Title: In This Last of Meeting Places

Author: tsubaki-hana

Series: Chrestomanci

Rating: K+

Disclaimer: Chrestomanci belongs to Diana Wynne Jones.

Summary: Age had not dulled his eyes or drawn her smile tight. (Christopher/Millie. For Niphridell.)

With the drawing of this Love, and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

- T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding"

He had been so delighted when Millie had answered yes, she would marry him no matter how completely obstinate, vain, ridiculously noble, and utterly oblivious to others that he could be. She had long since learned to live with him, had known what to expect of him, and while many thought that this inherent knowledge would dull their marriage, they both had disagreed, believing that it would be stronger for it.

"We know what we're getting into this way," says Millie, always smiling. "It won't be a matter of discovering each others bad habits, considering we know most of them, nor will it be a matter of whether we will be able to endure pressure."

They hold hands while she talks, and Christopher gladly hands over the conversation, lost in his own thoughts. They range from simple things, like the feel of a small cut on her right hand from a run-in with her stationary paper, to the changes that he is about to experience.

He knows that they will not have a hard time when they are married, or at least not in the normal sense of the word. There are dangers to them at all times, and to their happiness, but there will never be a danger to their love. Christopher knows, and she knows, that they could be separated forever, or that they may grow further apart in their ideas and arguments, but that they will always love each other just the same, because Millie will still be the girl who was a goddess and his constant support, and he will always be a meddlesome enchanter who threatened to blow up her temple if she did not let him leave, and a knight in slightly dingy armor, since he can't get the silver polish out to clean it.

They never tell each other so, because giving it words seems to take some of the magic from it. Words try and define something that is inexpressible with letters and verbs.

It is like their secret.

"Oh, no thank you," had been what Cat said when Christopher had approached him, a young man of 26 next to his own half a century of life, asking him if he wanted to become the full-fledged Chrestomanci. (And how old that half a century had made him feel! How very distant from the untouched blonde man before him with bright blue eyes, a crisp grey suit, and a sober disposition that stood before him.) Of course, despite all protests, Cat is more than ready to take the position in its entirety. Christopher had not done half as many missions as he had only a decade before. For all intents and purposes, Eric Chant is the real Chrestomanci.

"All this talk of time makes me tired," he says, and Cat laughs, not at all nervous like he might have been when they first met. He is gladder for it.

"Nonsense, you still haven't aged a day from the first time I saw you in that kitchen, scolding me for thieving apples," says Cat, rustling through a pile of papers with quick hands. (One hand, the left, bears a wicked scar from an accident, but he is surer with his hands for it.) In a glance, he is able to find exactly what he needs, but still frowns in concentration, looking hesitantly at him. "Of course if you're going to stop being Chrestomanci, that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to leave the castle. No, actually, I do think I would prefer it if you would stay."

"Oh?" says Christopher, smiling crookedly. "How certain you sound. Does this mean I'm not allowed to leave? You do realize that there can only be one man in the house who wears the fancy dressing gowns, and that is me."

Cat smiles in the manner that he always does, carefully and thoughtfully and full of sharp teeth.

"I wouldn't dream of taking that from you. I wouldn't look half as intimidating in my night clothes as you do."

"Utterly forbidding in house slippers and ruffled hair, yes, that would be me." (Which is a lie, because he has never looked at all out of place in those satin and silk clothes, but finds himself more and more uncomfortable with his thinning, long wrists.)

They speak at a comfortable and quick pace, simultaneously flattering and insulting each other in a way that reminds Christopher of Gabriel. With each disguised swing, he feels that hollow place that he keeps for his teacher, the man that would outlive the pyramids. And it is at times like this that Christopher wonders if Cat will look back and see him in the same light that Christopher sees old De Witt.

He hopes, but he hopes not. Christopher and Cat both know that he will not outlive the pyramids, but neither one quite has the heart to mention it to the other.

"Never you mind that Cat has no successor," says Millie, darning socks in her wicker chair while he, frowning, sips tea and lemon from a china cup. "You didn't have one until you were thirty or so. There's no point in worrying just yet. He even has one more life than you did when you started being Chrestomanci all the time."

