[WP] Your SO is immortal, you reincarnate, and your kids tend to go either way. Your SO just figured out that you remember all of your past lives.

“This was from our honeymoon, wasn’t it?” I asked, looking at the snowglobe in the garage.

“What?” Mae asked. “No, that’s a family heirloom. It’s from the fifties.”

Things could be both. The snowglobe played music when one turned a dial at the bottom. It was Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, rendered in the tinny tones of a tiny machine within the base of the globe. It was probably rusted beyond imagination and wouldn’t play, but I turned the dial anyway. The song started to play, slower than usual, before it petered out, the machine giving up.

“It’s been so many years since I’ve heard that,” Mae said. She started to clear out more things in the garage. We always had too many things, no matter how large a house we lived in. Mae’s immortality meant that wealth was never an issue. Those who had time found it easier to accumulate money. She hoarded the souvenirs of our various lives, and hated to part with them.

“You hated it,” I said, absentmindedly, laughing. I knew immediately I had said the wrong thing. It was our secret, from a few lives ago. I would play the music, she would tolerate it for my sake, but stop the dial from turning and silence the snowglobe the second I left the room.

“How do you know that, Travis?” she asked.

“I—”

She withdrew something from the box in front of her and tossed something at me. It was a small cylindrical tin, made of dark metal. I could hear the matches inside, and looked down at the thing in disgust. In the regency period, no one knew what harm cigars did. I grew up smoking them constantly, and so our time during that life was cut short. I took ill and while Mae had tried to nurse me to health, we had to part sooner than anticipated.

“That look!” Mae announced. “Why do you have that expression? Do you know that match box?”

“It’s — it’s dirty,” I lied. She shook her head. I worked in the dirt often. I had started my existence as a farmer, and over the centuries, I was never one to be averse to dirt or mud. Mae once she started digging into it, would never give up. So I did.

“I know, Mae. I remember everything,” I said.

“All of this time, you’ve known?” Mae asked. “You remember everything?”

“From the very first moment,” I admitted. “From the moment I saw you across a field, when I was just a farmer in Mercia.”

Over a millennium and a half together, and I still remembered our first meeting. Her hair was different now, dyed blonde. She wore glasses, to create an illusion of being older. But in those days, she had let her hair grow out, dark and wavy, until it reached her knees. I’d been the first human she met. I had braided her hair, clothed her, and taught her to blend in among people. It had felt like taming a stray cat, then. It felt like her loving me was inevitable, because I had shown her kindness when most people would have shown her cruelty. After all, it was a lawless time. Other than her immortality, Mae had no powers. She was just a girl that never aged or died, and while she healed from her wounds, she could still be hurt.

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We had married in the village, a wedding feast. It was a time before churches and Christianity. Mercians stuck to paganism longer than others had, and it was a beautiful celebration, free of the stoicism of organized religion. The church weddings had come later, but the first one had just been a feast, and then a return to our humble cottage. In our first life, there were no children.

“Oh my god,” she said. She clasped a hand over her mouth. “You knew all along? Why didn’t you tell me, Travis?”

“You can call me Alwin now,” I told her. I’d had countless names over the centuries, but the first one felt like who I truly was. “There’s no need for either of us to pretend anymore.”

“Alwin,” she said, the name a breath and a plea.

We had a mountain of memories to revisit, for her to understand why I’d done what I did. The first time, she had found me by accident. Each time, I was reborn with the same features. We came across each other again in Lichfield, her as a nun, and me as a traveler who’d come to the city for work. We left the ecclesiastical city behind for a whirlwind romance, for another life, and miraculously, a child.

I thought I had found a reincarnation of her, the first time. I thought that she didn’t know me, but over the years I found out. Se knew me better than myself, in ways that would take more than one lifetime. The first life, when she did not age or fall ill, I thought her to be something magical. We’d had to move often, as people were frightened of such unexplainable things. She lived first as my wife, then as my niece, and then as a grandniece. We had done so for centuries, until people stopped caring about their neighbors and we could live our own, perfect, private lives.

Our children who were immortal came back to us as friends, as Mae’s distant relatives. Those who had inherited my trait of being reborn visited less frequently. Some of them did not like to dwell on their unique circumstances. They preferred to live different lives each time, and found my life of lies and repetition to be something abhorrent.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

For centuries, we had lived like criminals. I saw the handle of a baseball bat poking out of one of the boxes. When one lived with an immortal, one had to live quietly. They could not pursue fame or glory, or even anything beyond a mundane existence. I had given up momentary dreams for a life with her, time after time. In one life, I almost made it to the major leagues. Then we met each other again. I don’t know how she found me, but she did.

Each time I saw her afresh, for the first time after a few decades of separation, everything else in the world became secondary. Became unimportant. It was a difficult living and aging next to woman who was forever in her youth. I saw her question before she approached me in each life.

There were lives in between when she held back. Empty lives, for both of us. She felt guilt for the difficulties I would face. In a few decades, I would be an old man again, with an obscenely young wife. I would go through infirmity, lose my body or my mind or both, and then be born again to go through the same trial.

“I didn’t want you to be guilty,” I said. “Every time, you feel guilty for being yourself. For bringing this impossible magic into my normal life and disrupting it. I wanted to simplify it.”

“I was cheating you, life after life. I never told you I was immortal.”

“I was cheating you too.”

Mae walked forward, her hand against my face. “I’m truly sorry, Alwin. If we could go back to that day in Mercia—”

“Then I would do it all over again. Every life, every moment. I want another millennium of moments with you, and more if the universe will grant it to us. And I won't forget any of it, because you are unforgettable, Mae.”