For the longest time, she didn’t know how to feel. She didn’t know how to face this new lease on youth, how to make peace with the stolen body inflicted upon her.
She’d had her heyday lifetimes ago, known her own long-limbed, sensual grace. She’d reveled in the attentions of handsome Italian boys with dark eyes and clever tongues. But she'd long since filed the memories away, shifting her focus to howling beasts and swirling spells. She’d crafted gleaming swords that resonated with their bearers' magic like the harmonic frequencies of a plucked string.
She’d become accustomed to sun-browned, leathery skin, to hawkish, penetrating eyes, to iron-grey hair cropped short at the jawline, practical and low-maintenance. She’d become used to strength and solidity, to corded, ropy sinew--a woman of two centuries with the build of a blacksmith.
But now, here is this new body, every bit as vibrant and hungry as the first. Now, here is middling height, a heart-shaped face, dimples, and long, lustrous, curly brown hair that Harry loves to run his fingers through, holding her in place as he kisses her breathless.
Now, here is this new man, whose young flesh holds the scars of a man ten times his age, whose dark eyes carry the weight of millions of ordinary people who have only him to protect them. Dark eyes that drift shut in quiet contentment as she touches him, a simple statement of her presence. He is starved for it, and she is more than willing to oblige him.
Though she feels guilty sometimes, enjoying this body.
She feels it the first time he says she is beautiful, for instance. She stills, the moment teetering on the edge of breaking. Not beautiful, a treacherous voice inside whispers. Not you, not any more. She was. Now she’s dead.
He senses the change in her, and he looks her in the eye, or at least the wizarding equivalent. His serious expression flickers from her eyes to the bridge of her nose and back, sidestepping the faint tug that would complicate their dalliances far more than either of them wants at this stage. Finally, he reaches down and takes her hands in his. He brings them close to his face, inspecting the palms.
She does not know what he’s looking for, but she knows what she sees. The knowledge is easy to push aside, but it always comes back. She sees smooth, elastic, pale flesh, marred only by a pair of small, faint scars near the knuckles, origins unknown. She sees no prominent tendons or veins, rendered in stark clarity by the passage of centuries. She sees no burn from an incautious moment in the forge, no puckered scar from the bite of a hellhound.
She sees lies. She sees the rightful property of a young woman, whose promising future was extinguished by a ruthless necromancer who hijacked her body and shoved her soul into the shell of an old man, then eliminated the evidence. She tries halfheartedly to pull her hands away, but his grip is strong. She meets his eyes again, frowning, but he shakes his head and gestures back to her hands.
He brushes his thumbs across the toughened pads at the base of each finger, tracing the rough edges. Those are different. When she usurped this body, it had possessed the soft hands of an academic, but her fighter’s calluses quickly asserted themselves. Despite the upheaval, her loyalties and responsibilities are clear: It will take decades to return to her previous magical potential, if ever, but she must make do. She has no other choice but to start again, reshaping this body for a new purpose, building a new city with the hewn stones of its fallen predecessor. She will drill herself in swordsmanship until new muscles possess the same memory as the old, and she will throw her metaphysical weight at the lowered limits of her magical potential until they splinter and fall.
With great solemnity, he kisses her calloused hands, identifies and embraces the one aspect of this body she can truly pinpoint as her own.
“You are, Anastasia.”
The treacherous voice is silent. She can let herself believe him.
It will continue to surprise her, sometimes, to see that strange face in the mirror. But she is beginning to make peace with it.
Story Notes:
This started out as a Fifteen-Minute Ficlet from the prompt, “Write about a justifiable sin.” It mutated from there. Thanks, as always, to Kat for beta-fu and reassurance that I was going in the right direction!
Disclaimer: Harry and Luccio belong to Jim Butcher! Let’s hope Jim lets them have some fun before he inevitably makes something horrible happen to them.