For Centuries - Season 3 [Completed]

Episode 4

James' journal - August312022f.mp3

"Paralysed", Jamie Bower

After that Saturday, Aidan didn't leave his apartment for months. One day I went and saw him.

He was sitting on the floor among his paintings. Some objects were broken as if they had been thrown through the room. It seemed like he had been there for hours, maybe days. His eyes were empty, and he didn't move. He didn't even react when I entered the room.

"What a magnificent rendition of the romantic peintre maudit. Bravo," I said.

Then I pretended to applaud. Still no reaction. Trying to make him laugh: failure. My heart ached at the sight of him suffering like that.

I sighed, and I leaned upon him gently. "I'm not going anywhere, you know? Let me hold you, okay? Let me be there for you."

After a few seconds of silence, he nodded without looking at me.

"Alright," I said.

I kneeled and took him in my arms. His whole body was in an excruciating tension. But the minute I held him, he crumbled against me, as if everything he had felt since Elise's disappearance had come out at this exact instant.

I sat down to catch him, pulled him towards me, and he cried on my chest, trying to catch his breath. "I'm here, love. I'm here," I said, stroking his hair.

The truth is that I was crying too, because I had no answer, neither to his pain nor to mine. She was gone. The light in his life, which he finally had found, after centuries mostly of loneliness and misery, had disappeared.

On this day, we finally talked, for hours, about Elise, about our past, about death, about everything.

He felt guilty: what if he had moved faster? What if he had understood what was going on? She could be alive. On top of that, he wondered why she didn't tell him she had the option of switching places with Am, why she had kept him in the dark, instead of trusting him. He felt he had failed her, that he had failed the love of his life.

And he thought he was right since the beginning, that he was not worthy of her. And all this bullshit. But he was, I knew it. I knew how much she loved him and how she would have done anything to protect him. What they had was real, as real as anything can be, even more. It was special.

Little by little, in the months after, he found his way back. Ikshan had come to see us in Paris and they had told us that there was nothing we could do. Everybody had told us the same thing.

So at some point, Am and Aidan, it was not that they had accepted her death, not really, but more that they had accepted to go on living their own life. Because that's what she would have wanted. Until, one day, maybe two years later, the dreams appeared. And that was a game changer.