Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

One of the first things Nile learned about any of them is that Joe drives by committee. He’s the one steering, sure, but Nile has taken up Booker’s mantle as navigator, Andy points out stupid detours on exit signs that Joe takes about thirty percent of the time, and Nicky reminds his lover to keep his eyes on the road and also occasionally flicks Andy in the temple when she insists on changing the radio station, a gesture that Nile finds shockingly immature for a man of his age. Joe is, actually, a pretty good driver when it comes to the basic mechanics, though. His acceleration and braking are smooth, and his steering is gentle. He swears at other drivers in his syncretic homebrew of Arabic-Italian-Greek, but he always has at least one hand on the wheel, and he does his best to stay out of trucks’ blind spots. All of this is to say, he’s a much better driver than Andy. Andy does not listen to anyone else’s suggestions, and her grasp on good driving is loose at best.

(“Boss, you’re going to kill us all. Stay in one lane,” Joe or Nicky will call from the backseat.

“You told me it’s like riding a horse, Joe. I’m riding the fucking horse,” Andy will cackle in response, and then they all feel their hearts stick to their ribs.)

They are finally through customs at Newark, so Nile is just about ready to throw hands when she sees the rental car that Joe has procured for them to drive all the way to the Rockies in.

“A Honda.” Her tone is nothing short of incredulous. “We’re driving two-thirds of the way across the country in a Honda CR-V?”

Joe shrugs, and Nile wants to smack him. “Good gas mileage.”

“Slips under the radar, too,” Andy adds, for once not choosing to be contrary. Nicky is suspiciously silent.

Nile sighs.

Joe ends up driving them out of the city, for which Nile is grateful. Watching Andy navigate the rush hour traffic on I-80 sounds like Nile’s own personal hell. And listen, Nile is from a major metropolitan area. She’s very used to aggressive drivers. Andy is something else entirely. She’s surprisingly quiet as they make their way out into the suburbs, and then past them, winding along the interstate going ten over. It’s October and it’s already mostly dark by the time they’re fifty miles outside the city. She wonders if her mom and Martin are putting pumpkins out on the fire escape. They could never afford to go all the way out to the country and buy big ones off the farmstands, but their mom would always make sure to pick out a few small ones at one of the nice grocery stores downtown. It was an extravagance, no doubt, but one that Nile is still grateful for. Say what you will about America, but Halloween is a good time.

One of the other first things Nile has learned about Joe is that he loves cumbia. Sings along extremely off-key. She asked him once, back in Crete, if he actually understood the lyrics and he simply shrugged cheekily and said he doesn’t pay much attention to the words. She listens to the beat from the backseat and closes her eyes against the door. It’s only been half a year, and Nile is still learning. Still adjusting. This is the second or third time they’ve come back to the states, and it’s still hard. Once, Joe and Nile took a detour to Chicago, and they watched her mom and brother from a distance. Andy and Nicky were over in Toronto, doing a quick retrieval, and Joe had offered to take her anywhere she wanted for a couple of days. He didn’t express any surprise when she said Chicago, didn’t object when she sat them in the coffee shop across the street from her old apartment, and he even quietly took her up to an abandoned office space where she could see into their kitchen window, watch them eat their dinner. Those two days were the only time she’s ever seen Joe truly quiet. Right now, for instance, he’s offending her ear drums with his bad pitch. She used to play the clarinet, and while she wasn’t good by any means, she was decent enough to know when she was out of tune. Joe has no such knowledge, apparently. Certainly doesn’t help that Nicky encourages him.

Nicky does not listen to much music, despite Nile’s pestering. She supposes that when you’ve been in love for literally a thousand years, the only music you need is your husband’s horrible singing. And she thinks that maybe no music is better than what Andy likes, which so far has turned out to be really screechy death metal and also opera? For some reason? The incongruity of it all is astounding. Nile likes that Orfeo one. But for the most part, she prefers R&B or neo-soul. Jazz is good, too. Jazz is great, actually.

“Quit moping, kid.”

Nile opens her eyes to find Andy turned around in the passenger seat to look at her. Her face is hard but her eyes are ever-so-slightly soft, and Nile decides to put it out of her mind. A handful of raindrops have splashed onto Andy’s window. The occasional streetlight on the concrete median casts odd shadows on her face, and if Joe wasn’t driving, Nile thinks that he would be sketching it, trying to capture the moment.

“I could say the same to you,” Nile bites back.

Andy snorts, and Nicky continues looking out the window. He’s still quiet. All of them are quiet, these past weeks. None of them know why. The time of year, maybe. Fall is always good for introspection. Joe flicks the turn signal on with his pinky and ring fingers and slides into the right lane. The interstate is mostly empty, a blessing. Nile wonders if she still believes in blessings. She thinks about this a lot. Never comes up with a satisfying answer. She thinks sometimes that worshiping Andy might be a more worthwhile use of her time. At least she knows for sure that Andy is out there, is listening. Except Andy’d kill her, and Nile couldn’t blame her for that. She watches Andy watch the road, and she thinks about what it must have been like, to be a god. Only one way to know, she supposes. She isn’t sure that it’s worth knowing. She’s learned a lot of things over the past six months, but the most prominent among them, the lesson that keeps repeating itself over and over and over again, is that power is such a corrupting thing.

It’s a little past dawn when Joe pulls into the parking lot of a Dunkin’ Donuts in Morris, Illinois with a jaw-splitting yawn. Nile has been dozing fitfully all night, distracted by dreams of Afghanistan when she falls too deeply asleep. She jolts all the way awake when he puts the car in park, and she perks up at the scent of coffee.

“I don’t know about y’all,” she says, “but I need some breakfast.”

Nicky and Joe murmur in agreement and Andy just shoos the three of them off, getting out and leaning against the hood of the car, pulling out a cigarette. One of the first things Nile had learned about Andy was that she prefers matches to lighters. There’s a pretty silver one that she keeps in her pocket almost always, though, and the one time Nile asked where she got it from, Andy had just sighed and went on playing with the flame. She doesn’t take it out this morning, though. Just strikes a match and then puts it out with her fingers when she’s done with it.

(“There’s a trick to it. If you come at it from the right angle, it doesn’t hurt,” Andy says, handing the book of matches to Nile.)

The three of them get breakfast, and Nile and Joe get supremely mediocre coffee, and Nicky slides into the driver’s seat before Andy can get there, much to her chagrin (and Nile’s joy). “Tesora, you are a menace behind the wheel. It is too early for your… bullshit.”

Andy huffs good-naturedly and crosses her arms, and Joe cackles, sliding into the backseat next to Nile.

“Doesn’t boytoy of the driver normally get shotgun?”

Nicky laughs while Joe pretends to be offended, and Andy just smirks. “I have permanent shotgun.”

“It’s true,” Nicky says, still laughing as he pulls out of the parking lot. “When we first started driving cars, she found a sawed-off shotgun and shot us for the front seat.”

Nile barks out a startled laugh and Andy shrugs cheekily. “I did what I had to do.”

They pass the next fifteen hours similarly, trading shifts behind the wheel and barbs in the backseat, until the shadow of the foothills looms in the darkness behind the Denver skyline. Nile almost gasps in awe at the sight of them. Joe grins a little. “Pretty, huh? Just wait until we get into the mountains proper.”

It’s too late and they’re all too tired to start the job right then (it is, after all, well past eleven in the evening), so they keep driving until they’re up the hills a few miles. Nicky directs Nile to turn into a quiet residential neighborhood full of little ranch houses from the ‘70s. They’re a half hour drive from downtown Denver, and a few miles away from the Denver Federal Center, the real reason they’re here. Most of the lights are off, and the driveway Nile pulls into is attached to a house that looks as though it’s been empty for days or weeks.

“Didn’t know you guys had any safehouses somewhere so pedestrian.”

Joe laughs a little as he reaches forward to rub Andy’s shoulder. She’s been dozing on and off for a couple hours, the first time on this trip that she’s actually slept at all. She looks almost peaceful. “Technically, it belongs to an acquaintance. But she is out of town for the moment, it seems.”

Nile raises an eyebrow but says nothing as she turns the engine off and stumbles out into the darkness, legs stiff from five and a half hours of driving without a break. Good gas mileage indeed. Joe helps Andy out of the car and ignores her drowsy comment about how she doesn’t need his assistance while Nicky grabs their bags out of the trunk. A key is produced from underneath a planter, and Nile steps into a cozy house with an open floor plan. There’s a skylight above the kitchen island and a half wall separating the basement stairs and kitchen from the living room, directly to her left. She hoists herself up onto the island and watches as Nicky drops their gear on the stone tile with a thud. Joe hooks an arm around Nicky’s waist as he comes through the door, and rests his head on Nicky’s shoulder. Nile smiles quietly. The two of them make her happy, what can she say? Andy is the last one in. She locks the door behind her and stalks down the hallway branching off from the kitchen. She disappears into a room and shuts the door with a quiet click.

“So this acquaintance?” Nile grabs an apple from the bowl next to her on the counter. It’s deliciously crunchy.

“A woman we met ten or so years ago, now. We were taking some time to rest and she and her husband were traveling in Morrocco. Husband died a few years back; Parkinson’s. Tori’s a nice lady. Lot of good stories from her.” Joe separates from Nicky and comes and sits down at the island, a few feet away from where Nile is still sitting on the counter, dangling legs bumping against the wooden base.

“And she just lets you guys take over her house?” Nile takes another bite of her apple. She chews slowly, savoring.

Nicky crosses the room as he exchanges a glance with Joe. “’Lets’ might be a strong word.”

Nile raises another eyebrow. “So, we’re breaking and entering.”

“Did we break anything? I don’t think so.” Joe grins, and Nile sighs, pretending to be put-upon. Nicky slips into Italian and Joe laughs at whatever he says. She leaves the two of them to their conversation as she finishes her apple, aware and not quite caring that she’s stealing from this woman. She slips off the countertop and stumbles around in the dark for a few moments before she finds the trashcan, to the left of the fridge. There’s a photo of little white boy with a sheepish expression on his face hanging over the garbage. She studies it for a moment. White-blond hair, squinty little eyes. Hands clasped in front of his body, little shorts and a striped T-shirt giving him the quintessential six-year-old boy look. She wonders if he’s her son, or maybe her grandson.

She lets her eyes wander over the photos on the fridge next her. There are a few recurring figures, probably family. An elderly woman with a breathing tube grins in one picture, giving the bird with both hands. Nile chuckles a little, letting the soft push and pull of Joe and Nicky’s conversation cushion her. They’ve switched into Greek, she thinks. Their private talks always drive her mad, the way they move from Arabic to Italian to Greek to English to Maltese over the course of three sentences. It’s like they’re always trying to distract whoever is listening. Nile kind of respects it. It grants them privacy. She isn’t sure whether it’s intentional, a way to keep sensitive information safe, or if it’s just a natural consequence of nearly a millennium of learning languages. Nile knows basic French from high school, and she’s picked up some broken Spanish over the years, but she can’t imagine being able to talk like that, gliding from language to language, alphabet to alphabet, script to script. They tell her it comes with time, but Nile isn’t sure what that means. Time has been a fickle thing her whole life. She isn’t entirely clear what she’s supposed to do now with an abundance of it. She thinks about her mom again.

It's early when Nicky shakes her awake. The sun is still not up. The four of them move like a well-oiled machine by now, gearing up and slipping into the car in smooth motions that Nile loses track of. Before she knows it, they’re pulling into the Denver Federal Center with falsified credentials (thank you, Copley). To get past the security booth with minimal trouble, Nile is pressed to the floor of the backseat, Joe and Nicky curled into the trunk. Andy is disarmingly pleasant to the guard, presents her ID card, and proceeds onwards to Building 67. They received word five days ago that the FBI was holding a family of Syrian refugees at the Federal Center, using illegal interrogation tactics (read: torture) to get information about ISIS activities. The feds are alleging that the father was an officer. Copley has evidence to suggest otherwise. Nicky muttered something under his breath about how it didn’t matter whether he was or not when Copley gave them the job. She agrees, it’s just. There’s this sick guilt resting in her stomach like a rock when she thinks about it, and she doesn’t know what that means. She doesn’t enjoy not knowing things.

The job itself is supposed to be quick. Incapacitate security on the floor. Find the holding cell. Get the family out and cover them on their retreat. Take them to the address Copley gave them. Steps one and two go pretty smoothly. It’s seven in the morning and shift change means the guards are distracted, still settling in for the day. The floor plans Copley got them prove accurate, and it’s quick work to find the bleak interrogating room where they’ve left the family. There are three children, an eleven-year-old boy, a seven-year-old girl, and a baby. The father is nowhere to be seen. Nile locks eyes with the little girl and beckons her closer. Her eyes are dark brown, almost black, and they look too big for her head. Her little body looks so hungry and Nile can feel her heart breaking. Her clothes are dirty and her hair is tangled, and Nile can feel something furious course through her veins. She’s so little, so much smaller than she should be at seven, and she looks so scared. Nile can feel it again, the black lump in her stomach, remembering. The eyes of the children in that village, the ones she was playing with, gun in hand, all those months ago, look so much like this child’s. Nile knows no one lives life fully without regrets. But this one is just too great to carry. So, she turns it into anger.

The baby is blessedly quiet as Joe ushers the mother, carrying the infant in her arms, out the door and towards the exit. Andy grabs the boy’s hand and Nile is reaching for the little girl when reinforcements come roaring down the hallway towards the interrogation room.

Joe and Andy make a break for it with their charges while Nicky and Nile are left to defend the little girl and find her father. There are five agents; Nicky manages to shoot two within twenty seconds of their appearance. Numbers three, four, and five prove more difficult, guns already drawn and firing as Nile pushes the girl underneath the steel table. Nicky shoots another while Nile is still fumbling for her gun – she had slung it over her back so as not to frighten the little girl – and then it happens. As Nile fires a fatal shot at Officer Number Four, Officer Number Five moves his aim from Nile to the space under the table. Her dive comes too late.

She doesn’t watch the girl bleed out. Instead, she drops her gun and charges the man. She is overcome by a rage that she didn’t know she possessed. The agent never stood a chance against her blows. She pummels him, over and over and over again, eyes blinded by tears as she knocks him to the ground and goes down with him. She can fear her knuckles becoming slick and sticky with blood and she doesn’t know if it’s hers or the officer’s. She doesn’t care. She hopes he dies. She spits in his face as she just keeps hitting, broken sobs tearing up her throat as she can feel Nicky’s hands on her shoulder, gentle but firm, pulling her away.

Nile lets out one last sob as she rocks back on her heels, wiping the snot away from her nose with the back of her hand, smearing blood and mucus across her face. She examines her work, and she swallows hard. His face is almost unrecognizable, nose definitely broken, and his teeth are definitely chipped, a few probably knocked all the way out. She feels for a pulse and doesn’t find one. “Oh my God.”

“Nile.” Nicky is quiet behind her, hand still resting on her shoulder. “Nile, we should find the others. Come. We have to go.”

She heaves out a breath and stands up, leaning down to collect the body of the little girl. She shuts her eyes hard when she feels the blood in her hair, even as her body is still warm. “I know it hurt, baby girl. I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you.”

Nicky walks ahead and doesn’t look back when he hears Nile’s whispering. She’s grateful for that. Such a small mercy, but such a necessary one. “I hope you sleep well.”

It’s late afternoon by the time they get back to the house, and Nile has barely said a word since they left the Federal Center. There’s something dangerous in her right now, and she knows if she opens her mouth too long, she will become a bomb. She can’t do that. Nicky keeps shooting her these sidelong glances that are driving her even crazier, and by the time Joe pulls into the garage, she’s ready to lose it.

She paces around on the concrete floor while the rest of them go inside, a hand reaching up to tug at one of her braids. She hasn’t redone her hair since London. She wants to, all of a sudden. But then she thinks about the little girl, thinks about her mother’s face when Nicky told her what happened, thinks about the father they didn’t have time to find, and she’s overcome again.

“Fuck!” She slams her fist, still crusted over with blood, into the white wall of the garage. It leaves a dent, and Nile has the good sense to feel a flash of guilt for it. But in the grand scheme of things, she isn’t sure that it matters. The woman will be dead in another twenty years, and Nile will still be here, still thinking about that little girl’s eyes. Still thinking about the sound her mother made. Still thinking about the disfigured face of the man she beat to death for it.

Nile can hear the door open and shut behind her as she stands there, both palms pressed flat to the wall, bracing her weight against it. Her breathing is ragged, still.

“Nile.”

It’s Nicky, and she doesn’t know whether to be grateful or not. Joe probably would have been worse. Andy, too. But she doesn’t know that Nicky is that great of an option, either. She wants to cry again. She wants her mom. She wants to wrap Martin up and never let him go for a single second again.

“Let’s go for a drive.”

Nile climbs into the passenger seat and lets Nicky whisk her away, the most explosive part of her anger quieted for the moment after her second outburst. She hates being angry. She really, really hates it. She is always so conscious of it, of what it makes her look like when she gets angry, and she wishes she wasn’t. She wishes that she did not have to know what it was like to have a school counselor flinch away from her because the slightest irritation made her into the Angry Black Woman, a threat to fragile white egos everywhere. It drives her mad. Literally, actually.

Nicky doesn’t turn the radio on as they drive, doesn’t say a word, barely makes a sound, in fact. He just takes back roads until they come into the town of Evergreen, another several miles into the hills, and eventually turns onto a quiet state highway, and then another. Nile’s jaw almost drops at the view as they make their way up the mountain. For a moment, every bit of grief, fury, and fear that has ever plagued her mind flies far away, and it is just the majesty of the whole world beneath her feet, and nothing else at all in existence. Joe was right.

It's another twenty or thirty minutes of driving along the winding mountain highway when Nicky pulls off into a rest area. There are no other cars in the expanded shoulder functioning as a parking lot, and when Nile steps out of the car, she can’t hear any traffic noise at all. Just the wind whistling and birds chirping. Nicky winces at the cut of the wind against his cheek for a moment. “Sorry. I should have told you to bring a warmer jacket.”

Nile shrugs, still holding onto tension. “No skin off my teeth.”

He starts walking towards a little trail just ahead of them. It winds through trees, hugging a cliff face to the right, and becoming one to the left. It only goes for about a hundred yards before they come to a little lookout, and Nile has to stop to catch her breath at the view. The valley is full of evergreen trees, mostly pine, but some spruce and juniper, too, and it stretches for miles and miles as far as she can see, without roads or houses or any sign of people at all.

“Talk to me, Nile.”

Nicky and Nile are both leaning against the little stone wall protecting them from the edge, resting their weight on their forearms. She isn’t sure who struck the pose first. She sighs and forces herself to meet his gaze.

“Is this what we are, Nicky? Killing machines?”

Nicky sighs himself and then looks away.

“Because if we are – dude, I can’t be that. I can’t do what I did today again. And we’re – what, supposed to be fucking chosen? God’s hand? I mean, that’s kinda what it looked like with Copley’s little serial killer theory board thing. Saving humanity and all that. But, fuck, Nicky, how am I supposed to believe this God is good when I have to watch –” her voice cracks and she has to resist the urge to cry again – “when I have to watch a little girl die for crimes her father didn’t even commit? How do you do that? How the fuck do you live with that, Nicky? How can you still believe? Because I don’t think I can. I don’t think I… I can’t.”

Nicky slides closer to her and puts one hand over hers. “God is hard. God will always be hard for you. I’m sorry. I wish I had a kinder answer. But there is not one.” He pauses for a moment, collecting his thoughts. “After the First Crusade, I spent so many years wandering. I had seen so much bloodshed, taken part in so much bloodshed, that I did not know what to do with myself or if I could carry on believing. I wandered around Genova, and then Venice, and then Florence and Pisa and even Paris for a little while. I was a shell. I went back to the Holy Land on the Third Crusade, but truth be told, it wasn’t for God. It was for Yusuf. It was to find him again. And I did. And I think that is what led me back to God. I wandered for that whole century, trying to find myself, and God, while also trying to run away from the horrors of my past. It felt irreconcilable, what I had done, and what I wanted God to be. In some ways it was. But in others… in others, God is the things that bring us back to where we are supposed to be. I have regrets, Nile. I have killed many men I should not have killed. But I have also seen this view, in front of us. This valley that stretches on endlessly, beautifully. And I have kissed the man I love a hundred thousand times. I have met you. You want to know how you can believe God is good, and I cannot tell you. You have to find that out for yourself, if it’s something you can do. But even if you lose faith, you can come back to it. And you have to accept sometimes that God is often just a sadistic asshole.”

Nile laughs a little at the last part and wipes at her eyes. “Sadistic is right.”

The two of them share laughter, and they enjoy the view. Nile does her best not to shiver in front of him for a few minutes, but then it becomes clear he is just as cold, if not more, than Nile is, and she gives in to her body. “Thank you, for this.”

Nicky smiles a little sadly and meets her eyes again. “Do not thank me. We all need it sometimes. It is no trouble at all, I promise you.”

“Still. Thank you.”

***

Booker stumbles home, bottle in hand, same as he does every morning. His sleep-wake schedule has become flipped, staying up all night to drink, and sleeping the hangover off all day. He would like the jury to note that immortality does not in fact take away hangovers, a fact he is currently ignoring in favor of a little hair of the dog. If it can be called that, given that he’s still actively pretty drunk from last night. He unlocks his door with clumsy hands, stumbles over the clutter on his floor, and collapses atop his mattress, groaning at the sunlight streaming in through the window. Sometimes he wonders if he’s secretly a vampire, given how much he hates it. It would explain an awful lot about him.

He needs a shower, he thinks, getting a whiff of his own musk of unwashed man. Even putting aside the alcohol, he is… rank. He does have a shower in the small bathroom off the main room, even if it’s mildew-infested and there’s a family of tiny black bugs nesting in the seam where the fiberglass meets the drywall. He’s only used it occasionally since he started renting this shithole. The team didn’t specify whether his banishment included their safehouses, but for the time being Booker thinks it’s probably best for him to steer clear, so he’s paying eight hundred euro every month for this cardboard box with running water. The plumbing backs up at least once every two weeks, and there are definitely rodents living in the walls. The landlady, in true stereotype fashion, is a chain-smoking sixtysomething woman with a gravelly voice and little sympathy for her tenants’ problems. From what Booker can gather, she’s a lifelong Parisian with little love in her heart for anyone outside of the north, and certainly not for those pricks from the Aquitaine (she really, really hates the Aquitaine – well, it isn’t called that anymore, but Booker doesn’t really care, and neither does she – for reasons that Booker cannot discern). There’s also, apparently, no central heating in this godforsaken place, and October in Paris is not forgiving in the slightest. He needs to invest in a space heater or something, he thinks. Or, he could just let the whiskey do its job and keep warm that way.

Before he can finish working out what exactly to do about the cold, Booker falls asleep. It might be more accurate to say he passes out, but he prefers to maintain some semblance of his dignity and therefore will continue using the former term, please and thanks.

When he wakes up, it is twilight outside his window, and he’s starving. And, he notes grimly, extremely hungover. Booker has somehow managed to be the only one of them who gets hangovers even in immortality, and he’s not sure that it isn’t some cruel trick from God. Or maybe it’s psychosomatic. Booker doesn’t think he’s a hypochondriac, because what kind of hypochondriac conjures up a hangover as their imagined disease, but he supposes that he can’t completely discount the possibility. Either way, his head feels like it’s about to crack open, and he feels a surge of gratitude that the sun has set and he can proceed on to his night without unduly making his headache worse. Jesus Christ, Booker hates being alive. And he hates the fucking sun. It’s so smug.

