into Matthew's eyes. "Did you finally catch a break on who's been blowing up the mailboxes, and learn that it's those Fitzgerald boys?"

Matthew bit back a chuckle. "All the deputies are still employed, last I checked. As for the mailboxes, we've known that for weeks; can't do much about it until we catch 'em in the act, though."

"I don't see why not," she grumbled.

"Because courts like to have hard evidence." He settled back onto the couch, careful to keep his body language loose. "What we need to talk about is … nothing like that." Glancing at the clock that hung over the doorway into the kitchen, he verified that Samantha was still at school. "It's the reunion." He blew out a breath, aware that he'd started his explanation off poorly. That was the problem with not getting to give it very often. "Correction: It's what the reunion means."

Judy scowled at him, rightfully confused. "Is this a hint that you want me to start dying my hair?" While it was a true that a few streaks of gray had started to appear in it, Matthew saw them at badges of honor rather than anything to be ashamed of.

He took her hand in his. Her skin was chilled and slightly damp from holding the glass and he rubbed it to warm it back up. "No, and this has nothing to do with your aging." With a squeeze, he clarified, "It's all about how I'm not."

"Oh." She dropped her gaze. "I guess I'd forgotten about that."

"I forget about it a lot, too. That's why reminders like for 20th high school reunions are so important. People are starting to notice, too. Just a few days ago, Mary Ellen, down at City Hall, asked me to give her husband some tips about keeping his looks."

"Mary Ellen only married Tom for his looks. That, and—"

"Judy—"

"I don't see why you're letting her get to you. It's just one comment."

"No, it's not. While I haven't said anything about them, there have been a lot. And not just words. It's strange looks and double-takes from people I haven't seen in awhile; it's jokes about Fountains of Youth and snide jabs about plastic surgery." He took in a breath, his gaze flicking toward the sliding door and the view it provided of the quiet yard that belonged to him and his family. They'd worked so hard for that, and soon he would have to leave it behind.

"Right now, it's just people sensing that something is off in their world." He squeezed her hands again, this time for his own support. "It's going to get worse, and quickly. You know how nasty people can be when they sense that someone isn't following the rules."

Judy nodded, all too aware of how people — especially in small towns — acted. They'd form ranks around their own just as easily as they could turn on anyone whom they decided wasn't.

"That's why I think we need to make plans for me to move on," Matthew stated.

"Move on?"

His lips pressed into a tight line; he hated this part of Immortality. "Not today, but very soon. A couple months, at the most. The longer I wait, the more likely it is that something will force my hand. I'm afraid I've learned that lesson the hard way."

Judy chewed her lip while considering — and making sense — of what he was saying. She would no doubt have a lot of questions, most of which were now years overdue for answers. At last she spoke, and made the decree that he'd worried she'd make: "Then I think this needs to be a family decision."

Samantha was a typical modern teenager, near as Matthew could tell. She wore the same style of acidwashed-and-ripped jeans as her classmates, usually paired with one of the seemingly endless number of black t-shirts that advertised some rock band or another.

He and Judy had adopted her at her birth, in a desire to round out their family, to help meet the social expectations that would make it easier for him to blend in, and to help out her sister. Her biological mother was one of Judy's younger sisters — a fact that everyone had successfully managed to keep quiet — which meant she had enough physical resemblance to Judy that no one questioned her parentage.

Now she sprawled on the couch in the family's living room, trying hard to look disaffected and cynical while Matthew set up what he had to say. She didn't know about his Immortality. They'd seen no reason to tell her. Not formally, anyway. However, he dropped a lot of hints.

"Do you remember the story about the Knight who won the Tournament and saved the Maiden's life?" he asked her. A smile tugged at his lips as he remembered who exactly the Maiden had been, and why her life had been in danger to begin with. If there was trouble, Amanda could always be trusted to leap straight in.

"Yeah?" Samantha squinted at him, her eyes lost behind the bangs that flopped across her face.

Matthew ran a hand through his hair. "That was me."

She kicked her feet against the arm of the sofa, as if trying to use it as a starting block to escape. "I knoooow."

"Samantha Louise, watch your tone," Judy reprimanded.

Matthew held up a hand, urging his wife to back off on the etiquette lesson. This wasn't the time. While he'd dropped hints, he thought he'd been careful to hide all the connecting details that would allow anyone to put them together.

"The Knight, the Conquistador, the Bandit Hunter in the Wild West, the Misguided Sheriff Who Saw the Error of His Ways, they're all you … well, the last one is also a ripoff of Robin Hood." She rolled to face him, which only succeeded in flopping the rest of her hair over her face. "Your characters are kinda all the same."

