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Human lives are incredibly short.
Frieren has always known this. It is not a revelation, but a matter of fact. She is an elf, there is magic in the bones of his world, and humans die quick and often and easily. She is not foreign to this concept, not when she hears her mistress’s voice on the wind, not when Fern went from being so small to a young woman in less than a blink of an eye.
Human lives are short. Frieren will live a very long life and she will outlive quite a lot of them. It has never mattered.
She has buried many people. She has lived without them. She doesn’t know why this, why one life, matters.
(She knows. Oh, she knows.)
She is not emotionless on purpose. Frieren cannot control how she feels as much as she can control the fates. There is a piece of her that came into this life knowing it will be long, that there will be many things to feel, and it has protected itself in fatty tissue and splintered bone. She is not afraid to feel but she is not built for it the way others are, wearing emotions on their faces, feeling joy and hatred and fear so abundantly that it leaks into the air around them like toxic gas.
She has never thought of it as something broken, not as others have. It is protection. It is no different than armor. She has thousands of years to live, and feeling everything the whole time sounds like a chore.
She did not cry at Himmel’s funeral. But she cries now.
It stings in her throat first. She thinks she has been poisoned, but only for a moment—long enough to slide off of the bed, to press her knees and palms into the cold wood of a new inn in a vaguely familiar town. Fern is sleeping soundly, and she can hear Stark’s soft snores on his futon by the fire. The fire has burned down to embers but she can see her fingers shaking through the shadows and breathes deep in an attempt to steady her pounding heart.
The first tear lands on the back of her hand. She watches it slide down her skin and braces herself against the sob that rips through her chest. Her hand flies up to her mouth, presses down hard.
It is strange. Unexpected. One moment she is dozing, warm and quiet, turning over their new adventure, and the next—
The next sob escapes her in a small, miserable noise. She shudders.
She moves on instinct, the same quiet part that stays calm in life-or-death situations. She grabs her coat with one hand and her boots with the other, and she sweeps from the room like she had never been there to begin with.
The rest of the inn is quiet. It’s the middle of the night, soft early springtime. There is a window open on the main level, where all other things are still, a calm and steady breeze with just a hint of a chill brushing softly against her exposed skin.
She doesn’t try to soften it, now that she is alone. Her gasping sob sounds horrifically loud in such a silent space. Her footfalls are heavy with desperation as she rushes for the door, stumbling out into the town street. Bare feet on cobblestones, stars in an endless expanse.
She knows where she is going. Frieren is no fool, and she knows the memory that brought this great big horrible thing out of her.
It is a statue. Just like every other statue Himmel left behind, his back straight and his smile kind, his sword in his hands. Unremarkable stone, well taken care of but no different than the others. This is just the same—never as alive, never real. She doesn't know why this is the one that bothers her.
But oh, she is not foolish enough to not know that grief is funny that way. She might not have felt grief like this but she has been outrunning this tug in her chest for a while now, has been blinking back these tears for years and burying them deep.
Grief is merciless. The moment she has looked away, the moment she has let her guard down, it has carved its way through.
It has grown. She doesn’t nurture it, doesn’t tend to it like blue-moon weed flowers; she smothers it like something ugly, something she doesn’t want to look at. She has avoided it for so long she hadn’t realized how limitless it has become. How greedy it has eaten away at her until it has grown too large, too glutinous, to ignore.
The statue is lit by the moonlight and the flicker of candlelight in the square. She thinks she remembers this town—another monster, another place to be saved. A blip of time. She doesn’t think they were even here longer than two months.
Somehow, it is here where the grief finds her. It is one statue that is her undoing. It is a town she barely even remembers, and a man who once looked at her with something she had been too dense to read, too unwilling to acknowledge—
She sits on the chilly cobblestone, pulls her knees to her chest. Stares up at one of the small remembrances Himmel left her and marvels, for not the first time, that people can feel so much.
It is grief. It has always been grief, small and stifled at first, but with every year the loss sinks in more acutely. Frieren knows grief but not like this, not in a way that matters. She has never lost so much, and only realized it too late.
She has only been so loved once.
Frieren knows it will always hurt like this. She has had a lot of time to pick up the small, sharp pieces of what Flamme left behind but there will never be anything as brutal as this. She has never felt this deep, though—this raw. She had never lost something as valuable as what Himmel would have given her.
Perhaps that is the crux of this feeling she must carry with her—it is the possibilities that will haunt her. Frieren took Himmel for granted and now she will always be chasing a ghost, always looking behind her shoulder for someone that will never be following her. She will always wonder what could have happened, if she had known her own feelings, if she had been less afraid of them. She will spend the rest of her existence dreaming—a frivolous thing she has never bothered with before, but now she cannot help but to dip her toes in. To open the window and let the light in.
She will carry Himmel’s memory for the rest of her life. He will live as long as stone, until the stories slip away in the short attention span of time. He will live until she cannot keep him alive anymore, until she runs out of the ample time she was given with her life to miss out on the most important part.
She hates when it hurts like this. (She hopes it always hurts like this.)
Frieren stays on that ground for long enough to catch her breath, to wipe the tears from her face. She studies the way the moonlight touches the statue and lets herself think of how he had really looked, and how he had looked at her. She clings to the pain that makes sense.
Regret is a fool’s game. Frieren lets the cobblestone leech the strength from her legs and allows herself this moment to be foolish.
When Fern and Stark wake the next morning, they will notice her boots have been moved. They will see the coat slung over the edge of her bed and, when Fern drags her away from her warm blankets, they will see the dirt on her nightgown. She’ll notice the moment Fern almost asks, and then doesn’t. She won’t say a word because it is not their business, and she doesn’t want them to worry about the things she carries. She does not want them to think the burden is something she cannot bear.
So they will rise, and eat warm porridge, and talk about where they will go next. They will wear their spring clothes and walk in the sun.
And Frieren will watch them and ignore the awful, fond reminder that human lives are so unbearably short.