He sits up with a groan and licks his teeth with a dry tongue. He really ought to drink some water before he proceeds with his night of drinking copious amounts of cheap liquor. Maybe swallow down some ibuprofen, too. If he has any. Come to think of it, he isn’t sure that he has any over-the-counter drugs here. Just some narcotics procured by less-than-legal means, and even Booker can admit that overdosing on powerful painkillers is an overreaction to a headache (and he will overdose on them – he’s not capable of taking a “safe” dose of those things, whatever that even means). There’s a pharmacy a few blocks away, at least he thinks. He can admit that he has not exactly spent the last four months exploring the neighborhood outside of the bar doors and the grocery store across the street from him that sells quality wine and crusty bread. Booker isn’t much of a cook; Nicky has always been the one who handled that, but he is more than capable of reading instructions from a recipe, and he has been able to make himself serviceable meals on the rare occasion he actually feels like eating anything. Going to a restaurant would be easier, but it would also require him to interact with other people, which is mostly a no-go for him. Other than the handful of times he slept with the landlady (he was lonely, she was horny, she knocks fifty euros off his rent in the months where they have sex, and she’s the one lacking an ethical code here, not Booker, so why should he feel bad about it?). There’s nothing here to eat other than a sad few wilting lettuce leaves and stale, three-day-old bread, here, though, and Booker honestly thinks he’ll throw up if he eats anything.

The night turns out to be a solitary one. Booker heads out into the city in search of booze, and when he finds what he’s looking for, he simply takes it back to his apartment and drinks alone. He rummages through his pile of shit by the door and comes up with a little battery-powered boombox and an Edith Piaf CD. He fucking hates Edith Piaf, but noise is noise, and Booker doesn’t feel much like propositioning sour old Bernadette upstairs tonight. He doesn’t know what time it is when he starts talking to himself, out of a lack of anything better to do (most of his books are scattered across their various safehouses), but it’s late. Eventually, and God only knows why, Booker wipes the dust off his laptop and opens it. It miraculously still has a little bit of charge, and before Booker really knows what he’s doing, one of their numerous burner email accounts is open and he finds himself typing in Joe’s email address. All of them have a thousand and one digital identities, but they also each have a few contacts that only the team know about. He doesn’t know what it is, exactly, that is drawing him to do this. He just knows that right now, he is more sorry than he’s ever been about anything, in the way that drunk men are often sorry about things that they would never admit to regretting sober. His fingers slip over the keyboard, fumbling and imprecise, and he eventually manages to string together several sentences of long-winded French. He hits ‘send’ before he can think any better of it, and closes his laptop, thus to forget the whole enterprise in another hour or three of heavy drinking.

***

Quynh can’t account for how long it has been. Her deaths sometimes stretch on for hours and hours, these days – it will be dark when she succumbs to the ocean, and light when she awakens, or vice versa. Every moment she is awake has become filled with desperation. Sometimes, in the earlier years, she could put it out of her mind, briefly. She could think about Andromache, and where she must have been. If she was hurt, if she was free, if she was tearing the earth apart at its seams to find her. She could wonder if Yusuf and Nicolò were at her side, or if their love for her was always superficial. She knows, has always known, how unfair it is to mistrust the boys’ love for her. But trust after the life she has lived was always going to be a tricky endeavor, and she really only knew Yusuf and Nicolò for a few hundred years. She loves them, of course she loves them, but sometimes she still wonders if they ever really loved her or Andromache in return. The two of them were perhaps always a little too harsh with the men, and Quynh does not expect love in return for camaraderie. But her fear has always broken her own heart a little bit, and she had to put it out of her mind rather quickly down here in the depths, lest she lose herself completely. She has been fighting and fighting and fighting not to lose herself, all these years, but Quynh can feel it slipping sometimes, falling away into her screams. She can see the light poking through the surface of the sea – after all these years, has Andromache still not been able to find her? The anger that takes hold of her heart in those moments terrifies her, and she has to remind herself that Andromache loves her, would die for her, would kill for her, would destroy the entire world if Quynh had only asked. And God, these days, Quynh wishes she had asked. Or, well, she wants to wish that she had asked. She wants to want to salt the earth and leave the corpses of humanity littering her wake, but she just cannot find it in her. How many times has she herself feared what is different from her? Did she not fear herself in those early days, too? Quynh does not know how to make sense of it, even after what she must imagine are centuries to piece together some kind of coherent emotional response. Sometimes she forgets who she is, and she has to wake up and remember. Quynh doesn’t always like remembering, these days.

She is still thinking about all of this, about Andromache, when she feels a sharp upward motion. She can’t be sure at first that it’s real, that it isn’t just a figment of her surely-demented and damaged mind, but she can see the light getting brighter, the hulking shadow of a boat in the water, and then – and then –

The coffin breaks the surface of the sea with a splash that is swallowed up by the music of the waves all around her, and oh God, Quynh has not heard the waves in so many years. She can barely see the vast world outside her prison, but the water has drained enough from the rusting seams of the coffin that she can breathe again, for the first time in so long that Quynh had almost given up on ever breathing again. She takes enormous, gasping breaths, almost wheezes, as the metal covering her face is pried open and she can finally see. The blast of ocean air on her wet face is so refreshing she almost wishes she could just float along in the wind for an eternity to forget about all of this pain.

When she has finally resumed breathing normally, after she-still-doesn’t-know-how-many years, Quynh’s eyes fall on a beautiful woman standing on her rescue vessel. The boat itself looks strange – all metal and strange contraptions as opposed to the wooden boats she is used to. Also, there are no sails, and no oarlocks to hold the oars in place. A boat that neither sails nor rows – Quynh does not believe in magic, but this does make her want to start. She puts this technological innovation out of her mind and refocuses on the woman. She wears a calculating, hard expression and Quynh can feel her throat seize in terror. She doesn’t want to go back in, she wants to stay up here, she wants to breathe, and the wild animal that has been growing inside her since she descended to the bottom of the North Sea tells her to do anything, anything this woman wants, if it will keep her dry and breathing.

Quynh tries to speak but finds her throat is rough and sore from screaming and swallowing countless gallons of seawater. She manages to croak out a few words of greeting in some truly ancient Vietnamese, mind blank of any other language, but the woman shushes her.

She really is quite beautiful, blonde hair pulled out of the wind, strange clothing on her body. Her goons wear strange clothes as well, actually, and Quynh wonders not for the first or the hundredth time just how long, exactly, she was under the waves. The woman says something to her, but Quynh can only understand every fifth word. It sounds a little like English, and must be whatever the current form of the language is, but even before the imprisonment, Quynh’s English was rough and only barely serviceable. Now, against what must have been hundreds of years of change, she stands no chance.

The woman, clearly catching onto Quynh’s uncomprehending face, clicks her tongue in consternation before trying again, this time in – in the dialect of Greek that she and Andromache knew best, so many years ago, the dialect that died out in the Greek Dark Ages, the one that they never taught Yusuf and Nicolò to speak so that they could keep the tongue they spoke at Troy all to themselves. Hearing the words pour out of this stranger’s mouth so fluidly tears at something in Quynh’s heart. Did this woman capture Andromache and torture the language out of her? Or, worse, did Andromache teach it to her willingly? Did her love forsake her so that someone else could talk to her in what passes for her mother tongue? Quynh does not object to Andromache taking another lover – they have both done it many times, and these years must have been lonely, even if, as much as it makes her heart burn with rage to think it, Andromache has not been locked up so callously as Quynh. But the thought of another standing to Andromache’s left, speaking a language that only the two of them have known for thousands of years – oh, how it breaks her to picture it.

 “Hello, Quynh. I have been looking for you for a very long time. I am so glad to finally get the chance to meet you.” The woman has stepped closer to Quynh as she speaks, goons off to the side. Quynh wonders why she has not been let all the way out of the coffin yet, if this woman derives some sick pleasure from watching Quynh struggle against her restraints. The chains have long since rusted away, but she can feel their phantom grasp on her wrists as she stands trapped, watching this woman size her up and listening to her co-opt a language that has always belonged to Quynh and Andromache and no one else. Not in thousands and thousands of years.

Quynh clears her throat, trying to nudge her voice towards cooperating. “Who are you? Why are you so fluent in this dead language? Did Andromache teach you? Do you know where she is?” The words tumble from her mouth with little control, trying to make it into the air before she is interrupted by a coughing fit. She can feel the urge resting in her throat and she fights it, trying to maintain what little dignity she can. Her voice sounds rusty and old, barely a rasp, and she winces as she speaks, feeling the strain of it on her lungs and her tongue and her throat.

The woman just smiles. “Everything in time, Quynh. Everything in time. Let us get you out of these chains first.”

Quynh can feel her body sink with relief as the goons come to pry open the coffin. It’s so rusted out that can just snap the doors off their hinges. Quynh comes tumbling out, landing on the alien metal deck with a clangorous thud, on her hands and knees like a supplicant, like a vanquished enemy. Her hair is falling wet around her face, and she can feel her breathing struggle in her chest, still foreign.

“We are going to do some great things together, dear.”

Quynh looks up at the woman’s cold smile, and she feels her insides turn to ice.

Chapter Text

The Croatia job really is just more fun than Nicky has had in years and years. Speeding off along a seaside highway, distracting henchmen, dramatically flinging himself into Joe’s arms – all marks of a very good time, and over the past fifty years or so, good times have gotten harder and harder to come by. It’s been five years since what happened at Merrick, and God above if Nicky isn’t just bone-tired sometimes. He likes the feeling, though, that there is some higher purpose to all of this. Nicky hasn’t felt the presence of purpose since Quynh disappeared, really. In those years, their lives revolved around that single point, ceasing in their search for a few years before Andromache would come back with some new way to look, a new lead that never actually led them anywhere, a new drive to push and push and push and push until one day – one day, she broke. It took three hundred years, but the endless searching and searching to no avail broke her. It broke all three of them. Joe and Nicky have never quite known whether stopping was the right choice, and he is not sure that they will ever know. When even the quest to find their fallen friend had ended with nothing to show for it, everything else just kept ringing hollow. Nicky loves this world. He loves it beyond measure and reason, and he knows that Joe does, too. Nile asked him once, not long after she first joined them, how he could still believe in God after everything, and the truth is, Nicky doesn’t always know the answer to that himself. But when he crawls onto the rocky Balkan shores beside the love of his life, sputtering and laughing and hearing the waves of his childhood on the sea in the background, he can’t help but believe. Booker hurt them all, and his absence still stings, even for Nicky, even believing that his punishment was just, and the loss of Quynh is still liable to break him if he thinks about it for too long, but even with all of that suffering, Nicky is in love with his life. He is in love with the long, lazy mornings in bed with Joe after a job. He is in love with playing poker with (and almost always losing to) Andy and Nile. He is in love with leading children away from the fires that the world always sets for them to suffer through, in love with watching the sunset and cooking for his family and listening to Copley’s perpetual exasperation with Andy’s risk-taking. He has not been so happy in a very, very long time, and he is glad to have found his mandate again. Knowing that he is on the path God has set for him delights some ancient version of him that still exists, still moves with him and talks with him and rests in his heart.

Even so.

There is something nagging Nicky about Joe these days. In fact, there has been for a few years now. Since Merrick perhaps, or maybe not long after. It feels as though he is not entirely there, even now, as they laugh and joke about how they’re ever going to find their way back to the safehouse with their shiny new car submerged, and Joe presses a kiss against Nicky’s cheek, both of them dripping wet. Something is off, and Nicky wishes Joe would just talk to him about it. There has not been any real reticence between the pair of them in so long that Nicky thinks he may have forgotten what it is like. Joe has always been a dancer, a tip-toer – when they were much younger, Joe managed to neatly avoid the subject of whether or not he had forgiven Nicky for what happened in the Crusades for almost two hundred years – but for him to outright hide something from Nicky is so out of the blue that Nicky has spent the last several years quietly in shock. He could just ask. He could. Perhaps he even should. But the thought of it just makes him even sadder. Joe will tell him when the time is right to tell him. At least, Nicky hopes. He cannot know for sure. This has never happened once before, in all their years.

Joe gets quiet after a while of wandering along the shore, and Nicky can feel the by-now familiar sense of disquiet intruding on his throat. He does not break Joe’s silence, does not ask the question that burns at his vocal cords. He thinks, shamefully, that he might be afraid of the answer. Afraid of what it means that Joe has been lying to him for five years. More than that, he is afraid that he is wrong. He is afraid that he has lost his touch somehow, that he simply does not even know Joe’s mind anymore. He is afraid that perhaps Joe has told him. Perhaps he has let it slip, and Nicky has simply forgotten, let it drift away.

Eventually, they come to a point where the cliff face is slightly-less unforgiving, and they can clamber up the rocks and return to the road. Their earpieces were both lost in the water; they can’t call for the others to transport them, but Nicky still remembers the way to the safehouse that they have been using since they arrived in Croatia.

“Hayati, I am not walking twenty miles. It has been a long day. We can find a payphone.”

Joe nudges Nicky with his elbow, pulling him out of his thoughts. Joe smiles at him with that smile that is only ever for Nicky, and Nicky melts. Whatever it is, he thinks, whatever it is, it could not possibly disrupt this thing that lives in Nicky’s chest, and so for the moment, he lets go of it. There will be time for that later. Especially since they are apparently not walking all the way to the safehouse.

"Joe, we used to walk twice that in a day. Where is your grit?” Nicky laughs and Joe pretends to be offended, all the while slinging his arm around Nicky’s waist and pulling him close.

Joe groans. “We are not walking all the way there.” Joe takes Nicky’s hand and presses a kiss against his knuckles, soft and warm, and Nicky realizes much later, walking back into town, that it was an apology. He just wishes he knew what Joe was apologizing for.

***

Andy watches as Joe and Nicky slip away to bed. Joe has that look in his eye like he wants to devour Nicky whole, and Nicky looks like he wants to be devoured. She takes another sip of her drink and makes a note to not head back to the bedroom for an hour, at least. She doesn’t really care if she walks in on it, but she knows that if she goes back there, Nile will be quick to follow and Nile does care. At least a little. Five years has done a lot to temper her disgust at seeing two old men going at it, but it hasn’t fully done away with it yet. As far as Andy can tell, Nile has never cared about the fact that they’re men as much as she just doesn’t want to see them getting nasty. Which, fair. But with Americans, it’s always hit or miss, and Andy can’t pretend she didn’t have the thought as she was going to retrieve Nile five years ago. None of them, even Booker, all those years ago, has ever been too offended by it, but then, the rest of them are all interested in their own sex to varying degrees. Come to think of it, Nile probably is, too. Her gaze lingers on Andy’s ass every now and then, has since that fight on the plane, but Andy isn’t sure that Nile even realizes. Besides, Andy does have a great ass, and she’s not about to pretend otherwise.

“I’m at peace.” Nile’s prodding has struck at the heart of something cold that has been lurking in Andy’s gut for the past five years. She isn’t lying, per se – she is more than happy to accept that if it’s her time, it’s her time, and nothing is going to change that. But for all the times that she has died, Andy can feel something nauseous work its way up her throat when she thinks about dying for good. When she thinks about never seeing Quynh again. When she thinks about all of the women she used to be. The mistakes that she cannot right. Nile, whom Andy loves with all her heart and wishes she had more time to know. Joe and Nicky, and Booker, whom she knows she is unlikely to see again but wants to anyway. Misses, anyway. Loves, anyway.

Nile quirks an eyebrow and the two of them exchange a few more comments, laughing all the while, before Copley sits down at the table and tells them about the buyer.

“All they can get us is this CCTV photo.” Copley slides his phone across the table, and Andy’s heart stops. All the blood leaves her face and rushes directly to her ears.  The only thing she can hear is the sound of it pumping through her veins. Copley and Nile are both studying it closely, but Andy hardly notices them, even right beside her. All she can see is the blood, the look on her face, the tremble in her jaw as she died –

“Oh my God,” she whispers, voice hoarse, lips white and numb. It’s so hard to tell, with the quality of the photo, but she’s certain. Even after five and a half thousand years, she can’t help but be certain.

“What? What is it? Do you know her?” Nile is looking increasingly alarmed the longer Andy stares down at the phone screen in front of them, and Andy has to force herself to take a steadying breath. Copley, too, is watching their exchange intently, his crossed arms holding looser to his body by the second as he becomes more and more concerned and bewildered.

“I – yeah. Yeah, I do.” She swipes at her face with her hands for a moment, needing to process. “Her name is – or was, more likely –” Andy pauses again, thinking. Trying to remember. “Ereshkigal. We… knew each other. A very long time ago.”

Nile stares at her, disbelieving. “So, this is another one of your crazy ex-girlfriends, then?”

Andy can feel her blood boil, even knowing that it’s beside the point. She can’t fully let it slide. “Quynh isn’t crazy.” She leaves out the part where she refuses to call Quynh her ex-girlfriend. It isn’t as though they broke up (or ever referred to one another as their “girlfriend”). But she doesn’t want to give Nile (or Copley, for that matter) another reason to think that she’s fragile. “But, yeah. Yeah, we were… lovers, I guess. And I – God, I screwed her over. Horribly. I didn’t know she was immortal.”

Copley sighs wearily. “How did you ‘screw her over’ exactly?”

Andy closes her eyes. This part she could do without remembering. God, there is so much in her life that she regrets, but this must be one of the greatest. “I… I pissed the wrong people off. I had a hard time sitting still back then –” she pointedly ignores the glance Nile and Copley exchange at the words back then – “and I got myself involved in a fight that I shouldn’t’ve. The other side was closing in on my position and I knew… I knew they were going to torture her, probably in front of me, and probably indefinitely.” She pauses again, collecting herself before she admits to this next thing. God, how Andy hates herself for this, even now. “I killed her. Quickly. I didn’t want it to hurt, and I knew – I knew if someone else got to her, it would. But I killed her. I was so young, then. I didn’t understand what I was doing.”

Nile’s jaw has slowly dropped over the course of Andy’s revelation, and Andy can’t blame her. Her fingers feel numb with shock, and her voice is barely above a whisper the next time she speaks. “I didn’t understand the gravity of it as well I should. As well I as I could have. Believe me when I saw that I have suffered for what I did for the last… well. It’s been a very long time.”

Copley and Nile exchange a horrified look. Andy closes her eyes again, grateful that Joe and Nicky aren’t around to hear this. It was quick. But the truth is the enemy was still far enough away that they could have escaped. They could have escaped, and Andy refused to. She can still see the betrayed look in her eyes when Andy drove her ax into her chest. She can still hear her heartbroken sigh as she died. Time has stolen more from Andromache than she will ever know. But it has left her with this. She wishes, guiltily, that it hadn’t.

"The rest of us are about to suffer for it, too, Andy.” Nile sounds so angry. Andy forces herself to open her eyes to it. “What were you thinking? You loved her and you killed her? Are you kidding me?”

“I know.” Her voice is so quiet that she can barely hear herself speak, and Copley and Nile exchange a glance. Nile’s gaze softens, and Andy can feel something wrench in her chest at that. She doesn’t want Nile to do that. Her anger would be easier to face than her pity. “I was wrong. I will always have been wrong.”

“Yeah,” Nile says, quietly. She isn’t looking at Andy anymore. “I, uh, I think I’m gonna head to bed. Lot to think about.” She gets up from the table with one more backwards glance at Andy, and Andy forgets her plan to give Joe and Nicky privacy. She turns back to face Copley and looks past the quiet horror on his face.

“Well,” he says, something like wariness coloring his eyes. “We’ll have to tread carefully.”

And with that, Andy is left alone in the room. She closes her eyes again. She hates remembering. All she ever seems to do these days is remember, and she’s so tired of it. She can hear Nile’s groan from down the hall when she walks in on Joe and Nicky and Copley’s quiet chuckle as he slips into his own room. He sleeps separate from the rest of them, most of the time. They’ve given him the option to share their quarters (the four of them are so used to sharing a space that even when they have the option, they usually still sleep together), but he always politely declines. When all five of them end up sleeping out in the woods or the desert or the grasslands, he positions himself a solid fifteen feet away from the rest of them when it’s finally time to bed down. Every time, it makes Andy remember Nicky, all those years and years ago. By the time she and Quynh found the boys, it was sometime in the thirteenth century, and they were already together, so he didn’t usually sleep far apart from the rest of them. But during the day, he would bring up the rear of the caravan, Quynh in the front, and he would always offer to take last watch. Many mornings, Andy woke up to find Nicky sitting or standing far off, watching as the sky gradually lightened and thinking unknowable thoughts. He isn’t interested in penance anymore and thank God for that. But Copley doesn’t have five hundred years to work through his guilt the way that Nicky did. Andy wonders, albeit briefly, if some good might come out of her confession, if Copley realizes that all of them are flawed, that they are constantly making mistakes, enormous mistakes. Andy wishes she remembered what it was like to have an unburdened conscience. She isn’t sure that she ever has. There are many, many people out there who would look at Andy and see a monster, and she isn’t sure that they’re wrong.

“Monsters did not take Quynh away from us. Monsters are not real, Andromache. Men are real, and they are sometimes cruel, and they do horrible things. But they are not monsters.”

Andromache wants to stab Yusuf when she gets like this. She restrains the urge. “You haven’t seen the things that I’ve seen.”

You haven’t done the things that I’ve done.

Andy opens her eyes again and turns to face the moonlight streaming in through the window. It is late. Too late. Andy only hopes that there is still time for the rest of them. God, how hope is such a destructive thing. And yet, Andy keeps on hoping. Somehow, she keeps hoping. Maybe she learned that from Joe.

***

“So,” Discord starts.  “Are you ready to hear about where your precious Andromache has been all these years while you’ve suffered?”

Quynh is sitting on a luxuriously plush sofa in a grand old manor somewhere in Scandinavia – or at least, she thinks they’re in Scandinavia. Andromache and Quynh never spent too much time in the Far North – most of the action has always been further south, and in all honesty, neither of them cares much for the cold. Or, well, Quynh doesn’t care much for the cold. After five hundred years, she supposes, bitterly, that Andromache’s feelings on the matter may have changed.

There’s a warm cup of herbal tea in her hand, sending tendrils of steam curling up around her face. Her hair is pulled back into a tight bun, and her clothes are similar to Discord’s. It has been many months now, since Quynh was rescued, and she is finally acclimated enough to the current time to have full conversations with Discord in a modern language. They mostly use English, much to Quynh’s disdain, but between America’s cultural dominance and the legacy of British imperialism, it is impossible to escape the language in everyday life. Discord has gotten her accustomed to the language as it is now, as well as modern French and modern Vietnamese. Her Arabic and Greek both need brushing up on, but Discord waves her away when she brings it up. Discord is adept at holding her hostage without ever telling her that she cannot leave or even trying to restrain her. She offers help with one hand and lets the other dangle there, ominously, the threat of taking it away never spoken but heard loud and clear, regardless. Until Quynh agrees fully to cooperate with Discord’s plans (which she still has not explained in detail), Discord will not provide her with identity documents, which, Quynh learns pretty early on, are monumentally important nowadays. She could likely get them elsewhere. Any documents worth having inspire entire black markets of forgeries, but Discord is clearly one of their kind, and people like them have always had a better hand at falsifying. It’s silly, perhaps, but Discord does clothe her, and feed her, and teach her how to navigate modern life. They have gone out in public many times by now, and Quynh has come away from each shopping trip or seaside jaunt feeling a little clearer on her place in this new world. It is hard to give that up, especially knowing that without Discord’s resources, she could spend decades searching for Andromache again. Quynh is getting better, but she is not quick with the new technology, modern travel is difficult for her, and the team has always been very good at covering their tracks. If Quynh was not so far behind, it would not be an issue, but she is. So, she stays put, and after months of careful teaching and teasing and molding, Discord has managed to sow a doubt in Quynh’s mind that she does not enjoy. Quynh and Andromache did not doubt each other all those years ago. But, she must admit, after five hundred years, she expected more. She expected to be found by Andromache, not this strange woman with her strange voice and oddly familiar face and a very weird name – Quynh does not have much experience with names these days, but what little experience she does have tells her that Discord is still quite unusual. She thinks privately that it’s ridiculous, but she holds back from saying so. Andromache would find it ridiculous, she thinks, aching behind her sternum. Find me, she thinks. Bring me back home, my love.