"My characters," he murmured. He had often enough been accused of not having much imagination, which was why he drew so liberally from real life events when he was pressed into coming up with a bedtime story. Heavily sanitized real life events, of course.

"All those stories were about you?" Judy interjected. "I assumed some of them were …. Have you ever had a job that wasn't in law enforcement?"

Matthew shrugged, suddenly self-conscious. "Conquistador is military."

Judy narrowed her eyes; for all that they didn't talk about, she wasn't oblivious to the kind of person she'd married. "Were you, by any chance, the general … or whatever the person in charge was called? The Captain, wasn't it?"

"I—"

A long, piercing yowl cut through the air and ended Matthew's attempt at a correction. The cry of utter fury ripped down Matthew's spine and put him instantly on guard. His hand slid toward his side, where normally sat his gun.

Or his sword.

With a cry of her own, Samantha rolled off the couch, landing hard on the carpeted floor, then popped to her feet the way only young people could do. "Corwin!" she shouted.

Another yowl cut through the air, this one more affronted than angry.

Matthew and Judy exchanged a glance, quietly accepting that it would be easier to deal with this and then resume the conversation than to try to ignore the continued racket. With Samantha in the lead, the three of them headed out the sliding door to the deck.

A roof overhang protected the deck from the worst of the southern sun, cutting both the brightness and the temperature by several degrees. It made for a pleasant place to enjoy meals when the heat and humidity grew too high to tolerate staying inside. At least, it would once Matthew got the bug screens mounted. He'd been putting off taking care of that chore—and now had another reason to regret his stalling.

On the deck table, stood their cat, his back arched and orange fur bristling, one paw raised in preparation to smack the intruder who had dared to venture into his territory. With another yowl, he lurched forward and swatted his warning.

His reflection in the kitchen window silently copied the move.

Samantha sighed, familiar with how this battle went. "Corwin! Get down!"

As could have been predicted, the cat didn't obey. Instead, he stalked closer to the window, his teeth bared. A few more inches, and his visual angle would change enough for him to lose sight of the "other" cat, and most likely any recollection of why he'd been fighting; until then, his anger only appeared to be growing.

The part of the day where the sun shone at the right angle to turn the kitchen window into a mirror, fortunately, did not last long, nor occur every day. Yet it did happen often enough that one would think that the cat would have figured out by now that he wasn't defending his family from a real intruder.

"We really need to do something about that window," Judy commented.

"Could get rid of the cat, instead," Matthew suggested. He'd never liked the animal. From the moment it moved into their lives by stealing a sausage off the grill while he was cooking it, Matthew only reluctantly put up with it because its charm had a way of minimizing its transgressions — not unlike his namesake. Also, because his daughter and the cat had fallen into immediate love with one another, and even he didn't dare interfere with that relationship.

"Dad, no!"

The yowling reached a new ear-splitting level, and now Matthew sighed. If the cat didn't stop, one of the neighbors was bound to call in a noise complaint. Worse, an attempted murder complaint.

No Immortal ever wanted to be under that kind of scrutiny, frivolous or not.

Knowing that his choice now lay only between what kind suffering, he stepped between the cat and the window.

His hope that blocking the reflection would stop the cat from trying to fight it died when Corwin spat his fury through barred fangs, and his ears flattened backward.

Then he leaped.

Matthew got his hands up in time to protect his face. The cat's claws tore into his arms and hands, both left unprotected from how he wore his shirts with their sleeves rolled up to his elbows. With effort, Matthew managed to hold back his yell of pain as he batted the cat away.

Corwin landed hard on the wooden deck. He lay stunned and still, caught in a strip of sunlight on the wooden planks. Samantha started toward him, her hand outstretched and cupped to touch his head. "Corwin?" she murmured. "Are you OK?"

The cat blinked, then sat up and began cleaning Matthew's blood off his paw, no more concerned about what it was or how it had gotten there than if he'd merely stepped in an unfortunately placed puddle.

The nerves in Matthew’s arm shrieked, sending out a set of mixed signals that vacillated from mere itchiness to agony to numbness. Corwin's claws had dug deep and dragged in stutters down his forearm and onto the back of his hand. Rivulets of blood ran from the wounds and soaked into the cuff of his shirt.

He sighed. This hadn't been how he'd planned to prove his abilities—though it was conveniently dramatic and bloody. In his experience, mortals never fully understood what rapid-healing looked like until they saw it for themselves—and given the alternatives, this would do.

"Matthew?" Judy caught his inspection, and perhaps misread the assessing furrow in his brow as being the result of shock. She reached for him, not unlike how their daughter had reached for the cat, then paused when he twisted away. "My goodness! Matthew! Let me see."

