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A DROWNED MAN’S WATCH (STILL KEEPS TIME)

A little angsty oneshot character study. WARNINGS: Grief, depersonalisation (inferred), suicidal ideation

SUMMARY: Nathan Young has been immortal for a very long time. WC: 973 CHARACTERS: Nathan Young, Simon Bellamy (mentioned), Alisha Daniels (mentioned)

At some point, he stops counting the years.

The sky of London is blanketed with darkness. There are clouds, thin and far between, whose edges are illuminated by the lights of the city, the shine that drifts upwards and hangs in the air, making stargazing impossible. It’s a shame, really, because he likes to look at the stars. He thinks that if he stares for long enough, he’ll figure out how much they’ve moved since the last time he made the effort to crane his neck upwards. One day, Nathan will look up and find that Orion’s Belt has drifted down Orion’s hips, and he will know what the span of his life has been thus far:

Too long.

His friends wither away like the roses he once knew them as. Where they were once thorny, vibrant creatures, beckoning life and the promise of spring, they’re aged now, skin creased like the covers of the leather-bound diaries that he attempted to fill with his adventures, but gave up on. There were too many stories to tell. There were too many endings to pen. If he didn’t write them, they would fade away into his mortal memory. Writing people down immortalised their loss.

He burnt the books a long time ago. Watched the flames climb into the sky, the smoke drifting, spinning like a grotesque dancer, a reminder of how delicate and ethereal the hearth truly was. No matter the warmth, it is always snuffed. The night is cold and long. The winter is always on its way. These are the things he knows.

He’s standing in a cemetery, looking down at names that should mean something to him, but no longer do. They’re just words nowadays. Alisha might have been the most important, gorgeous woman he’s ever met in his life, or she might have been the most irritating soul on the planet. Simon might have played rugby or danced in a troupe. He doesn’t remember. He cares, though, which is why their gravesides are populated with flowers that are always replaced before they rot away.

Nathan supposes that people are quite like them, the flowers. They’re beautiful for a while. He can admire them as what they are, the soft and gorgeous populace of the Earth that will inevitably succumb to time, just as everything else does. Except for him. Never him.

Maybe it’s a curse. He thought, for a long time, that it was a curse. He started telling other people as much when the origins of his immortal coil became faded from mental view.

I threw peanuts at a witch. He’d said to a man who had wept over his blood-drained body before screaming when life returned with a gasp and a cough. She gave me a nut allergy and an eternity to deal with it.

It might have been true. It probably wasn’t. He tells others things that he knows aren’t true, but that he’s beginning to believe anyway - he was the third person to stab Caesar, and he was the man who organised the placement of the rocks at Stonehenge, and Shakespeare plagiarised the line ‘all that glitters is not gold’ from him - all lies. Everything he does nowadays is a lie.

The worst one is the smile. It’s never left. He’s always wearing it. One hour bleeds into another, and teeth mash themselves together as though that will make him happier, somehow. The hours don’t matter. They don’t count for anything. He has all of the time in the universe. Quantifying it makes him feel old; quantifying it makes him realise that there’s so much more to come, and he’s scared.

Because the sky above London is dark and the clouds are lit up, but one day it will be red. The sun will burn up. The stars will die. The shooting stars will crash into the ground before any of his wishes are fulfilled. The ground beneath him will be filled with corpses of people he may have known, long ago, before the synapses stopped firing.

People talk to him sometimes. There’s a certain allure to a man who sits on a bench and stares into nothing. They want to understand, they want to view what he views, see the world through lenses that are faded and vintage. They tell him their stories, they talk for minutes or hours, and then they go away, and they realise that the strange man didn’t say a word.

They don’t even know if he was listening. His secret is this:

Always. He’s always listening.

It’s hard to remember. Not because the memories have died, though most of them have, but because the ones that live are so far away that they feel as though they happened to someone else. Someone who didn’t falsify the zest, someone who ran and ran and never expected time to catch up with them. He remembers a storm. Hail the size of minivans. He’s not sure if it’s just a story that he tells himself to drift off into sleep. It’s hard to tell.

He finds himself at a lake and thinks about throwing himself in. It won’t do anything. He’ll thrash around for a while, deflate, and then he’ll be back at square one. He’ll be alone. Nathan is a drowned man’s watch that still keeps time. Nobody is looking at him. There is no need for him to keep ticking, and yet he does. Constantly. The hours come too slowly. They pass, marked by the bell of the tower in the centre of the city, and then they’re irrevocable. Everyone who hears that toll succumbs to entropy. Everyone who breathes this poisonous air is going to die somehow. Everyone who isn’t him.

At some point, he stops counting the hours. They don’t mean anything anyway.

(Except they almost definitely do.)

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