“I have been ready for over a year,” Quynh says, cooly taking a sip of her tea as she maintains eye contact with Discord. That appraising look from their first meeting on the boat has not stopped in fourteen months, and it still manages to make Quynh itch. She is almost four thousand years old – there is quite little that feels older than her in this world, but Discord does. She feels ancient compared to Quynh, especially with all of the knowledge she holds that Quynh does not.  “You have been withholding it from me, a carrot to keep me here so that you do not have to find a stick. It is hard to punish someone who has lost so much, is it not?”

Discord looks like she almost approves, and it makes Quynh feel sick to her stomach. Quynh has worked with many, many people over the years whom she has had moral quarrels with, but she has never once in all her years actually enjoyed the approval of any of them, and she is ashamed to say that she likes having Discord’s approval. She wonders, detached, if her troubled mind is conjuring up a replacement for Andromache in the only place available. Discord and Andromache are both stoic, both skilled across disciplines and intelligent beyond measure, but where Discord is cool and collected and still, Andromache is (or was) warm, hot, burning brighter than a wildfire at midnight, always rearing for the next fight or the next injustice, always willing to laugh when Quynh needed it. Quynh misses jokes. Discord doesn’t make very many.

She almost smiles and it turns Quynh’s stomach. “She has been, as we’ve established before, free for the last five hundred years.”

Quynh feels every muscle in her abdomen clench. They have, in fact, established this many times, but Discord has offered precious few details. Just enough to keep Quynh from fully disavowing her. Quynh is not stupid; she knows that this woman with her abominably stupid name is keeping her on a leash and using Andromache as the collar. She just cannot help but sit there and drink her tea, too desperate to know something, know anything more, to ever seriously consider bolting. And as much as she hates to admit it, Quynh does enjoy Discord on some level. She’s quick on her feet with a wit to match and she has largely been decent to Quynh, even if Quynh knows, knows, on the basest level of her soul, that Discord is using her for something. If only she quite knew what. When she speaks, her voice is tight. “Yes. We have discussed this already.”

“I wanted to make sure that you were well-adjusted before we spoke about any specifics. You’ll forgive me for making you wait so long – although, for women as old as us, a year is less than a drop in the bucket, wouldn’t you agree?”

She waits for Quynh to give the slightest nod, urging her on.

“What I have to say may be very upsetting for you, and I wanted to make sure that you would be able to stomach it – Andromache, or Andy, as she mostly goes by these days, has been more or less living her life in her usual fashion for the past two hundred years. In fact, they’ve found two new soldiers for their little army, and have more or less carried on fighting whatever wars they manage to stumble onto.”

Quynh inhales deeply, steadying herself. Something like intense grief boils up to the surface and is replaced immediately by blinding, cold rage. How dare she? Two hundred years of simply moving on with her life? Of fighting and fighting and fighting because God forbid she sit down for longer than a second? Quynh and Andromache fought so many times over the years – after three thousand of them together, it would be hard for everything to be perfect all the time – and Quynh remembers how her face would grow red with unbridled anger when Quynh would accuse her of being addicted to violence, addicted to killing, and Andromache would accuse her in return of being unfeeling, uncaring towards the rest of humanity, and Quynh would concede. Without fail, that accusation, the one that struck something in Quynh’s chest that she never dared name, would force her to give in to Andromache’s bloody whims. They had other fights, and Andromache did not always win those. But this one, this argument that ran under every action they took for millennia, always ended with Quynh giving in and Andromache getting what she wanted. Even now, even with Quynh gone for five hundred years, Andromache is still, somehow, getting what she wants. Quynh grasps the mug so hard that it breaks, piping hot tea burning her hand without her noticing as she sits there, eyes unblinking, thinking about what she might like to do to Andromache when she finally sees her again.

If she notices how Discord’s lips curl up in a twisted smile at the sight of her anger, Quynh chooses to put it out of her mind.

Discord never does really outright say what she wants. It’s a delightful trick, and one that Quynh files away. She doesn’t know that she’ll ever have any reason to use it, but just in case. Quynh likes having things in her back pocket, what can she say?

Two more years after Discord finally tells Quynh about Andy, and three years after Quynh is rescued, Discord starts showing her the photos she’s gotten ahold of over the years. Photos from jobs, random appearances in the background of blurry tourist snaps, shots that look like they came from sniper’s nests around their safehouses. It makes her heart burn every time she sees one. Joe and Nicky (and she knows that they’re now Joe and Nicky; Discord told her) always look so happy, so at ease, and it makes her sick. She wonders, distantly, if it ever made Andromache sick, and a twisted part of her hopes that it did. She once has to stifle a snort, imagining Andromache stabbing the both of them to death the first time she walked in on the two of them rutting on the ground like animals. God, they were always fucking everywhere when Quynh still knew them. She and Andromache always thought it was amusing – their love for one another was inspiring, but their singular devotion was a running joke among the four of them. Andromache and Quynh would joke that in a few hundred more years, they’d expand their horizons and start sleeping with other people occasionally, like the two of them had, and both of them would be a little offended and promptly re-declare their love for one another. Quynh has to shake her head to keep from missing it too much. Andromache and the boys hurt her. They left her to rot. They left her to find her own way out of the ocean, to be rescued by this strange, strange woman who Quynh has been dreaming about for four thousand years and never found any good answers on. It was one of the first dreams she had, and they were so young then. There was no Lykon, no Yusuf, no Nicolò. They scarcely knew what the dreams meant, and in the flurry of their long lives, Quynh can admit that the strange pale-haired woman who haunted her nights just disappeared into the background, white noise. She could not put her finger on why the woman looked so familiar when Quynh first fell out of the coffin onto the deck of the ship, but when the dreams had stopped, finally, some weeks later, she realized. What a strange thing, she thinks, that neither Andromache nor either of the boys had ever dreamed of this woman. If the boys had, they certainly would have told Andromache and Quynh, and Andromache hid very little from her. Many, many years ago, warm and spent in each other’s arms, Andromache had told her about the lover she had killed in a moment of desperation and fear, and if she had told Quynh about that, of all things, there is nothing Quynh can imagine that Andromache would not have told her.

Discord and Quynh do not fight for any cause, a welcome respite from five centuries fighting her lungs and millennia before that of fighting everyone and everything that breathed, but Discord does arrange for her to train, to re-acclimate her long-atrophied muscles to movement, and occasionally, the two of them even spar. Sparring has always been such a uniquely erotic thing to Quynh, and she struggles not to recall scenes of running Andromache through with a spear over and over and over until they started fighting with their fists, until they struggled to the ground and fought each other’s clothes off and had sex that felt far more like a declaration of war than a coming-together. Discord is cool and sharp and Quynh can feel herself constantly getting drawn in. In a world where there is no Andromache for her to fall back on, is it not fair for Quynh to fall into this other woman’s arms? It was never unheard of for the two of them, and after five hundred years, well, Quynh is a little lonely. So if Discord invites her back to her room, wherever they are staying on a particular night, and Quynh accepts, well. It is hardly a betrayal to the Andromache that Quynh remembers, the one who would have searched for her, to do the same thing they always did, to try something a little new, a little different. And if the hunger in Discord’s eyes is so much like the hunger in Andromache’s that it makes Quynh’s chest hurt, well, there is no reason she needs to dwell on that. And if the two of them circle each other like birds of prey, a twisted mirror of the first few thousand times that Andromache and Quynh fell into bed together, well, there are so many people in the world now that it is hardly unthinkable that a few of them would turn out the same. The sex is good and Quynh can feel the power in her own body again for the first time in centuries. So what if she wishes that the woman she lies with most nights has dark hair instead of light, has different eyes, has a warmer smile and a more righteous mind and a bone-shattering love for Quynh that this newcomer to her bed (this interloper, she thinks on more than one occasion) has never shown her? So what?

The pictures are just another reason to give in. If Andromache wishes to abandon her, then she must have prepared to be abandoned in turn, even as it makes Quynh shake with pain to think about it.

Five years after Discord rescues Quynh, and four years after she finally learns about Andy, Quynh picks up on a pattern.

“The pictures, the more recent ones,” Quynh says. Discord hums in acknowledgement and continues poring over invoices that she accessed through some kind of techno-wizardry that Quynh fears she may never be able to replicate. “The blond man, ah – Booker, yes? Why is he not in most of the photos from the past several years?”

There are several of Booker alone, looking very sad in various ways, and usually with a bottle of something or other in hand, but none of him with the rest of the team, and even now, even hardened against Andromache and her betrayal and all her fighting, the constant fighting, Quynh can feel herself ache to smooth his hair, knowing what it is like to be so totally alone, and wishing it upon no one else except maybe Andromache, when she is feeling particularly uncharitable.

Discord looks up and pauses, weighing what she does or does not what Quynh to know. Quynh is so familiar with this look by now that she could probably parse out the exact math of the woman’s calculations just by looking at Discord’s subtle eyebrow twitches. She has mostly chosen to put it out of her mind. What good does it do her to fight against this woman when she has given Quynh everything? There is some place in her heart that demands that she stay until Discord feels the debt for saving Quynh from the sea has been repaid. Discord does not call it a debt, but Quynh can feel the weight of it nonetheless, and she will not be caught failing to settle up. “He was… banished, I supposed. Betrayed them all. Gave them up, as far as I can tell. Since then, he’s been separate and given how depressed he looks, I imagine it wasn’t his choice.”

“Betrayed them?” Quynh is incredulous. What would be the point in that? Except Quynh thinks she knows. Even if Booker could not possibly have anywhere near as strong of a motive for hurting these people as she does, she knows that he has hurt. She feels his pain in her dreams every night, his resentment. She can almost agree with him, almost want to pat him on the back for it, but – but only almost. Something is lodged in her throat and it’s keeping her from thinking always. She doesn’t interrogate it too deeply.

“Turned them in to a pharmaceutical company to see if they could harvest the biological code for immortality.”

There’s little interest in Discord’s tone, so Quynh does her best not to betray any more curiosity on her face. That’s the game, she’s learned. Follow Discord’s lead and show the occasional sign of independence, just enough so that she knows Quynh is not a mindless goon, but never enough that it is a threat to Discord’s plans. Quynh still does not know what they are, but she is starting to suspect it has something to do with Andromache. Even worse, she is starting to suspect that she might not care, that she might be okay with letting Andromache suffer if it means she pays for what she did to Quynh. Vengeance was never quite Quynh’s style, but if ever there was a time to try something new, well.

First things first, she thinks, Quynh needs to meet this Booker. And when she tells Discord, her savior is all too happy to assist in Quynh’s quest.

***

Booker really did not mean to send that message to Joe the first night. He was so drunk that night, doesn’t even remember about it for several more days, when he decides on a whim to check his email and finds a response from Joe to an email he barely recalls writing. Upon remembering, his face burns red with shame. Only six months into a century-long punishment, and you’re already breaking the rules? You’re hopeless, Book. Absolutely hopeless. The voice sounds suspiciously fond and suspiciously like Andy’s, so he shuts it out before he can think too hard about it. He does his best to pretend Andy does not exist when he can. Easier than missing her.

Booker has moved around a time or two more since the emails started. He doesn’t take much with him when he goes, but he always brings the dusty old laptop and a charging cable. It isn’t often. Just occasionally. Just when he cannot take the unbearable loneliness anymore. Joe’s first reply had come six days after Booker’s initial message, and it was hesitant and still wounded, but affectionate. That’s Joe for you. Booker knew, even with Joe screaming at him in the lab, that he would always be the one to break first. Maybe that’s why he had chosen him in the first place, written him that drunken email. Besides, Joe will speak to Booker in French and Nicky refuses to, responding in Italian to every single comment Booker makes in his native tongue. And if Booker strongly suspects that Nicky is the one who called for a full century, and if he knows that getting Joe to write him will break Nicky’s heart, well. Sue him. He’s tired and his family hates him. What else is he supposed to do?

It really was not going to happen again. Booker did not even turn on the computer for six more weeks after Joe wrote him back. But once is never enough, is it? Insatiable, Sebastien. That is what you are. A slave to your appetites, and you make the rest of us slaves to them as well. Genevieve did always know him too well, but alas. No time to dwell on that as he pounds back another glass of whiskey and thrusts open the laptop and writes a second message to Joe. And maybe in another month, he writes a third, and maybe two weeks after that, a fourth, and maybe a few days after that he sends Joe a fifth message, and after that, they are both doomed. Joe’s missives are always carefully worded, always betray very little of what the team is doing, but he asks question after question about Booker’s life and his family and his books. Booker can’t help it – he’s lonely. And it’s hardly his fault if Joe is choosing to break the terms of Booker’s punishment. It’s not his fault at all. And if Booker knows, just knows reading Joe’s anxious emails, that Nicky has never been told about this, well – it was never an intention of his, but he will not even pretend that it’s not a bonus.

Once, maybe two years into their correspondence, Joe drops by Paris in the middle of the night, bringing with him a sleek copy of No Exit with Sartre’s original notes on the play included in the back. The two of them don’t talk much and Booker does not ask him to stay longer than an hour, knowing it will spell disaster for both of them if Joe is missing for that long. But he can’t keep himself from asking, when Joe stands to leave – “You never told Nicky that we’ve been talking, did you?”

Joe doesn’t meet Booker’s eyes, and Booker has to suppress the cruel glee he feels at the confirmation of what he has suspected for a long time. Joe leaves and the two of them fall silent for a few months, before Booker cannot help himself (drunk, again) and writes Joe another email. And maybe three years in, the emails turn into text messages and the occasional phone call, and four years in, Joe comes to visit again and offers Booker a copy of the Odyssey. “It’s one of my favorite translations. Andy even says it’s pretty close to the feel of the original Greek.”

Booker thanks him and takes the book and hates himself for relishing in the guilt in Joe’s eyes when they look at each other. It isn’t that Booker does not love Joe, does not love Nicky. They are his family and his closest friends. But Joe and Nicky together, Joe and Nicky the unit, well. No one could blame him for the anger that wells up from the base of his spine when he thinks about the two of them and all of their grand love, all of their gestures and honeyed words and secret smiles and their stupid language, a mish-mash of words and pronunciations and grammar styles compiled from a thousand years of learning and re-learning each other’s mother tongues. He’s allowed this, Booker decides. He is allowed a little bit of anger. Or, a lot of anger. And an attempt to sabotage a relationship that literally inspired some poets to believe in love. God, how he hates them. Not quite as much as he hates himself for what he’s done, for what he’s doing, but he does.

So, if the messages are still coming, five years on, even if Joe only ever replies to what Booker sends him and does not ever initiate the contact himself, well. Joe and Nicky made this monster themselves, and it is not Booker’s fault if this breaks them, especially knowing both of them well-enough to know that any fractures will heal quickly. Not Booker’s fault at all. Andy would probably laugh at this. Or she’d smack him. Maybe both. Booker just knows, though, that there will be hell to pay for him and Joe both when Nicky inevitably learns about this, and frankly, Booker is surprised that Nicky has not already caught on. He almost hopes that Nicky notices soon, if only so that he is spared the trouble of having to still listen to Joe and Nicky fight about it when he is finally released from exile in another ninety-five years. God, Booker feels old.

Five years on, Booker is waiting on a response from Joe as he stumbles back to his latest apartment, another shithole place in this shithole town, and he drops his bottle on the concrete floor. Ah, well. His hands are far from agile even when he’s sober, so he tries not to trouble himself too much with it.

And then, pushing the charmingly-antiquated key into the lock, he finds out that he need not bother. Someone is waiting for him inside already. He draws his gun.

Chapter Text

Booker, as it turns out, is extremely easy to track. He hasn’t made much of an effort since his exile to hide himself, and Quynh takes full advantage as she combs through records on Discord’s computer (she knows how to use one, even if she’s a little slow at it). She eventually comes up with address that she thinks is current, and from their most recent hideout in Poland, she makes her way west, to Paris, and she finally meets the man she has been dreaming of for two hundred years. She manages to convince Discord to let her go alone – she’s a four-thousand-year-old eternal warrior, thanks, she can handle a Parisian drunkard – and so, blessedly unaccompanied by paid guards, Quynh slips the lock on his door easily and waits inside, armed with a venomous smile and a pitcher of water (and, you know, weapons). The apartment is sparsely furnished, with a mattress on the floor and a crappy laptop computer resting, closed, on top of it. The walls have water-stains and the stove and sink has food stains and the latch on the window is broken. It’s almost quaint, she thinks, amusing herself more than anything else. She drums her fingers idly on the windowsill as she waits for him to return from his big night out.

Quynh finds herself bored as she waits. Anticipation gets old after a while, and two hundred years of it is enough to kill someone from boredom. She wouldn’t be surprised if one of her deaths in the coffin had been from that deadly thing. There’s a gun hiding under her designer coat and she wonders if the new boy is worth using for target practice. Her aim is quite good after five years of concentrated training, but she can admit that it’s nowhere near as good as her skill with a bow. She’s only touched a longbow once or twice in all these years, but each time she picks it up, muscle memory takes over and she can pin down her first shot with a second and then a third on the target. She’s still a little shakier with guns. They were in their early stages when she went under the sea, although she got pretty good with the Chinese fire-lance back in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Booker has only ever lived in a world with guns, she thinks, absently counting down the minutes until he returns. She almost wishes that he wouldn’t. If he does, well. Then she must continue on with the plan, and until she knows what she wants to do with Andromache, finding out where the woman is sounds like a horrible idea. Quynh is loath to admit it, but over the past several years, she has come to find a bland comfort in not-knowing. She has a vague idea of where Andromache has been and what she has been up to, but their data (or the data that Discord lets Quynh see) is usually several steps behind, meaning that by the time Quynh knows about Andromache’s job in Seattle, she has already gone to Toronto and Crete and Mumbai and Siberia and Kauai and Damascus and Berlin. For all that Discord’s systems are thorough, they are not very fast, and Quynh likes that, in some ways. Everything is fast now, and although she’s mostly used to it after five years, sometimes it still catches her out and forces her to stop and catch her breath. This, though, this hellish waiting is much too long for breath-catching and Quynh would really like this asshole to make an appearance.

Finally, after what feels like hours, she hears the door to the building open, and she pours herself a glass of water as he stumbles into the room, still drunk, and draws his gun sharply. She supposes that even copious amounts of alcohol cannot beat two hundred years of instinct as she sips her water and watches him stare her down.

“Booker,” Quynh says, the name still resting strange on her tongue. She had wondered, coming here, if she should call him Sebastien instead – Booker seems so overly familiar for a man she does not know at all – but no one else seems to, these days, so she opts for the nickname and hopes that it makes him squirm a little bit. He’ll be doing an awful lot of that where she’s taking him. “It’s nice to finally meet you.”

“Quynh,” he breathes, lowering his gun slowly, as though he’s uncertain. He suddenly seems a lot more sober than he did a minute ago, and Quynh hopes he doesn’t make it hard for her. She has had a long journey, after all.

“I am sorry to start us off on such a sour note,” she says, before pushing forward off the wall and kicking him in the chest. She draws her gun as he stumbles backward, coughing, and aims for his leg. The silencer on the gun keeps the noise from reverberating in the empty stairwell beside Booker’s apartment, and she is momentarily grateful as she takes aim at a second spot, this one on his shoulder, and surges forward to press him chest to the wall. She produces a zip tie from one of her pockets and slips it tight around his hands. His face is pressed to the plaster in a manner that looks quite uncomfortable, and Quynh hates herself for the grim satisfaction that swells up in her chest at the sight. How very like Andromache, she thinks, hating the taste of the thought.

“You,” he gasps, struggling for air, “what are you doing?”

She smiles icily and pulls him back from the wall by the collar of his jacket. His eyes are dull and dead, she notes, and hopes that her own are not mirrors. “What I must.”

She slams his head against the wall and when his eyes flutter shut, she heaves him into her arms and carries his weight out to the car. She arranges him in the passenger seat like he’s just a friend meeting for coffee and pastries, and the two of them drive off.

Booker wakes up not far outside of Paris, coming to with a gasp followed by a sigh. He eyes her wearily as she minds the wheel, adept enough at driving but still, she admits, a little overwhelmed by it. There have been a great many changes to the world in the last five hundred years, and some of them are harder to adjust to than others.

“Where are you taking me?” He spits in French, which Quynh mostly understands. It was never her strongest language, but she was conversational before she went under, and a few days a month watching French cooking shows on television has reacquainted her with the language, even if her comprehension is far better than her own clumsy attempts at speaking it.

“Somewhere secure.” Quynh answers in English, and after a bout of silence, she pulls off to the side of the road and unbuckles her seatbelt. It’s quick work to break his nose with the butt of her gun, so she does, and while he’s wincing and groaning, she slips a black blindfold over his eyes and watches as he accepts his fate. This is probably more interesting than all the drinking he’s been doing for the last five years, Quynh thinks. If anything, he should thank her for the enrichment. He doesn’t, of course, mostly just leans his head back against the seat and resumes looking sullen and French as his nose cracks back into place. His face is covered with blood, and some of it is dripping down his neck, staining the collar of his cheap cotton shirt.

They drive for a long time, stopping only occasionally to refill the tank, and eventually, they turn off onto a winding dirt road in Liguria, heading towards the safehouse Discord has furnished her with. It’s right on the water, which makes Quynh’s throat close a little, even still, but she puts any potential motive of Discord’s out of her mind. It does not matter. She is getting what she wants, and Discord has been very generous in helping Quynh’s aims. Very, very generous. It matters not why. It also does not matter why Discord picked Liguria, less than one hundred miles from the city Nicolò hailed from. Quynh is not stupid; she knows when she is being warned. But she is also feeling reckless enough not to care.

The goons are already at the house when she pulls up, dragging Booker out of the car with one hand as he stumbles along, still bound. Quynh slams him down in a chair and undoes the zip tie holding his hands together. She nods briskly at one of the goons and heads for a back room, not caring much what they do to him while she takes a quick nap. She needs it more than he does.

***

Somehow, Nile’s charmingly youthful insistence that they need time off has convinced Andy that they can have a quick vacation. Joe is glad – he needs to go see Booker again, and it’s gotten harder and harder over these past few years to find the time to slip away. He didn’t really mean to respond that first time; it just sort of… happened. He slipped and his fingers typed out an email and hit ‘send’ by accident. That’s how that works, right? Joe does his best not to think too much about it, which of course means that he’s thinking about it constantly. He would like it to be stated for the record that he never reaches out first. He isn’t sure that it’ll make much a difference to Nicky. He isn’t sure that he wants it to, either.