Over her shoulder, he addressed their daughter instead. "Samantha, come here. There's something I need to show you."

She shook her head. "Dad, I think Corwin's hurt. He's got blood in his fur." Her voice quavered, and Matthew could hear how hard she was fighting to keep it level so that she didn't spook the animal. As if, Matthew thought, the cat was smart enough to understand either her words or her tone.

As if in response to his thoughts, Corwin paused his ministrations and leveled a glare at Matthew, then heaved his butt around so he was facing the other way and resumed licking his paw with loud slurps.

Samantha tucked her own hands between her knees and leaned closer to him, murmuring, "It's OK, boy. I'm sure it's not a big deal. We'll get you fixed right up."

Knowing that he needed to catch her attention before his Quickening kicked in and his real wounds vanished, he pitched his voice sterner. "Saman—"

"I need to call Jenny! She'll know what to do!" Popping back to her feet, Samantha raced into the house to call her best friend. The sliding glass door whooshed open and slammed shut, and never once did she glance her father's direction.

Matthew rolled his lips together in a silent bid for patience. "She's not going to make this easy, is she?"

Judy ignored his question to level some of her own. "And you, Matthew? Are you going make it easy and allow me to look at those wounds? You're going to need some fixing up too. Cat scratches are nothing to laugh at." She snagged his arm and yanked it—and him—to the edge of the deck and into the direct sunlight where she could better inspect the wounds.

"I'll be fine in a couple minutes," Matthew pointed out. There was no point in arguing with Judy when she got it into her mind to take charge, and she had gone into full nurse mode now.

The first crackle of Quickening licked along one of his wounds, and Judy yelped.

"What was that?"

She'd never seen him heal before, Matthew realized, not in any meaningful way. Sure, he'd had his share of minor shaving and paper cuts, scalds from hot water and overheated engines, and assorted bumps and scrapes that every person experienced. She'd had the same litany of injuries, with her most serious being a crushed thumb from their toddler once pulling the car door closed at the wrong time. Even on her, most of those injuries were quickly forgotten. That his healed in seconds rather than days merited little notice.

He'd had some more serious injuries in their time together, but none that she'd known about. What was the value in sharing that he'd been impaled if there was no stab wound, or that he'd broken bones in the line of duty when the fractures healed before his shift ended?

What was the value in telling her how people sometimes hunted him if he always managed to talk them into changing their minds?

He'd learned the hard way that the full truth about Immortality was best treated as a need-to-know.

None of this needed to be known right now. The Quickening would work at the speed that it worked, and there was precious little he could do about it. He'd explained this all to her, more or less. If she hadn't understood it then, she was about to.

Matthew led them into the house so he could get cleaned up. As he passed the doorway to the living room, he spotted Samantha hunched into a corner with the phone pressed to her ear. The coiled cord was pulled taut across the kitchen, so he changed paths and headed for the bathroom sink instead.

"Every time?" Judy asked, following close behind. "Just like that?" She seemed more surprised than he'd anticipated.

"I've never hidden this from you," he pointed out. Leaning close to the mirror, he inspected the blood stains on his shirt. The cuff of one sleeve was soaked, and the front showed several speckles and splashes from when he'd pushed the cat away. The shirt was a loss, he decided. How times had changed. A mere hundred years before, he would have tried to salvage the item. Now the effort of getting the blood out wasn't worth the cost of buying a replacement. Besides, he had several other shirts already in his closet—which was also a recent change, in the scheme of his lifetime.

"You've also never shown me." She watched as he stripped out of his shirt and tossed it into a wad on the floor. "Does it hurt?"

"Getting injured hurts me the same as it hurts you." It was hard to keep the weariness out of his voice. Rapid healing wasn't the same as invulnerability, nor did it come with any resistance to pain. It only meant that he recovered faster and near-completely from the gravest of wounds.

Judy stepped closer and wrapped her arms around his waist, resting her head against his naked shoulder. "I meant the healing. Electricity zapping all over the place like that doesn't look real pleasant. I half expected your shirt to catch fire. Fabrics are flammable, you know."

Despite himself, a grin tugged at his mouth. "I can honestly say that I've never lit my clothes on fire while healing." Although, he could think of a few times in his life where it could have been useful. He turned on the taps and stuck his arm under the water. The remaining blood rinsed away easily, needing only a quick application of soap and a few scrubs with his fingers to wash away all trace.

No sooner had he patted his arm dry than Judy grabbed at it again. She traced the path from the claw marks up his forearm and into the bend of his elbow, then brushed her fingers back down the length of his arm. Goosebumps rose in the path and Matthew shivered from the touch

"It's all gone," she commented. "No scabs. No scars. Your arm hair even grew back." She lifted her gaze to meet his in the mirror. "It's like nothing happened at all."

