She changed her name when she met him. Or rather, she changed it back.

In this life, she’d been called Jasmine, a name as sickly sweet as the scent of the flower. It was pretty and feminine and she was neither of those things, nor did she wish to be. Instead, she preferred to think of herself as tough, determined, proud. Those qualities held more value to her than the ability to parade around in the latest fashion or to coo over glittery jewellery.

And so she’d baptised herself Sica, and felt it fit her far better, with its crisp end and sweet start. It had been six hundred years since she’d borne the name, but the intervening centuries were nothing to her; time spent in stasis, waiting unknowing for him.

“Where are we going?” she said, dragging her suitcase behind her. She had her passport clutched in her free hand, and a small bag over her shoulder and that was all she had.

Pack light, he’d said, but pack warm. Winter can be cold there.

Larch paused and looked back at her. Those six hundred years had rolled over him like water, leaving him in evergreen youth. His eyes were grey and changeable and right now, beneath the fluorescent lights they were pale and almost silver, gleaming like a spider’s web. Nothing different about that classic profile or his fluid way of moving either, but he had acknowledged time with one small gesture: his black hair was shorter and styled and might even have seen some shampoo at some point in his centuries of leisure time.

“It’s a surprise,” he said firmly.

“I don’t like surprises,” she grumbled under her breath. He heard anyway, as she’d intended.

“You like me.” A hopeful little smile curved on his mouth. “Don’t you?”

Yes. Oh yes. She had liked him and loved him and been torn from him before she’d had a chance to get beyond that first whirlwind romance – to feel the warm, slow comfort of knowing he would be there when she woke every morning, of reading his face like a favourite book, of knowing just how his hand fit in hers. Those old passions were what brought her here, trailing him through an airport to somewhere unknown.

Sica looked into those pale eyes, and the fondness she saw there still surprised her, revealed with the overwhelming surety of sunrise. “Maybe I’m just after your money.”

“Ah. Then you’re in for a big disappointment. Black Monday was not a good day for me,” he said solemnly, but she saw the mischief tugging at the corners of his mouth. “And what pittance I had left, I spent on the plane tickets.”

She scowled at him. Once he’d been taller; now their eyes were level, and every glance was even more intimate than it had been before. “Then you’d better take me somewhere mind-blowing.”

She thought something brief and sorrowful moved over his face, but it vanished so quickly it might have been a trick of the light. Only his steady smile remained. “That I can manage.”

~*~

It was an eleven hour flight to Europe, and once she’d exhausted her book and the in-flight movie, once she’d chewed the last bit of airline food and tired of seeing clouds outside the window, she decided to try and prise some more secrets from Larch.

He’d passed through check-in and customs with the world-weary air of a seasoned traveller and it struck her how little she knew of him in truth. Their time together had been brief and heated – limned with anger or desperation or some potent combination of the two and while she would not deny the intensity of those times, it meant that she had loved – and did love – him with breadth rather than depth: she could say with ease that he was honourable and passionate and resilient, yet she could not have said what made him so.

They had been two people hurled together in a turbulent time, and they had made the best of it. But the best then was nowhere near good enough now in slower, gentle moments.

He was reading, his eyes avid on the page, flicking through another of the interchangeable gritty noir novels he loved.

“Why do you read those books?” she said, curious. The type was familiar: tormented antiheroes and beautiful dead girls, smoky cities and street slang mixed with Hollywood glamour of a darker, richer sort.

He blinked, as if he’d risen out from a trance. Then he half-smiled, almost embarrassed. “I guess they remind me of my life then.”

“Don’t tell me you were a private detective with an alcohol problem and chronic commitment issues?” she said airily.

“No. But I was all alone, and I lived in a city where millions of people lived together, alone, whole crowds made up of lonely people wishing for better things they couldn’t have. It was a time when everything was about glamour and sparkle, but underneath it was still dirty and squalid and hard, and it was the closest I ever came to...” He hesitated, and his eyes were achingly vulnerable. “...to how I first felt after you died.”

It was the first time she had ever heard him mention it so directly, but it confused her. “Why did you want to feel like that?”

