Time after time

The air smells like soil. It's a dry and a little crumbly smell. It's the virgin smell of topsoil in plastic bags from the nursery, but already stained by the aroma of the just passed rain.

It's a pleasant and relaxing small, filling his nostrils while he plunges fingers in the humid, welcoming freshness of the flowerbed to arrange with lovely care the latest bulbs. Splendid narcissi will bloom, Arthur is sure of this. Even if he cannot see them anymore, he'll still be able to feel their perfume, like with the roses he planted the year before and are already blooming, despite being just the end of March.

It's always been the moment of blossoming he favours, the ephemeral moment of fragile possibility and doubt, like a girl not yet woman.

Seeing the buds, watching the gradual opening of the corolla, is one of the things he misses. A tear of nostalgia glides on the cheekbone, but Arthur weeps it away with the back of the hand, almost with anger, leaving behind a trace of grass and dirt.

Cold metal against skin reminds him about how he's forgotten to take off the wedding ring before starting gardening.

He undresses the ring to clean it with the edge of his T-Shirt, once dark blue, now faded light blue for having been washed way too many times – he cannot notice the difference – but the jewel shoots from his sweaty finger and lands somewhere else with a too gentle thud to be perceived.

Arthur tells himself he's stupid, of course, while getting on his hands and knees and patting all around him, hoping his fingers would meet the smooth surface of the ring. His palms pat the grass with caution, albeit the garden, kept with extreme care, being child-safe.

He finds only some worms, a couple of snails and a coin – or a bottle cap. It seems the ring have fallen farer than expected.

Arthur sights, rolling of his back, and stares at the slightly lighter spot in the sky that tells him about the sun whereabouts. He has a hand on forehead, like a visor. Since when he's started working from home, he has a lot of free time. Gardening is just one of the many ways for not sitting around.

Arthur stays is that position for an unknown time, in the stillness of a lazy spring afternoon, until the familiar noise of a car parked in the alley interrupts the silence.

Arthur already knows which other noises will soon follow.

The click of the closing car door.

The tap tap of nearer and nearer footsteps.

His husband's soft singing, meaning he's in a good mood. Not recognizing the melody, Arthur supposes it must be what remains of a new, radio broadcasted piece.

"Stop," he tells him, when the footsteps become clearer. He's still lying down on his back, arms and legs open to form a star.

"I made the wedding ring fall, I don't want you to step on it," he explains, a little annoyed like it's an obvious thing.

Arthur hates explaining things, because what in his mind is perfectly clear becomes confused and tangled when he starts to express it. So he begins to stutter, he feels embarrassed and often makes a mess of everything. No, he doesn't like explaining thing.

Especially if it's about his extremely tangled feelings.

He crosses arms on chest and sits up, while Francis tells him about his day in the atelier, alternating the report with questions Arthur answers in monosyllables.

Everything as usual.

"Found it!"

Arthur offers his hand to receive the ring, recovered from the berries bush he insisted to plant the last autumn.

"You should start wearing around your neck, you know?"

"You should start annotating things. I told you it bothers me," he replies, pouting. He recovers the stick, abandoned at his side and gets up.

"I go inside. It's starting to get hot," he announces. Francis says something about having to take a "surprise" he left in the car. Arthur nods, waving a hand above head to signalling he's understood. He moves slowly, like an old man.

They've being living in the countryside for four years, in a pretty little house, like the ones you would find in an illustrated children books, closed out because it fell apart.

They were hard years, with several troubles, lot of scenes and way too many debts. Above all, no one considered how expensive the renovation works might be, with the material, the workers and all the hitches that always happen in such situations.

Hadn't it been for the economic, moral and physical support from both families – Arthur's brothers were enthusiastic to dig in bricolage - and Francis's noisy friends the frail equilibrium they'd reached when Arthur started to accept his blindness would've been destroyed.

Unemployed, having to start again from scratch in learning how to care for himself, Arthur loathed fiercely the house, as a symbol of his very own futility.

He'd even thought about spending some time back at his parents' house. However there was something wrong in wanting to go back to the nest. Maybe it was the fact of always having to prove to be at least up to his older brothers – and an example for Peter, the youngest. Good example!

They might as well stay in the roulette Gilbert lent them – one of his numerous purchases made without thinking – and then in the only room that wasn't falling to pieces.