Matthew offered a slight nod, careful to not give in to his urge to offer explanations. He'd vowed that, with this relationship, he'd let Judy take the lead in deciding how much to know and when to learn it. As smart and forgiving as she was, the world she lived in no longer had a lot of room for people who lived—and died—by the sword. He wouldn't have been able to bear it if she'd learned the truth, and feared him for it.

"No wonder you've never been bothered by mosquitoes!"

A chuckle burst from his mouth. That was the conclusion she'd reached? "They still bite and sting. Bees, horseflies, fleas … I can't escape them any more than you can."

"But you only have to suffer for a few seconds. Eighteen years of camping and picnics with you, and I thought you were suffering just as much as the rest of us; that you just weren't the complaining type."

"I'm not the complaining type," he pointed out. "There's no value in talking about problems unless the goal is to solve them."

"So says the immortal man," Judy replied, a teasing lilt entering her voice. "I'll have you know that I've learned a lot of really juicy information from listening to people complain. You do it right, and people won't even know what they've shared."

"No wonder you have the whole town wrapped around your finger." He'd always admired the way she could take a disparate group of people and soon have them all circling around her. It was one of the qualities that he'd fallen in love with, in fact. He tightened his arm around her, feeling the plastic of her banana clip press into his arm. "I'm going to miss you," he murmured. Leaving always hurt, no matter how many times he had to pack up a life and say goodbye to people he loved. Most of the time, he had little choice in the matter, as disease or war had forced his hand and he had no one to take with him.

In some ways, that was easier.

Like a tide that had reached its high mark, their apparent difference in age had vanished and had begun to turn the other direction. The few strands of gray hair on her head twinkled like tinsel under the bathroom's strip lights. Fine lines creased the corners of her mouth and blue eyes. And her once pointed features had filled out and softened. She wasn't old—far from it—but she was visibly older.

He, of course, was not.

It wouldn't be long before merely being seen with his wife would draw even more scrutiny. While society accepted—in some ways, even rewarded—older men with younger wives, it could be vicious about punishing the opposite. Especially, when the people who made up that society remembered that the difference had once been the other way.

Judy's gaze sharpened. "Matthew, you listen to me: Me and Samantha, we're not going anywhere."

He opened his mouth to point out that he would be the one leaving. Obviously. He couldn't ask them to pack up and leave the town in which they had such strong roots. Samantha only had two years of high school left, with kids, like Jenny, whom she'd been friends with since she could barely sit upright in the baby swing at the park. If he was careful, he might even be able to last until after she graduated—though experience had taught him to not make promises like that.

Judy jabbed a finger at his reflection, silencing him. "Don't you dare argue. I'm not a fool. I know what you mean by 'moving on,' and I want to make it very clear that you will not be severing your ties with us, nor us with you."

Matthew pulled away, more to get a clean shirt from the closet than because he wanted to leave her embrace. "I will be ending this life and starting a new one," he said. He'd have to die. A car accident would make the most sense. Easy enough to stage and wouldn't cause any issues with the insurance about Acts of God or suicide. He'd walk them through the details on that after he'd thought it through more.

For now, he kept it vague: "New job, new address, new history … new name." Grabbing the first shirt he saw, he pulled it on. "You and Samantha can't be part of it. That's not how this works." He forced back the emotion that threatened to choke him and focused instead on the buttons. They seemed to be somehow too small to grasp and too big to fit through the button holes.

A soft voice broke his concentration.

"Dad?"

Chapter Text

With the closet door open, it had blocked his view of the rest of the master bedroom. At some point, Samantha had joined them, perhaps to give an update on what she thought they should do about the cat. She sat now on the edge of their bed, tears streaking the reddened skin of her face.

As if she felt required to justify her presence, Samantha stated, "Jenny's mom had to use the phone, so I…." She trailed off into a loud hiccup.

Judy found her words first. "Samantha, honey! How long have you been there?" As she pushed past Matthew, she rested a hand on his arm as if to say, "I've got this."

Samantha shook her head, the question of time meaningless. It had been long enough. Her swollen gaze sought out her mom first, then Matthew. In a near whisper, she asked, "Are you and Mom getting a divorce?"

"Oh, sweetheart, no." Judy had pulled Samantha close to her—a mother consoling her young child, although Samantha was nearly the same height now—and was stroking her hair and continuing to murmur assurances to her.

"A divorce?" Matthew echoed. He froze, shirt still only partially buttoned. His thoughts roiled from the possibilities the single question raised. Could it be that simple? He raked a hand through his hair. "That … that could work."