“Where are you heading, boss?” Joe is sitting cross-legged on the deck of the boat while Andy is standing at the railing, gazing out over the Mediterranean. She’s been oddly quiet since Croatia, and Joe can’t quite parse why. Something happened after him and Nicky went to bed that night, two days ago. Copley and Nile have been exchanging worried glances and when Joe asks about it, they give him non-answers. Evasiveness is a strategy he himself has employed many times, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying when someone else does it. He is almost a thousand years old and does not need to be coddled. And yet.

“South Korea, I think.” She doesn’t turn to face him while she speaks, and Joe frowns. She sounds distant. He holds back a sigh and cranes his neck to scan the deck for Nicky. He’s off talking to Nile about something, a book open and forgotten in his left hand on the other side of the boat. Joe smiles in spite of the sour atmosphere around Andy, watching as Nicky gestures with his right hand and laughs at something Nile says. He’s telling a story, Joe thinks, watching the way his eyebrows move. He can’t quite make out their conversation, nor does he particularly want to. If it matters, Nicky will tell Joe about it later, and if it doesn’t, well, Joe is happy to leave their business alone. Something bitter rises in his throat at the thought and he has to tamp it down. He really did mean to tell Nicky about it. It’s just that, well –

Joe does not have a good excuse, and he knows that he doesn’t. He has always known that, even for all that he wishes he did, for all of the thinking that he has done on the matter in the last four-and-a-half years. Joe does not enjoy hiding this from Nicky. He just doesn’t know how to say it without sounding like a massive hypocrite, without sounding like a traitor, and after several years of lying, well. It does not make Joe look very good, he’ll admit. He’ll tell Nicky when he’s back from Paris. They’ll talk it out, and it’ll all be fine. Joe has forgiven Nicky for far worse than a few years of white lies. Far, far worse. Although, for all Joe knows better than to remind Nicky of his sins in this headspace, calm and relaxed, he knows himself well enough to know that when their tempers inevitably get the better of them both, he isn’t going to remember.

Copley and Andy split off from the rest of them once they’ve docked, and Joe debates whether or not to make a break for Paris or wait as they tie the boat up. Leaving in the night might be easier, he thinks. Just slip out of bed, leave a quick note, promise to be back soon. Besides, Nicky is looking at him like he knows something is up, the way he has been for the past few years, and Joe decides it’s better not to risk it. Best to leave when Nicky is not around to stop him, to come back and then finally tell him everything. He really will. Promise.

“C’mon, Nile,” he calls, and she comes jogging over towards where the two of them are climbing into a taxi. She had been watching Copley and Andy leave, Joe thinks. A mystery that will not be solved soon, he’s sure. Andy can keep a secret better than almost anyone Joe has ever met. The only person who has ever been better at it is – was, he thinks with a sharp pain – Quynh. Quynh, who taught Nicky how to shoot. Quynh, who taught Joe patience. Quynh, who made Andy’s eyes go soft and hungry in a way that Joe has only seen replicated a few times. Quynh, who told Joe once, when the two of them were the only ones awake, that she wished they could settle down sometimes. That she was tired of the fighting. Joe still does not know what to make of that, and he wishes that he did.

“Where are we going?”

"We’ve got a place a ways outside of town.” Nicky is in between Joe and Nile, fingers absentmindedly tracing patterns on the back of Joe’s hand. Nile is still quiet, and Joe can feel himself grow more unsettled by the second. Nile does not do quiet very much, the same way that Joe does not do quiet very much, and the last time he was as circumspect as Nile, it was 2019 and Andy had just gone on an indefinite hiatus following the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Joe does his best to put the memory out of his mind.

“You’ll have a separate bedroom this time, tesora. No need to worry about finding us in a, ah, compromising position.” Joe winks at her and she laughs through her nose, squeezing her eyes shut in disgust at the memory of the other night. The taxi driver blessedly ignores them, more engaged in whatever song is on the radio than his customers’ conversation. He speaks, it seems, only just enough English to get by, so they are probably fine either way, but still.

“You’d think after a thousand years you two might have a little more self-control. Or, you know, the ability to lock the damn door.” Nile’s voice has dropped to stay under the radio as she talks, almost second nature to her to be subtle at this point, Joe thinks.

Nicky and Joe exchange significant eyebrow wiggling, just to elicit an eyeroll from Nile. “Technically, it has really only been eight hundred years,” Nicky says, earning him a laugh from Joe.

Nile just sighs in a world-weary way, hiding her face so that Joe and Nicky cannot see her quiet smile, and Nicky chuckles. “What, tesora? You think that two hundred years does not make a difference?”

“I guess it makes me glad that you aren’t two-hundred-years-more-insufferable, but other than that? To you guys two hundred years is child’s play.” Nile is raising an incredulous eyebrow at the two of them, but she’s still smiling, and Joe feels himself melt a little bit. Ya Allah, he loves her. Who could not, after five years with her? After five years of watching her lean over Nicky’s shoulder and read alongside him when he has a novel out at breakfast, regardless of what language it’s in, five years of speaking perfect Arabic with her, discussing poetry or art together in his native language. She also endlessly teases the two of them, even now, even with her mood a week expired, and Joe wishes briefly that he could tell her how much he loves her, loves them both, But the moment isn’t right, so he just smiles and shakes his head at her, turning to look out the window instead.

The house is not far outside of town, one Joe and Nicky found on their year off, right before they'd found Nile, and it’s beautiful, full of light and blond wood. Joe may be the artist, but Nicky’s mind for spaces is nothing short of magical. Booker had come, Joe remembers with a pang, to help them set the place up. It was the last time they saw him before Marrakesh, the last time they saw him before, well. Joe closes his eyes as he sets their bags down on the sofa. It isn’t worth dwelling on. Nicky is still giving him that look like he doesn’t quite recognize him, and Nile has drifted towards the wide windows since they walked through the door, eyes focused on some distant point. Joe wonders for the thousandth time in two days what happened in Croatia, and he wonders how long he has until Nicky knows his secret. How much longer he has before it all implodes. Five years, he thinks, five years they’ve had with Nile, five years they’ve had protecting Andy and pretending not to care about Booker. Five years of their plan, however haphazardly thrown together along the way it was, working. But when have their long-term plans ever really stuck? When has it ever managed to last longer than a week, a year, a decade? Joe wants to laugh at the irony of it all, that the people with all the time in the world end up being the flightiest. His fists are clenched loosely, he notices. How long have they been like that? How long has Nicky been looking at him like he wants to reach into Joe’s chest and pull out his heart, examine it in his hands like the surgeon he has so often been, even as the blood from his veins and plaque from his arteries stains his hands? How long has Joe been pressing kisses to his knuckles because he cannot bear to press them to Nicky’s cheek, afraid that so close to his ears, he will hear the lies on Joe’s tongue?

My new boyfriend, he says, and wants to cringe as soon as he says it. It is not true, of course it is not true – Joe has not ever, not since they met, wanted anyone else. But it strikes at the heart of the truth, doesn’t it? Is this not its own kind of infidelity? If Andy was still the woman she once was, the woman she became after Quynh disappeared, she would kill him for this. She has done worse for less. But she has changed, quietly and quickly and in ways that Joe still cannot quite name, and even if she had not, her anger is irrelevant to him. Or at least, compared to Nicky’s. Compared to the quiet of that, compared to the way Nicky will stew for years or decades, will slip out of bed in the middle of the night and lay down on the sofa so that Joe can wake up alone after going to sleep beside him. Joe has a temper and he is not ashamed or unaware of this fact after nine hundred and fifty-nine years of living with it, but it burns bright and high and fast. He is done with an argument after a week. Nicky is not done with an argument for ten years.

“Caro, where are you?”

Nicky has had a hand on Joe’s shoulder for who knows how long. Joe has been distracted, eyes fixed on an unseen point in the middle distance as he thinks. He does not know how long Nicky has been trying to get his attention. He tries for a smile and hopes it is not hollow. “Right here, Nicolò. Sono qui.”

He places his hand over Nicky’s, and Nicky’s eyes melt. No one else would notice it, and Joe marvels over this fact, even still. Even after almost a thousand years of watching these eyes, even after eight hundred and thirty-odd years of pressing kisses to the skin all around them, of gazing into them openly, he marvels. They have never ceased to draw Joe in, never ceased to be the subject of so many of his sketches, his thoughts, his gaze. Joe has loved this man for a thousand years and he will love him for a thousand more. He will love him until time stops. And he will tell Nicky, he swears to himself, on all that he is, that he will tell Nicky when he comes back from Paris.

“I’m gonna head for a walk,” Nile calls, already most of the way to the door before the spell breaks and Joe turns away from Nicky. She’s gone before his brain is present enough to formulate a response. He will find out what is wrong with everyone recently, even if he has to beg for it. Even if he has to pull at seams until the whole damn thing unravels. This itch in his brain is not like him, he knows. He does not normally need like this, is normally happy enough to let Andy’s business be Andy’s business, but this – this just feels wrong. His instincts are screaming, and he does not know why, does not know what about this specifically feels so urgent. But it does, so he will look. Joe has made his life out of looking.

“Well,” Nicky starts, eyes glinting with something like hunger, something that makes something hot coil up in Joe’s abdomen. “We will need a way to pass the time while she’s out.”

“And what did you have in mind, caro?” Joe positions himself so they’re facing one another directly, and he takes his hand from where it has been clutching Nicolò’s, still resting on his shoulder, to comb down his side until it comes to rest at the other man’s waist, digging his fingers in just slightly, feeling the way Nicky’s body instinctively tenses in anticipation. Oh, how Joe loves this part. Nicky cocks his head to one side, thinking, and there’s a flash of something else for just a moment, too quick for Joe to read it, before his love comes back to him

“Oh, you know. The usual.” Nicky has slipped back into Italian, and as he speaks, he pulls Joe in closer until his words are hot against Joe’s skin and Joe shivers. Everything else can wait, Joe thinks. Everything else can wait. The world will stop moving as their hands find their rightful places at each other’s sides, as they kiss each other so deeply you would think they had been apart for twenty years, as Nicky’s hand tangles in Joe’s hair, as he pushes Joe back until his back has hit the wall, as they stumble, still kissing, into the bedroom and Joe slams the door closed with Nicky’s body, as they grapple with each other’s clothes and Nicky leads Joe to the bed they picked out together six years ago, as they intertwine their legs and their fates all over again, as Nicky slides down Joe’s torso with a parting kiss to his swollen lips, as Joe loses his mind for what must be the hundred-thousandth time in his life and forgets all the poetry he ever read, ever wrote, ever recited, as Joe offers the same in turn and luxuriates in Nicky’s arched back and flushed cheeks, as they lay together afterwards, slow and loose and warm and unaware that anything has ever been wrong anywhere. The world will stop, Joe thinks, because nothing bad could ever happen while Nicky is in his arms. The world is cruel, but it would not dare.

***

It’s early in the May evening when Nile slips out of the house. There’s something brewing in the air there that she can’t quite put out of her mind, try as she might. Nile has gotten pretty decent at reading all of them after five years. It’s almost as long as she was a Marine, and Lord knows she got used to Dizzy and Jay’s tells after two months in the same unit. Nile has been watching Nicky’s face for a few years now, and she’s starting suspect something is wrong in the Smith-Jones household. She can’t put her finger on what. But she catches Nicky looking at Joe sometimes, looking like he’s trying to figure this man out, as though they haven’t spent a literal millennium together. Nile doesn’t know a crazy amount about relationships – she hasn’t exactly had a lot of time for them – but she knows enough to know that looks like that are probably, to use a clinical term, not good.

So, you can understand why she needs to clear her head after spending so much time around all that. And especially in light of Andy’s revelation the other night in Croatia – fuck, man. Nile thought these people loved each other, but it’s starting to look like all they do is lie to each other. Because Joe is clearly lying to Nicky about something, and Andy just hides and hides and hides and hides, and all that is before she even touches on what Booker did. She knows that she doesn’t have a right to be upset about Andy keeping what she did to that woman from her. Nile is not stupid, she’s not possessive, she’s not unreasonable. They’ve only known each other five years, and Andy is like, well. However old Andy is. Nile has still never gotten a straight answer on that. She’s starting to think Andy doesn’t want anyone to think she’s an old hag. But even knowing that, Nile cannot help but feel a little miffed. She’s expected to trust a woman who has done the things that Andy has done? And more than that, she’s expected to trust a woman who has done the things that Andy has done and then does’nt tell her about them? And Nile doesn’t want it to change how she thinks about Andy. She really doesn’t. She wants to take the woman she has grown to love over the past several years at face value, but fuck, man. It’s getting really fucking hard to do that. And what makes Nile burn is the fact that when Andy told her, when she hung her head in shame while she was talking, Nile could not even be surprised. She has known Andy for too long, and c’mon. Andy shot her in the head the first time that they met. That isn’t the behavior of a woman who is all kind and warm and so great all the time.

But, Nile thinks, you love her. She cannot help but love Andy. And God above if Nile hasn’t killed some people that she wishes she hadn’t. Hasn’t let some people die that she wishes she hadn’t. Nile doesn’t want to examine that too closely, though. If she thinks too hard about it, if she dwells on it for too long, she’ll start seeing parallel lines made out of their lives, and Nile would much rather keep that sight far, far away from her.

So she walks, and she tries, really does try, to calm herself. After all, it has only been five years, and to these people, that is only a drop in the bucket, the ocean, really, of their vast lives. She can’t expect them to go telling her their deepest secrets right from the get-go. Although given how Andy’s been tiptoeing around Joe and Nicky for a few days, Nile isn’t sure that either of them knew about Andy’s murdered lover, either. Which is not, admittedly, a very helpful thought as she tries to get her blood pressure back to a healthy level.

She wanders along rocky cliffs, hidden from the road by dense trees, and she tries to take deep, calming breaths and all that therapy shit. She had suggested once, only half-joking, that the rest of them might benefit from talking to someone and Andy had actually laughed in her face. It isn’t that Nile really believes in it all that much but some of them (not her, obviously, thanks) have pretty clear PTSD, and they have shit to help with that now. There are things they could do to help themselves and they don’t and it drives Nile up the wall. They don’t tell each other important things and they don’t take care of their psychological well-being. Does Nile take care of her psychological well-being? That wasn’t the topic, please and thanks, and she’d appreciate it if you’d go back to picking on the other three.

She takes another deep, calming breath and pretends that the rocks she’s kicking with her boots are Joe and Nicky and she’s forcing them to be honest with one another. She misses the way they were in the first months that she knew them, warm and loud and open and always close. These days, they look so far away from one another, even standing the same distance apart that they always have, and Nile frequently has to resist the urge to ask Andy if that’s just a normal part of their relationship, if sometimes they are just distant and it will pass. Andy will find her concern laughable, and Nile doesn’t feel much like being laughed at. Not after what Andy told her. And listen, Nile loves them all. She really, really does. It’s just. Fuck, man.

Nile drifts up and down the shoreline for a few hours or so before she makes her way back to the house. It really is a beautiful place. She wonders how long it’ll be before she, too, is richer than God and can own property all over the world. Probably if she asked, they would just give her access to all of their accounts, but Nile was raised right and she knows that you don’t talk about money if you can help it. Plus, her expenses are always taken care of anyway and her cut from each job is usually enough to buy shampoo and books and nice new scarves for her hair. She doesn’t exactly have much to complain about on the financial front.

The sky is starting to glow a little, the telltale sign that sunset is almost underway, and Nile basks a little in the glow before she returns to the frigid air she knows she’ll find inside. She takes yet another deep, calming breath, cursing that stupid social worker she had after her dad died, the one from school who would pull her out of Ms. Sherman’s fifth grade class and ask her how she was feeling today and if she had any more of those dreams about her daddy and could she tell her what she felt inside when her mother told her what had happened? Nile cannot even remember the woman’s name anymore, just remembers that she was short and slim and white, the way those adults who just want to help, Nile, why do you have to make it so difficult, are always white and always flinch when she opens her mouth a little too wide. She remembers the way she would nod and furrow her brow and study Nile like she was a kicked puppy instead of a hurt little girl with a dead dad and a depressed mom and a little brother who needed someone to take care of him and didn’t understand why no one was able to give him all of the love he deserved. She remembers hating her, remembers the way the AC in her office was always too cold and the sofa she made Nile sit on was directly under a vent. She would shiver her way through their little chats and Nile would want to scream. She was eleven years old and she didn’t understand what it meant that these women who claimed to give a shit never understood or really tried to help in any meaningful way. She’s almost thirty now, actually, and she still doesn’t get it. And she doesn’t remember the damn woman’s name anymore. She doesn’t think she really wants to.

She slips inside the house and lets herself sink down with relief when she senses the quiet, only to have it interrupted a moment later. As she rounds the corner from the front door, she spots Joe and Nicky by the window, facing off. Joe’s shirt is off and his loose hair is a mess, as though he’d just been asleep or… well, Nile doesn’t want to think about that (again). Nicky’s shirt is on, but not buttoned-up, and he looks similarly like their argument interrupted an intimate moment. She wonders, absently, if this means they were having sex on the sofas and she makes a note to avoid them for the rest of their stay here.

Nile pauses, still half in shadow, out of reach of the sunlight streaming in through the windows on the western side of the house, and watches as Nicky runs a hand through his hair roughly.

“It feels as though I am in love with a ghost these days, Yusuf. You keep secrets from me and disappear for days on end and do not tell me where you have been. Evade, evade, evade - that is always the way with you, and after a thousand years, you’ll forgive me if I find it tiresome.” Nicky is speaking in Arabic, which Nile understands pretty well these days after many a long lesson with Joe. She doesn’t ever really hear Nicky speak it, though, and she wonders if Joe is thinking the same thought she is. It certainly seems damning to her, but when Joe answers, it is in Italian, and Nile cannot understand that nearly as well. She only picks up a handful of phrases, but it’s enough to know that Joe is calling his husband some truly foul names. Good God, what happened while she was out?

***

Joe’s blood is boiling. It is not as though Nicky’s question is unfair, and he knows in his guilty, unworthy heart that it is. But right now, all he can hear is the way that Nicky is speaking to him in his mother tongue for the first time in a long time, because he has to be angry to do it.

“Don’t call me that,” he spits, still using Italian, the language of so much of their love poetry. If Nicky gets to corrupt a refuge, then Joe can do much the same. All is fair in war, and Allah most high if their fights are not like war. “If you are only going to call me by my given name when we are fighting, I would rather you not call me by it at all, you bastard son of a philandering lesser merchant. You crusading sack of shit. I speak Italian for you every day, every hour, and you cannot even do me the decency to not reserve my mother tongue for your anger and your anger only.”

Joe had really, really hoped they could postpone their arguing until after Paris, but Paris is increasingly looking like it may no longer be an option, and Joe is cursing himself. If he hadn’t gotten distracted while they were in bed, if Nicky had not been able to notice the way Joe was transparently thinking about someone else, even if it was not, could never be, like that, and then, well. Here they are, twenty minutes later, screaming at each other with no discernable goal on either end besides petty, childish insults and loud glaring.

Nicky looks at him, stunned. They have not had a fight like this in sixty years. Joe has done so well over the past thousand years to curb his anger, to soften his hands and soften his tongue and forgive Nicolò his smallest trespasses, and the grander ones long since atoned for, but there are things he cannot abide by. He hears his native tongue more from Nile, the baby of their little family, the one who knows him the least, than he does from the love of his life and the reason his blood flows through his arteries. When they were lying there, warm and sated after several rounds of lovemaking, Joe stroking his lover’s side gently, Nicky had interrupted their quiet to finally ask, and Joe, angry though he is, can admit he was ashamed. Shame, well. That, he can admit, still has far too much power over him, even if the things he is ashamed for have changed so much over the past thousand years.

“You are still not answering the question, Joseph. All I ask of you, my heart, is to tell me the truth and you are refusing me! What have I done to deserve this? Five years of secrecy, Joe. Five years and you do not tell me the truth – what have I done that warrants so cold a response? What? What?!”

Joe locks his jaw and looks away. Nicky’s hand shoots out and grabs Joe’s chin and forces him to look back. “We do not lie to one another, Yusuf. Not even in the very beginning. Why are you lying to me now?”

He’s reverted to Italian, too, and his voice has gone soft and wounded. Joe forces himself to ignore the burn of Nicky’s fingers where they are digging into his skin too hard. “Caro,” he tries. “Caro, please.”

Joe tries to force the words out. He really does.

“What in God’s name is wrong with you two?”
Joe and Nicky startle and jump back about two feet each. Nile appears from the darkness, watching the two of them for who knows how long, and Joe can feel his face burn with shame.

“Nile,” Nicky says. “Nile, che – qué hac – what are you doing? When did you get back?” Joe feels as out of sorts as Nicky sounds. He listens to his lover fumble with languages before settling on English, and he thinks that might be an unfortunately apt summary of their situation. He should just say it. He should, he should. He should just tell him. But Joe still cannot muster up the courage to do it, clenching and unclenching his fists and his jaw and trying to summon up words which do not come. He does not quite know what it is so wrong with him lately. He wants to grab Nicky’s hand where it has fallen away from his face and put it back there, or press another desperate kiss to his knuckles, or lead him back to bed where they can fall away to each other again and pretend the world does not exist, pretend none of this has happened and they are just two men from vastly different backgrounds who stumbled by chance into each other’s lives and made their homes in each other’s bodies, who will grow old together in the normal course of things and do not have to face all of the things that haunt men who will never grow old. Joe wants, and he thinks again, pained, of his plan to slip away to Paris tonight. He wonders if he could still make it.

“I got back a few minutes ago. And I’m asking you a question. Do you need me to repeat it?” She’s speaking purposefully slowly, as if she thinks that they’re stupid. Joe honestly cannot even find it in him to think that she’s wrong. They are being stupid, Joe especially, but he is not going to admit it first. Nicky may have a point.

Joe and Nicky exchange a weary glance, and then both sigh at the same time. An unspoken truce passes between them. “We are fine, Nile, truly. And we appreciate your concern. It is touching.”

Nicky’s voice simultaneously grates on Joe’s nerves while also soothing them, and Joe wishes he could throw him against the glass and kiss him until they forget about all of this nonsense, both of them. Until Joe forgets that Booker ever sent that stupid email, until Nicky forgets about Joe’s lies, until they forget what it is like to be angry with one another, to love each other and want to throttle one another all the same.

“No, no you’re not ‘fine.’ I’ve been watching the two of you tip-toe around whatever is going on here for a while now, and it’s getting old. I mean, Jesus Christ, you guys have been together since Cleopatra or some shit. How have you not figured this out by now?” Nile has crossed half the room by now, standing with a world-weary and exasperated expression that makes Joe want to lay down any weapon he’s ever taken up and tell her that he loves her. God, he's a sap. No wonder Booker targeted him (was it targeted? Joe has never been clear on that point).

“Not Cleopatra,” Joe grumbles under his breath, instinctively defensive about his age.

“Get your shit together, guys. I can’t deal with this on top of all of Andy’s bullshit right now, okay, so –” Nile stops abruptly, realizing that she has said just a hair too much, and Joe and Nicky both lock eyes again.

“What happened in Croatia?” Joe asks, pronouncing each word slow and measured.

Nile looks askance. “The buyer,” she says, voice a hoarse almost-whisper. “The buyer, Andy knew her. And ever since then, all the details Copley has been getting… I think something bad is about to happen. I think we might be in trouble.”

Chapter Text

Once they leave the safehouse in Croatia, Andy knows that she has to arm herself with the facts, and she knows, unfortunately, that if Copley does not have them, there is only one other person on the planet who will. It’s a long flight to Seoul. They depart from Rome, suffer through a layover and almost twenty hours on various jets, and by the time they stumble out into the bright South Korean sunshine, Andy is ready to murder whoever invented modern air travel. Are they most likely already dead? Yes. Does she care? Absolutely not; Andy is not above digging up graves and desiccating corpses, nor will she feel any shame about the matter.

