A Restless Night

In the middle of the night, the crying started up again. Rena stirred and folded a pillow over her ears to smother the noise. Is this what it will be like every night? Odo pulled himself out of bed and left to check on the child. After a few minutes, the house was quiet again.

Odo returned wide awake and sat on the bed. “I’ll need to build a crib. A bed doesn’t work for a baby.”

“Did it fall?” Rena asked.

“No no. Just something I realized,” Odo pulled Rena in close.

“It’s freezing,” she said. Odo’s side of the bed had gotten cold since he first got up.

“You’ll warm up quick.”

With their faces close together, Odo could tell that something was wrong. There was a sad look that had been on Rena’s face ever since he first told her his theory on the child, and that expression had fallen even further after Dr. Gocha’s visit. ”What is it?” Odo asked.

“I don’t know what to do,” Rena said, “I was a child during the revival. For as long as I can remember I was one of the youngest people in any room. I don’t know anything about raising a child. I don’t remember anything.”

“My daughter,” Odo began. Rena’s eyes snapped to him, getting Odo to speak of his old family was rare. “It’s hard to remember the different lifetimes. They blend together one after another. When I look at you, I half expect one of your old faces. But my first lifetime, the one that was so long ago it almost seems like a myth, that is probably the one I think of the most. My daughter was incredible. I taught her all about the animals back when we were ranchers. She always got angry whenever we had to slaughter a chicken for food and would refuse to eat. I remember one thing about being a father, and that’s that I knew very little.”

“I’m sorry,” Rena said. It was clear that the day’s events had brought up long buried and painful memories in Odo that Rena knew she could never understand. “Do you-” Rena stopped herself.

“What?” Odo asked.

Rena tried to pass off her question, but Odo encouraged her to continue. “Do you wish she was still here? Do you wish your daughter had made it to be reincarnated?” Rena asked.

Odo considered for a moment, “I wonder what all these millennia would have looked like had she still been alive. What would our family be like? What would she learn or do? Would she have gotten sick of me as so many children seem to with their old parents these days? I wish she had more time. I’m not like Gocha, I don’t see immortality as a curse, and I don’t see it as a blessing the way you do. I only wish she had been given a choice.”

“I wonder if it really is all coming to an end,” Rena said. What Dr. Gocha had said about a potential end to the necromancer’s magic had rung in her head all night. In honesty, the thought had her awake long before the baby’s crying.

Odo brought Rena in even closer, “Don’t worry about that. Even if I had one lifetime left, I wouldn’t change a thing.” He gave her a kiss on the forehead and loosened his hold around her.

“I wonder if it’s the same for humans as it is for animals?” Rena said.

“If what’s the same?”

“If after all this time, do we even have instinct?”

Rena and Odo were unlike many couples. They had been together for nearly 2,000 years. It was common for people to shuffle through relationships, many lasting even less than a single lifetime, but there was something about the couple that seemed unshakable. Even if they had the task of raising a child, they would find a way to do it.

Rena finally felt the exhaustion of the day hit, and her anxious mind quieted enough for her to sleep. For the rest of the night both sides of the bed stayed warm.