He knew why he hadn't thought of it himself. As a Catholic man straight out of the thirteenth century, divorce had never been a legal, religious, or socially accepted way to dissolve a marriage, except in the most extreme situations. Only "'til death do us part" would do. While he was aware of the recent cultural shifts that had made divorce more common—alarmingly so, if he dared voice his opinion on the topic—it hadn't crossed his mind as an option he could use.

"Jude," he interrupted, "it could work. I really think it could work." He wanted to pull his wife off the bed and twirl her around; he wanted to grab his daughter and pull her into a huge hug.

He could move on to his next life without having to force his family to suffer through his death or funeral, without requiring them to put on a show of grief for the neighbors and community, and without needing to sever all ties with them. A divorced man would be expected to move away, yet no one would ask questions if he returned from time to time for significant events. And the legalization of no fault divorce meant that he could leave without saddling his family with the scandals of adultery or abuse.

He could still call and visit.

He could join them for vacations — at least for a few more years.

Maybe Samantha would be willing to choose a university in whatever city he ended up in.

The solution was so neat!

But his two favorite people had only heartbreak in their expressions, and he'd been alive long enough to have learned painful lessons about how to deal with that.

He dragged the armchair over and sat down opposite them. "I need you both to listen to me." He waited until he had their attention, fighting to keep his demeanor calm and level. "There is nothing I want more than to spend your whole lives with you. Unfortunately—" Pinching his eyes, he pushed back the pain of memory along with the rest of the sentence. That he would outlive them both hurt too much to say. A deep breath in and out helped to center him. "Samantha, I'm going to tell you something that's not easy to believe, but your mom and I think you're old enough to handle it."

Samantha's eyes ticked to Judy, and Judy nodded back, though neither of them visibly relaxed.

Breaking the news gently with reference to what she already knew hadn't worked, nor had the direct approach of showing how he could heal. A simple statement of his identity could work, but stood a better chance of angering her further because of its unbelievability.

He pushed back his sleeves and held out his arms, hoping that she'd see the lack of wounds—for all the good it would do, since she never noticed he'd been injured. "Sam–"

Before he could say anything else, she held up a hand. "You don't need to make such a big deal of things; I already know I'm adopted."

Matthew stopped, caught open-mouthed. He met Judy's eye, and she shrugged her own surprise. Samantha knew? They'd never told her, in part because they didn't want to risk her sharing that information with anyone else. The more people believed that he, Judy, and their daughter was a traditional family, the less likely they were to notice all the ways in which they weren't.

Yet, she'd already known and had kept it to herself. That boded well for the next secret.

And Matthew couldn't pass the opportunity to take the opening she'd provided. A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth in recognition for what they shared. "So was I," he told her.

Samantha shook her head, flopping her swath of bangs over her face like a veil. "You were?"

Though accurate, it wasn't completely true—and Matthew wanted her to know the truth. "It's more precise to call it fostering. The … system worked very differently back then."

"No kidding!" she exclaimed, kicking a foot against the edge of the mattress. "You had all that hippie stuff going on, right? Peace, love, flower power."

Did the Hundred Years War count as any of those, he wondered? He flashed on an image of plate armor in psychedelic colors with macram&acutee; riding tack, then shoved it back into the darkness where it belonged. No, besides a lot of alcohol and a shortage of bathing, there didn't seem to be that many similarities.

"Hm, no. Not for me. It was … a little longer ago than that." Another breath, and he launched into his story. "I was probably about six when the Earl noticed me. Until then, I'd been raised with the other children of the outdoor staff, mostly the stable hands and groomsmen. So, when the Earl's grandson grew old enough to start learning warcraft, the Earl brought me into the household to be his son's companion and friend."

Samantha's mouth tightened and spots of pink bloomed high on her cheeks. "I thought you were going to tell me something real, not this … not this story. I'm too old for little kid stories, you know. I'm not a little kid anymore." She started to stand up, but Judy held her back.

"We know," Judy stated. "I had a hard time believing it all too. Listen to him." To Matthew, she asked, "This was, what, in the Middle Ages?"

"Middle Ages?" Samantha interrupted. "You expect me to believe that Dad was born in, like, Shakespeare's time? That he's some kind of royalty? And that he's English?" Each question came out louder than the last, until Matthew reflexively glanced at the bedroom windows to verify that they were closed.

They were, and the blinds were pulled too, cutting the sunlight into thin strips of brightness against the opposite wall.

But he had to face the fact that he needed to speed this up. Samantha was rapidly getting too upset to be reasonable, and he wasn't doing much better.

