Chapter 282

Nima

"I’m sorry you have to do this," I say, my voice a thin whisper as she gently washes my back with a soft, warm cloth. The water feels good, but the humiliation burns hotter. How embarrassing.

The thing with having an old body is that it betrays you. It forgets how to hold itself, how to stay clean, how to be anything but a fragile vessel slowly emptying.

She doesn’t pause her careful, rhythmic motions. "My dear beloved," she says, her voice low and impossibly steady, "this is not the first time I have done this."

"It does not make me feel better if you say that," I murmur, closing my eyes against a prickling of useless tears.

The cloth stills for a moment. Then I feel her lean close, her lips brushing the shell of my ear. "I mean," she clarifies, her breath warm, "growing old with you. This is not the first time."

I try not to cry but fail. The tears are silent, warm tracks through the wrinkles on my cheeks, lost in the bathwater.

"I think it’s an honor, my beloved," she says softly, and continues her gentle washing, as if tending to something precious. Which, to her, I suppose I am.

"Actually," she says, her tone shifting to something lighter, almost mischievous, "do you know that I once wore diapers?"

I blink, the sorrow momentarily startled. "Diapers?"

"Cloth. Those things we wrap babies in," she explains, as if I’m the one who needs the clarification. A soft chuckle escapes me, watery and surprised.

"Hey," she says, a smile in her voice, "it’s nothing to be embarrassed about. It comes with the age. Every creature starts and ends in a state of... reliance. It’s just a circle."

The profound simplicity of it settles over me. A circle. Not a decline, but a return.

"Hmmnn," I murmur, leaning back against her supportive arm. "I hope in one of my next lives, I’ll have a lifespan of a thousand years."

She pauses again. "Not eternity?" she asks, her voice curious.

I shake my head slowly, feeling the truth of it. "Eternity... that would mean I’d be unable to move on to my next life with you." I open my eyes and look up at her, at the love etched in every line of her ageless face.

"I don’t want forever in one place. I want forever in cycles. With you in the middle of every one."

She stares at me, her golden eyes shimmering with an emotion too deep for words. Then she bends, resting her forehead against my damp hair.

"A thousand years," she whispers, a promise and a pact. "Then we’ll do it again. However long the circle takes."

A wave of profound exhaustion, deeper than any sleep, washes over me. Let me just close my eyes for a second.

The darkness that comes is soft and warm, like sinking into a sun-warmed nest.

*

When I open them, the world is different. Brighter. Sharper. The scents are overwhelming her, herbs, soap.

I try to turn my head, and the motion feels strange, effortless. I look around.

I am small. I am on her lap, curled in a soft towel. Brown and white fur. Paws.

I shifted. In my sleep.

Panic, faint and distant, flutters in my chest. I try to shift back. To be me again. I concentrate, but my body doesn’t listen. It feels comfortable here, simple. I try again, straining with a will that feels slippery. Nothing.

"My little bunny," a voice whispers, thick with a relief so profound it cracks. I turn my nose. Daphne is looking down at me, her face pale, her eyes red-rimmed. She strokes a finger down my back, her touch trembling slightly.

"For a second there... I thought I lost you."

On the third try, with a soft poof and a dizzying swirl of sensation, my form expands, settles. I am Nima again, human, wrapped in the towel, in her arms. I am shivering.

She doesn’t speak. She simply rises, carrying me as if I weigh nothing, and moves to the large bed. She lays us down, wrapping the thick, warm blanket around us both, creating a cocoon against the world.

The shivering subsides, replaced by a deep, weary chill. "I’m afraid," I whisper into the hollow of her neck, the words barely audible. "The next time... will genuinely be the last."

She sighs, a long, slow exhalation that seems to carry the weight of all our yesterdays. Her arms tighten around me.

"It never gets easy, you know," she says, her voice so quiet it’s almost part of the darkness.

"Losing you. You’d think, after so many times, I’d get accustomed. Build up a tolerance. But it..." her voice hitches, just once, "it hurts. Every single time. Like the first time. Like it’s brand new." She pulls me closer, until there is no space left between us, as if she could physically prevent the parting.

A strange, bittersweet warmth blooms in my chest, alongside the fear. "I’m glad it’s you," I murmur. "Cause I don’t think I would handle losing you. I don’t think I’m strong enough."

"I suppose," she says, her tone dry but layered with a vulnerable truth, "that makes me the more emotionally strong one."

I lean into her, pressing my whole self against the solid, warm length of her. The blanket, the bed, the room—they all fall away. There is only this: the scent of her skin, the steady beat of her heart under my ear, the impossible truth of her.

"I love you," I say.

"hmmm," she responds. It is an agreement. An acknowledgment. A sacrament.

Her hand comes up, fingers threading gently through my hair, stroking with a rhythm that speaks of forever.

"In our next lives," I murmur into the quiet, the thought blooming fully-formed, "I want to have a baby."

A soft chuckle vibrates against me. "I would love to, my dear. But I don’t have the... equipment."

"I want to, though," I insist, the longing sudden and sharp, layered with echoes of other selves.

"I’ve always wanted one.... Not just me, they did... I mean, I did, too..." The lines blur, a chorus of wants from a chorus of lives.

"We could have adopted," she says gently, logically. "And in some of our past lives, we could have tried... other arrangements."

"No," I hear myself say, the certainty not entirely my own. It’s deeper, older. "That’s different." I tilt my head back to look up at her in the dim light. Her golden eyes are soft, waiting.

"I want to have your baby."

She goes very still. The hand in my hair pauses. For a long moment, she just looks at me, seeing not just the old rabbit in her arms, but the actress, the duchess, the assassin, all the women who loved her and wanted this impossible thing. A slow, impossibly tender smile touches her lips.

"...I’ll make it work," she whispers, as if I didn’t ask her to defy biology.

"Dee," I breathe out, the old nickname slipping from a forgotten tongue. "I’ll take you up on that."

Dee? Why did I say that? The name feels both foreign and intimately right on my lips.

"You used to call me ’Dee’ at some point, too," she says, her thumb stroking my temple, helping the fractured memories settle in my mind.

"Really?" I ask, my mind very confused.

"Yeah," she says, and that’s all.

I try to grasp the threading memories, but they slip away. Oh, well. The effort is suddenly too great.

"I love you," I say again, pouring every version of that love into the words.

I don’t hear her response.

The darkness that comes this time isn’t sharp or frightening.