I've held this off for a little while and I'm glad that I did now since it needed a major fix. Also, I see from a comment that there is a possibility of confusing people with this one, so I'll explain something.
The person who was Bart isn't even in this story.
That spirit left his body. There is no shift in point of view between Bart and the general. It's all the general. This is just like you looking around from the driver's seat of a used car that you've just bought. You might find some maps and personal things from the previous owner in the glove box. You might find strangers waving at you as you drive down the street because they recognize the car, but don't know that it's been sold.
I call him Bart since that's the identity that he's now inside of, the life that he's trying to fit into. The general has his own memories, and he also has access to the ones that Bart lived, since they're resident in the brain that he commands.
He does have trouble with speech patterns sometimes, but other than that, he's doing ok in the new body.
-------------------
The little town of Dairydale turned out to be a pleasant little place for the most part. True to its name, it was situated in a group of gently undulating hills in the middle of fine dairy and grazing country. The inhabitants were a peaceful lot – mostly. Like any small farming community in the Midwest, there were people and then there were other people. It wasn't often, but there were drunks to be taken in so that they could sleep off the effects of the elixir which helped them to forget their troubles, and now and then, there was the occasional, nasty bar fight which needed to be broken up. The rest of the time, life went on.
About the only thing that Bart was mildly unhappy about was the fact that he hadn't really found a place to live that suited him and his needs. It wasn't as though he was looking to build a Bat-cave or anything, but what he really wanted was a room to rent in a nice enough neighborhood and access to a place where he could park his vehicles out of the weather. He'd have thought that wouldn't be too difficult to find in a place like this, but it was becoming a bit of a challenge.
Bart had gone through the thin Rooms to Rent section of the local paper for weeks and checked out the odd ad which appeared there, but he found nothing that appealed to him. It was beginning to look to him as though he was going to have to rent a house and it wasn't what he really wanted to do. He'd be living in an empty box for the sake of renting a bedroom with a garage and that would just be a waste of money.
He wasn't even thinking about the "room" problem the next time that he drew the night shift. He'd actually been thinking back to the incident at the cemetery a few weeks earlier and what had happened after that. He hadn't been back to disturb her and didn't plan to unless there was a police matter. So far, the only one had been to run escort duty for one funeral, but that only took him nearby and in the daytime.
Well, that wasn't quite true, he'd admitted to himself. He hadn't said anything to anyone, and he hadn't been back to disturb her. That was true.
But he had been back.
One of the things that had bothered him a little about all of this – this being in a body that had been repaired and now lived under his control was just how little there was to do for people these days. He'd lived as nothingness for most of his existence, but the way that he remembered it, you had to strive for things back in his day – even if it was to survive.
The trouble for him here was that there was considerably little to strive for now. He was happy just to be alive inside a body again, though it was older than he'd been when he'd been wrenched out of his, and he was even thrilled that the original owner had gone to some lengths to keep it fit and trim – even muscular, he admitted. But it wasn't the same thing as what he'd been used to, not by a long shot. That was why he'd pushed his memory of his old body to the fore. But now that he had this, he wanted to keep it like this.
He joined the local mixed martial arts school for the work of it to his body. For the fighting, well, he was learning to hold himself in check. It wasn't all that hard to do since what passed for sparring didn't really get his blood up, not like the brutal combat of his past. He just had to remind himself to keep it top of mind not to kill anybody.
For the things that he knew they had little or no knowledge about, he'd sent off for a short, ninja-style sword. He'd wanted one for the weight and had ordered one with no edge, but the maker had sent an edged one, stating that he was out of stock. Bart didn't care that much. He didn't particularly give much of a damn about what most people did with these, he had his to keep certain of his muscles worked, particularly the ones under his arms, over his ribs, and the ones along his forearms and around his wrists. He probably looked silly, swinging the thing around in his motel room, but he didn't care. All that he knew was that he now felt the heat from working muscles in those places once more.
Then he began to run.
He'd run south out of town one night for miles and then turned around to run back. But by the time that he'd gotten near the cemetery, he looked and there was the light of that fire again. He wondered how he should try to tell her that she ought to find a better place for it. You could see that thing easily from the top of the hill that overlooked it. His original intent had been to run on past the cemetery and right back into town.
But as he ran, he began to feel more and more certain that he ought to make sure that she was alright. At first, it was just a vague feeling, but as he drew nearer, the sense became much more defined.