At the beginning there was only a mattress – the first thing they've brought from their old apartment – to sleep and, sometimes, make love. Then boxes came, mountains of boxes. Crumbling piles of boxes Arthur stumbled it so many times he lost count.

Then, little by little, things started to turn out right.

Yes, Arthur loathed that house.

Now he can't imagine living elsewhere.

The new house has been build customized for him. On the floor there are special rubber strips he can follow with his stick and he knows the exact number of steps between every wall and every pieces of furniture.

It took him a whole year to memorize every measure, but now it seems so natural and immediate that the efforts done seem to belong to another life

He knows there are twenty stairs to go upstairs. It took him seven steps to go to the kitchen – only for a glass of water, God forbids he touches the stove – the sink is opposite the door, on the left, four step. The glasses are in the cupboard, on the lowest shelf. The tap pours cold water if turned left and warm if turned right.

Now his world is made like this. It's made by shadows and colourless spots. Above all, it is made by geometries. Left and right. Up and down.

And steps, hundreds of steps.

He pours himself a glass of peach flavoured cold tea, he indulges in the strawberry jelly leftover from the past dinner and finally he sits on the fresh terracotta floor in the living room, with back against the couch. He should shower, he can feel blades of grass in his hair and soil under his nails; but tiredness makes him fall in a semi-catatonic state from which he'll exit only if urged by an external stimulus. Sometimes it's the phone ringing – "No, we aren't interested, goodbye" or "Yes, mum, everything is fine" or "Francis, one of your strange friends!" and so on. Others it's his soulmate.

"Arthur can you come over a moment?"

Good the second.

Arthur never answers right away. He's always been the kind of person who doesn't like to be ordered around; he is difficult to be conquered and even in domestic life he doesn't make exception.

If he does something, anything, it's because he wants to. Except for sex when he drinks too much; however, in those cases he tries to convince himself that, giving that drinking is a totally free choice, the consequences are too.

Finally he gets up, rambling about the pain in the ass he has as husband, he walks near the walls and he stops on the doorstep, with arms crossed.

"What's the matter?"

"I bought you a gift."

It isn't his birthday – not yet, but it'll be soon – it isn't their anniversary, it isn't any commanded celebration that requires an exchange of gifts.

"What did you do?" he enquires, albeit knowing that Francis doesn't need similar pretexts to make him a gift. Usually his gifts are small things that Arthur dismisses as rubbish, but saves with jealousy. That's why he stretches out hands.

"So, this gift?"

Francis can't avoid thinking he's look just like a child, with a pouting face and the caterpillars, sorry, the eyebrows frowning while he tries to divine the present and to hide his impatience. Francis shakes his hand and whistles. After few seconds, the answer to Arthur's question arrives, shaped like a fluffy and whining thing that knocks him down, happily licking his face. The fluffy thing pushes his head – apparently oblong shaped - against his chest and under his right arm. Arthur lets a laugh escape.

"Good boy," he murmurs, caressing he dog's chinstrap. It's soft and warms his heart and stomach.

"What is its race?"

"Half-breed."

Arthur pauses, afraid his tone may sound too annoyed and hysteric, because it still happens he feels powered faced as at the beginning, and asks: "Is it a guide dog?"

"Too. But I didn't buy him for that. I though you may like it. You like dog, don't you?"

He's right : he's been loving dog since he was a child. As far as he can remembers, he his family has always had a dog. Francis, however, prefers cats and Arthur thinks that after all he has the same elusive, unbearable primadonna-like nature as them.

He calls the dog Parsifal and accepts that he becomes his eyes. There's something strange in all this, like a slightly bitter taste in the back of his mouth. It's the light discomfort caused by thinking about the universe. Dogs see in black and white, like him once.

"I feel old," Arthur comments one evening, scratching Parsifal behind his ears.

"You're thirty-one," Francis, who is three years older, points out. He has always thought Arthur is old inside, with his baggy argyle cardigans and the plaid on the knees on Sunday evenings.

Yes, he's thirty-one and, as strange as it may sound, he's terrified by it.

"I don't know what to do," he mumbles, expressing only the point of the iceberg made by his thoughts, with head posed on the other's shoulder.

"What do you want to do tomorrow?"

"Don't change subject!"

"I'm not changing subject. Tell me, what do you want to do tomorrow?"

Arthur shrugs. Tomorrow is Wednesday, one of the many Wednesday in parade, so he'll probably stay home working; maybe, if he finishes quickly, he'll go out for a walk or end that embroidery work that has been going on for weeks without a clear picture. Maybe there isn't even a picture.

