Life goes fast sometimes. The days seem slow, but the weeks, the months... those go by fast.
It felt like one day I was seeing Davor's home for the first time. Our home. A multi-roomed tent on a wooden base, with thick fur rugs that made it feel like a proper solid house.
I didn't really get the whole "living in tents" thing, but the way Davor explained it, orc culture (at least in the First Fire clan) was hypothetically nomadic, so everyone lived in tents. All the buildings were tents, intended to be picked and moved when needed. Except for the large wood and stone structure that served as a church for their many gods as well as a convenient meeting place and the city's heart. But as time went on, the clan stopped moving, and the tents all became permanent fixtures behind the tall walls of stout timber and the trench that circle it.
I argued that meant they weren't actually nomadic, but Dav (and maybe the whole damn clan) saw it differently. Sure they were never going to leave, but they COULD leave. I guess that makes a difference.
Anyway, I moved into Davor's comfortable tent, and Davor junior got his own room. A few of Davor's friends came over and measured Junior's room, and they worked together to make a beautiful handmade crib in just a few days. The clan was like that, seeing where help was needed and coming together to make it happen.
The days went by, and slid into weeks, and it felt like I had barely blinked before a season had passed. We'd hit big milestones, like Davvie going from clinging to walls to fully running around with the other kids, saying "dada" for the first time, learning his first words in Orcish. By now he was picking up Orcish as a third language as fast as I was, if not faster, and we practised that, Amellan, and Elven in our home.
Davor learned a bit of Elven too, although I had to struggle not to snicker at his pronunciation. I'm sure my rudimentary attempts at Orcish were just as bad.
Davor and I had our first big fight, and our second, and during our third I was genuinely worried we might break up. In the end, Evelynne and Krugga had come over and mediated. I learned to understand Davor a bit better, and how he always meant what he said and said what he meant. We patched things up, and came out the other side stronger.
Then, Evelynne gave birth to her daughter. Arkura was named after Bolarr's grandmother, apparently, and had her mother's big brown eyes. It wasn't too long afterwards that Dav gave me the first big shock of our new relationship when he casually asked whether I had ever thought about another child. Arkura's birth had been long and pretty rough for little Eve, but I'd be lying if I said those pudgy green cheeks hadn't ignited a bit of baby fever in me.
The topic was big and daunting, but we talked about it. And talked about it. And talked about it.
He mentioned how close together most orc siblings were in age, and it got us talking about the difference in ageing among the various races. Which led to my second big shock.
"You're only twenty-one?" I exclaimed, my jaw almost hitting the surface of the table where the two of us and little Davvie were eating.
"What's wrong with that?" Davor asked, looking genuinely confused.
"That means when we got together the first time, you were... you were only eighteen?" My stomach turned at the idea. He'd been just a kid. I had thought he was older than that... at least twenty five.
"I'm not sure I understand the problem," he said, and even as I processed this huge load of information, a little piece of my mind was busy noticing the way he got that little scrunch on his forehead when he was really thinking about something. The silly romantic part of me wanted to lean forward and kiss him between the eyes until that little scrunchy look of concentration was replaced by that big smile of his. And then I'd kiss him until that smile turned into another kind of look...
I shook my head to clear my distraction. "Eighteen is so young."
"For having a kid?" he asked, still looking confused. "Remember that lady we stopped and talked to earlier today? The pregnant one?" I nodded, and he continued. "She's got a one-year old, and she's pregnant with a second child. Heck, it could be twins with how much she's swollen up. She's only nineteen."
"Then, she," I stuttered. "She would have been just seventeen when she got pregnant the first time."
"That's pretty normal," he told me. "Most younglings start being interested in dating around thirteen or fourteen, start fooling around not much later than that. I was... late... in that way. I didn't get together with someone until I was sixteen or so. Not uncommon to see someone starting a family by eighteen, maybe have a couple kids by my age. If they're interested, that is. No one has to, of course, I'm not trying to pressure you."
"I guess, it's just different... where I come from," I finished lamely. "Or maybe because of my elven blood. I guess my human friends I'd grown up with were... 'fooling around' by sixteen or seventeen. A lot were married by eighteen or twenty. But none of them were too interested in me that way... I still looked like a kid, even though we were all the same age. 'Ten or twelve', that's how old one of them said I looked. I didn't start dating until I looked more-or-less like an adult. Thirty or so?"
"Thirty?" he asked, incredulous.
"Sure. My elven father would have rathered me to wait until I was fifty or sixty. The only reason he didn't insist on it was that I wasn't fully elven."
"You started seeing guys when you were thirty?" he confirmed again, and I nodded.
"I'm almost forty now," I said, finishing the thought for him. Suddenly, irrationally, I was worried he was going to reject me. I'd spent so long among peers that aged faster than I, the same curse that I could see Davor Jr. already starting to struggle with as his playmates grew in size and maturity quicker than him. Old fears briefly resurfaced, fears of rejection, of not fitting in, of being too different.
"Forty," he said, wonder and awe twinkling in his eyes. "Gods above. You don't look a day over... if you were an orc I'd put you close to sixteen or seventeen. Forty is what we'd call middle-aged. And you don't look like you've aged a day since we met."
My stomach twisted in anxiety again, this time about something far more profound than fears of rejection. "Davor... how long do orcs live?"
"An orc could probably live to eighty, maybe, but I've never met one that old."