Back Again

"So. Uh."

Robert turned his head when Mona sat down next to him, watching her silently, waiting for her to continue. It was obvious she was going to, and just as obvious that she was going to say something unimaginative and unnecessary. But he let her do it anyway.

"How are you feeling?" There it was. "You were... dead for a pretty long time."

"Not that long." Five years, compared to nearly a hundred and twenty... Still. He looked away from her, up at the stars instead. "It wasn't that unpleasant, anyway."

That wasn't met with the hesitation he might have expected, and gotten, from her five years ago. "I'd wondered, actually. If you stood up to Ba'al like that knowing what was going to happen. You said immortality felt like a curse."

"It does. But I didn't die on purpose, exactly." He glanced back over to her. "I knew there was a chance he'd do something like that, and there was a chance it wouldn't kill me."

Mona looked a mix between triumphant and appalled. "You did know immortals could kill other immortals!"

"Of course I did. Do you remember the lake?"

That must have seemed like a non sequitur; Mona gave him an unimpressed look. "Yeah a lot of that night is like a really fast blur of trauma, Robert." She sounded ten again, and Robert hadn't laughed in decades, or he might have laughed then. But she did think about it, and it didn't actually take her long at all to remember, "That was when you used the bone blade to kill that monster."

"And I said..."

"That you only help once." Mona looked pretty pleased for a moment, despite her obvious weariness. "Ha! But I got you to help a second time, and for like, five years straight."

"No." That caught her visibly off guard, and he continued, "I said we were lucky that had been that human's monster, and that their human was already dead."

Mona blinked. "Yeah. Because if a monster kills..." She looked confused, and tried again even as he could see it slowly dawning on her, another affront, "If a human dies and... Oh my God Robert you asshole!"

"That's right."

"You lied to us!"

"More than once," Robert agreed, and looked away again, around at the others. Their odd little gang, their team, he supposed. Sleeping, though he wouldn't be surprised if at least one of them was listening in, just pretending to sleep. "If it helps any, I think you know all of them now."

"It doesn't help all that much, no!"

But they sat in silence, and it didn't take Mona long to calm down. "...It helps a little," she admitted. Probably, from the way she was saying it, a lot. "So you knew immortals could kill immortals, and you knew you were the only person there who could kill Ba'al... So you made the bone blade immortal? How did you know I'd do that?"

"You're sentimental." Sentimental enough to try to pick pieces of him up to help, maybe, to get part of him close enough to the blade... "But I couldn't," he admitted. "That's why I said it was a chance."

"Why didn't you just attack him yourself?"

"The only weapon I could have used was yours, and he would have killed me anyway if I'd tried to get it."

"Did you know it would make me immortal if I did it?"

He'd seen that question coming, but he still felt that uncharacteristic hesitance. "I... wasn't sure."

"You know, I almost forgot how much of a jerk you were."

"You didn't forget," he pointed out, reasonably. "You figured a lot of this out."

"So," Mona practically ignored him to plunge on, "it's probably karma for you making me some immortal, eternal kid without my permission, even when you heard me keep telling Ringley I didn't want to be a vampire or anything -- thanks for that, by the way -- but I'm sorry if I like." There she did pause, an awkward pause that lasted a few moments too long. "...Brought you back when you would have liked... you know... not being immortal anymore."

That time, when he looked away from her, it wasn't because it was easier not to look at her. He tilted his head back and fixed his unblinking eyes on the stars, one of those sights he hadn't gotten in the Shadow Dimension and a sight he certainly hadn't gotten while mostly dead and sleeping in Mona's bone blade, and he felt the cool grass under his cloth hands, and the dirt under the grass that he knew would stick to the fabric until he brushed them off, and maybe washed them. The wind was barely a breeze and the silence of the human world sounded like life and living things around them, a living world.

None of this felt new, exactly, and it could probably never feel new again no matter what he or anyone else did. But it felt close enough, and there was a thrum of contentment in him that he hadn't felt in a long while.

"I don't mind it," he said. "It was refreshing."