"The usual," he answers.

The same the day after and so on. Perhaps they can walk around the city on Sunday or they may stay home; in May they may decide if going on holiday or saving and staying home; until they reach a point when you can't plan anything anymore without entering the kingdom of fantasies.

"The thing you always said. See? The thing we call future are just pieces put together. Episodes. You don't need to rush."

"Did you read it in fortune cookies?"

Nevertheless, a few days later he finds himself reflecting, thinking that maybe, maybe, Francis is right.

Maybe life is made of episodes. You live them, sometimes you project them, sometimes they arrive by chance, and then you look back and notice that, puff, ten years had passed.

Lately Arthur looks back a lot – more than what the psychologist had suggest him to do.

He remembers, for example, the time he made the microwave oven explode.

First the crisp sound of the explosion came. Then the firing alarm started. Finally, there the sad sound of water pouring from the ceiling.

The show that presented in the kitchen was distressing, clouded by a thick blanket of black smoke.

Francis had been on the verge of splitting hair when confronted with a similar disaster. He'd understood that Arthur hadn't a good relationship with cooking the first time he saw how he kept his kitchen and how desolated his pantry was.

At that time his adorably goofy soulmate ate outside the home almost all his meals. When he didn't go out, he depended on takeaways and pre-heated food. It wasn't then a surprise that he was so slim.

When he had the impression the microwave had cooled enough, Francis grabbed a couple potholders and bends forward to recover what had caused such a disaster. At least what was left of it: the melted remnants of what once was a tin tray.

Without saying a word, but ducking his head from time to time for his boyfriend's – ok, almost-husband – stupidity, he took one of those markers which may write on any surface and with it traced a perimeter around the smallest among the five hot plates.

"Arthur," he said, putting hands on his shoulders, with such a solemn expression it seemed he wanted to reveal his deepest and most intimate secret, "from now one in this kitchen you'll touch only with hot plate for your tea."

And suddenly the charm broke, the illusion snapped and fell down, reflected in a pair of green eyes, quickly passing from astonishment to anger.

"It's my kitchen! You can't throw me out my kitchen!"

"Error. It was our kitchen. Now it's my kitchen."

"Are you kidding me?"

"Absolutely no. Who is the moron who doesn't know metal trays can't go in the microwave?"

"Maybe you should have warned me?"

"Even children know it!"

They continued to fight, of course, crashing door and pouting, like it always happens. There'd been times they slept away, saying that maybe they were too fast in moving together. Other times, albeit living under the same roof, they ignored each other for days, pretending they were perfect strangers.

Despite all, in the end, something – a gesture, a memory, a word – make the respective walls of pride crumble - so that the fight would end until a new storm.

Maybe the longest period without scenes was their honeymoon. Two whole weeks. A record.

And it was one of the few trips Arthur wasn't bothered by.

Arthur doesn't like travelling. He doesn't exactly know why. Maybe it's because he was born on an island, albeit big. He already has all he needs. He doesn't mind the contact with different cultures, always open to try new thing, but only as long as he can convince himself of his mother country superiority.

He's very patriotic from this point of view.

Above all, he was never into all-inclusive travels to find soulmates. They are travels organized by nations, twice a year or more when financially possible. Participation is almost free, except for a symbolic donation of voluntary amount, and only few don't take part in them when possible. Year after year people promise to reach even the most God forsaken lands, no matter how long the road may be.

There're clans and tribes still closed up, where who doesn't have a soulmate is thought to bring bad luck and isolated. Still what the soulmate system refuses the most is a close society. Not considering exception, isolation and sedentary lifestyle are cancer for the community, they bring death. The villages that refuse to keep in contact with the external world are destined to retreat into them and, finally, die.

That's why travelling to find your soulmate is one of the pillar sustaining the so-called civilized society.

For Arthur, however, traveling means getting tired. It's tiring for the trip per se, for the fatigue in communicating in a foreign language, for having to learn local uses and costumes. It's a complex set of activities requiring an effort rarely paid by the benefits the journey should produce.

Now blind, Arthur likes to travel even less; the not indifferent effort of having to learn every time by scratch to move in a new context adds to the aforementioned efforts.

The time is never enough.

Still there's a way of traveling Arthur loves, by ship. Arthur loves the sea, he loves to stay on a ship and for that the only journey he faces without bitterness are cruisers.

If they weren't so expensive, at least.