The small drawing room (the one that she always affectionately tells guests is a mere 70 feet wide) seems a lot bigger when it is only the two of them, sitting as close as the furniture and his bony side will allow. He has always loved how warm she is next to his own coldness, soft where he is all angles and sharp corners. There have never been two people who look more different that fit so well together, or so the two of them tell each other when they are alone like this. Sometimes he wonders if she was made to be soft to keep him, so thin and brittle, from breaking.

"That wasn't because I didn't want one," he says, and steeples his fingers together. She smiles, one of her quiet, unhurried ones, and prods at his ankle with one booted foot. He smiles too, glad that she doesn't feel it necessary to kick him under the table like she might have done when they were both still very young.

Millie sighs. "I suppose that next you will find fault in the fact that he dresses much more subtly than you as well. Cat always liked to blend into the background. Something about his paleness drives him into the corners of your eyes. Your red suit would have made his face look like a wraith's, like he wasn't as real as it was." (What she means to say is that Cat is unlike him in the respect that he does not like to be the center of attention, but with the years, her tact has been much refined, and she will never say anything that will hurt his feelings. It hurts anyway, but in a phantom way.)

With long, spindly fingers that knot into the lace of her dress, he puts his arm around her shoulder, and listens, very calmly, to the clicking of her knitting needles. Millie counts his heartbeats in her stitches.

When one Eric Chant is declared to the Prime Minister and Parliament as the new Chrestomanci, Christopher is torn between the floating feeling of a boat without a dock and the relief of a man who has put down a lead mantle. On one hand, he has known nothing but his work for years, ever since the arrest of The Wraith, and without the calls from other worlds, he is not wholly certain what it is that he needs to be doing. He knows he can be helpful, but it is not quite the same as being the leader of the pack.

On the other hand (the one he wears his wedding band on), he knows that he is tired, tired from two, very nearly three decades of working in his position. He is beginning to feel he tell-tale creaks and pains in his hands and head, and he knows that these are ones that Millie can't just throw some verbena cream and a muscle brace on. She knows it, and covers up her inability to help with her ability to worry for him. Everyone else simply ignores it, treating him like the lord and master of the house, which Cat seems to prefer anyway.

"It won't matter how many years I live here. You'll always be the leading man," says Cat, laughing over his supper, sending Marianne a fleeting glance that Christopher recognizes from a mile away. (It wasn't so long ago that he made the very same ones to his wife, heart raw and mouth wide with guarded grins. Millie had been so long in recognizing it for what it was.) "I'm still partially trapped by the idea that I'm eight-years-old and completely unable to explain magical theory."

From across the room, Roger takes it upon himself to inform Cat that he probably still couldn't tell him the difference between an illusion and a grimoire, but would be able to recognize it for what it was.

"True," says Cat, "so in some respects I wouldn't be much good by myself now would I?" With this, he looks deferentially at Christopher, but looks very much like he would like to call him 'Chrestomanci', the same way he has been for ten years.

Christopher, looking at the tableware vaguely, wonders if he'll ever get used to his real name again. Only three people have ever bothered to call him Christopher since he was first given his position, and one of them only does it in defiance. (He loves his mother, but grudges die hard, and she has sworn by the gunmetal grey curls on her head that he is her son before her superior. Conrad has no uses for titles. And Millie? Millie knows him from before he had ever even heard the word Chrestomanci, much less had it for his own, and he draws comfort that she has never defined him by his position or title, but as a boy that brought her books and a man that gave her his life in the form of a gold band.)

The others, not exactly sure how they ought to address him now, simply stay quiet.

"Christopher, really, are you so insecure in your position in the house that you would give up our room to Cat? I've never seen him so flustered!" says Millie, turning the bed down, giggling like a school girl. "Chrestomanci or not, I sincerely doubt he wants a room where a couple of old crows have slept for the greater part of 40 years, much less a room that both of his cousins were probably conceived in."

"'Probably', in the respect that it is just likely that at least one of them was conceived in either the downstairs bathroom, the west parlour room, our room, or the conservatory, all in one weekend?" he says wrly, setting down on his side of the bed, smirking. She just throws one of the decorative pillows at his head and demands that he never mention that, lest Cat take to hiding in his room.

"Nope, that's not safe either," he says while trying to hide his own laughter, "because we both know that the second time around..."