“So where exactly are we going?”

Copley has asked this question almost a thousand times in the last two days, and as much as Andy enjoys him, she is similarly ready to kill him. She can admit that she could have just answered his question the first time he asked, but this is a highly sensitive matter, and on the off chance one of the team reaches out to him to ask where they are, Andy would rather he not tip them off. It’s just, well. Andy and Tuah parted on what might be called awkward terms, and she has no idea what kind of reception she’s about to get. That tends to be the way it goes with her lovers. Andy will be the first one to admit that she’s shit at the whole relationship thing. Meaningless, no-strings-attached sex? She’s awesome at that. Actually being together? Not so much. Quynh was the closest she ever got to doing it right and that – well. Best not to think too hard about it.

Andy’s bag is slung loosely over her shoulder, which is aching from hours and hours of carrying it from gate to gate across airports and being crammed like a sardine into too-narrow economy seats. The last-minute flight options were… lacking, to say the least, even with Copley supervising. They didn’t tell Joe and Nicky about their conversation that night in Croatia and Andy hopes against hope that they might never have to. Maybe they’ll talk to Tuah and he’ll tell her that this was all a fluke, that this woman has never shown up in any other records, that she just happens to look like a woman Andromache knew once, many years ago. Or maybe she’ll blow up her family while Andy’s off galivanting through East Asia. Who knows.

They wind through the cramped streets of the city until Andy can smell the same fish stew his neighbor always made, and she knows before she really knows that she is in friendly territory. Andy has always loved the Far East, even in the lonely years since Quynh disappeared. It holds a dear place in her heart, after thousands of years of watching its markets and governments and borders and people and languages change beyond all belief. The woman Andy was the first time she came here, not yet world-weary and traveling with a new companion she still was not quite sure she could trust, even after five hundred years of dreaming of one another, would not for an instant believe that any of this was possible, and it almost makes Andy laugh to think of it. How naïve was she, back then?

“All this way,” Copley starts, and Andy tunes him out. He’ll get an answer soon enough. God, was she this impatient before she died the first time? You’re still this impatient, a voice helpfully reminds her, and she elects to ignore the fact that it sounds distinctly like Quynh’s.

She leaves Copley waiting on the street corner to twiddle his thumbs while she makes her way to Tuah’s little house. She has always loved it here, all these years, and she wishes she could have stayed longer. She really, really does. But Andy cannot let anyone attach themselves to the parts of her that even she does not understand, and however much she cared about Tuah, still does, he could not let go of things she could not answer for.

He opens the door, and she wonders if she’s making up the relief in his eyes when he sees it is only her.

“Somehow I’m not surprised,” Tuah starts, almost biting back a smile. Well, Andy thinks. Maybe this won’t be horrible. “Tea?”

“Please.”

She takes a seat at his counter as he plops two tea bags in mugs and boils water on the stove. “I see you’re still wearing her necklace.”

Andy tenses reflexively, but there’s no venom in his voice, no jealously, no hint of upset, and Andy relaxes again. “Haven’t ever taken it off.”

He pours the hot water and tugs on the teabags a few times to make sure they’re getting the full effect of the water before he leaves them to steep. Joe’s tea is better, she thinks, but Joe uses real tea leaves, because Joe has had a thousand years to learn how to brew it himself (although it’s usually for Nicky).

“Listen,” she starts. “I’m not here for… to talk about us. I need information, and I was hoping you might know something.”

Tuah’s face falls ever-so-slightly, but he straightens his back and gives her a collegial nod, stepping back to grab their mugs from the counter behind him. “I had hoped you might’ve reconsidered, but I understand completely. Anything I can do to help you, though, I’m happy to.”

Andy admires his honesty. That was one of the reasons she had been drawn to him in the first place. Smart, and honest, and usually kind, even if he wasn’t always nice. A retired-soldier-turned-academic who led a quiet life and welcomed Andy back with open arms every time they saw each other for nearly a decade. She looks at his eyes, still just the same as they were on the day that they met but now set off by laugh lines that she doesn’t remember. It’s been fifteen years since they met, she realizes. He has gotten fifteen years older, and she looks just the same. It’s always the same damn thing with mortal lovers, and she wishes she still carried a sword so that she could fall on it right about now. “There’s a woman. We think she might be one of us, but no one else has met her. Blonde hair, these days, and used to go by the name Ereshkigal. Making under-the-table deals with arms dealers to access military-grade explosives.”

Even if Tuah wanted to lie to her, she catches the way his mouth tightens, almost imperceptibly, and she knows that he knows something. “When I was doing my research, I thought… I thought she was maybe an old acquaintance you all had fallen out with, nothing too serious, since there’s only sporadic evidence of her. She didn’t seem to ever do much of the work your team does until maybe a few hundred years ago. But then, well. She showed up here.”

Andy lets out a rushed exhale. It’s not exactly comforting when your scorned former lover turns out to also be immortal and is not only planning something nefarious but is leaving a trail for you to find. “She came for you? Tuah, are you – did she –?”

Tuah reaches across the counter and lays one hand over hers. “She roughed me up a little, tried to get some answers out of me about you, but. Well.” He offers her a worn, but still unbearably fond, smile, and Andy can feel a throbbing between her temples.

“I’m sorry,” she says, almost a whisper. God, she hates apologizing. She hates how good at it she’s gotten over the past seven thousand fucking years on this miserable plane of existence (it’s not miserable, she thinks, aching, it has never been miserable unless you made it miserable).

“I understand why you did what you did, Andromache. It was unfair of me to put you in that position.” Tuah is still smiling at her, and Andy lets herself smile a little back. She does love him. It was just never the same, never as much as he loved her, never as much as she had loved Quynh, all those years ago, or Achilles after her. Andy has made a shameful habit of loving her partners far less than they love her. Ereshkigal is example enough.

They stay like that for another long moment, tea forgotten in front of them, before Andy remembers Copley waiting outside with a guilty flash. “I brought someone with me. A colleague. He’s – well, I think you two will get along.”

“Tuah, I’d like you to meet James Copley. He’s a newer colleague of ours and I think the two of you might be able to bond over your research.” Andy gives each of them a pointed look and they both awkwardly cough and refuse to meet her eyes.

Copley offers up his hand and Tuah shakes it. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, James. I hope what I have to offer will be helpful on your mission.”

“Likewise.” Copley turns to Andy, a question in his eyes, before turning back to Tuah, and then to Andy again. “So –?”

Andy almost laughs at his awkwardness. “He’s like you, Copley. He’s mortal. What, forty now, right?”

Tuah nods, clearly pleased that she remembers, and Copley looks visibly relieved. “I was worried for a moment that I had missed something big in my research.” He’s trying for levity, but he misses his mark, and Andy elects to drag Tuah into that mess of a conversation, too.

“Tuah here has actually also done some very thorough looking into all of our lives.” Andy says it with forced politeness, and she ignores the way Tuah has turned bright pink.

“Ah.” Copley just nods once, and Tuah clasps his hands together as if to say, shall we? The answer is, of course, that they shall, and the three of them descend into the very nice library that Tuah keeps in a renovated cellar. He has all sorts of very nice old manuscripts down here, Andromache remembers from the year she spent with him, as the cooler conditions and lower light underground make it the ideal place to store all of his research. The two of them spent so many hours poring over old texts down here. She has to tamp down the memory, because remembering that leads, inevitably, to remembering the day she realized he was conducting research into her life, her work, and that she had to go. Booker had reached out with a job, and with Tuah trying to piece together some semblance of sense from her story, Andy needed to run. She is not proud of herself for it, for abandoning yet another person she really did love, but ultimately, there was no other choice. She couldn’t just let him reconstruct her life, even the parts that she doesn’t remember, and still sit there and take him to bed every night, offer him her soul. It just didn’t sit right, and knowing now that she has made him a target makes Andromache feel sick to her stomach. If she had stayed, she wonders, if she hadn’t done the job in South Sudan, if she had told Tuah all the stories she never tells simply because he asked and she loved him, would any of this have happened? Would Booker have kept trying to find ways to turn them over? Would Ereshkigal have found Tuah? Would Andy have been able to keep him safe from her? Would her family still be safe?

She snaps herself out of it.

“So, the woman,” Andy prompts, letting her eyes pass over Tuah’s accumulated findings on her life. His research is scattered across a few tables and a bulletin board. It’s far more organized than it was the last time she saw him, five years ago, more like Copley’s than the mess of documents and printouts and manuscripts scattered across the floor that Andy remembers. (Tuah, she had asked. Tuah, what is all this? What have you been doing? She wishes she didn’t remember the look on his face, so pleased with himself, a proper historian as ever, when he told her, I’ve been looking into your life. Andromache, the things you have done, it’s just – it’s remarkable. Her face had gone pale. No. No, Tuah, you don’t want to open that Pandora’s box. Please don’t do this.)

“She goes by Discord these days,” Tuah starts, ignoring the incredulous look Andy and Copley exchange at that ridiculous name. “Over the course of my research I found a number of sketches and accounts of a pale-haired woman nearby at many of the same places your team was in, but I never was able to make much of it until she came here.”

“When was that?” Copley asks, eyes darting to all of Tuah’s collected research on Andy and the rest of her family. God, she thinks, she should have introduced these two much sooner. They have so much they can bond over (stalking the team). Although Tuah gets more of a pass than Copley does. Tuah at least wasn’t trying to track all of them down and extract the secret to eternal life from them.

“This was maybe three years ago. It was a while after you left, Andy, but I couldn’t tell you exactly when. She stayed for a few days, made some threats to my person and my career and my family and all that, but when it became clear that I didn’t know where you were, and she couldn’t find out from my research, she disappeared. Haven’t seen her since, but it did inspire me to go back and dig up more on her.” Tuah isn’t meeting Andy’s eyes, and she realizes with a sinking feeling that there is so much more here than she realized originally. So much more. “It turns out that she’s been doing mercenary work, the same kind of things you guys do, but usually without cause – there is no pattern, no greater good that comes out of it the way there is with yours. It’s an easy way for someone of your abilities to make money, but I couldn’t find much on her from before around 1520 or so.”

“1520?” Andy’s voice is faint, and she has to swallow. Quynh disappeared in 1517. Copley glances over at her and she realizes that they’re having the same thought. “Tell me, Tuah – did she mention her plans? Even just the slightest bit of information is more useful than you know.”

“Discord didn’t tell me anything directly, but I have been keeping track of her where I can since then. She’s good at covering her tracks, but within the last few weeks, she’s made a huge payout to a group of hired mercenaries in Italy.” Tuah pulls open his laptop, sitting on a collection of papers that has been strewn haphazardly over the desk, and shows them a digital copy of the invoice. It looks remarkably similar to the ones that they use, and Andy wonders, a little meanly, if Booker has been designing receipts for another group of muscle-for-hire.

“Where in Italy?” Copley is peering over Tuah’s shoulder in consternation, trying to make sense of a completely nonsensical situation.

“Liguria, it looks like. Or somewhere nearby. Definitely up north.”

Copley and Andy exchange another look. “I think we need to head back.”

Something crosses Tuah’s face, but it’s gone before Andy can figure out what it is. “Let me come with you. I’ve gathered a lot of information about who she is and what she’s done, and my contacts at the university may still prove useful. I want to help you.”

“Tuah,” Andy starts, voice soft and eyes on the edge of watering. “I can’t let you get hurt again.”

Copley shoots her a look that is something like surprised, but she ignores it.

“I was a soldier, Andromache. I know how to handle myself. And she clearly wants to hurt you, and even if it can’t stick, I’d like to keep that from happening.”

Andy can feel Copley’s eyes boring into the side of her head.

“You haven’t told him?” He asks.

“We haven’t exactly been meeting up for coffee once a month, James.”

Tuah looks between the two of them, confused. “What are you two talking about?”
Andy sighs and makes a mental note to never bring Copley anywhere, ever again. God, her head hurts. “I lost it.”

“What?”
“I’m not healing. It’s gone. I’m mortal.”

Tuah reaches out and she has no choice but to let his hand settle on her shoulder. “Andromache,” he breathes. “How long?”

She flinches.

“C’mon. Let’s get back to Italy.”

***

After Nile’s interruption, neither Nicky nor Joe has much heart to continue fighting. They sit down for a tense dinner, Nile flicking her gaze between the two of them, definitely judging, but not saying anything. Nicky still has not gotten an answer out of Joe, and he is starting to think that he is not going to. He wants to tear his hair out, wants to scream, wants to spit in Joe’s pasta as he is dishing it out at the table. He doesn’t, not with Nile right there. She is not a part of this, does not need to be subject to Nicky’s temper. It is probably good that she’s with them right now; Nicky does not know what he would do otherwise. His temper is not explosive, not the way Joe’s can be, but right now, he is angry. It has come up a few times, this anger, in the past several years, but normally he is able to tamp it down. Tonight, well.

It is hard for Nicky to let go of things once he has latched onto them, and as they laid in bed, in their hazy post-coital bliss, Joe transparently in an entirely different world, Nicky could not help but ask, and when Joe did not answer, he could not help but be angry. For Joe to keep something from him for five years, that is bad enough. For him to keep something from Nicky even after Nicky asked about it, well. That is an entirely different matter, and not one that Nicky can let lie quite so easily. They do not lie to each other. That is the thing that Nicky has always held onto, that the two of them have always been horribly, brutally honest with one another since the beginning. If that is not the case anymore, if that has maybe never been the case, then Nicky does not know what to do with himself besides glare at Joe as they eat the dinner that Nicky had made for the three of them.

Nile joins him as he’s tidying up the kitchen afterwards, turning the faucet on and washing dishes with a practiced hand. Nicky can feel his anger deflate at that. He cannot stay angry while it is just him and Nile. She has done nothing wrong.

“So,” she starts, and Nicky braces himself for another admonishment. “What do you wanna do while we’re here?”

Nicky blinks a few times as he wipes down the counter, surprised. “A little rest would be nice.”

“I thought you guys said we didn’t do days off.”

Nicky almost chuckles, still too sore emotionally to commit to it, and Nile offers him a half smile as she sets a plate on the drying rack beside her.

“I suppose it could be argued that all of our long days traveling were like days off, since we didn’t do much besides walking, but I digress.” He tucks the salt and pepper back into a cabinet above the oven.

“Us kids really do just always have it better, huh?”

Nicky laughs this time, and he tries his best to let go of his anger. It’s dark out by now, close to nine, he thinks, and he is tired. He wants to climb into bed, but the thought of it, of being wrapped up in Joe’s arms and sheltered there, makes him feel sick to his stomach. He puts it out of his mind. Maybe he will sleep on the sofa. He picked it out; he knows how comfortable it is. “Only sometimes, tesora. Only sometimes. But you are right in some respects. Vaccines, for example, have made life significantly better for people your age.”

Nile laughs and turns the water off, flicking her hands dry and reaching for a towel to dry them completely. “Did you guys ever get vaccines, or is it kind of pointless for us?”

Nicky has to stop and think about it. They have done so many things over the years, it is hard to keep track. “We can still get very ill, but we do not die from it, so I don’t know that any of us have any need for a vaccine. But I seem to recall once being administered the polio vaccine to convince a young boy that it was okay, and I imagine there must have been other times.”

Nile nods, satisfied with his answer, before she hoists herself up onto the white countertop as he’s reaching for the broom in the corner. They do this every few weeks, and Nicky has come to look forward to their conversations. Nile is bright, so much brighter than Nicky remembers being when he first met Andy and Quynh, and she asks delightful questions. Nicky adores her. “Do you ever make any meals that aren’t either pasta or soup?”

Nicky pauses in his chores and clutches a hand to his chest. “You do not like my cacio e pepe? I do not know how I will recover from this grave –”

“No, you ass,” she says, laughing. “I’m just saying, we could do with a little fried chicken. Or macaroni. Or potato salad. Or literally anything that isn’t just Italian food, although I’ll grant you that your cacio e pepe is delicious.”

"You miss the taste of home, don’t you?” He asks, suddenly soft and serious. Her smile fades a little.

“Yeah. Yeah, I do. But I mean, you probably don’t eat anything now that you ate growing up so I guess I can’t complain too much. I still have restaurants that cater to me somewhere out there, right? So, I mean, it isn’t the end of the world.”

Nicky hums a little, considering. “When you are older, homesickness is different. I have had nine hundred years to learn how to cope with it. You have only had five. My family, my language, they are all a very long time gone. Yours are all still alive. I remember how hard it used to be, when I was –”

He cuts himself off at the sound of the front door closing. Nile looks bewildered.

“Did Joe just –?”

Nicky sighs and puts the broom back. Will that man ever stop moving?

“Let’s go,” Nicky says, making for the living room so that he can find his jacket. It’s May and they’re right on the Adriatic, but he doesn’t know what the weather is like where they’re going, doesn’t know where they’re going, in fact, and he’d like to be prepared. He stops moving when he sees that Nile isn’t either.

"Where are we going?”

“We’re following him.” He says it like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, because it is, to him, and Nile rolls her eyes.

“Jesus, you two are codependent.”

But Nile heads into the living room with him, grabs her bag, and calls a taxi for the two of them. Nicky runs out the door to see if he can catch sight of Joe’s car, but the road is too far from the house, so Nicky is left to guess. He does, however, have a sinking feeling about where his husband might be running off to.

When the car pulls into the long driveway, Nile slides into the backseat first, and Nicky spares one last look at the house that he had imagined retiring to so many times in the last five years. One day, caro, he’d tell Joe, we will go back to that pretty little house in Italy and we will live out our days there and adopt four children, two boys and two girls, and Joe would say, we’ll have a garden and I’ll buy you fresh flowers every week and we’ll take the kids to the mosque on Fridays and the church on Sundays and Andy and Nile and Booker will visit every Eid and every Easter.

Nicky closes his eyes hard and slides into the car beside Nile.

“Where to?” The driver asks.

“The nearest train station. We are going to Paris.”

***

Joe knows better.

Running away in the middle of a fight is far from mature, and he knows better than that. Kids know better than that. It’s just, well.

Joe doesn’t know what it is, actually. He doesn’t know why he runs. He doesn’t know what is so wrong with him that he must always run. It is always what he does, isn’t it? He ran from Jerusalem, ran from his family, ran from his people, ran from his fate. He ran towards violence, has been running towards violence almost since he met Andromache. He wonders how much of it he can blame on her and chastises himself for it as he gazes out the window on the train. This is the last service of the night towards Milan, and from there, he’ll make for Paris. He needs to get out of that house, that sweet home that he found for him and Nicky, the one that Nicky always said they would retire to when they lost their immortality, the one that Joe wanted to plant flowers around, the one that they renovated together, Nicky’s shirt undone and hanging loose around his torso as he wiped sweat from his brow, the high summer heat getting to them as they worked with the AC off. Joe closes his eyes. He does not want to remember right now. It will only serve to make him feel all the more guilty.

The train is almost empty this late, and Joe wonders idly if Nicky followed after him. That has always been their routine: Joe runs, and Nicky chases. Joe opens his eyes. He cannot see much out the window; the light on the train makes it so that all he gets is his own sorry reflection. He thinks about taking the tie out of his hair, and he doesn’t. Nicky is the one who does that, every night when they lay down. He’ll reach over and slip the elastic onto his wrist as he runs his fingers through Joe’s hair. Joe closes his eyes again.

Nicky and Nile (because Joe knows that Nicky will drag Nile with him) might be on the car behind him. If they left the house within a half hour of him, they could be on the car behind him, talking quietly about Joe’s failings. Or Quynh. Or Booker, or Chicago, or any of the novels they have read sitting side-by-side in the last five years. Joe opens his eyes. Booker does not know that he’s coming. Joe never tells him when he does. He cannot think about it before he does it, most of the time, has to slip out the door before he can stop himself and take a quick train out to Paris. The only times he’s been there since Merrick, they were already in the North, and Joe had stopped at a bookstore before he got to whichever apartment Booker was staying in at the time. He wonders what Booker will say when he sees Joe walk through the door.

Nicky will tell Andy immediately, Joe thinks, and almost laughs. The Catholic in him has never fully the abandoned the idea of confession, even taken it to mean that he should confess other people’s (read: Joe’s) sins for them. Does Joe know that’s not actually how Catholicism works? Yes, but it makes Nicky laugh when Joe says that, so. He wonders if Andy has picked up on this on her own. She has never read him quite as well as Nicky does; no one could. But she has known him for almost eight hundred years, and she knows almost every quirk of his. It goes both ways. He knows, for instance, that Andy has not been hiding something from them this whole time. Whatever happened with the buyer that Nile is so worried about, it’s a new development, something unexpected. Andy does not get quiet like this unless she’s surprised, and this must have been a massive shock, whatever it is. Nile wouldn’t quite explain herself when pressed, though, so Joe knows almost as little as he did twelve hours ago on the boat.

Joe closes his eyes. This time, he dozes off, head leaned against the window, and he dreams about the house.

It’s a memory more than a dream, from sometime in the summer of 2019, both of them hurting after their last job, after Andy’s hasty disappearance. Joe has only found it and paid cash for it a month or so prior, and the two of them are gutting the kitchen. It’s a good use for his hands, a welcome distance from all the suffering they saw in the DRC during the Ebola outbreak. Here, they are just two men trying to make a place with good bones become a place with great skin, and there is nothing else. In his memory, they have never fought in a war, or killed each other, or seen a child die in the other’s arms. Maybe that is how he knows it is a dream. Nicky’s T-shirt clings tight to his shoulders, fabric dark with sweat, as he peels off sheets of ugly glass tile with a crowbar. We could save this, Joe murmurs. If I separated the tiles, they would be good for a project. There’s something about the way they catch the light – and Nicky leans in and kisses him, dropping the tool to the stone floor with a clang. Joe sinks to his knees right there on the tile, no one else around to see it, because for once, for once they are blessedly alone in this house, so Joe sucks Nicky off until he sees God right in the middle of their naked kitchen, and Nicky thanks him when they’re done. I love you, he says. I love you so much that it is like breathing to me, it is vital. If you took that away from me, Joe, I think I would die in minutes. And Joe pulls Nicky down on his knees beside him, pulls him for another kiss, this one softer and slower, and as they each rock back on their heels, Joe wraps his arms around Nicky so tightly that neither of them think they will ever let go. The next thing Joe remembers from that summer is Booker coming through the front door to help the two of them move furniture into the house. He jolts awake at the change. They’re only a few minutes from the station in Milan.

Joe wipes the slightest bit of drool from the corner of his mouth and blinks the sleep out of his eyes.

When he gets off the train, he purchases a ticket for the next train to Paris, leaving at six o’clock tomorrow morning. It is eleven-thirty at the moment, and Joe does not know what to do with himself in a city he has only spent hours in at a time in the last four hundred years. They do not come to Northern Italy much anymore. He turns the thought over a few times and eventually just settles for dozing fitfully in the train station as he waits for the morning to come. If Nicky and Nile have followed him on the same exact train, they do not find him there. The Milano Centrale train station is large, and the second busiest in Italy after Rome. It would be easy to lose sight of someone in here, and Joe takes cold comfort in that as he drifts in and out of consciousness on a bench, an alarm on his smartphone set for five in the morning to make sure he actually gets where he’s going. Joe is horrible about getting anywhere on time. He isn’t sure what he’d do if he didn’t have Nicky. He shudders at the thought that he might be about to find out.