The fact that Arthur doesn't like to abandon the security of his island doesn't matter anymore when Francis decides it's time his husband knows his country. Visiting his in-laws, of course.

Arthur met them only twice, at the wedding and during a birthday party, many years ago.

You have to know that Francis' family situation is complicated, despite not rare.

Francis' mother, Marianne, after having spent more than thirty years of her life looking for her soulmate without success, willing to set down and build a family, had finally decided to reciprocate one of her colleague's courting. He was shy, but clearly in love with her. They started to date, they liked each other, in the end the married. Soon after Francis was born. They were such a close-knit couple people immediately assumed Marianne and her husband where soulmates. How could possibly be otherwise?

In short, for some time things went great, until the unexpectable happened, during a paediatric visit, when Marianne's universe exploded with colours by meeting a passing by male nurse's eyes.

Marianne wondered for a long time what was the best choice. On the one hand she abhorred the idea of leaving behind her devoted husband; on the other hand she couldn't ignore the thoughts insinuating how there was nothing bad in following an already set Destiny. She also caressed the idea of a polygamous wedding – the law allowed it - discarding and reconsidering it according to her mood.

She could have forgotten what has happened, but with which impact on her psyche? Which consequences for her familiar and sentimental life?

Finally, after days of stress, she decided to speak with her husband. At that time Francis, who was three, understood something had changed because for the first time his mother told him he had "eyes like the sky" and "hair like the sun".

"Grey," he chirped.

"Non, mon petit. The sky isn't grey."

Still his friends saw the sky grey, like his father, so he frowned in doubt.

"You'll understand when you are older."

Marianne spoke with her husband, twisting her hands in her lap, hoping he would've offer her a solution. A solution, indeed, came and it was so clear that it give her new oxygen: involving Charles in their daily life, welcoming him as friend and, if ever Marianne had wished, as her companion. The woman tanked and cried her eyes out, venting all the pressure cumulated in the previous weeks.

"Papa died when I was sixteen for a on the job accident and maman married Charles after some years," Francis finishes. Arthur slightly nods to signalling he's listened. Then, sneaking under the covers, he adds: "At least you didn't have five brothers to fight with."

Francis's homeland is divided in two autonomous macro regions, with a stormy past: the Republic of Aquitania, his country, older and clearly agricultural, and the Kingdom of Franchia, smaller but richer thanks to its trades.

They spent a trimester in Aquitania – they both can work from home – not having previewed it, but in a way that, in the end, is pleasant for all.

Instead it's a period of surprising quietness, where even the ever-present quarrels thin out. Francis' family welcomes Arthur with warmth and kindness, but with enough tactfulness for not being too much invasive and putting the guest at ease. Above all, Marianne and Charles are excellent guides during the numerous excursions, more or less, long Arthur is involved into, whether he's willing or not. Surely they don't spend those three months lazing around.

"Come again next summer!" is the greeting accompanying them to the airport.

"It'll be a pleasure," Arthur assures, with warmth he gives to few.

"We'll come for sure," Francis echoes with the enthusiastic tone of promises not kept in time, before hugging his mother for a more private goodbye.

And so years pass, like previewed, by episodes. A whole life slips through fingers, with the past cumulating to the base of the brain, made of sounds and colours, when tasting a cookie make you burst crying with no reason.

Years pass, a lot, too many, to the point Arthur stops counting them. It doesn't matter anymore and every birthday is a year stolen from Death, not given to Life.

Years pass and other two dogs follow, Merlin and Morgan. Then a cat arrives, which always rubs against Arthur's legs, making him trip and mumble.

People have always said he's acid like an old man. Now he's for real. Old.

Years pass and now there're wrinkles on their hands. Now Francis too needs glasses to read – Arthur can't avoid feeling a sense of satisfaction – and is becoming a little deaf.

Now that they are both retired, they spent together maybe more time than they have ever had before. There are evenings when the promise made years before creeps between them, over the TV broadcasting the usual program, while Arthur embroiders and Francis draws. It's a heavy question that nobody is able to answer. It's a bitter race nobody wants to win and at the same time nobody wants to lose.

They wait, until once again it's life itself to give the answer, following the scheme she's planned. Her spokesperson's a doctor who goes around the problem too much, as if saying it slowly would change something.

Francis waits, alone, meaning he's truly worried.

Pancreas cancer, end-stage, is the verdict he receives. They give him between two and four weeks left to live.

