Oleander: A Fictional Narrative

Oleander lied awake in bed, staring at nothing in particular. Mortimer shifted beside him, waking up a bit and noticing the small thoughtful frown on his husband’s face.

“You okay?”

“Yeah. The memory thing is just bothering me again, it’s no big deal. You know how it hangs on me.”

“C’mere,” Mortimer said, kissing Oleander on the forehead. As he pulled away from the kiss, Oleander looked up at Mortimer’s gray eyes curiously.

“Hey. You might have told me this already, but what color were your eyes before?”

“Red. Well, technically, first they were brown and then they turned red when I became an aspect, but you only knew me when I had red eyes.”

“When were they brown?”

“During that time I can’t tell you about. The time you can’t understand. When I was-” the final word was cut off as if the sound was plucked from the air.

That makes sense,” Oleander hummed softly, lost in thought. Leaning back, he ran a hand through his hair, feeling at the gray hair near his temples that he never tried to hide despite all the hair color changes he’d done throughout the years.

“I remember a time, and it might have been from—from then, from that time you can’t explain, that you didn’t age when I did. I remember some years that you did, remember the grays going through your hair at about the same rate as mine, but then you stopped. Was that…was that something to do with the way I was with Her around?”

“Yeah. After you-” another word lost, “you didn’t age, so I never felt the need to age with