Millie, laughing into the coverlet, mousy greying hair coming out of her sleeping braid, tells him to stow it before he frightens anyone. "You must be losing your memory in your old age, Christopher," she says teasingly. "Because I am quite certain that you're thinking of Janet's room."

"Fine, Mrs. Know-it-all. Let's just start over right here, and that way we can both be on the same page since you're so insistent on reading ahead," he says glibly, not expecting a proper retort for that. If nothing else, Christopher is still the quickest thinking on his feet.

Millie smiles. "But Christopher, I already know the end to this book."

At least, he thinks while kissing her brow between bouts of laughter, 40 years cannot damage a sense of humour (even if everything else seems so different to him).

Three more years pass, and neither of them are particularly surprised when Julia comes home and declares that she is going to marry her longtime beau. They have waited much longer than he or Millie ever suspected that they would. "There's a time for everything," she had said, glossy black hair falling across her eyes. She had looked irritable, as though waiting wasn't what she wanted to do at all. She is not a patient woman, much in the way that he is not a patient man, but she has the grace to bow to time.

In her adulthood, she has shaped into a beautiful woman with an elegantly rounded face and strong-minded disposition. In her green dress (an expensive one, the kind that Christopher buys her when he is given the opportunity and to her protest), she looks a lot like him, and he knows already he couldn't change her mind anyway, because they are equally as obstinate.

He knew the day that she became the first of the children to move out of the castle and go to London that she would be the most set in her own ways (which are really his ways, only separate from him).

"It's just the way things work out," says Jason from over a window box of chrysanthemums and stubborn wizard's nettle, blooming white and thorny into the other plants. They stand outside of the Woods House, stomping and clicking heels against the mossy pavers of the garden paths where the herbologist does his rounds. "My own Evelyn has gone off to marry that Farleigh lad down in Helm St. Mary's." He frowns a little, wispy blonde hair getting into his face as he kneels with a trowel and can of weed killer, muttering about ignorant laymen's poisons. "All you can really do is smile and tell them that you're happy about it, proceeding to pay out your nose for the wedding."

"Ah yes, it's the brides family that pays, isn't it?" he asks, not really caring. He has always been financially well-off, from his employment to the British government and twice over from the Chant family. His father had passed on a year before (and it doesn't hurt as much as it ought to, he thinks), leaving him a sizable portion of real estate in Japan and France as well as enough stocks and bonds to finance him and Millie for more years than he can imagine.

Horoscopes finally paid off, Christopher thinks with a smile, looking down at a lonely peony in the rosebushes.

Jason, covered in dirt, looks up at him, frowning in the way he does when it looks like he has given too much water to his herb garden. "I can tell that the wedding isn't the part that bothers you. I'll be frank since we've known each other so long." despite the confident words, Christopher still sees his friend chew his lip thoughtfully, picking over his words. (He has always been good at reading people, even when none can read him.)

"Children grow up, even when you feel that they never will, and when they do, it's our job as parents to let them do as they please, only putting our hands in when we think they will hurt themselves,"says Jason, wiping topsoil and moss from his gloves. Christopher carefully sidesteps the debris in his leather shoes. "We raise them, and then they go off to be their own people. They aren't like pets."

"But smell about the same when they're little," Christopher adds, feeling better for it. Jason just smiles, tanned skin crinkling at the edges of his eyes, and for the life of him, Christopher has never seen someone's face so like an autumn leaf in colour and texture. He wonders if his eyes don't do the same. ( He knows that it isn't likely, because where Jason is comfortable, suitable for the ever-changing trees that will never put out the same pattern of leaf, Christopher is tall and pale like stone, something without the sense to change with the seasons, instead chipping at the corners. He, however, does still hope to age as gracefully.)

"I understand perfectly, Jason. I suppose I'm guilty of looking at Julia as though she were still eight and insisting on dressing to match Millie. I doubt she even remembers that anymore, not with those clothes from Paris she likes to wear, couture or whatever she called it," he says, waving his hand dismissively.

Jason laughter is sharp with amusement. "As though you were not guilty of dressing for the times, Christopher Chant. I've never seen a man put so much attention into his appearance as you do."

"One of us has to look good."

They laugh again, but it is a little stiffer than before. He feels the need for distraction, but cannot leave the subject, not when it is still too new in his mind to forget.

Christopher sighs. "Well, then I suppose I should get ready to be without my only little girl."

