#oops i feelingsed

[qqueenofhades]

(Sorry for going through your tags and liking practically everything. I just watched the Old Guard last night after seeing all your posts about it. Loved it!) A plot bunny that came to me and you can have it is picturing the four staring into mirrors and repeating facts about themselves, their birth names, their birth place and year, their parents etc. So that they dont forget them over the centuries even as they have to modernize everything about themselves.

He looks at himself in the mirror one morning, Joe still asleep in their bed behind him, and starts the recitation he must sometimes do.

“My name is Nicolo di Genova,” he mutters to himself, turning on the faucet. “I was born in the Republic of Genoa in summertime, God’s Year 1070. My parents were Domenico and Elisabetta di Genova, and we lived in a house by the Porto. My brothers were Matteo and Pietro. My sisters were -- " he pauses, crosses himself, sees her face as if through a glass darkly, her delight in telling him her secret -- “Caterina, magistra of Salerno, Magdalena, Margarita, and Innocenta who died in the cradle, God rest her. I lived there. I walked its streets. I knew them.”

Nicky finishes his shaving, crawls back into bed, and whispers, “And I love a man named Yusuf.”

“Eh?” Joe stirs, adorably rumpled. “What?”

“Nothing.” Nicky kisses his ear. “Go back to sleep.”

***

The next few mornings later, however, it’s Joe’s turn.

“My name is Yusuf ibn Umar al-Kaysani,” he says to his solemn reflection. “I was born in Cairo, under the Fatimid caliphate, in the month before Ramadan, in the year 461 al-Hijra. My father was Umar ibn Ismail al-Kaysani, and my mother was Maryam bint Tariq ibn Khaled al-Katibi. My brothers by the same mother were Umar, Muhammad, Musa, and Ismail, and my sister was Noor. I was a faris, and I sometimes wished I was a scholar.”

He looks at himself, his face in the mirror, exactly as it was almost a thousand years ago, and does not know what else to say. He inclines his head to his reflection, crawls back into bed, pulls the sleeping Nicky back into his arms, and whispers with a smile into his shoulder, “And I fell in love with an Italian.”

***

Booker’s recitation is quieter.

My name is Sebastien le Livre, it goes, and it pops up at unexpected moments. I’ve always been called by some variant of it as a nickname. Now it’s Booker. I was born in 1777. I was twelve years old when they stormed the Bastille, sixteen when they guillotined the king and told us that we were free of monarchical tyranny forever, a great Republic, and I was twenty-seven when Napoleon Bonaparte became emperor and I went to war.

My father was named Jacques. My mother was named Emilie.

We lived just outside of Paris.

My wife. It alarms him to realize he’s starting to lose the precise shape of her smile, her hands in his hair, the taste of her mouth. Come back to me, he wants to beg. Come back to me, Marie.

My sons. My sons. My sons.

(It hurts to even think their names.)

***

Andy tries once, in the dark of the night when the pain of missing Quynh gets too much. Stands up and stares at herself, and really does her best to remember.

My father was...

What was his name? She barely knew him. A gruff and energetic Scythian warlord, almost indivisible from the fine-grained sands of memory. Some rattles that might have been him talking to her, correcting her grip on an ax. He saw no need for daughters to be less than sons in defending the house. At least for a time. She thanks him for that, at least.

My mother, Andy thinks. Surely she must remember that. Her name. Her face. Her gentle smile (was it gentle? She was a Scythian woman, no tender nursemaid, and raised her daughters with axes and hammers in their hands as much as spindle or distaff). My mother...

It’s there. She’ll remember it, she promises, tomorrow. She will.

My sisters....

There were several of them. Four? Was it five? She has a faint memory of running through a vineyard, trampling the vines, and being afraid of punishment. They ran, they hid, they giggled in desperate delight at their own nerve. My sisters.

(She can’t remember their faces.)

(She isn’t sure she can still remember their names.)

[addictsitter]

For this prompt on the kink meme:

Well after he should've started, Kili still doesn't talk. To everyone surprise, however, he will memorize and sing all of the songs he overhears from his mother/brother/uncle/everyone else.