Matthew rose to his feet, pushing the chair out of the way. "I am Matthew of Salisbury, ward of Earl Salisbury, William Longesp&acutee;e, and I was well over three hundred years old before Shakespeare's parents were born."

Samantha regarded him, the pink in her cheeks brightening. Finally, she provided her assessment: "You don't sound very English."

Matthew dropped his head back, imploring the ceiling for help with dealing with this teenager. "That's because we all spoke French," he snapped. "What are the schools teaching you in history classes?"

Samantha lifted a shoulder in a dismissive shrug. On her fingers, she ticked off: "Pilgrims, Revolutionary War, Civil War, World War I, and World War II. They keep telling us we'll cover the Korean and Vietnam wars, but we run out of time every year. I think they don't want us to know the truth." A beat, and she added, "You don't sound French either."

"It's not important what accent your father does or doesn't have," Judy corrected. "What matters is that he doesn't age." Titling her head, she gave him a considered once-over. "He doesn't look a day older than when we first met."

That wasn't precisely true, because Matthew always started his identities clean-shaven and then let more facial hair accumulate as the years passed. He could look several years older or younger than his physical age. It was a common trick for all male Immortals, though its efficacy had limitations from how the culture marked class and rank that had to be carefully monitored.

That distinction didn't need to be examined right now.

"That's what your mother and I were talking about," Matthew explained, gentling his tone. No matter how carefully he explained this, he knew it wasn't going to be pleasant to hear. "The time has come … where I have to leave. People are starting to ask too many questions, and for someone like me, that can get dangerous."

Samantha stared at him in a silent challenge, and Matthew braced himself. Immortality didn't fit into most people's understanding of reality, and getting them to make room for it rarely happened easily. He didn't need to get the idea through to her tonight, at least, but he hoped that she wouldn't completely steel herself against it.

"So you are getting divorced," Samantha stated. It wasn't a question.

"How I leave is a discussion we need to have as a family." Matthew sat back down in the chair, crossing his hands over his knees. "So is when. It doesn't need to happen tomorrow—but it does need to happen. I'm sorry."

"For what it's worth," Judy interjected, "I went into this relationship knowing that this day would come. I just—" She flapped a hand against the air, as if hoping that there was still some string out there she could pull to change the outcome—"didn't expect it to come so soon."

"It always does,” Matthew agreed. He rolled his lips together, perhaps in a precursor to say more, or perhaps because he had nothing more to say. No matter how far away the future seemed, it always caught up with him faster than he was prepared for.

The silence dragged out. Samantha started examining her nails, then picking at them. He'd seen her do the same thing when stuck on a homework problem; she was thinking, trying to grasp the shape of the problem so that she could figure out how to take it apart.

Judy’s attention drifted to the far wall, where it seemed to get stuck. Her eyes began to mist over and she dabbed at the corner of one with her pinky finger. Matthew didn’t have to turn to see what she was looking at; their wedding picture hung on that wall, just as it always had from the day they’d moved into this house.

“I could use a fresh glass of tea. Anyone else?” Matthew suggested, more as an excuse to break the impasse than because he needed anything to drink. Without waiting for an answer—in this family, he could assume that they all would say yes—he headed back to the living room.

A glance out the glass doors confirmed that Corwin had moved on to wherever he went when he wasn’t causing chaos in Matthew’s life. With a slight shake of his head, he quietly acknowledged once again how appropriate the name choice had been, as well as the possibility that he’d somehow forged the cat’s personality with it, then continued to the kitchen.

Disregarding the drink he’d named, he headed to the liquor cabinet instead and poured himself a healthy glass of whisky. The scent of smoked wood wafted up to his nose, and he closed his eyes as he breathed it in.

His family had taken the news … about as well as could be expected.

In some ways, that made the next steps more difficult. He didn’t have the option to backtrack or change his mind, and now he knew even better what he had to say goodbye to. Judy and Samantha would have a lot of questions over the coming months, but that was only natural.

“Dad?”

His eyes cracked open. Samantha stood in the living room, head bowed and hands curled into fists at her side. “Hm?”

“Did you drink from a magic spring?” she asked. “Is that how it happened?”

The sip of whisky already in his mouth threatened to go down wrong, and he had to swallow it carefully to avoid choking before answering, “Did I do what?”

“Like Tuck,” she offered, as if he was supposed to know what that meant.

He raised his brows in question, and Samantha heaved out a sigh of the aggrieved. Such a response from a child to an adult would’ve been unthinkable only a few years before. As much as he wanted to reprimand her for it now, he felt like he’d already done enough to her. Further discipline could wait.

“You remember … that book I had to read for school last year. Tuck Everlasting, about the family who stopped aging? Is that what happened to you?”