The seven-hour journey to Paris passes uneventfully, and sometime around two, Joe is out and about in the Parisian streets, dutifully ignoring the lingering chill in the air here, even in May. The sun is shining, and in the light of day, Joe is willing to momentarily put the disaster waiting for him at home out of his mind. He whistles some tune he cannot remember the name of anymore, stops to pick up a few things, deciding this time to forgo the book, and arrives in front of the building where Booker has been staying most recently, only to look up from his little brown grocery sack to find a very pissed-off Nicky standing in the doorway, Nile looking deeply irritated with them both off to the side.

“Shit.”

Chapter Text

“Why exactly were you cast out, Sebastien? I know Andromache well enough to know that she would not take that decision lightly.”

They are in the house on the sea, still, Booker tied to a chair, looking positively murderous, Quynh standing above him polishing a dagger. She’s sent the goons away for the time being, wanting a private moment for this. She doesn’t need to find out for Discord, doesn’t even really need to find out for herself, but she wants to know, and the one thing time has never been able to steal from her is her curiosity. She could live a perfectly satisfied life without ever knowing, but it’s less fun that way, isn’t it? And Quynh is, for whatever reason, intrigued by Booker, fascinated by the why of it all, why he was chosen, why he would betray the only people he has, why he would just blow his life away with alcohol and moping away in Paris. God, Quynh hates Paris. It’s always been wet and miserable there, never sunny enough to offset the chill. It hasn’t been fun there since the Merovingians and their palace mayors. The Carolingians were boring and pious, and the Capets were disorganized and corrupt. Quynh likes the new democratic systems far more than she liked the old systems of loyalty, but she can admit that she misses the court intrigue. Modern politics depress her.

“Why do you want to know?” His face is filthy and he’s scowling. Quynh thinks he never stops. She’s starting to find him a little tiresome. They’ve been here for only twelve hours, but his company is already wearing on her. She likes that. Difficult people are more interesting. It is what drew her to Andromache over and over and over again. Cracking her open was akin to descending blindly into a gold mine and coming up with dust every day for five hundred years until she had enough to smelt into an ingot. Andromache was one of the most tiresome people Quynh had ever met. She closes her eyes for a second and lets her hand still where it was sliding the cloth over the blade of the knife. She inhales deeply and opens her eyes and thinks about the man in front of her, instead of the woman she left behind – no, the woman who left her behind, the woman who abandoned her over and over every day for five hundred years. Quynh cannot forget who the traitor is.

“Does it matter?”

She shines the knife some more.

Booker shrugs.

“Then tell me, Sebastien. What did you do?”

Booker won’t meet her gaze. What a pathetic thing he is, Quynh thinks. Perhaps he is not like Andromache, not like the Andromache she knew.

“People live a very long time now,” Quynh starts, answering for him. She knows exactly what he did. But she wants to hear him say it. “And yet, men are greedy creatures, aren’t they? We want more than we are allotted. You want less, don’t you?”

Booker still keeps his eyes resolutely trained on the rotting wooden floorboards. Quynh drops the dagger on the table with a thud and grabs his face. She forces him to make eye contact.

"You are a peculiar man, Sebastien. A very peculiar man. You should not lie to me. Did Andromache not teach you not to lie to powerful women?”

“How long have you been out?” Booker’s voice is rough as stubble against her cheek. “How long? I haven’t, uh, haven’t been dreaming of anything but the water, still. What happened?”

Quynh inhales sharply and lets go of his face, then admonishes herself for betraying any surprise to him. Perhaps she is losing her edge. “Five years,” she says, quietly. “But I dream of the ocean, most nights.”

Booker nods a little, as though he could possibly understand the weight of what happened to her, the crushing pressure of the ocean, the hollowness carved out by hunger and thirst and the burning in her lungs that still finds her, even now, even after years out of the water. She wants to scoff but restrains herself. This man has not earned her disdain. Not yet.

“What did you do to them, Booker?”

Quynh picks the knife back up.

Booker resumes looking at the floor.

“I didn’t mean for anyone to get hurt. I mean, any more than usual.”

She lets the knife slip from her hands and catches it before it hits his femoral artery. A reminder.

“It was one job,” he says, so softly that Quynh thinks he does not mean to say it at all. “One job, and then, he – it wasn’t enough. I sold them out.”

“You sold yourself out, Sebastien.”

“Irrelevant.”

Quynh raises an eyebrow. “Your lack of self-preservation astounds me.”

Booker shrugs again. “You’re far from the first.”

She almost laughs. “Why? What did they do to you that was so horrible?”

He swallows. Quynh watches the muscles of his throat working. “Loved me.”

It’s so soft that she can barely hear it. She’s caught out by the vulnerability of it. She suddenly understands him far better than she wishes she did. She has never known whether to envy him for getting these years with Andromache or resent him for giving them up or thank him for breaking them. She still does not know. She does not want to understand him. She does not want to understand any of them ever again.

“Get up.”

“What?”

“Get up,” Quynh says again, cutting the bindings keeping Booker in the chair with the knife. She drops it on the table again and jerks him into a standing position. Before he can move beyond bewilderment, she punches him in the face. She follows it swiftly with a knee to his crotch, and while he’s still reeling from the first two blows, she spins him around and slams him against the closest wall. The cabinet on the other side of the room rattles with the force of it. She pins him there with one hand and hits his face again, and then again, and then again. When his mouth and nose and cheeks are covered with blood, she flips him around and presses his face into the wall, a mirror of their meeting just yesterday, and breaks both of his arms.

“You’re pathetic.” Quynh spits on him and turns on her heel and leaves the room as he slides down the wall and lands on the floor in a heap. She locks the door behind her. It doesn’t unlock from the inside.

***

It’s a long journey from Seoul back to Rome. The three of them manage to snag three seats together on the flight. Andy glares at both of them meaningfully and slides into the window seat before either of the men can object. Tuah takes the middle seat. Andy isn’t sure that’s a good thing.

She listens to the two of them quietly discuss their research when they aren’t sleeping. Both of them have the good sense to seem a little ashamed about it, but Andy knows both of them well enough to know that neither of them regret it. Copley has turned it into an advantage for the team, and now Tuah is doing much the same. Andy is not about to just let random men take interest in their lives, though. Two times is a coincidence, not an indicator of a 100% future success rate. Besides, Tuah’s research made him a target for something awful, and even knowing that he was a decorated soldier as a young man, Andy cannot help but fear for his safety. She doesn’t want to, hates the feeling of it in her throat, but it creeps up on her no matter how she tries to stop it. Discord is almost as old as she is, and Tuah is a forty-year-old man in reasonably good shape who hasn’t seen serious combat in fifteen years. Not since he met Andromache. Not since she told him to get out. She closes her eyes as the plane begins its descent into Rome, eighteen hours later. Quynh used to say that Andy was addicted to violence, and maybe that used to be true. She won’t deny that even now, she loves a good fight. But every victory on the battlefield rings hollow these days. She just doesn’t have the stomach for it anymore. So when she found Tuah bleeding out in Afghanistan after being abandoned by his unit, well. What else was she supposed to do but wire him a few thousand dollars, offer him a new Indonesian passport to replace his American one, a new life far away from the excesses of empire? And maybe she came with him to Indonesia to get him settled in, and maybe she left an address for him to write her, and maybe she started coming by as he moved to South Korea and went to school and figured his life out. Maybe. So what?

Andy had missed him in the last five years. For a decade, she would show up every six months or so, exhausted and done with humanity, and the two of them would fuck and kiss and he would make her laugh and talk to her about the degrees he was getting. And then, after the DRC in 2019, well. She didn’t know where else to go, and she didn’t want to fight against the currents of horror anymore. All Andy wanted, after that horrible job, was to curl up and die. And maybe Tuah was the only thing that kept her from trying, over and over and over again, that year that they spent together. Maybe she should have seen it coming, the obsession with her work. But she didn’t want to. God help her, she didn’t want to let go. She loved him, loves him, even if it has never quite been the same with him as it was with some of the others. And she didn’t want to let that go, even well after she should have known what he was getting up to. She misses the sound of his voice, sometimes. Andy doesn’t think she’ll go back; they served their purposes in each other’s lives already. And, she thinks, guiltily, he is forty already. He had always wanted children, and Andy knows, somewhere in the back of her mind, that her random appearances in his life made that nearly impossible. What would she have done if she had showed up and he was trying to start a life with someone else? Andy does not mind sharing lovers, has never minded, but people these days tend to, and she herself well enough to know that she may well have asked him to overstep that. And she knows him well enough to know that he would have obliged. The affection in his eyes when he looks at her is enough to make her sick. She misses drinking red wine with him on the sofa. But the domesticity of it always chafed against her. Tuah got the chance to lay down his sword. Andy will never be able to let herself. Maybe there’s a deeper reason she ran away. Maybe she was waiting for an excuse. Maybe she did want to let go. She doesn’t really know. It doesn’t really matter.

Andy doesn’t let herself dwell too much on it. They get off the plane and shuffle through customs and make their way out into the warm Italian evening. It’ll be late by the time they get back to Rimini, but Andy knows that Nicky will still be up, and probably Nile too. Maybe Joe, although Andy has spent enough time sharing rooms with him to know that he will easily conk out by eight o’clock, given the chance. Tuah does, too. She thinks that they’d like each other, both of them scholars, both of them soldiers. Both of them kind.

Tuah dozes, head against the window, on the train back to Rimini. Copley calls Nile to let her know that they’ll be back soon, a courtesy Andy might have scoffed at if it weren’t for the indistinct unease underlying all her thoughts. She didn’t think she would ever see Ereshkigal’s face again, or Discord, or whatever bullshit name she goes by these days. Andy doesn’t want to think about her, has never wanted to think about her, has been forced into it by the last five days of worrying over what she might do. And she knows, knows somewhere in the part of her brain that begs her to go to work when she hears about a tragedy, that she should not have escaped these reminders for nearly as long as she has. She doesn’t know what to do about it. Nothing can ever take it back.

Andromache can never be the person she was before, ever again.

Even if it weren’t for the five thousand years of separation, nothing would ever remove the stain of it from her soul, and God knows how deeply it has bound itself to the fabric of her heart. She wonders, darkly, if Quynh’s disappearance was some kind of sick, cosmic retribution. This is not the first time she’s had the thought. It won’t be the last, either. Andy closes her eyes. She’s sitting across from Tuah on the train car, Copley beside her, and she wonders if she is really meant to trust either of them. She wonders if she has ever really trusted either of them, and knows that she has. Knows that for all her pretentions of hatred, Andy has always believed in people, whether she wants to or not.

“You two were together, weren’t you?”

Andy opens her eyes and turns to face Copley. She does her best to keep her face neutral. “For a certain amount of ‘together.’”

Copley raises an eyebrow, and Andy sighs. She has never spoken about Tuah, not to her family and certainly not to anyone else, and yet.

“I helped him out, a long time ago. We saw each other occasionally for a while, and then…” Andy loses her words, distracted by the memories of Tuah’s face when she walked out the door to go to Marrakesh. She does not miss being with him; it isn’t like that. She’s moved on with her life, and she thinks he has too, even if he still wishes she would come back. But she does love him, will always love him.

“And then?”

Andy turns back to face the window again. “I spent a year with him, right before you hired us. Half the reason I took the job in the first place was because I had just broken things off.”

Even looking away from him, she can feel the weight of his gaze on her back. “Why?”

“Your curiosity is too strong for your own good, James. If you keep asking powerful women questions like that, you’ll end up with your ass in a gutter somewhere.”

He huffs out a laugh and she softens a little. She likes Copley, even if he’s a smartass. When she speaks again, her voice is quieter.

“He wanted to know. About my life. He did all this research, and I just – I needed to leave. It was suffocating.”

“What? Because he knew about all of the good you’ve put into the world?”

She snaps her gaze back to him. “Because that was all he cared about.”

“It wasn’t.”

Andy startles, finds Tuah awake and blinking blearily.

“But I understand, now, why it was too much. And I’m sorry, for whatever it’s worth. I’m a historian; I can get a little carried away, sometimes.” He’s looking at her with that undisguised fondness again. It’s different now, she thinks. He isn’t looking at her like his wife or the love of his life anymore. He’s looking at her like an old friend, and she has to swallow back her relief at the thought that he might still welcome her back into his life, at the end of hers. Andy relaxes back into her seat, even though she finds herself once again startled, this time by the realization that Tuah may outlive her.

But the thought isn’t accompanied by a wave of grief or pain. It just sits there, and Andy realizes that maybe she is a lot closer to being at peace with death than she thought she was, talking to Nile back in Croatia. If she could just do this one last thing, fix this one last problem for her family, maybe it’ll all be okay.

Unfortunately, when Andy returns to the house in Rimini, Copley and Tuah in tow, she finds out that there’s more than one problem that needs to be fixed.

***

Nile loves Joe and Nicky a lot, okay? She really does. She just needs to remember this as she’s sitting in silence with Nicky on the car ride to the train station, and then the trains to Milan and Paris after that, and then walking in silence with him to an address that Nile got from one of the files on Copley’s computer. She didn’t even realize that Copley was keeping tabs on Booker until Nicky asked her to find the address. It’s the little things like this that still smart, even when Nile wishes that they wouldn’t. She knows all of them very well by now, and they know her, but Jesus Christ if they don’t conveniently leave out details constantly. She feels like they should have told her someone was keeping up with Booker, even from afar, the same way she feels like they should have told her about the massive piles of money they have in various accounts around the world sooner than like, a year ago. That feels like information that belongs in the welcome packet. Nile snorts as they walk to the apartment where Booker is supposedly spending his time recently, picturing a poorly-designed brochure with too-small Arial text and bad graphics. Ah, if only.

“How do you even know he’ll be here?”

Nile doesn’t even really care about the answer. She’s just tired of watching Nicky stew about this and wants to make him talk about it before he inevitably bites Joe’s head off (again). She isn’t saying that Joe doesn’t maybe deserve it just a little for lying to his husband for five years, but there’s a limit to how much suffering one man should be put through for what probably amounted to a lot of shame about going back so quickly on something he advocated for. Nile loves Joe. He’s funny and he’s witty and he can get Andy to crack in a way that neither Nicky nor Nile can manage. But she knows that for all Nicky has learned kindness from Joe, Joe has failed to learn detachment from Nicky. And there isn’t inherently anything wrong with that, at least in her twenty-nine year old opinion, but it does lead to situations like this, where she is being led somewhat-against-her-will to the apartment of a man she only knew for five days five years ago because Nicky is pretty sure that his husband is cheating on him or betraying their agreement or whatever the fuck he thinks is happening. Nile isn’t really sure on that point, actually. She isn’t sure that Nicky is either.

“Trust me, Nile. I have known this man for a thousand years. I know exactly where his mind takes him.”

They manage to beat Joe there by a matter of minutes – just enough time for them to recover their breath after running through the streets of Paris. Nicky has sunglasses on, but she knows his eyes are red with sleeplessness underneath them, and she knows that he’ll take them off the second him and Joe start talking. Can’t bear to not be looking him in the eye, Nile thinks. God, the two of them are weird. She can’t imagine being in love with someone the way the two of them are in love with each other. She thinks it would be like suffocation, or drowning, maybe. And Nile knows a lot about drowning, by now. The dreams come once a week, on average, and Nile has had the thought on more than one occasion that she knows more about what it’s like to succumb to the ocean than almost any living person on earth. Quynh and Booker may well be the only other people who know it better, and she isn’t sure that either of them count as living.

When Nile spots Joe approaching, he looks strange. Unsure of himself in a way that is foreign to her, a little line forming between his brows as he examines his grocery bag.

His face goes blank when he sees the two of them. Nicky runs a ragged hand through his hair and regards Joe as though he’s a stranger. Or, no. That’s not quite right. More like he’s a traitor. Maybe those are the same to Nicky. “Exile, Joe, means that we do not stop in to drop off his groceries.”

“Nicky,” Joe starts, and Nicky obliges him with a soft, expectant gaze. His mouth hangs open for so long that Nile thinks about telling him that he’ll catch flies. “It isn’t – this isn’t, I didn’t –”

"Are you sleeping with him?” Nicky cuts him off, and even Nile is surprised by the bluntness of the question. “If that is what you want, I am – we can have that discussion, but why him, and now? Joe –”

\Joe laughs, a little hysterically, Nile thinks, and drops his grocery bag, coming up to put his hands on Nicky’s shoulders, only stopping short when Nicky pulls back. “Nicolò. After a thousand years I would have hoped you would know me better than that.”

“Andromache said –”

“Niki, caro, that was centuries ago!”

“I’m gonna go check upstairs.” Nile excuses herself just in time to hear Nicky ask Joe for the second time in two days what in God’s name he’s been hiding. She doesn’t want to stick around for this fight.

What she finds upstairs, however, is evidence of another. There’s a suspicious brown stain on the wall level with the crown of Nile’s head, and an uneasy energy to the place that she recognizes from countless hastily (and often forcibly) vacated homes. They’ve spent a lot of time in those over the past several years. It is not, she will admit, her favorite place to be. A gun, safety off, is abandoned on the floor, and there’s a half-drunk glass of water with a faint pink stain on the rim. There’s also a scent tickling her nostrils, deeply familiar, one she knows intimately, but not one that she can name, and it’s driving her crazy. She hurries back out the way she came, where Nicky and Joe are still in the middle of arguing about the correct way to treat Booker, and pushes in between them (they’ve moved steadily closer to one another while she was inside, like they’re either about to make out passionately on this street corner or start throwing punches. Maybe both).

“Guys,” Nile says. “We’ve got a bigger problem than whatever bullshit is between you two right now. Booker isn’t here.”

Joe eyes her with increasing worry and Nicky takes a step back. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, he’s gone. And it doesn’t look like he went willingly.”

The train back to Milan is rife with tension. After taking the boys up to the apartment to review the evidence for themselves, the three of them decided that the best course of action is to return to Italy and wait for Andy and Copley to come back so that they can discuss this as a team. That small moment of cooperation from Joe and Nicky seems very far away at the moment, however. Nile rests her temple on the window and sighs as the two of them continue to bicker like little kids. They’re slipping between English and Arabic and Italian and Nile is, unfortunately, able to catch almost every word of it.

“You have always been too harsh with him.”

“He does not need to be coddled! I love him and he knows that I love him. I have never been unkind to him.”

“Untrue. You refuse to speak to him in French despite being perfectly fluent.” 

“It is objectively the worst Romance language. There are so many vowels! And you pronounce only a fraction of them! He should try speaking Italian more; it’s a very beautiful language.”

“Jesus fucking Christ, guys,” Nile interrupts. “What, haven’t boned in a while?”

If looks could kill, Nicky would be charged with first-degree murder for the stare he gives her.

“Nile,” Joe starts, clearly trying for a soft tone despite his irritation, and landing somewhere in a strangled middle, “that is hardly –”

"My concern? Maybe if you two could lock a goddamn door it wouldn’t be.”

Joe doesn’t have anything to say to that, and neither does Nicky. They don’t resume fighting, thank God, but they do continue shooting each other dirty looks. Even with that, though, Nile can see the obvious fondness in both of their eyes. She wouldn’t be surprised if this blows over in another two hours, to be honest. But she knows better than to think it will. As much as she agrees with Joe about how cruel they’ve all been to Booker, she also can’t get past the whole “lying to your spouse for five years” thing. She’d probably also be pretty fucking mad if she were Nicky. She keeps going back and forth about whose side she’s actually on. Probably neither of theirs. She’s on her own side.

The rest of their journey passes uneventfully, with Joe and Nicky occasionally continuing their argument, but Nile is left to think about what Andy told her. She shouldn’t have slipped up and mentioned anything to Joe and Nicky, she knows, but she couldn’t help it. It’s been weighing on her mind for days now, and even though she can’t in good conscience tell Joe and Nicky what Andy told her, she can’t just pretend nothing happened. It’s probably good that she got out of the military when she did. Nile is still unsure of what to think about the US military-industrial complex, but the last five years have shown her just how much strife the world can blame her home and native land for. Nile isn’t unaware of the consequences of empire, of colonialism, of global hegemony and unparalleled military spending. Her name is Freeman – her identity is marked by the eighteenth-century slave trade. America’s legacy in part, and maybe in whole, will always be the suffering it has inflicted on her family. And that’s even before she accounts for the fact that her father died fighting a pointless war for them. Before accounting for the fact that she died fighting the very same one. She shakes her head and snaps out of it as they step off the train in Milan.

It's almost eight by the time they finally stumble through the front door, and Nile is exhausted. She wants to sleep for a thousand years. She pretends not to see Joe and Nicky slip into the bedroom, or hear what she thinks is the particularly pointed click of the lock on the door. They confound her sometimes. Who pauses a serious argument to have sex? She supposes that if anyone was going to, it would be Joe and Nicky. The word insatiable was coined to describe the two of them. Nice to know, she supposes, that the two of them will not stop being the two of them just because they have a fight. Nile can admit that she doesn’t understand why Joe would keep something like this a secret for so long. Except, she thinks, looking back on her memories of the last five years, there have been so many moments where it seemed like Joe was about to say something, about to do something, but the words never came. She wonders. She wishes any of this was simple.

Copley calls her not long after they get back to tell her that him and Andy will be home by eleven, and Nile thanks him and wonders what they were doing in South Korea. Andy wouldn’t tell her before they left. She hates being infantilized like this. And she understands, truly, that compared to the rest of them she really is an infant. But it stings. To anyone else, she would be an adult, even if still a young one. But Nile has the curse of being not only the youngest by two hundred years, but also eternally twenty-four years old. Joe and Nicky were older than her when they went to Jerusalem, all those years ago. She wonders, absently, if Joe holds that over Nicky’s head when they’re fighting. She thinks it would probably be effective. Nicky seems so constantly guilty about things he didn’t even do; Nile can’t imagine what he feels about the things he actually did. Catholics, man. At least she escaped that shit.

Nile picks up a book and pretends to read it for a while, eyes drifting in and out of focus across the pages. She wonders if she still has the muscle memory for the clarinet. It might be nice to pick it back up. Something to do with her hands besides killing – Nicky is teaching her about medicine, Joe about art, Andy about writing and translating, but it’s hard to just pick things up with what little time they have to themselves. She sets the book down sometime around nine-thirty, Joe and Nicky still in their room, and finds a legal pad and a pen. She just sits and writes. Nile has never been too creative on her own – Martin was the one between the two of them who was always making up stories – so she just writes down a few of the stories Andy has told her. There are so many that Nile thinks no one could ever count them all. There is so much to that woman that no single person could ever hold all of her in their hands. Nile isn’t even sure that Andy can hold all of herself together. There are things that she keeps tucked away with Joe or Nicky or Booker. Or Quynh, Nile thinks, remembering the taste of Andy from the dreams that Quynh has. And God above, does Quynh have dreams about Andy. It’s a weirdly intimate thing, to share dreams with a woman that you’ve never met. Nile hopes that Quynh finds peace. She hopes she never has to say that to Andy.

A key in the lock turns, and as Andy is walking through the door, Joe and Nicky make a hasty reappearance. There’s a bite mark on Joe’s bare bicep that’s rapidly disappearing. Nile thinks she might see a little spurt of blood before it closes up, but she chooses not to comment. None of her business, and they’re both in undershirts. Not that Nile cares too much about all of them being clothed; she was a Marine, she can deal with casual nudity. But sometimes it’s hard to take them seriously without their shirts on. And besides, she does not always enjoy being reminded of the fact that they fuck nasty behind closed doors. She isn’t hating, but that is not an image she wants in her head.

