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He’d seen Armin sleep before. In every life, Armin slept like this: his brow untroubled, his mouth slack, his limbs thrown wide.
Wide, the way they’d been his first death. Hundreds of years ago, when blades had given way to gunpowder. They’d thought the world was theirs, so they had ridden to war.
Lives later, lives without Armin, empty successions of days where Thada had pursued wealth and power so that when he found him again, he could keep him, he learned that firing mechanisms would have kept the gunpowder from exploding into Armin’s face and chest.
Limbs thrown wide, because that time, there had been nothing else left of him. Only the curse that clung to him or Thada or both of them, their lives set to repeat. Or their deaths.
Thada slipped out of bed, careful not to let the springs squeak behind him. Armin spoke of a future where beds were made of something called memory foam, but Thada had slept on horsehair, and piles of leaves, and in those early days, the ground. He was no longer surprised by what the future held in store. As long as, breath to breath, heartbeat to heartbeat, his future encompassed Armin.
He unplugged the camcorder from the wall charger and checked the battery. Charged enough to get more footage, more videos of Armin for his endless archives. The other day, Veynai had sent him a memo about a new technology with more storage capacity. DVDs, he’d called them. Thada had decided to invest.
Money had always bought memory. Those first few lives, he’d had nothing, and Armin’s face had grown vague round the edges. Thada had scratched his visage into the dirt beside his campfire, the trunks of mahogany trees, training his recalcitrant mind to remember.
Remember him like this, the sheets tangled around his waist, the morning light brushing over the outcroppings of his shoulders, the chest Thada had marked up the night before.
He’d restrained himself, this time, with this Armin, mercurial and vulnerable in turn. He’d gone slow, even as Armin turned desperate in his arms. Not like the last time he’d taken Armin in a pool, sometime in the sixties.
Armin had been a star then, too. Thada had encouraged him, another way to immortalize his face. He still had those rolls of 16mm stored somewhere, reels of that Armin, hard-edged and cynical and brilliant, too brilliant for the era.
Drugs and disease had taken him that time, enemies that Thada hadn't been able to fight. He couldn’t stop the illness that stripped weight from his bones, the weakness that prevented him from working, the callousness of the studio when he could not fulfill his contract.
He’d learned, then, that his power did not extend to the government, the courts that condemned sufferers to the edges of society, the morgues that left their emaciated bodies to rot. Armin would never die that way again. Thada had made sure of it.
He watched Armin’s eyes open through the tiny screen of the camcorder, the colors of the video not quite true-to-life, still not as good as the artist’s brush. That would change, Armin had assured him as he’d lamented the picture quality, telling him about a future marked by cameras and content.
It sounded unbelievable, but Thada had lived too many pasts to doubt the future.
“Good morning,” said Armin, his voice soft from sleep, the way, in every life, he’d woken up in Thada’s bed. “How long have you been filming me?”
Since a camera obscura had cast the outline of his face on a screen hundreds of years ago, but Thada snapped the camcorder shut rather than tell him. They’d been rival warlords then, and his army had won. After the battle, Thada had found him too late to prevent what happened next, the blade silver and gold in his chest, the ground around him soaked with blood.
“Thada?” he asked in this life, and Thada blinked away the memory. He kept all the memories, even the ones that tore him apart, hoarding them for the lonely centuries between Armin.
“Do you want something to eat?” Thada asked, though he'd already ordered, because Armin always woke hungry.
“No,” came Armin’s voice, and Thada’s heart beat against his ribs, because he’d never done that, and maybe this time was different, this time he’d live.
He’d thought that before, during the Kengtung wars, the first time Armin had fallen in love with someone else. Thada had thought it might be better that way, to love him from afar, in case he was the curse-carrier and by withholding himself he could prevent Armin’s death.
He’d been disappointed, then. Devastated, when Armin’s lover sold him to the suzerain. He’d been dead by the time Thada had allied with the western invaders and crossed the border. He’d learned not to hope. Much.
“Come back to bed,” Armin told him, and hope stuck in his throat as Thada stumbled toward him, batting aside the sheets until Armin’s skin slid against his.
Thada drank in Armin’s laughter, even though Armin always woke hungry and he wanted to feed him his usual breakfast and wrap him in a hundred lifetimes of accumulated wealth and protect him from the increasing list of dangers his previous lives had taught him to fear.
Armin hooked a knee around his waist, pawing at Thada’s robe until the terrycloth disappeared somewhere in the debris they’d made of the sheets.
Thada fell onto his forearms, his mouth against Armin’s, tasting sleep and sunlight. Memory paled before the present of Armin’s parted lips, his racing heart, the way he shook under Thada’s touch, his knee loosening from around his waist as Thada pressed him into the mattress.
No art could capture this truth, though Thada had paid enough artists to try.
“Nightstand,” Armin managed, his eyes heavy-lidded, and Thada obeyed, though last night he’d laughed when he’d seen what Thada kept in the top drawer. He wasn’t laughing now, scrabbling for what Thada had in his hands, his golden skin stark against the navy sheets.
The knock startled them both. Armin froze beneath him. Thada went for the second drawer of the nightstand, because he wouldn’t lose Armin that way again.
“Breakfast, khun Thada,” came Veynai’s voice through the door, and Thada left the weapon in the second drawer untouched.
“I thought you would be hungry,” he explained, as Veynai knocked again.
“For you,” Armin replied, hunting in the sheets for what he’d dropped earlier. “Text him to go away.”
…which Thada didn’t understand, because texting would take longer than speaking, and what kind of future had Armin returned from, where speech had given way to pixels on a screen.
He’d find out. Armin knew the future he was running from. Thada knew the pasts that had destroyed them both. So.
Theirs was the present of sunlit sheets and moonlit sandbars. Of Armin’s flushed cheeks as Thada found what he was searching for, his fingertips digging into Thada’s shoulders. Memory tugged at him one last time, Armin in the purple light of the pool deck, his wet hair swept from his forehead, dripping down his neck.
“I’m yours, Thada,” he’d said.
His pulse skittered under Thada’s lips.
This time, he would be.