"Blame all the wine you drank. I told you to see a doctor sooner, but you never listen," Arthur growls, with a wet voice.

He can't cry and he doesn't want to. Maybe he's more angry than sad. He's wounded. He's disappointed. He doesn't know. He only know that in four weeks maximum the world around him will be grey again and he'll doesn't even notice it. But there'll be the awareness of the absence and that'll be enough.

The following weeks are strangely quiet, lacking the excitement of the lists that catches lot of people on the verge of death. Actually both of them try to continue living as they've always done, even if Death has already entered their home and there He had set, like a long-term guest.

Arthur alone takes care of Francis in the last weeks, when he becomes too weak to pretend nothing's happening. When he struggles to raise arms for eating, Arthur feed him – "Come on, don't make a fuss, the food I cook is perfectly edible."

When he pukes his very soul, Arthur keeps his hair away from his face.

Being blind isn't an obstacle. It hasn't been for a long time. Arthur has lost his eyesight for more than fifty years now, a period far longer than the time when he could still see. During all those years, Francis has always taken care of him, so Arthur is only returning the favour.

"I don't like to have debts. Don't start with your romantic junk," he snaps.

Something will never change.

Around the end of the month Francis's health seems to improve, but Arthur doesn't rejoice and doesn't mark as wrong doctors' forecasts. On the contrary, he gets even gloomier, aware that it's just Lord Death's last gift – or joke – before He'll go away with his new load.

The only positive thing is Francis being strong enough to stay in the garden, where Arthur is happy to guide him, near the rosebushes he planted years before.

"Do you think we'll meet again?" Francis asks, like he's expressing a longer reasoning.

"We are romantic today, aren't we? I'm sure it's your old age speaking. Instead, you've begin to go crazy. I'm going calling the priest," Arthur replies.

In his mind Francis hasn't aged a single day. Surely, he can feels the calluses on his hands when he holds them and he hears the years in his voice, but the face he remembers hasn't changed. It has just lost colour.

Francis invites him to sit on his knees. Arthur protests, refusing, because he's too old for such silly thing and anyway his husband isn't strong enough for similar ideas. Nevertheless in the end he accepts.

"Only because I don't want to hear you whining."

Francis puts his arms around Arthur's waist and Arthur shivers, feeling how thinner he's become.

"Do you think we'll meet in another life?" Francis insists, serious but calm, waiting for an answer Arthur doesn't know, can't, doesn't want to give him. He learnt to accept that two people might be destined to each other. To believe also in reincarnation is too much an effort for him. So he snaps: "He hope no. You were enough for just a lifetime!"

"You too, you too," Francis laughs, but his laughing is weak, hoarse, and Arthur knows he won't hear it again.

He would cry, if he had tears left.

His remaining five years are the longest. He dies on a bench outside the library, with a book written in Braille opened on his thighs.

Many years later

The girl was running. Whatever her errands were, they had to be really important considering her hurry. She zigzagged in the crowd, with her bag pouncing arhythmically against her hip. Her long ponytails whipped the air. Sometimes, without any sign of wanting to stop, she looked at her wrist watch.

She was doing so, when she crashed against an unknown object. It must be a person, a woman, the girl considered after a quick examination. She raises her gaze, a little stunned, adjusting her glasses, stuck between the impulse of running away and the courtesy imposing her to apology. She found herself face to face with a young woman, whose hair - "dark blond", as the girl would have learnt - were held in a high ponytail by a crown hairpin. She was wearing a periwinkle coloured jacket and a white long skirt.

The girl almost laughed for the irony of the situation: the best day of her life, at least according to everyone, was happening on a crowded pavement, while she was rushing to the admission exam to become a nurse. She would've surely missed the exam. Still, she didn't care.

The girl and the young woman watched each other,

Then the stranger stretched out her freshly manicured hand, smiling.

She had white and sane teeth. The girl felt butterflies in her stomach, like a déjà-vu.

"I'm Celine, nice to meet you," the young woman introduced herself.

"Rose. My pleasure," the girl muttered.

"So, Rose," Celine began, getting up and brushing her skirt, "are you free tonight?"

Notes:

It's the end. I would've never imagined to do a mini-series, but here I am. This last OS closes the circle. I decided to give an hint for a reincarnation AU (Rose and Celine are respectively the names I give to Fem!England and Fem!France) because I thought it may be a very good conclusion. Upon the reader the duty to judge.

My apologies for any mistake.