“Hey, boss.”

Nicky elbows Joe as soon as he opens his mouth and Nile is thrust back into any of her thousands of memories of Nicky flicking Andy in the shoulder for changing the radio station while Joe drives. She almost wants to give in to the softness of it, despite herself. Nile almost finds herself wishing she loved them less so she could put up with them more. Almost.

Copley is close on Andy’s heels, as well as a man Nile has never seen before. She draws her gun before she knows what’s happening, keeping the safety on and her aim focused on the ground right in front of his feet. Nicky has also worked with Nile on her aim quite a bit over the past five years, and Nile knows how to fire a warning shot. The new guy is kind of tall, East or Southeast Asian, with a clear plastic crate of files tucked under one arm. He blinks at the sight of her gun, nonplussed.

“Andy,” Nile starts, voice low and dangerous, “who the hell is this?”
Andy inhales deeply, almost as if to steady herself. Nile braces for the worst. “This is Tuah. We used to… know each other.”

Nicky and Joe exchange a look as Copley closes the door and Tuah sets his crate down on the credenza near the door. “Didn’t know you had slept with anyone other than Booker since - what was her name? Maryam?”

Andy rolls her eyes and Tuah looks mildly uncomfortable. Nile can’t stop herself from blurting out - “You slept with Booker?”

Joe pats her shoulder. “Questions for another time, tesora.”

Nile huffs, but there’s affection in it, and Joe and Nicky both offer her their own sad half-smiles, each almost apologizing for his own conduct but not quite. God, they’re the worst sometimes. Nile adores them, even right now. Not that she’s going to say that to them until they decide to stop being mopey and insufferable and angry. Nile has increasingly little patience for angry men. There’s so many of them in the military; she’s more or less had her fill for life.

“Hold on – Tuah? As in, Hang Tuah? Like, the mythical Malaysian warrior?” Nile is wracking her brain trying to recall the details of the story. She’s picked up bits and pieces of almost every world mythology over the past five years, and besides that, she’s always had a strong basis in the Mediterranean myths and East Asian myths since most art features mythological figures pretty heavily. She prides herself on her cultural knowledge; it’s one of her favorite parts of immortality so far. All that time to learn about other people, and now that the American exceptionalism is starting to wear off, it’s more than a little fun.

“Well,” Tuah hedges, “historians are not sure whether or not he was a myth or a real historical figure. It’s the source of a lot of healthy – never mind. You don’t care about all that. Yes, I was named after Hang Tuah. My mother was Malaysian, and she wanted to honor her heritage.”

“But you grew up in England?” Nicky asks, clearly suspicious of his accent, and Nile watches as his hand reaches for Joe’s and then stops short, as though he’s reminding himself that Joe is a dirty traitor or some shit like that. She figures that he kind of is, but even so, she doesn’t really think that Joe was wrong for what he did. Other than the lying to Nicky part. But given Nicky’s reaction, Nile kind of gets why he lied. Not that she’ll tell Nicky that.

“I was raised in the US, but my father was British, and I spent a lot of time with his family. I sort of picked up the accent on and off over the years, and going to university in Hong Kong meant that it just sort of stuck.” Tuah rubs a hand on the back of his neck, almost sheepish. Andy looks almost as embarrassed as he does. Copley seems largely unaffected.

“Can we get back on track?” Copley says, irritation in his voice mixing with the concern in his furrowed brow. “There are important things to discuss.” Nile knows that Copley’s right, but she has also become accustomed to a certain level of attention to seemingly unimportant details. Five years with the team has taught her that any inconsistency could be a warning sign. Nile would’ve thought that a former-CIA agent of all people would understand that.

“We have to tell you something,” Nile and Andy say at the same time. Nile sighs and gestures for Andy to go first. I always go first. It turns out Andy meant that in more ways than one. Nile wishes there was time to stop and wonder how far those four words are going to stretch through their lives. Nile wonders how long she has before there are no more firsts for Andy to go.

“The buyer for the weapons, she’s – an old lover of mine. I hurt her, a long, long time ago, and it seems like she’s back for revenge.” Andy swallows, hard, and Nile has to close her eyes for a moment. A week ago, they were all okay. But it’s been five days now since Croatia, and everything has been steadily falling apart since then. Maybe it’s been falling apart the whole time, Nile thinks. Maybe this has never worked out quite right for them. She doesn’t know. She wishes she did. She wishes she knew a lot of things. She wishes these people would just talk. They have the luxury, she thinks, of waiting entire lifetimes to tell each other the truth. Nile still isn’t used to the idea. She doesn’t think she ever wants to be. She doesn’t ever want to lose sight of her life the way Andy did. The way Booker has. The way she thinks Joe and Nicky do sometimes, the two of them alone with their grand love and all of their honeyed words and quiet kisses, the way everything else gets to be insignificant when it is just the two of them. Nile doesn’t believe in any of that, doesn’t think her God wants any of that. What matters? That is the question she has been asking herself every day for the last five years. Who matters? Who gets saved? Nile is starting to think the answer might be no one, and she is starting to know that the answer should be everyone.

“How long ago, exactly?” Nicky crosses his arms, brow furrowed.

“Before Quynh.” Andy won’t meet any of their eyes. “Tuah here has… a lot of research on all of this. I didn’t know until Croatia that she was immortal. I’m not sure what the game is here, yet, but I promise we’re going to figure it out.”

“If she’s immortal, then why have we never dreamt of her?” It is Joe’s turn to frown in consternation, and Nile realizes that she, too, has never dreamt of this former lover of Andy’s. The face from the photo was vaguely familiar, but not the way the faces she sees in her dreams are familiar. Felt more like someone she passed in the hallways at school but never spoke to than some big, significant figure.

“I don’t know. Right now, we have more important things to worry about.”

Joe and Nicky exchange another look, and Nile can practically feel the truce that passes between them. “We have some news too, boss.”

Andy eyes the three of them wearily, and Nile notices, not for the first time, the bags under her eyes. God, Andy looks tired. It comes and goes, but Andy has seemed tired for almost the whole time that Nile has known her. Andy raises her eyebrows, waiting. Nile looks to Joe and Nicky, and sighs. Why do they all have to make her life harder?

“Booker is missing.”

***

In all honesty, Booker had been hoping that Quynh might have at least a little affection for him after watching him go through everything he’s gone through in the last two hundred years. So far, no dice. She’s beaten him within an inch of his life several times, and they’ve only been in this shithole for a day. First, it was about his betrayal of the team. Booker has no idea how Quynh knows what he did, and frankly he doesn’t care. It makes so little difference to him that yet another person is stalking their movements that he hardly registers it as a threat. Maybe he should. He just doesn’t care anymore. He wishes that someone could finish him off for good. Maybe Quynh will crack the code for him, if she’s so hell-bent on revenge. Currently, she’s trying to extract Andy’s location from him. It isn’t going well for her. It isn’t going very well for him, either.

“I told you a thousand times, I’m out. I don’t know where they are. Come back in another ninety-five years and I might be able to help.”

Quynh slaps him across the face. It’s just the two of them in the room. Her little henchmen or whoever they are leave them alone for her interrogations. She has the feeling of a woman on the edge, ready to be sent off the deep end with just another push. Booker has to resist the urge to send her over. There is something deeply wrong with him, and he knows it. He has never been able to resist a good knife-twist. Genevieve knew that. Andy knew that. Even Joe and Nicky knew that. The problem, he thinks, is that other people are too willing to overlook it. They think they can crack the code to his kindness, and he doesn’t have a good enough heart to tell them it isn’t there.

“Do you have any idea, you pathetic little excuse for a man, how hard it was to come back to the world and find out that not only did Andromache stop looking for me, she was actually happy? Any idea at all?” Quynh spits on him and he winces. He tries to flex his wrists against the zip ties holding him in this creaky wooden chair, and fails. Quynh leans in closer and clamps her hand down around them. “That was not a rhetorical question.”

“She isn’t.”

Booker is not lying. He has never seen Andy happy. That’s not a word he could use to describe her. But she has, in some ways, moved on with her life. And he can understand why that might hurt. He knows watching Andy and Joe and Nicky and Nile move through their lives together has twisted a certain thing in his chest. Joe doesn’t ever tell him much about it, but Booker knows that they are all moving on with their lives, without him. And that’s good. That’s right. Booker hopes he dies before his banishment is up. (He doesn’t. He misses them so badly it aches.)

“Tell me where she is and maybe I will consider believing you, Sebastien.”

Quynh has gone back and forth a bit on the whole name thing. She seems to have settled for now on his given name, which Booker thinks that he prefers. No one has called him that since Genevieve. Joe took the army nickname and ran with it, and then, well. The rest is history, isn’t it? Everything they do is history. Booker is sick of living between the pages of textbooks. He just wants to find a nice bottle of something. His hands are going to start shaking from withdrawal soon.

“Like I said, I’m not exactly on speaking terms with the team at the moment.”

Another half-truth. Quynh raises an eyebrow. Booker wonders if she knows about the emails, the late night visits. She brushes her fingers over the stubble on his cheek and tilts his chin up. “Tell me the truth, Sebastien. You do not have anything to lose with these people. They have abandoned us both, and yet you are still trying to protect them?”

His breath catches in his throat. Every night, the dreams of the ocean jolt him awake and he can feel the suffocating rage at being cast out like Ishmael, the unwanted, illegitimate child, the thief of some other son’s inheritance. Never mind the fact that there is nothing to inherit besides misery. It still manages to swallow him whole.

“Let me go.” His voice is so quiet that he can barely hear himself speak. “Let me go, and I will find her for you.”

Quynh’s lips press together into a thin line, eyes blinking. “I think we could have been good friends, Sebastien. It is a shame that it has to be this way, isn’t it?”

“Let me go.”

Quynh considers it a final moment. She picks her knife up off the table and splits the zip ties with two deft motions. The blade slices the skin on his wrists open. Booker craves the sight of his own blood. He’s starting to think that Quynh does, too.

Chapter Text

“So, hold on. I’d like to circle back to Andy sleeping with Booker.”

Nile knows that they have much more important thing to be focusing on at the moment. Andy, Tuah, and Nicky have disappeared into the kitchen, where he’s cooking something or other for the two of them and Copley. Copley is off in one of the bedrooms, resting after their flights. Nile’s head is spinning. To recap, Andy disappeared to South Korea with Copley to pick up yet another one of her exes, who coincidentally has also been conducting seriously creepy research into all of their lives and is somehow the key to figuring out what Andy’s first evil ex is doing. God, their lives are so complicated. Actually, maybe that’s just Andy. Joe and Nicky and Booker all seem to have pretty tame personal lives. Andy is just like that, apparently. Until they know more about what this woman is doing, Nile thinks she might as well dwell on things like Andy and Booker having sex. Because what the fuck.

“Why?” Joe and Nile are sitting on the sofa, Joe’s head turned away from her, towards the windows. Towards the night. He looks back to her, face softening when he locks eyes with her. His hair is still pulled back, but a few tendrils have escaped, framing his face. Nile thinks that Nicky would tuck them behind his ears if he were in here. He’s not. Nile isn’t sure when he will be again.

“That’s kind of weird, isn’t it?”

“Why would it be weird?”

Nicky wanders in, something red staining his breast pocket. The smell of tomatoes and basil drifts into the living room and Nile idly remembers that she’s hungry. Nicky comes up behind Joe and looks like he’s about to wrap his arms around him and tuck the crown of Joe’s head under his chin, a position Nile has seen them in a thousand times over the last five years. Nicky visibly restrains himself.

She hems and haws for a moment before settling on, “Because we’re family.”

Joe sighs. “Family does not mean the same thing to everyone. If you want to think of us like your nuclear family, as your brothers and sister, then sure. Okay. Go ahead, we will not object in the slightest. But that’s not the only conception of family out there.”

Nile pauses. “You mean like you two?”

Nicky picks up where Joe left off. “Sometimes. Or sometimes it is not definable, what someone is to you. And sex does not mean the same thing to everyone either. I like to think of it as, as communion. Like breaking bread with someone. And if you want to find communion with someone you love, I think that can be a beautiful thing. Andy and Booker have never been in love in the way Joe and I are, but that does mean their only other option is to look at each other as impotent creatures or as brother and sister.”

Nile tilts her head to one side, considering. “I guess. I still think it’s kinda weird.”

Joe shrugs. “And you’re allowed to. But they are also allowed to do what they want. Besides,” Joe adds, eyes glinting with mischief, “a woman as old as Andy knows what she’s doing in bed.”     

Nile groans. “You guys are disgusting.”

Nicky laughs and Nile watches the way that Joe’s entire body seems to relax into the sound. She wonders how long she has until they pick their fight back up. Maybe it’ll wait until all this blows over. She hopes it does. She hopes they just leave off.

“You know you love us, tesora.”

Nile smiles in spite of herself – she does love them, and she would never tell Joe otherwise, even in jest. Just because they have all the time in the world doesn’t mean they can slack off when it comes to telling each other how they feel. Nile wonders how long it will take the rest of them to get that message. Sometimes, she thinks, immortal warriors are just really exhausting to be around.

“God only knows why,” Andy says, mostly cheerfully, wandering into the room and plopping down on the sofa next to Nile with a bowl of something that looks absolutely delicious. Soft tendrils of steam wander up and frame her face. Tuah follows after her, settling in an armchair across from the three of them. He’s probably in his late thirties or early forties, if Nile had to guess, with deep laugh lines and a few distinguished greys in his well-groomed beard and hair. There are a few wrinkles on the skin of his hands, nothing too noticeable, but enough that she thinks he must have been something else before he was an academic (and he reeks of academic). A farmer, or a soldier, or a carpenter. Something dirty and hard on his joints. Nile has developed a much keener eye for that over the past several years. Joe, ever the artist, has tried to teach her how to pick up on subtle things like the callouses on someone’s palms that tell her how they spend their waking hours. A useful skill for an artist, but a thousand times more helpful in their line of work. Joe has also tried to teach her some tricks for sketching before. It doesn’t ever really stick. Nile has never been what you could call artistically inclined. She loves looking at art, loves studying it, but to make it? That is far outside her purview. And there is so much art for her to look at in her life these days. Andy, for one.

“Yes, why she would love a liar and traitor like Joe is beyond me.”

Joe makes a wounded noise at Nicky’s barb and Andy sighs. “What happened this time?”

“Yusuf has been sneaking behind our backs to talk to Sebastien for God only know how long.” Nicky moves out from behind the sofa and takes a seat in the second armchair, a few feet away from Tuah. Nile rolls her eyes. Tuah looks mildly uncomfortable, new to all of these people and already being thrown into the middle of a fight between two men who have been together for like eight centuries. Nile would be pretty uncomfortable, too. It was bad enough joining the team when Joe and Nicky weren’t in the middle of a fight.

“It isn’t as though Andy has been some paragon of honesty either,” Nile says, jerking a thumb towards Tuah. “No offense, dude. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

Joe waves her off. “Andy is Andy. Her personal life is her business.”

Nicky glares at Joe. “And is your personal life then supposed to only be yours?”

Nile takes a deep breath. She turns to face Andy, who is undignifiedly shoveling forkfuls of pasta in her mouth. “You wanna tell him about how your personal life is now all of our business?”

Andy closes her eyes for a split-second too long to be blinking. Nile thinks she’s trying to brace herself. “It was a very long time ago. I made a bad choice.”

Nicky crosses his arms. “And how bad, exactly, was this choice, Andy? What did you do to that woman?”

“It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that the woman I hurt is trying to hurt us.”

Nile furrows her brow. That isn’t what she remembers from Croatia. “Like, we know for sure now that she’s trying to hurt us?”

Andy swallows and Nile watches the muscles in her throat work. “Tuah… well, he uncovered some evidence that Discord is coming after us.”

“Discord?” The incredulity is plain in Nicky, Joe, and Nile’s voices as they exclaim in unison.

“Is she a My Little Pony character?” Nile snorts.

“Actually,” Tuah starts, “I have some reason to believe that she inspired the character of Discord in that particular cartoon.”

“I’m sorry, what?!”

“Guys, focus.” Andy sets her bowl, still mostly full, on the coffee table and holds her forehead in her hands. “Tuah, can you tell them?”

Tuah sighs and shifts in his seat. “Discord’s activity has ramped up significantly in the last several years. In the past six months alone, she’s made significant payouts to mercenary organizations on three different continents, acquired several different properties under various shell corporations, and –” Tuah pauses, bites his lip – “purchased a high volume of various explosives typically used by the United States military.”

Joe and Nicky both simply blink a few times, dumbfounded.

“Does she know,” Joe starts, voice low, “that we’ve been tracking the movements of those very same explosives?”

Copley wanders in as Joe speaks, completing the set. “I’ve been in touch with my CIA contact, and it looks like she does. We’re essentially just waiting now to see what she tries next.”

Nicky sighs and turns his head to look out the window. He looks tired, too, Nile thinks. They all look tired. Nile feels tired. All they ever do is run. All they ever do is fight. Nile knew going into this that she was joining an army, she just… she thought it might have been a little more different than the army she came from. The eyes of the little girl she watched die back in Denver still haunt her, almost five years later. Nicky told her that day that God is a sadistic asshole, and she still can’t think of a better way to phrase it. How else do you explain any of this? How else do you explain how much Nile wants Andy to lay her guilt down, even knowing how awful the thing she did was? How else do you explain the horror of their lives?

“And you did not think it relevant to the rest of us? How long have you been sitting on this, Andy?”

Nicky stands up and starts pacing in front of the window. Poor guy. Nile thinks that she has it rough, but his trust has just been betrayed by two of the people he loves most in the world and has known for like a thousand years. He probably wins today’s oppression Olympics. He looks like he’s ready to collapse from anger and exhaustion. Nile knew that Nicky could get angry – they’ve been together almost nonstop for five years – but she didn’t know that he could get angry like this. She didn’t know about these jagged edges. He always seemed so worn smooth.

Andy sighs again. “Since the last job. I wanted to have all the facts first.” She doesn’t seem ashamed, just resigned to Nicky’s rage and Joe’s pretending. And Joe is pretending. Nile knows that he is just as hurt as Nicky that Andy didn’t tell them about her evil ex. There’s a certain quality to his eyes. Nile wonders how it is that she’s gotten as good at reading the three of them as she has, while Copley still seems to misinterpret at every turn. She likes James quite a lot, but he is so distant and awkward sometimes that it’s hard to visualize a version of him that you could just get coffee with. Nile is glad she came along too late to be subject to his researching. She thinks that would probably make it a lot worse.

“Sure, boss.”

Joe doesn’t look Andy in the eye.

***

Quynh makes her way to Rome with no small amount of trepidation. She knows that Andromache will come, and she does not know whether or not to be glad. It’s a long drive into the ancient city. She could simply take a train; they seem to be much more convenient, but Quynh likes driving, and public transportation comes with a greater risk of being found.

She has not seen Rome since sometime in the fourteenth century. Whenever the last time she and Andromache were fighting. That was their routine; Quynh would run, and Andromache would chase. And Quynh would always run to Rome. There was something about the city that was so intoxicating, an air to it that she loved. She remembers, distantly, when it was founded. She followed Aeneas to Italy all the way from Troy, even despite her bubbling hatred for the Trojans. One of their worst disagreements, Quynh thinks, changing lanes, was about Troy. Andromache believed that the people of Troy had done nothing to deserve the siege. Quynh believed that the rules of hospitality were very clear on stealing your host’s wife. That was when Andromache became Andromache, in fact. She was not the wife of Hector; that Andromache grated on Quynh’s nerves. But the people of Troy saw her as a princess, as a protectress, and they named her thus. All these years later, Quynh thinks, and Andromache is still using the name they gave her at Troy, at the city Quynh wanted to see razed. Quynh does not know who she would be without that woman. She wonders if Andromache will recognize her, will see past the hurt and the fear and the crushing, debilitating pressure of the ocean, still pressing down on her chest, and see the woman that she once knew. Quynh wonders if she will recognize Andromache. Somehow, she doesn’t think that much has changed. All she ever does is go, and Quynh has seen enough of Discord’s research to know that Andy has not stopped going.

Quynh likes Rome, even still. Even for all the times she hid in its alleys, fuming. All of the times Andromache tracked her down within days of her arrival to a specific boarding house or pier or market, all of the times she watched Yusuf and Nicolò fight about the pope within the city walls. She likes it. It’s infectious in its joy, or at least it was seven hundred years ago, and Quynh is not ready to face the potential that it will disappoint her, the way Andromache has disappointed her. Five years, Quynh thinks, and Andromache has still not managed to locate her. The new girl, Nile – has she really not said anything? Does she really not know?

Except, Quynh thinks, looking idly out the window as she steers, Booker told her back in Liguria that he still dreamed of the ocean. Quynh still dreams of the ocean, dreams of Andromache sometime, too. Dreams of slipping her fingers inside, dreams of hurting her. Dreams of dragging her under the surface of the sea with her and letting both of them drown on repeat. Dreams of kissing her until neither of them can breathe and they die all over again.

She thinks idly of Justinian as she pulls into the city. He was mostly horrible as an emperor, ineffective and dull, and the only two things that cemented his legacy were his collection of imperial law and his conquests in North Africa. Funny how history forgets, she thinks. He was never here, ruled over Byzantium from Constantinople and did not spend much time at all in Rome. Andromache had hated Justinian, but liked Belisarius, so the two of them had fought for the man over and over and over. They were in between ideas and tired and waiting for something new to find them after Lykon died. Quynh misses Lykon. She has never stopped. She wonders if Andromache still thinks about him at all, if she’s finally moved on from that loss, too, or if Quynh was just uniquely insignificant to her. If she mattered at all. Discord asks her about that sometimes, low light from the lamp on the nightstand creating a halo around her blonde hair. Asks if she really thinks Andromache ever loved her. Quynh has never been under the misconception that Discord loves her at all, either, but sometimes she thinks that Discord might be under the misconception that Quynh loves her. And Quynh does not. Gratitude and love are very distinct sensations.

She ditches the car towards the outskirts of the city and heads on foot towards the center. There’s a spot she’s looking for, banking on the fact that a city as old as Rome never changes too much. Quynh reaches instinctively for her necklace and doesn’t find it. She thinks about the way Andromache pretended to hate humanity. It was almost funny, she thinks in retrospect. Andromache was violent and frequently brooding, but she was also so invested in seeing the right side win. Quynh wonders if Andromache ever realized that things are rarely that black and white, especially in war. Quynh has to swallow back the faint sense of longing that creeps up her throat. Five hundred years is a long time. It is still not enough to erase two and a half thousand years of love. And God above, Quynh does still love her. But she does not know if she will ever forgive her. If she can ever lay with her again.

She walks through the streets and she can almost smell the fish stew that she and Andromache used to make, standing side-by-side over the pot just a few streets away in a boarding house. She can still hear Yusuf and Nicolò arguing about the exact details of trinitarian faith. Can still see Andromache standing, ax covered in blood, in the street during the sack of Rome, can still feel her hands coming to rest on Quynh’s waist, pulling her away from the blood and the burning city until they were far outside the walls and they could collapse, crying in each other’s arms. Quynh closes her eyes and sits down at a picnic table.