Strange shadows moved in his expression: emotions she could not understand because she had not endured centuries bisected, knowing that happiness had come and gone with the suddenness of a hurricane. She could guess, but the years divided them then like a glass wall.

“I was forgetting you, Sica. I tried not to, but it was harder and harder to remember what you looked like and what you sounded like and what you tasted like. I did these things...terrible things and I told myself it was for you. I told myself it was justice.” His voice was so tired. She wanted to smooth the tension from his mouth, from the white ridges of his knuckles, but she held back, unsure. She didn’t know this boy. “But it didn’t bring you back, and the world kept changing. I left my home because I couldn’t bear to be there without you, but that only made it worse. Suddenly I was the only one in the whole wide world who even knew who Sica Aldernik had been...but I couldn’t remember your face.”

He sighed. “I travelled for years and years, trying to find something that would jog my memory. I was empty...I never stayed anywhere for long. Just long enough to know that you weren’t there – you were still dead, still forgotten.”

“You looked for me?” she whispered, startled. So it hadn’t been a fluke that they had met again after so long.

“Of course I did.” His tone was sharp; his face was proud and cold and so very reminiscent of that young lord who had confronted her long ago. “And sometimes I found pieces of you – there was a nun in Paris who had eyes just like yours, and suddenly I could see you again, so I stayed in Montmartre until my memories began to fade once more and I realised she was just another girl. Or I’d hear words and think it was you – and I’d track through the crowds trying to find them.”

“That’s...” She searched for a word. Too many that would hurt him came to mind: obsessive. Touching, in a desperate sort of way. And sad. Terribly sad.

“Scary?” he suggested with a self-deprecating smile. “Insane? A little too devoted? I’ve thought the same, Sica. I told myself that, but you can’t understand how...how shocking it is to think you’ve seen someone you lost, and be thrown right back into that moment. It’s awful and amazing at the same time. And that was what it was like then.” He tapped the book. “Everything was so intense. There was the Depression and Hollywood and then the wars. It seemed...okay to miss you there, to let people see I was grieving. Everyone was grieving something, and everyone showed it.” A sudden self-consciousness passed over his face. “So, yeah. That’s, um, why I like trashy detective novels.”

Sat on the plane then, Sica felt disoriented and young and overwhelemed, and all the love in the world could not erase those feelings.

~*~

She was amused but unsurprised to see he had booked them separate rooms in the bed and breakfast. After their first meeting, wild and tumultuous as it had been, she had had to eke kisses from him.

Sica had wondered just why that was, fearing it was some flaw in her – and then it occurred to her that he was simply behaving as he had been brought up, that Larch came from a society when marriage was sacrosanct, even among the Nightworld, where good men were honourable; for them respect came side by side with distance except in the most private of circumstances. And he was a good man. She knew that.

Living as he had, a nomad grazing over countless pastures, the ever-shifting strata of etiquette across region and time had been unable to alter his own early beliefs.

But that didn’t change the fact that she found it frustrating. She was seventeen and she was half-dizzy with love and every time she was clasped to him, soulmate link thrashing between them, those kisses began chaste and became smouldering, and she pressed closer and closer, hands inching under his clothes-

And then he’d step back, breathing ragged, oh-so polite, and that would be that.

“Why?” she’d asked once, thoroughly aggravated. “You want to, I can feel that.” She dropped her gaze pointedly.

“Yes, I’m sure you can,” he said wryly. “But I don’t just jump into bed with people. Even people like you.”

“It wouldn’t be casual sex,” she’d told him. “Not for me, anyway.”

Nothing of sordid awakenings, of creeping out after picking her clothes up off the floor; of a hasty goodbye or an awkward silence. Part of her longed for the aftermath as much as the act – what would it be like to wake up warm against his body, pleasantly drowsy, to make good morning last for hours, to hear his voice rough with sleep, see him disarrayed and naked?

“That’s not it. I don’t want to rush this, Sica. What’s the hurry?”

“What’s the wait?” she groused.

“I just want everything to be perfect,” he said so quietly that she almost missed the yearning in his voice.