He did, now, remember the book. He also remembered wondering if the author might be a fellow Immortal, or know someone who was, because of how well the problems of immortality had been captured. The only part that had struck him as improbable was the existence of a magic spring that would cause the immortality. Though, for narrative purposes, he supposed it was as good an explanation as any. “No, no. No springs.” He took a sip of his whisky, and tried to concentrate on the flavors as they rolled around in his mouth.

Samantha’s fists tightened and pressed into her legs. The denim of her jeans tightened, and he thought he heard the rips on the knees tear further. In a quiet voice she asked, “Am I going to stop aging too?”

Why would she think that, he wondered? He wasn’t her genetic parent, which she’d already stated she knew. That Immortals couldn’t have children was irrelevant.

Biting her lip, she peered out from behind her bangs. “Because we’re both adopted.”

Ah, that explained it. He shook his head. “No. That part is a coincidence.”

“Oh,” she breathed.

Matthew couldn’t tell from that what she had wanted the answer to be. The choices were no easier for him, either, if there were a choice to be made. The possibility that he could raise a child, escort him or her into adulthood, and then get to hold on to that relationship past the bounds of a mortal lifespan had an allure; he couldn’t deny that. No matter how many times he did it, leaving his children behind did not grow easier.

But, for him, the possibility of a person he raised becoming Immortal also meant the possibility that some day he and his own child would have to raise swords against one another in the Game. It was hard enough to imagine doing so against his students. However, the relationships he had with them—deep and loyal though they may be—did not start with a babe in arms.

As a purely academic exercise, he was curious about which option she’d prefer. She’d reached the age where she was starting to push away from her parents, exhibiting small attempts at psychological independence in her clothing, language, and attitudes. None of them lasted long, though. Not yet, anyway. It reminded him of when she’d first learned to walk and she’d do a lap of the room, then cling to his legs afterward, in need of the reassurance that her explorations weren’t going to lead to abandonment.

If she had the option to be immortal and spend eternity with him, would she take it? Before he could ask, she continued: “Dana said that she wishes her parents would get a divorce.” This would be the third member of the friend group she’d formed on the playground.

“Why is that?” Matthew asked, forcibly dragging his attention back to their conversation.

That Ross and Shannon weren’t getting along didn’t surprise him. He’d known them both from his time pushing swings, catching flailing children on the slide, and encouraging and monitoring their escapades on the monkey bars. There’d always been a tension between them, which he had chalked up to the stresses of Ross being a long-distance trucker who often spent large tracts of time away from home, while Shannon tried to juggle her part-time job at the dentist office, with raising their four children.

Samantha shrugged. “I dunno. She says that her mom tells her what to say to her dad and her dad tells her what to say to her mom, and neither of them will talk to each other. It's really uncomfortable, and I don’t like to go to her house anymore.”

Matthew opened his arms and Samantha fell right into the embrace. “Your mom and me—it’s not the same thing.” He placed the promise gently onto the top of her head and felt her hair wisp from his breath. “It’ll still hurt, and it’s going to ask you to be strong in ways you never knew you could be.” Tightening his hold, he continued, “But, if we divorce, it’ll be so we can continue to be a family, not to end the one we have.”

The first of their last family dinners passed in near silence. Everyone had a lot of thoughts to mull over, the heaviness of which slowed the speed of their forks and, more than once, caused one or the other of them to pause with a forkful of food hanging in the air, forgotten. Matthew had expected that Judy and Samantha would have a lot of questions for him, the anticipation of which clenched his stomach into a hard knot. That none of those questions had yet to manifest deadened the tastes of the meal.

There was a line he needed to tread between telling them what they needed to know to make informed decisions, and letting slip how much he was choosing to withhold. Despite all his experience, he still struggled with navigating that line.

Though Judy had not exhibited the open curiosity about Matthew’s life that mortals usually did on discovering how long he’d been alive, that didn’t indicate a lack of attention or interest. The skills she’d honed monitoring the doings of the other people in town were no doubt employed at home, too.

Some unannounced signal indicated that dinner had ended and the three of them set down their forks onto plates that had yet to be emptied, and that’s when the first question rolled forth.

Judy retrieved the scratch pad and pen from by the phone and dropped it on the kitchen table. She cleared her throat and glanced between Matthew and Samantha. “We’re going to need a reason, so let’s start with that. Why would you and I get a divorce?” Poising her pen over the paper, she waited.

Matthew blinked. He’d anticipated that they would start with discussing his age, perhaps with a checklist of gotcha questions about historical events and people he’d encountered. Sometimes loved ones wanted to know if he knew others like him, which inevitably let to questions about whether they also had met any.

