adiva_calandia

For

myriadwords's challenge this week.

Title: One Life to Give
Rating: PG
Notes: Spoilers for Wizards at War.

A death-blow is a life-blow to some,
Who ‘till they died, did not alive become
Who, had they lived, had died, but when
They died, vitality begun.

—Emily Dickinson

I only regret I have but one life to give for my country.

—Nathan Hale

It’s called the tenth life, Tualha had told him, paws tucked under her, eyes slitted near shut. Some cats – with a distinct emphasis on the noun; Tualha was no good at subtlety – still have work to do after their ninth life ends, and She grants those cats another life to do it in.

She’d stood up, stretching, then flopped over onto her side and rolled onto her back to look up at him over daintily folded paws. Not that it’s a life the way we think of it, she’d added, unusually serious, but it’s something.

And what are we to get, then? he’d asked.

She’d lashed her tail deprecatingly. The stories only talk about a few very special cats. How am I to know what you lot get?

There was no time to remember the conversation when he was standing in the cavern, Spear in hand. Even if there had been, he wouldn’t have been able to think of it over the roaring of impotent energy inside him.

And even if he’d been able to think of it, he would have dismissed it with a twisted grin. He’s no cat, and secretly he wouldn’t mind if this was the last thing the Powers asked of him, this raging burning laughing passenger.

But instead, Miss bleeding Yank had caught hold of him, and he’d woken up a lifetime later wrapped in Star Wars sheets.

And after that, there’d been work to do, in spite of the stiff scar on his chest and the empty place where Something had gone missing. There was always work to do, in this Universe.

Months later, he remembered, and tracked down Tualha in a barn, sharpening her claws on a beam.

I’m still here, aren’t I, he pointed out.

So you are. What about it?

Well, I might not have spent nine lives on the Powers, but I spent all I had.

She fixed him with a wide-eyed stare for a few moments, and finally twitched her ears in assent.

He grinned. I thought you said only “very special cats.”

Her ears flicked back, and she stood up, tail ramrod straight. Sure and a bard’s always glad to have new stories to tell. But no cat, Master Two-Lives, likes to be told she’s wrong.

She stalked off into the barn, and Ronan, grinning harder, went back to work.