happy birthday schermionie!

title belongs to snow patrol. please review (:

She still remembers her first taste of the Elixir, the sweet liquid trickling down her throat. She was young and naïve, and saw immortality as her next adventure, a journey she would willingly embark on with her husband. And so she drank the Elixir, grinning at Nicolas even as her hand trembled as she raised the goblet to her lips. He kissed her then, the taste of the Elixir still on their lips, and forever stopped seeming like a long time.

She didn't know then what she knows now. She didn't know then the giant paradox of immortal life- it's heartache and it's joy; it's pain and it's happiness; it's worth it and it's not. It's watching as people are born and then die, the cycle of life continuing, even as she stands still, frozen in time.

And as the years turn to decades and the decades turn to centuries, and she watches as everyone she ever cared about turns to ashes, Nicolas is there, and she remembers why she still drinks the Elixir every night, remembers why she wanted to live forever in the first place.

And then one day, it's over. Nicolas clasps her hand as he smashes the stone, and neither of them mentions the shaking that contradict their repeated assurances that it's going to be okay. Nicolas turns to her after and kisses her with a searing intensity that belies their ages, and she clings to him, wishing for more time, more forevers.

He goes first, slipping into death as they sleep, and she doesn't cry over him- not even when people say with more than a hint of irony that at least they had a long life together, and all she wants to do is scream that it wasn't long enough for the intensity of the love they had. She waits for death, and when she feels it coming for her late one night, she lies in her bed and smiles, waiting to go into a new forever with Nicolas.