"Stop being melodramatic, Chant. Janet hasn't left yet, now has she?" asks Jason, shaking a packet of seeds threateningly at him, and Christopher smooths perfect black hair (and grey, but he doesn't let anyone know, not as long as magic still runs in his blood) away from his face.

The next spring, Julia Chant becomes Mrs. Julia Kinlan after her father walks her down the aisle, simultaneously happy for his daughter and struggling with the innate desire to kick Michael Kinlan, the young cursebreaker and magician, in the shins for taking his daughter from him. But Julia looks so lovely in her white dress, and Millie is sending him warning looks, so he resists.

It is too surreal, because not so long ago he can remember being the one at the altar, looking back at Millie happily and hesitantly, torn between reaching for her hand and turning for the rose bush next to him, somewhere to properly hide from change. It doesn't feel like it has been 30 years since he had swung Millie by the waist around the dance floor, when he never felt out of breath or out of time. They had a lifetime before them then, and now it feels as though a lifetime was half over in a couple nights of sleep, as though everything between those moments were only passing thoughts, not passing years.

But he will not be unhappy today. He will not, because he is still able to empathise. Mr. Kinlan will not be meeting with his immaculate Italian shoes. He comforts himself by saying that he will resist until Christmas.

Then, maybe things won't seem to move too fast.

"Do the floor tiles always have to be this damnably cold?" he mutters from the edge of the bed, where he knows she won't hear his protests. His face is covered in scruff, the winter air leaves him cold, and what worse is that his feet are freezing. (There are more important things, but he'd rather take on the problems that can be solved.)

He is 56 this winter, and it bothers him that he can feel the chill in his body where just a few years before, he would have been able to ignore it. Millie is always telling him that he is built like a scarecrow, all bones and no meat, but he has never quite realized how true this is. (Now that he knows, he'll never say so, just quietly accept it as best he can. He's never been old before, and he's not entirely sure that he likes it after half a lifetime of insisting on being as dapper as he was at 25.)

"What are you on about now, Christopher?" Millie grumbles from beneath her pile of blankets.

"Nothing, dearest, nothing at all. But may I recommend carpets for next winter?" he asks, standing with a shudder. He would like nothing more than a proper dressing gown and his velvet slippers, but refrains from complaining. Millie always knows what he would complain about already.

He is stopped before he gets far, Millie's white and rough fingered hand grabbing for his own from across the bed. She smiles and pulls him back. "It's too early and too cold to be roaming about the halls right now. I doubt even Cat is up yet," she says. "And besides, I'd like some company, at least for a little while. I get cold when you're not around.

He obliges and crawls back into bed, laughing when she protests at his cold feet, but tucking his head into the crook of her neck anyway. Her mousy hair tickles his nose, wiry and unrelenting against his cheek. She weaves one hand into his own salt-and-pepper hair (she protests when he uses glamour spells when it is just the two of them) and whispers nonsense about what she'll have to get done today.

He is still half in love with the way that she can warm his skin, but worries that she is not as warm as she used to be.

"Waiting is what we do, I knew that when I joined this family," says Marianne for her chair, glancing nervously from time to time towards the main hall where they all know the tile pentacle is. "I'm sure that Cat can handle being by himself, even if it is for a week."

Marianne Pinhoe, or rather, Marianne Chant is a tough girl, tough enough to survive a marriage to England's own Chrestomanci. Her red hair is always well-kept in a braid down her back, her skirts, much more body contouring and short than the ones that Millie would have worn, rustling behind her. Christopher and Millie smile, knowing the very same feeling that Cat and Marianne now put up with.

"It's good that you realize that, my dear," says Millie, "because Cat is the strongest enchanter in all of England," she turns to him, "sorry darling," back again to Marianne, "and he can take care of himself. He would be offended if you sent the calvary after him. He already feels inadequate at times without the extra help."

Marianne smiles wanly, but Christopher can tell that she does not completely agree just yet.

Personally, he can't blame her. As a person who has never actually been to the other worlds, Marianne has never properly seen exactly what is waiting for Cat or the dangers that come with it. Christopher has spent years telling Millie not to worry, making light of all the things that could have killed him, just for her peace of mind.

When Cat comes home that evening, covered in mud and several other things that neither of them give a name to, he does much the same.