Maybe he’d have to navigate revealing to Sam that she wasn’t his first child, and Judy wasn’t his first wife. That truth was hard for mortals because the idea that he’d lived other lives made less sense to them than the idea that he’d merely lived. No matter how careful he was, he’d found that his loved ones struggled to understand how he could have had whole other families without compromising how much he loved or devoted himself to any of them.

That Judy had jumped right into the logistics of ending his life with them surprised him; though, he supposed it shouldn’t have. She was nothing if not pragmatic.

“What’s wrong with ‘irreconcilable differences’?” Matthew stacked their plates and pushed them out of the way. It seemed the most fitting reason, considering that the whole issue was the irreconcilable difference between his inability to age and the community’s expectation that he should. “Isn’t that what people say now?” He still couldn’t believe that a marriage could be dissolved that easily, even though he’d lived through every step of the cultural changes that made it so.

“It is,” Judy agreed. She narrowed her eyes at him, as if unable to believe that she needed to say more. “And nobody would believe it."

“Who cares if they believe it?” Samantha asked, indignantly. She crunched down on a piece of ice in her mouth and glowered toward the center of the table. “It’s none of their business.”

With a sigh, Judy lowered the pen. If she’d ever thought her family-members understood the world the way she did, she’d now been painfully corrected. “We live in a small town, sweetheart. That’s for both of you, by the way. You have to have figured out by now that everyone will make it their business. Look what happened when Lauren O’Neill took that ‘girls’ vacation’ to Santa Fe. She’d hardly been gone a day before the rumors started circulating that she was cheating on her husband. The rumors, I should remind you, were all true.”

In unison, Matthew and Samantha tossed up their hands in defeat, in a gesture so alike that there was no questioning their family relationship.

“I figure,” Judy continued, “if we get a couple of the broad details worked out, I can start dropping hints at the class reunion. A little damage control now can save us a lot of trouble later.” She tapped her finger against the page absently. “No, the worst thing we can do is keep this a secret.”

Samantha crunched down on another ice cube, and Matthew winced at the sound; she was lucky that her teeth didn’t break. “How did people know?”

“Hm?” Judy tapped the end of the pen against the page, her focus so strong that Matthew could see her working through and discarding possibilities by the way her eyes crinkled and her tongue flicked in and out of her mouth.

Samantha sighed. “About Mrs. O’Neill. How did people know that she was cheating? Did someone rat her out?” She propped her arms on the table and leaned closer. “I’ll bet it was the mailman. He probably saw….” She trailed off as she registered the disapproving expressions from both her parents. Her shoulders slumped. “Fine.”

“It’s one thing to monitor the rumor mill,” Judy explained, “and another to be swept away in it.” She patted Samantha’s hand in reassurance. “Don’t worry; I’ll teach you everything you need to know. You’re old enough now to start learning.”

The hum of the refrigerator’s motor filled the room as all of them descended back into their thoughts. Matthew regretted having pushed his plate away; at least moving the knife and fork around would have given him something to do with his hands.

“I think,” he finally said, “that this is a problem we can’t solve tonight.” A breath, and then a necessary acknowledgment. “This isn’t my first time … moving on …, and even I don’t know what to do. Perhaps we should table the discussion for now.”

Judy rolled her lips together, tapped the pen in a rapid staccato on the notepad, then nodded. “The reunion is months away yet. There’s no sense in rushing. That’s how you end up with stories that don’t stand up to scrutiny.” She looked meaningfully at Samantha and waggled her eyebrows. “Like, forgetting to tell your girlfriends to not call you at home while you were gone.”

It took Samantha a second, and then she giggled. “Bogus.”

“Sloppy,” Judy translated. “We are not going to make mistakes like that … not with centuries of experience to draw on.” She smiled at Matthew, and his heart clenched. Saying goodbye to her was going to hurt.

“So, if we’re not doing this tonight,” Samantha ventured, “can we do something fun instead? Maybe something as a family?”

Shoving his chair back, Matthew stood up. With his awakened awareness of how their time together was coming to an end, the remaining moment became that much more precious. “That’s an excellent idea. Samantha, go put your shoes on.” Another idea came to him, and this one melted some of the anxiety that had been gripping him. “Judy, get the camera. I’ll meet you both at the car. What's still open? Mini-golf? Bowling alley?"

"The bars!" Samantha yelled, voice carrying from the back of the house.

"We're not going to the bars," Judy admonished. "You're still too young."

"The park," Matthew decided. It was too late, and they were too full, for a picnic, but the river trail would be beautiful this time of night. Plus, it led right to their favorite spot of all: "And then ice-cream."

That, he thought, would give him the whole beauty and sweetness of their lives together to hang on to, no matter where he ended up going next without them.