But it would be perfect, she wanted to say. It would be you and me, how could it be anything else?

And yet...she had not endured half a millennia of isolation, five hundred years of dreaming and waiting and hoping, and so held her tongue and waited for everything to be perfect.

Which brought her here: a foreign country, rain beating on the windows and a cold, depressingly single bed. The only warm thing in the entire room was the cup of tea that the landlady had thrust upon her, mumbling something cautionary about her ‘young lad’ and ‘funny business’.

If only.

“This had better be good, Larch Blackthorn,” she muttered into the air as she crawled between the frigid sheets. “This had better be damn good.”

~*~

The morning was surprisingly warm and bright, and the countryside that had seemed so bleak the previous night now looked fairytale fresh, all leaf-lined lanes and undulating hills.

She lolled back in the passenger seat while Larch drove, fiddling with the radio and making small talk. When he parked in a cobbled square, she was delighted by the market there and set about trying to haggle with the vendors, who tolerated this excitable tourist gladly, selling her what Larch loudly lamented as ‘tat’.

“Honestly,” he said, holding up a pair of rainbow-striped furry socks with an expression of utter disgust, “when are you ever going to wear these? They might as well have ‘passion killers’ stitched into the side.”

“They’re for you,” she said sweetly. Larch looked even more appalled before she dived back into the clutter of stalls.

“No, don’t you dare buy that mug...Sica, for god’s sake, the Royals got married twenty years ago! And if that’s genuine Prada, I’m a howler monkey, and – yes, I know he told you it fell off the back of a lorry, but they say that to everyone...no, honestly, the motorways would be chaos if this much junk kept toppling off them.”

An hour later, she declared himself satisfied and Larch, now with bags in each hand, scowled in response. Several vendors waved them off, beaming.

“So where are we, anyway?” she said brightly as they stuffed her shopping into the trunk.

He glanced over his shoulder, and she caught the wicked glitter in his eyes. “Turn around.”

There was a sign next to the car park that welcomed visitors to Old Arnwich. Whatever the significance was, Sica didn’t get it, and she told him so.

Larch only smiled. “Say it aloud.”

She mouthed the words, and then stared at him. “It’s...it’s my name. Aldernich. It’s named after me!”

“They didn’t forget you, you know.” He laughed at her expression. “I was so surprised when I first came back. I shouldn’t have been though, should I? If I couldn’t forget you, how could they? If you look back – right back into the town’s records, not long after I left, John Aldernich and twenty others convinced the rest to change the village’s name. ‘In memory and in hope,’ it said.”

She stared about the bustling little town with its rows of shops – butchers, boutiques, cafes – all glass and concrete. “I grew up here,” she said, awed.

I lived here when it was just ramshackle cottages and dirt tracks. I was born here, I hunted here, I played here...

I died here.

And I fell in love here.

“Me too,” he said softly.

In his face she saw wariness mingling with anticipation. Even now he wasn’t sure of her reaction – but he’d dared to bring her here, knowing all that lay in the past, buried beneath the shiny tarmac and the flurry of modern life.

Here we are, back where it began, but this time it will be right.

“This is...” she searched for the word, and it slipped from her lips with the ease of truth. “Perfect.”

He smiled shyly, and when he took her hands, Sica didn’t care if she woke today or tomorrow or a month later in his arms because that day would come, and thousands more like it, imprinted with kisses, tangling him up in arguments while her fingers tangled in his hair, mapping the lines of his body, this curve, that plane, and it would be all the sweeter for the wait.

Yes...she saw him then for what he was and saw perhaps the mistake she had made. He was still uncertain, still afraid, still in need of time to accept that she was here and his forevermore, without condition or qualms. It didn’t matter how much time had passed, it didn’t matter that he had seen so much more and hurled away the years like cigarette ends, ground down to ash.

It only mattered that he loved her, that he had always loved her and that his heart was still that of the boy she had met, that in him she saw the future rising to meet her as she rose to meet his kiss, unstoppable, remarkable, intense, amazing, filled with promise as perpetual as the far-stretching ocean.