"It was nothing," he says, smoothing cropped blonde hair with a gloved hand. "It was just a messy job."

(The part that both he and Cat leave out is that it is a messy job in Series Two where there is a war going on, and that he offered to go instead.

"No, I don't think that would be wise," Cat had said, almost trembling with anxiety, and his handsome face contorted into a frown. "Marianne understands that it has to be done, and I have to do my job, no matter how unpleasant it can be. Besides, Millie would never forgive you if you didn't come back."

"I don't think I will forgive you if you don't come back," he retorted, feeling that he was all tight lines and worry, something drawing him thin.. "It's an unreasonable mission anyway, and it's better to lose an old man than a promising young enchanter," he had protested.

Cat had only frowned at that and used his authority to tell him no. Christopher, while still worried, was at least relieved that Cat had learned to stand his ground. It didn't make him feel better to watch his much too young cousin, almost son, walk off quietly to somewhere he would probably die.)

"It's nothing he can't handle," says Millie.

Christopher, unlike Millie and Marianne who sit gracefully, is not made for waiting. Until he sees Cat's face, his fingers remain painfully white against the parchment pages of his book, because unlike Millie and Marianne, he knows that no matter who the Chrestomanci is, the Chrestomanci is still just a human being with extraordinary luck.

"You should slow down a bit, Christopher," says Millie, watching with worried eyes as he, angry for no apparent reason and aware of it, filed and moved books in his study, ripping the place down in an attempt to find one irrelevant note from nearly 30 years ago, one from Gabriel.

"I can't give up," he says, "because giving up will be giving in, and I won't be ( read as "never will be") ready to do that."

Millie, looking placidly up from her work, stares at him from sepia eyes (like the pictures, because everything is a little less bright in the wintertime). "It's not giving up, it's being reasonable. You're not exactly the most organized of book keepers, which is why you had a secretary to begin with," she says, ripping stitches a little more forcefully than necessary from the blouse that she has been working on. "If Gabriel gave you something that never passed into the hands of one of your assistants, then you have likely lost it in a book or in a pile of papers."

He feels himself smile bitterly, temper getting the better of him because this is not what he wants to hear. "Of course, of course, because I'm incompetent with the upkeep of my study," he says lightly, tauntingly. "I will be sure to keep that in mind while I continue to look. However, if you would like to accept that the last letter that my mentor would give me is without enough meaning to hunt it down, no matter how disorganized my paperwork is, then you are welcome to go back downstairs."

Millie, biting her lip, gives him an angry glance before grabbing her glass of water and walking out of the room.

Christopher swallows, feeling something suspiciously like empty protest in his throat. He's not so certain that he wanted her to leave after all.

The note, when he finds it, was written in blue ink before moisture from one of the stone walls had washed the words away. All that remains is the magicked signature, reading "Gabriel De Witt" in pointed, exacting letters. The tips of his letters look sharp enough to hook his fingers, drawing unintentional blood.

He wonders if it was worth it. He and Millie have been married for 36 years, and he cannot remember, not once, deliberately seeking a way to upset her in order to be alone, especially when he can just ask. (So what he really wonders is if his pride is worth being spiteful for, punching a hole in their airtight relationship just because he is angry that he cannot stop his previous apprentice from running headfirst into danger, cannot stop himself from feeling useless for it, and cannot stop a letter from dripping its words onto the base of a desk drawer.)

It is not in Christopher's nature to humble himself overmuch, and he resolutely does not when he finally brings himself to apologise to Millie, pulling up next to her armchair with the footstool, being careful not to sit on her book sitting on it. Millie is not in the habit of forgiving and forgetting so easily, and makes it a point to not start today. She frowns at first at his clumsy attempt at reconciliation, showing her with no small amount of reluctance the ruined letter.

"You were right, of course. I had stuffed it behind a bookcase, and the condensation got to it before I even remembered that it existed. I don't suppose it was worth messing up the rest of the study for it, especially since we all know I'll never be able to put it back together the way it ought to be without magic."

"And even then, it will only be neat, not in proper order," says Millie, looking up at him from over her reading glasses, smile playing at the corner of her mouth. "Don't think for a minute, my good Mr. Chant, that you are out of trouble for your overly sharp tongue just because you've admitted to being slipshod in your paperwork keeping skills."

"I know. I don't expect to be."