He'd spent a few minutes just watching her, this lone worshiper in the trees. It certainly was a bit different from what the people here did to worship their god. He never got within maybe twenty feet from where she was. He didn't want to frighten her and he was also mindful not to disturb her worship. But he loved to see her so much. She was so wondrous to look at. He couldn't understand how she put up with the mosquitoes, the way that she was nude under that robe. It didn't matter, he guessed, he was thankful all the same.
He wondered if she could sense him at all, the way that she'd seemed to that first night. He got his answer when she'd started to look up as he sat on the heavy limb of the oak. But he was gone before she actually did look up, and on his way down the tree on the other side. Whatever he'd noticed was not present then and so he ran home
He'd been back a few times since. A few times, as in, every night. He knew that he was drawn to her and he didn't really know why. He just knew that he was and it wasn't really much of anything to do with not having had the ability to enjoy a woman in seven thousand years or so.
He smirked and supposed that it made him a peeping tom or some other sort of pervert in the modern age. He didn't really care. He sought her out because he liked to see her and he felt as though he ought to look in on her to be sure that she was alright. He didn't do it out of any prurient sort of interest, he told himself. Not much, anyway, beyond just looking at her and feeling wonder and just a little happiness that someone like her was alive on this otherwise cold world.
It made him a little sad that he knew nothing about her and now he longed to know everything about her. He took to watching her from the other side of the cemetery fence most nights that he saw her there.
That was how she caught him.
He saw her walk off away from him and stood waiting for her to come back into his field of view.
But she didn't.
The overcast evening was still warm from the heat of the day, threatening thunderstorms vaguely with distant rumbles and he'd been running with his T-shirt off and tucked into the elastic waistband of his track pants. He wondered about where she'd gone, but then felt her approach from a different direction as he stood with his arm on the cemetery fence.
Here, like this, he had no time for anything. Bart didn't know what to do – but he knew that he'd better think of something quickly and with absolutely no thought to any possible repercussions, he put his forehead on top of his forearm, feeling the changes. He almost wanted to groan then, feeling what he'd done , but there was no time now to turn anything back.
He knew what he looked like now. He no longer wore the face of Bart the sheriff's deputy. He still had the body, added to by the mental image of himself as he'd once been. Every day in the past two months the body that had once belonged to Bart had been shifting to what it looked like now. He'd had to eat like a horse to fuel the changes in his muscle mass, and there had been some pain and discomfort to the building of it, but now, two months later, he looked like himself again at least in his body. He'd also had to buy a ton of new clothes.
One huge difference now was to the texture and color of his skin. Bart's skin was normal in every respect for a man of mixed Caucasian and Ojibwa heritage, since that was what it was. But not if he let himself shift like this.
Like this, his skin was a much deeper olive-tone and he now wore the general's scars and markings. It was what he now was. If he wanted to make this all go away, he'd turn a bit lighter, his face would become like Bart's, and the markings would disappear. But to look as he'd looked so long ago, there were other changes which came to it.
Bart had collected the few and small scars which might come during any man's life in this age. But he'd never fought using a sword or an axe, or a pike. He'd never drawn back a heavy war bow in his life, where the general had done that all day long if he'd had the need of it, his long and thick arrows punching through all but the thickest plate over leather armor at a good distance. Bart had never suffered the wounds which even the most successful fighter suffered during his rise from fighter to fighting general, and Bart had never broken skulls or crushed throats in his life, but the young general had and often.
Even during his time as a marine, Bart had never killed another man with his bare hands where the general had killed many. It just came with the life, and there had rarely been anything personal about it. You either died or you won and it went on until you didn't. That was the warrior's life. Every scar, every healed tear or rip that his skin had borne now showed clearly and he knew it. The welts which were added to mark his successes as a fighter now rose on him. The pale and faded tattoos came with them and so did the general's long black hair, tied high in a topknot and still spilling down over his shoulders. He knew that his face was now very different.
But there were other features that came whether he wanted them or not, and these came from the necromancer who had torn his spirit from that powerful body. His mouth looked the same as it once did – with fuller rather sensuous lips, but his eyes – they weren't like Bart's or the fearless general's at all.
They were black. Black irises sitting on black eyeballs, the whole thing looking like twin deep liquid pools of onyx-colored fluid.
It was too late now and there wasn't a thing that he could do about it, other than perhaps try to remember to smile carefully. He lifted his head and stood with his arm along the top of the fence with only his eyes looking over at the moving spot of inky darkness that came near to him across the fence.
If he'd hadn't just faced his own struggle now, Bart might have laughed. She held up a charm and whispered that he be bound to the spot. To her credit, he felt the effect.
