withoutverona | A Battlefield, March 15, 1918

Some people get to live long lives.

Some don't.

Even with an extra hundred years, Romeo did not.

It wasn't a bad life, though, nor one that made him more unhappy than he would have made himself anywhere. It ended on a battlefield somewhere in Europe, on March 15, 1918.

Romeo was either 36, or 72 years from being born.

He wasn't supposed to be armed. A Franciscan priest, he was in theory a chaplain with the French infantry. But by this point in the war, if you were a warm body and could hold a gun, you were on the battlefield.

And despite near 20 years of preaching peace, Romeo remembered how to hold a gun.

He'd been stunned himself when he turned into a priest. After his fruitless meeting with his great-great-grandfather, Romeo had made his way back to Paris. Unable to afford a train ticket, it had been a slow journey, made mostly by hitching rides in the backs of wagons. He hustled games of billiards for what money he needed, and, mostly, sulked about the utter pointlessness of it all.

Back in Paris, he was equally at loose ends. He tried to save money enough for passage to America but watched what few coins he could earn writing and selling poetry in Montmartre flow through his fingers like water.

The priest found him, literally, drunk in the gutter outside a church, too drunk to protest that he was a sinner and did not deserve the refuge he was being offered. He put Romeo to work in the monastery kitchen. Romeo expected to loathe the work at first. After one year, it became a part of him. After three, he took vows.

And after 1902, none who had known Romeo in his previous life would recognize the young priest as he heard confession, tended to the sad, old and sick (and if he was perhaps a little extra-solicitous of the more attractive young women, he never crossed into impropriety), and, as a teacher, attempted to convince teenage boys to appreciate poetry. He often thought, ruefully, that Friar Laurence had had the easier task in explaining plants.

He never forgot his strange, short time in Fandom, and he often prayed that the people he had known there lived happy lives, somewhere, a hundred years away.

His unpriestly passions were channeled into prayer, poetry, and the bottle, and there they remained until the war started.

Romeo didn't consider not enlisting an option.

[OOC: And the ironic thing is his birthday is armistice day. NFB, NFI, OOC = pie, my apologies for the spammage.]