(Only he does, and he knows that Millie knows, and it will be a while before Millie will give him the break that he is hoping for because it is the only way she knows to punish him without being cruel, and that is one thing Millie will never be.

He gets the feeling that she knows that he is getting older, and that it frustrates him, even when he will not admit it to anyone, and that it is this and not a letter that would make him so angry.)

He kisses the back of her hand, and she calls him an insufferable know-it-all just like she ought to, telling him that no matter what he thinks he can do to make things better, she'll be the one to decide when he is forgiven, and that he had better not try any of that dashingly handsome suitor business on her.

"I'm wise to your games now, Christopher," she says. "So this time, follow my lead."

Millie laughs at him the first time he shudders away from being called "grandfather". He laughs a little too, not exactly sure why it would bother him so much when he loves his grandchildren so very much.

"Well, would you prefer 'gaffer'?" asks Millie, who laughs again when he winces, thinking of the Pinhoe and Farleigh families in Ulverscote. "I didn't think so. Until you find a better name, you'll go with what they want to call you. And don't be choosing something complicated either. Sandra would never be able to figure out how to say it."

Christopher, now showing his grey and white hairs along with the rest, looks at his progressively bossier wife. She does not frown when she tells him what to do, but instead looks at him with warm eyes and a crooked grin, thoroughly enjoying herself. She knows he will not protest (much) to her teasing. She is more forgiving of him now.

Sandra, a girl of four years that belongs to Julia and her Michael, sits just across the room from them, her black curls hanging like corkscrews around her face while she fusses with the lace at her collar. She climbs her way back to Christopher, who lifts her up with no protest whatsoever, sitting her down next to him on the sofa.

"What about you? What do you want to call me?" he asks, pulling an errant thumb from her mouth. "Your grandmother," he says, looking at Millie with a wicked smile, "seems to be under the impression that I need to be reasonable and find something for you to call me. I think that 'granddad' sounds impressive."

Sandra looks at him with a crooked smile while Millie snorts.

"And why do you think that sounds any more impressive than the other ones?" she asks, eyebrows quirked up with amusement. But Christopher smiles knowingly, having won this round. He will not be so easily forced into the elderly position of being called 'grandfather'.

"Well now, I think I am a rather grand person who also happens to be a dad, so what better way to express my brilliance as a parent than to bestow me with the ritual honour of being called 'granddad'?"

He is learning to age more gracefully, or is at least trying, but Christopher Chant can never drop his sarcasm and self-importance, even for a granddaughter that is presently drooling on his favourite velvet footrest.

The one funeral that Christopher never expects to attend is the one that is held for Jason in the middle of a beautiful spring. At first, when he is told that Jason passed away from a bout of influenza in Ulverscote, he doesn't believe it because the begonias that Jason planted last year are looking wonderful in the front flower bed, and instead trudges down to the old Pinhoe house with one of his shoes only partially laced. Jason still owes him a rematch in cricket from the time that Christopher swears that his old friend had cheated. They had laughed over it, but he was still insistent.

There's actually a thousand things that the two of them need to do, because if nothing else, a lifetime of spending time in close quarters with one another has left them with many plans, including the most mundane ones like walking on the castle grounds to the more insane ones like the desire to just drive one of the cars off into a nearby pond. (This one, he recalls, comes from their teenaged years, when Gabriel had just bought the car with the leather seats and had threatened to hang anyone that ruined the leather. Immediate plans had been made involving water damage and swamped engines.)

At the age of 67, Christopher still has a million things that he needs to do with his best friend, and he's not ready to call it quits.

Irene does not answer the door, but Evelyn instead, with her beautiful curly blonde hair and wide grey eyes, a beautiful mixture of her parents. She tells him as gently as possible that Irene will not be speaking to anybody just yet, and that the household is still in mourning.

He still doesn't quite believe it, until he sees how overgrown the herb garden is. He steps into it will blatant disregard for his shoes, muttering about the hydrangeas acting as if possessed, flowing into the Queen Mary roses and really, doesn't Jason take any pride in his loose but ever-present order?

It's not until he is ruining his white trousers by kneeling in the dirt, pulling up dandelions and bermuda grass by the handful, that he realizes that Jason is not going to be working on his garden any more, and who's going to grow those infernally bad-tasting anti-cold weeds now? No one's going to get in trouble with him anymore for drinking all the currant wine, or follow him into Series Ten to see if that plant all the desert street merchants smoke in their pipes is all that it is cracked up to be. He stops, hunched over, with one handful of parsley and another handful of unraked leaves, and finally allows himself to grieve. It does not come in tears, but in a horrible burst of anger, like it has been doing more and more these days.

It is Irene that finally sees him in the window, pulling every weed up with a vengeance, and it is she that finally comes into the garden and lays a hand on Christopher's shoulder. It is heavily veined, because Irene has always been very hands-on in her husbands work as well as her own, and if he doesn't move, he can feel the cracks from her fingerpads where he knows her tile clay has worn them down.

"Don't worry, about the weeds, that is," she says haltingly, adjusting her gauzy blue shawl. Much like Christopher, her hair is salt and pepper black, but her eyes are paler than they used to be, and she seems very different from the woman that Jason had excitedly pulled up the front stairs to meet his magical foster family. She smiles, widely as she is wont to. "Our youngest son David is an exceptional herbologist."

Christopher laughs, then he weeps.

There are times that Christopher thinks that he must be going batty in his old age, because more and more he finds himself talking to things that will never talk back to him again, like sunsets and little house finches that like to sit on his favourite camellia bush. He doesn't know why he talks to them, especially when he knows that there's a whole household of people with ears and the ability to comprehend what he says, but he feels better knowing that no one will say anything back to him. (None of them will really say what he needs to hear anyway, not the way that Jason did...had...would. Christopher is growing less fond of past participles with the passing of each year.)

Christopher is very selfish and does not want to be told that things will get better. He likes his fifteen minutes of melodrama before going back into the house to run over strategies and political figures in Series Seven.

It is Janet that first discovers that he talks to anything but live, ordinary people. Janet, having long since decided that she would simply stay at the castle, had become something of a retainer at the castle, keeping Cat's notes in careful order and keeping Marianne and Millie company. But Janet, unlike the others, is better at catching the previous Chrestomanci at vulnerable moments because she is always looking for somewhere to be needed.

When Janet catches him talking to a robin in the early spring of the year after Jason's death, she does not say anything, and he is grateful, because while he could pass it off as senility, he'd really rather not, as though that would somehow decrease the value of his thoughts. He frequently wonders if she isn't just as grateful that he didn't ask what she was doing so far out in the gardens.

Of course he still talks to Millie, and still about the most irrelevant things that he did when they were still just children, like didn't the word 'strength' look funny when you though about it, or if toast always landed butter-side down because of gravity or out of a cosmic sense of spite. The older they get, the less willing Christopher has become to discuss the serious issues, as though by ignoring them he can just brush them aside and that they will not come back.

"Of course they don't just go away," he tells a small poppy flower that lazily swings back and forth in the evening sunlight. "I've always known they won't go away, but sometimes it's just nice to pretend that we're still living in those days of wine and roses. Well, I suppose it should be days of daisies and brandy, because Millie isn't fond of roses," he says with a smile. "She told me people overlook daisies because of the more elaborate beauty of a rose, and that she thought it was all rather gaudy."

"Talking to the flowers again, are you?"

He turns, not too quickly because that would reveal that he was surprised, and Christopher is never caught off guard, least of all by his wife. He had not realized Millie was there, and wonders how long she has been.

"Oh yes, a very receptive audience, these flowers are. Polite enough to even nod their heads in agreement if a passing wind catches them. I can see why Jason liked to entertain them so much," he says flippantly, feeling the shift of the grass next to him. Millie looks as lovely as ever in dusky peach, hair pulled into a white and brown crown around her head. He grabs one soft hand and kisses it.

"You know, he wouldn't want you to mourn the way you do," she says, leaning her head against his shoulder, and vaguely he can feel the metal of the glasses bite into his shoulder. He doesn't mind though, so he weaves an arm around her waist. "There was a time that you came inside and talked like a jackass to us, not just the background. And here I thought there would never be a day in my life that I would miss your wry humour."

He smiles. "Then all you'd hear is serious business and maudlin nonsense from my younger associates and relatives. Someone's got to fly in and mix things up a bit on occasion, or else life would become dreadfully normal."

"Normal, in this household? Not likely."

"All according to my carefully organized machinations."

She bumps her hip into his grumpily, but he can still see the half-smile on her face. "Always about you, isn't it? Now you've even got the garden doing your bidding."

"I try."

They stand for a great while watching the sun begin to go down, and without meaning to, Christopher finds himself memorizing the number of clouds in the sky, the blades of grass, the way that he can feel Millie's thumb run over the back of his hand, and he doesn't know why. It all somehow seems important, as if he doesn't have the chance to do this ever again. The moment will pass, someone will stir or call for them, and it will be over and never so perfect as it is now.

"You know we've been here all our lives, and I don't think it's ever been as lovely as it has been now," he says, "which is really saying something since I've lived here since I was twelve-years-old."

Millie, lazily, nods her head and closes her eyes, face aflame with golden light.

He will be 72 this year, and Cat, already getting on in his own years, has found a successor and has had a nearly grown son of his own. Julia has had three children, and Roger has long since gone to India to live with his exotic bride, Ida, where Christopher and Millie are frequently invited to spend the winter months in order to escape the chill of the British Isles. Their children are more numerous, but Roger is more patient than he was at that age, and more than happy to put up with all of his young adults he calls children still.

While Jason is no longer around, much like Bernard and Mrs. Bessemer aren't, Christopher feels that things couldn't have gone better than they did, not when they had a lifetime filled with danger and powerful magicks. Cat still has three lives, he is down to one, and he proudly allows his wife to wear that one around her hand. (Though he has frequently wondered, wondered if the gold will dull when he dies, if the magic he put in the ring will die with him and leave a cold piece of metal. He hopes that if nothing else, he would like the memory of himself to keep the ring warm.)

Christopher still has not learned to change like a tree might with passing seasons, still doesn't have the good common sense to change his colours (besides dressing gowns, which he has gathered in abundance), but he has learned to settle in the way that stones do, soaking up sunlight and making themselves comfortable with the changes around them. Millie, while decisively more tree-ish than himself, has always comfortably stood next to him in his place.

He turns to look at her now in the last blaze of sunset that is afforded to them this summer, because soon it will be winter and cold again, and they will be off for New Delhi and come home with twice the amount of clothes that the started with (most of which are his). He looks at her the way he might have when they were both still young, and she smiles too. Age has not dulled his eyes, and it has not drawn her smiles tight, and both have never been so grateful for this lingering feature of youth, something so inherently their own. Even if his hair is getting to finally be more white than black, and her veins show more than they once did, they are still Christopher and Millie, and he will still let her handle the conversation while he acts vague and counts stitches in tablecloths and the number of times that she might blink within the span of one sentence.

Christopher, in passing fancy, counts each of her glimmering eyelashes and shadowed wrinkles, thinking each one beautiful.

"Of course, when I said 'til death do us part', I do hope that wasn't giggling I was hearing from your side of the altar," he says to her, still completely outfitted in his wedding outfit. He adjusts the collar of his shirt, smiling.

"It was," Millie says unabashedly, already giggling again. "You were being melodramatic about it, and you know it. I could see that you were taking advantage of the situation to the best of your acting abilities."

They're still holding hands, making rounds between guests and friends, and there's nothing more pleasant than the feeling of the warmth between their fingers. No matter how many unpleasant aunts and cousins they might have to go through, Christopher is confident that nothing will take away the elation he is feeling now.

He doesn't have to tell Millie that for all his silliness that he is quite serious about meaning to be with her until the end of their days (which he still doesn't believe exists at all). They know each other well enough to know that this is for a lifetime, and Christopher, even if he does like to pull jokes at important moments, does not kid about how he feels.

But they don't have to tell each other in words.

They just understand.

A/N: This is actually a lot closer to the style I normally write in, which is very unlike the Pratchett-esque humour I use in most DWJ stories. But this story is particularly dear to my heart, because no matter what you say, people get old, and some handle it more gracefully than others. I went with the idea that Christopher, being not only vain but a bit of a dreamer, would not handle the changes as well as the others do.

I wish I had talked a bit more about the kids and their families, but it wasn't immediately relevant to Christopher when I was writing, and as such was passed up.

Constructive criticism is welcome, but it is preferable that you don't get on my case about the time jumps. Those are highly intentional because they highlights specific moments of importance to Christopher. Anything else is fair game.