She thinks about the dream that Nile had the other night. Until Booker, Quynh hadn’t realized that they could see each other’s dreams. Most of the time, they are so mundane that it doesn’t even register. But over the long years with nothing else to keep her occupied, Quynh has come to recognize the specific sheen of them, the quality of the light, changed and distorted. Booker’s dreams before she escaped from her prison were overwhelmingly about his wife and his children and all of the wars he has seen. Now, they are mostly about Nile and Andromache. Quynh wonders what it means sometimes that he never dreams about Nicky, and only very rarely about Joe. Nile’s dreams are almost exclusively about Andromache, though, and have been since Quynh has been getting them. It is a strange, strange thing, to see her again through such young and adoring eyes. And Nile does adore Andromache. It tugs on something unnamed in Quynh’s chest. She can still see the outline of Andromache’s body in her finery, the subtle makeup – just enough to make modern men take her seriously, Quynh now knows from experience – the short braid wrapped around the back of her scalp. Quynh can sense the simmering tension between this young girl and this ancient woman, and the way that Nile is resolutely ignoring it. It makes her bite back a smile. Young people never know who they are or what they want. Quynh does not think that Nile does want Andromache, exactly, but she does not not want her either. Three thousand years ago, in Scythia, Nile would have been right there with the worshippers.

***

Nile falls asleep not long after the six of them finish talking about Discord. She pads down the hall to the room she shares with Andy, and she collapses on her side of the bed. It is too hot, now, to sleep, but she sighs and turns over. Andy is still out in the common spaces, she can tell. Nicky too. Copley and Tuah are unaccounted for, but Nile knows that Joe is sleeping peacefully in the next room. Nothing could make that man miss his sleep. Nothing except maybe Nicky, and even that is a strong maybe.

It’s easy to drift off, and when she does, she finds herself on the scene of a job they took six months ago, in D.C. They hadn’t been back to the States since the Denver job in 2020, and Nile is somehow experiencing culture shock in her own culture. It’s one of the last state dinners of the Biden administration, and the mood is noticeably sour. Nile can’t remember what country is visiting; somewhere Scandinavian, she thinks. The ambassador from Sweden or wherever does not want to be visiting a lame duck president, and the president himself is distracted, withdrawn. The vice president is doing a wonderful job working the room, but women always have to be patient and friendly and available in a way that men do not. Joe and Nicky are elsewhere, working behind the scenes while Nile and Andy do the dirty work. And listen, Nile knew before this that Andy was kind of a liar. It would be hard not to. But she has never seen it on display with such deadly precision before tonight. The way she smiles and laughs and gently rests her hand on the wrist of countless charmed diplomats, the way she leans in, the way she acts a little clueless about international geopolitics, just a Senator’s wife, after all, with a deliciously accurate Southern accent to boot, well. Nile all of a sudden does not know what to think when she looks at Andy. If she hadn’t spent so much time with her before, Nile might have thought that Andy really was the wife of the junior senator from Georgia. Her dress is appropriately tight and appropriately long, with just enough eyeliner smudged around her eyes to make her look desirable, to make someone want to whisper in her ear or hear what she whispers in theirs. Nile has to pretend the thought doesn’t make her shiver. It doesn’t, okay? She is not attracted to Andy. She just… she gets how one might feel that way.

They are trying to recover a thumb drive with very sensitive information about Ukrainian troop and weapon movements; it turns out there’s a high-up military commander in whatever country is visiting tonight that has been working closely with the Kremlin, and Andy and Nile are here to make sure that thumb drive never makes it across the Atlantic. From across the room, Andy’s gaze locks onto Nile’s and they understand one another immediately. Nile follows the US contact (a truly ineffective staffer with too much access in a disorganized administration) to the ladies’ room, and it’s quick work to get her up against a wall. Enough research went into tonight for Nile to know that this woman is gay and deeply in the closet (religious guilt is a bitch). Nile knows what she looks like with her box braids in a bun and a well-tailored suit on, and she knows what repressed women will do when offered the opportunity to let loose.  Maybe it’s wrong, to fuck this woman in a White House bathroom just to steal something quite valuable from her purse. But Nile is exhausted and confused and aching from how beautiful Andy looks tonight, from watching her lie and lie and lie, and she isn’t sure that she cares about right and wrong anymore. If four-and-a-half years have taught her anything, it’s that effective is much more important than right. Good and bad or right and wrong or moral and immoral are pointless distinctions. So she slips her fingers inside a woman she will not remember the name of after tonight, and stops her from making a mistake that will come at the cost of so many lives. It’s the utilitarian thing to do. Nile is tired of watching people die. Her right hand is still sloppy and wet when she slips the drive into Andy’s clutch with her left. Andy raises an eyebrow at the sight of her, but says nothing about it. There’s almost a smirk playing at her lips, and Nile knows, suddenly, that the Andy she has come to love over the past several years is the real Andy, no matter how good she is at lying. It’s a reminder that Nile needs, right now, and then, with no warning, she sits straight up in bed and remembers that Andy is still Andy, and Andy is still a liar, and Andy looks so peaceful when she sleeps next to Nile that Nile thinks that she wants Andy to live forever again. She doesn’t know who else she would share her bed with.

***

Nicky is exhausted.

He would like to sleep for approximately a thousand years. Maybe when he wakes up, Joe will be less of a liar. Maybe when he wakes up, he will know how to let his anger burn up quick and loud the way that Joe’s does. Maybe he will know how to let this go. Except, he does not really want to. He wants to be angry. He wants to keep ignoring Booker’s existence for another ninety-five years and he would like for Joe to do the same. Would like his husband to grant him this one favor, even knowing that their history has been quite a lot of favors on Joe’s part already. Nicky wonders absently as he paces in front of the wide windows if this is his punishment. If all of his penance was never going to be enough, and the only true way to amend his unamendable sins was to be betrayed in a much quieter way.

It’s early the next morning when the call comes, Joe already awake and sipping tea in bed as Nicky blinks awake, vision blurry. They had sex yesterday upon their return, a reaffirmation that neither of them has any intention of drawing this out for longer than absolutely necessary, but Nicky still finds himself wishing that he had moved out to the sofa. He’s quite sure, though, that Copley has given the third bedroom to Tuah and camped out in the living room, so.

“Oui, oui.”

Nicky rubs at his eyes and sits up. Even here, in the sacred space of their bed, he still cannot find peace from Booker. Christ. Nicky will kill them both the second he has the chance. Except, he thinks.

He could never kill Joe again. He made a vow, many lifetimes ago now, many versions of each of them long since dead and buried in the intervening time, that he would never again take up arms against that strange, lying, kind and loving man. And even though Nicky has made no such vow for Booker, he knows better than to think he could ever hurt him. He is not Andy. And even Andy has not killed any of them in years. They all still train, of course, but that is different. That is not pain for the sake of pain. Nicky is old enough, has seen enough wars to know that pain for the sake of pain is the mark of cruel men. Nicky tries very hard not to be a cruel man.

Joe hangs up the phone and Nicky looks at him expectantly, silently. Joe sighs.

“Booker,” he says. “He’s okay. He wants us to come get him. He says it is important.”

Nicky inhales sharply, then sighs. “Promise me, Joe, that we can go back to banishment, true banishment, after this brief episode.”

Joe looks out the window, and Nicky knows what is coming even before he looks back and says the words. “No, hayati. I am sorry. I can keep him at arm’s length, I can continue to tell him nothing of our lives, but I cannot shut him out again. I am angry with him, still, but you know that I never wanted a century to begin with. We know how to be kinder than this. We are kinder than this.”

Nicky lets Joe take his hand and press soft kisses against his knuckles. Supplicating. His voice is softer the next time it comes. “We are kinder than this.”

“You are kinder than this, Yusuf,” Nicky says, voice gentle and much fonder than he means for it to be. “I am the same as I have always been.”

“Nicolò,” Joe whispers, and Nicky can feel the heartbreak of those three syllables deep in his chest, “Nicky –”

“Let us table this discussion. We can decide when we return.”

Joe closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and opens them again. He wears such a resigned look that Nicky is almost sorry. Almost.

The drive to the countryside outside Bologna takes a little less than two hours, and Nicky and Joe say little to one another the entire time. Nicky does not trust Booker, does not trust that he will not fold to his own suicidal whims again, but he is still thinking about what Joe said in their bedroom. He does not want Joe to be right about this, but he fears that he might be. Even so, that does not make lying acceptable. Eight centuries of companionship and friendship and love. Love so deep that Nicky has been the subject of countless volumes of poetry, countless canvases. Love so deep that other people can only wish that they had someone who understood them the way that Joe and Nicky understand one another. Eight centuries, and Joe chooses now of all times to lie. Andy, too, although Nicky half-expects this from her. Andy in her entirety is unknowable. Joe has never been that, even at the very beginning, killing each other within Jerusalem’s city walls. Why now? Why about Booker?

Nicky can admit that he would have been furious either way, but he would care less if Joe had just told him sooner, told him of his own volition. They’ve fought enough by now that Nicky knows it started maybe six months in, and he wants to smash something. He does not feel like that often, but four-and-a-half years is a long time, even for the two of them, and Nicky does not know what to think. Maybe if it had been an affair, this would be easier. Nicky could deal with that; it is not his ideal situation, but Joe’s fulfillment matters more, and he knows that Joe loves Booker. Nicky loves him, too. That would be, while annoying, at least under the present circumstances, quite manageable. Nicky does not know how to manage this, so he says nothing at all to Joe as his husband deftly navigates to whatever address Booker gave him. Whatever the directions were, they must have been very specific, because Joe pulls onto a dirt road and takes several turns until they come upon a bench with a very put-upon Booker waiting for them in a tracksuit. He looks terrible. Nicky does not know whether to laugh or pity. Maybe both.

Nicky gets out of the car and watches as Joe talks to Booker, watches as Booker refuses to so much as look at him, and he knows. Knows in his soul that Booker did this to hurt him as much as Joe kept it from him to shield him. Because Booker, for all his flaws, knows them, knows that Nicky needs Joe’s honesty and Joe needs Nicky’s happiness, and in this one horrible instance, the two were at odds, and Booker was feeling petty. Nicky does not know what to do with this terrible knowledge besides getting back in the car and remaining just as silent on the way back as he did on the way there.

He’s still quietly in shock when Booker gives something small to Andy, when she unfurls the paper inside the container, when he catches sight of the script on the parchment – and he knows again, something new this time. Even before Andy says it, Nicky knows all of a sudden, why Booker needed to urgently to come home, and Nicky tamps down any resentment he has felt. His family, his family, it might finally be whole again.

Nicky cannot help the way his heart lifts when she says, “It’s Quynh.”

He is simply not ready for the way it is about to be crushed.

Chapter Text

Nile watches Quynh and Andy’s reunion from afar. It’s hard, to see Andy finally getting what she wants so much, only for it to so obviously be blowing up in her face. Nile wonders if this counts as enough of a meeting for the dreams to stop. Her and Quynh lock eyes for a half second before Andy starts talking, and Nile does not want to dream of the ocean anymore, does not want to see into Quynh’s mind. Quynh might be the person in the world who understands her the best, and she is clearly not interested in reconciling with the team. And Nile is not sure how much she wants to be understood anymore, how much she wants these people to really understand her.

She can only catch half the words, but she does think she hears the phrase endless war pretty distinctly from Quynh’s lips, and she has to swallow back her own guilt. She has had the same thought so many times, has she not? She has wondered what the point in all of their senseless violence was, all of the killing. There is so much killing. Nile does not want to kill anymore. Not ever again. She has died enough times to know that it is not exactly pleasant. The others didn’t tell her this, but every death is a real one. Every single one an ending of everything that you are and everything that you ever have been. Nile wonders if she is damned to hell for the endings she has imposed on other people. She wonders if Quynh thinks the same way about all this. She wonders if she learned this from Quynh, if that’s possible. She wonders if so many endings, so much destruction of herself has bruised her in a way that will never be mended, a rot that will only spread until she is given over completely to it. Nile wonders if that is what happened to Andy, if that is what Andy has been trying to undo, now, these past five years. If she can ever undo it, the rot, the necrotic flesh of her soul, the pain that she has felt and the death that she has dealt out. Nile hears the words endless war and all of a sudden, she cannot unsee the angel of destruction that Andy has fashioned herself into, and Nile is not sure that she will ever know why she did.

Nile watches as the two women move forward and back, watches as Andy’s face and shoulders fall so visibly. She can’t quite hear what they’re saying, but she knows it isn’t good, knows Andy well enough to know that she isn’t going to supplicate, even for Quynh, and knows Quynh well enough by now to know that she is so, so angry. Nile thinks she would be too.

She had asked once, years ago, now, why they stopped looking. Why they wouldn’t go back for her. Andy just told her that one day she would understand. One day she would comprehend the immensity of Andy’s grief or some bullshit like that. The vagueness of these people really does just drive Nile absolutely bonkers. And the nerve to imply that Nile does not understand grief – well. Even if it were not for her father, for her own deaths, for the life she never got to live, Nile has dreamt of Quynh enough to know what grief is, real, sickening, disgusting grief that swallows you whole. But they pretend that she could not yet know, and they offer wishy-washy answers as to why. It really isn’t that hard, Nile thinks, to give a straight answer. And yet.

Her train of thought is interrupted by a flash of familiar blonde hair across the plaza, and her heart briefly stops. “Oh my God,” she whispers. “Oh my God.”

She reaches instinctively for the cross she used to wear around her neck, before she refocuses and realizes that Andy and Quynh have disappeared down an alleyway, neither of them any the wiser to Discord’s appearance. Although, Nile thinks, grimly, if Quynh is as angry as Nile knows that she is, well. There are questions here that need answering. Big, big questions. She leaps after the two of them, interrupting them in the middle of their fight. It doesn’t just look like a fight, actually looks pretty erotic to Nile, but she refrains from commenting. Not her place.

“Discord’s here. We gotta go, we gotta find her!”

Both of them stop and look up. Quynh’s eyes widen in surprise, before she curses Andy in Vietnamese and runs off. Andy blinks a few times, dazed.

“God, you people are useless.” Nile sighs and rubs at her eyes with the back of one hand. She runs off in the direction she saw Discord heading, figuring that Andy will catch up eventually. Sprinting is exhausting in the Roman heat, but she persists, keeps struggling through until she catches sight of Discord, a flash of hair and white skin disappearing into the doors of one of the various churches that dot the Roman landscape.

Nile huffs a little to herself. Sanctuary. Of course this woman wants sanctuary, wants to trick Nile into letting her go, unharmed. Nile knows that she will, though, knows that she cannot raise a finger against this woman. Not successfully, and she isn’t sure that she would want to either way after what Andy did to her. Nile has wondered, these past days, what she is supposed to do about the creeping guilt in her stomach when she remembers all of the lives she has taken. Is what she has done any better? Is the fact that she was not personally betraying them any better than what Andy did, killing a woman she loved, a woman who loved her?

“Clever,” Nile says, coming up on the woman as she watches the votive candles burn, flames dancing and flickering in the damp church air, “hiding in a church.”

Discord turns to half-face her, and Nile watches the sad smile that plays at her lips turn into a smirk. Nile thinks she’s had her fill of smirking for the rest of her life. Andy does it so often, so much. Nile hates the way her heart beats faster at the thought. She is not in love with Andy. She’s interrogated this feeling an awful lot over the last five years. But she does love her. And fuck, yeah, maybe she’s kinda attracted to her. Who wouldn’t be? But it’s like this weird soup of attraction and love and envy and burning hatred that Nile likes to pretend isn’t there. She does not want to hate Andy. She is not even sure that she does hate Andy. But there’s a bitter taste in her throat at the thought of what she has been drawn into, what she has done, what she has become for Andy. Nile has given her life over to this woman, and she isn’t sure what exactly she is getting in return.

“I never liked your God much.” Discord tilts her head to the side, appraising Nile like a piece of jewelry. “But then, I don’t think you would like mine.”

Discord continues looking at her like that, like she is some rare cut of meat, gold flashing in the pan. A tool, a means to an end. Something to be coveted, sold, profited off of. Nile thinks about vomiting. For everything that she has done, Nile thinks, Andy has never once looked at Nile like a tool. For everything that she has made Nile become, Andy has never viewed her as anything other than a person, a breathing, living human being with a family and feelings and opinions. Nile suddenly gets the cold feeling that this woman, this hurt creature who has twisted herself around a single moment from thousands of years ago, does not view almost anyone as a person anymore. And Nile has seen too much of people like her, people who look like her, who talk like her, getting looked at like tools, like objects of profit, like bugs. Seen too many kids who wear their hair like her and like the music that she likes get thrown up against brick walls because they had a hoodie on.

“How is it, I wonder, that you can stomach what Andromache is doing, hm? Playing God with the little mortals? How do you justify that?”

Nile can feel her mouth fall open. She will not let this woman in on her own apprehensions, will not let her get to her. But she can feel them strike at the heart of Nile’s own doubts, her own worries and wonders. They are speaking quietly, quietly enough that none of the congregants can hear them, but Nile can still hear her words echoing in the church. God, this place is beautiful. Nile still has her ancestral Protestant hatred for the Catholic Church (sorry, Nicky), but Christ if they don’t know how to build a beautiful church. And here Discord is, speaking words to feelings that Nile was not sure she would ever voice.

“Because it’s what’s right.”

Nile does her absolute best to keep the waver out of her voice, and she thinks she succeeds. She can hear an Italian woman behind them murmuring to whoever is next to her, and Nile knows that they need to leave soon, before they are caught making a scene here.

“Abandoning your family? Creating more childless mothers like yours, more fatherless children like you? Is that right, Nile Freeman?”

Nile grits her teeth. “Do you know all that she’s done, really? All of the good that has rippled out from her actions? Do you know about any of that?”

Discord laughs a little and waves a hand, dismissing her. The candles shiver. “I’ve seen your little friend’s research. I would not have taken you for a utilitarian, Nile Freeman, but I suppose I should not be surprised. You run with a pack of wild dogs, murderers, soldiers who pretend that they are kind. You had so much potential, my girl, after you died that very first time.”

It hits Nile like a stack of bricks, the memory. Flashes of blonde hair just peeking out of a surgical cap. Piercing blue eyes find hers from over a surgical mask. Middle-aged skin, beeping. The numbed tug and pull of surgical thread through her throat. The surgeon peeling off gloves stained with Nile’s blood. Slipping in and out of consciousness, the dreams of the train and the ocean interrupting the sight of the doctor on base. “Oh my God,” she whispers. “You.”

Discord offers her a joyless smile, all teeth. She’s one to talk about wild dogs. “Me, yes. I needed to make sure you would not dream of me. I could not have Andromache finding out before it was time.”

“Why is it time now? What changed?”

Discord reaches out and brushes a thumb across Nile’s cheek. Nile wants to break her arm for the audacity, but she doesn’t. Not here. “Oh, my heart. You and I are the same. Lost little puppies who would follow the immortal woman until the sun burns out. Quynh, too. Do you think that she loves you, really loves you in any sort of way that matters?”

Nile averts her eyes to look at the figure of the Virgin Mary. Hail Mary, full of Grace, the Lord is with Thee. She turns back to look at Discord, and she thinks about miracles. She wonders if Andy is hers.

“I know that she does.”

Nile turns on her heel and goes to leave, before she remembers that she probably should not leave the crazy woman alone in the church. “Five thousand years,” Nile says. “Five thousand years and you are still stuck on her. Why?”

“Are you saying that you wouldn’t be, daughter of Lance Freeman? Granddaughter of Jeffrey Freeman, great-granddaughter of Harold Freeman? Great-great-granddaughter of Andrew Smith, a freed Black man from Mississippi, released from bondage by Andromache the Scythian and her band of bloodthirsty animals?”

Nile doesn’t have an answer for that, doesn’t know what she can say to that. Doesn’t know how she could ever adequately thank Andy and Joe and Nicky for what they did, didn’t know that they did it. Doesn’t know why Discord is bringing this up, now, when she’s trying to convince Nile to hate Andy. She wonders if Discord just can’t come up with anything strong enough yet.

Discord leaves her there, stunned, and Nile has to remind herself to close her jaw and go back and find Andy. Her anger and gratitude and grief swirl together as her feet pound against the cobblestone streets, sun too bright above her, the distant shouts of drivers and the smells of restaurants lost to her as she races through the streets of Rome until she finds Andy, still looking shell-shocked and not that far from where Nile left her.

“Get up. She got away. We have to get back to Rimini right now.”

***

Andy drives carelessly on the way back from Rome. Nile is tense, exhausted. Andy wonders how much of that is her fault. Probably a lot of it. She wonders if she’s supposed to apologize for all of this, but she knows that she won’t mean it. She should have apologized to Quynh. Should have gotten down on her knees and said I love you. I’m sorry. Come home. Should have created a perfect mirror of the first time they fought, so many long years ago, Quynh on her knees, Andy’s ax buried in her gut. Should have forced the words out about her lost immortality and let Quynh kill her for good. Wouldn’t that be poetic. Joe would probably have something to say about that. And anyway, if Andy didn’t apologize to Quynh, there’s no chance she’ll apologize to Nile.

“Andy.”

Nile’s voice is taut and hot with something like anger. Andy can feel the younger woman’s gaze on her cheek as she keeps her eyes resolutely on the road.

“I’m going to ask you a question, and you are going to answer me honestly.”

Andy raises an eyebrow. She still doesn’t turn to face Nile. Scenery blurs by to her left.

“Who are you? Really, who are you? How old are you? Why are you so intent on just going and going and going and killing and killing and killing? Because I don’t know that I can carry on with all this unless I get some answers, and soon.”

Andy blinks. None of them have ever asked. Not like this. Not so forcefully. Of course, Andy thinks, it would be Nile. Who else?

Damgalnuna. Alexandria. Andromache. Andrea. Andy. I am six thousand years old, give or take a few centuries. My mother had three husbands, all of them warriors. My father died when I was so young that I do not remember him. My mother died when I was twenty-two.  I was a scholar in Eridu. I taught my nieces how to fight with an ax. I was a god, once. I am afraid of being worshipped again. Worship begets violence, and for all of the men I have killed, I cannot let anyone be killed in my name again. All I have known since my birth is violence, and love. I love you and I will kill you. I have killed you. One day, I hope you kill me. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

“I’m the same person I’ve always been.”

“No.”

Andy almost wants to laugh at the simplicity of it. At her own inability to answer easy questions. At Nile’s refusal, always kind. But never compromising. Andy wishes she could go back in time and save her from this life. She hopes that Nile never has that wish.

“Look at me, Andy.”

“I found out when I was young,” Andy starts, softer, this time, still not looking at her, “that if I saved someone’s life, maybe this wouldn’t all ring hollow. It’s just that saving some lives often means ending others. You learn how to carry it with you, in time.”

Nile huffs. “Maybe we’re not supposed to carry that, Andy. You ever think about that?”

“Yes.”

Andy finally turns to face Nile, and watches as Nile goes from furious to surprised. As though she had never really thought that Andy might have pondered this exact question over and over and over. It hangs over her. Her life has been a disgusting attempt to answer it.

“I’ve died a lot. More than almost anyone on this earth. I know what I’m doing when I take a life. If there was a way for you to live your life any differently, I would gladly send you off on that path. I just haven’t found it yet. I’m not always sure that it’s out there.”

Nile blinks and considers. “My dad died in Afghanistan when I was eleven. And then when my brother was eighteen, I died in Afghanistan, too. How many families, do you think, have we ruined like that?”

“The little girl, the Syrian girl who died in Denver, not long after you joined us,” Andy starts, remembering the way Nile looked haunted for months after that job, “her name was Dima.”

Nile swallows and Andy watches the muscles in her throat work out of the corner of her eye. She corrects the wheel so that they don’t hurtle off the road.

“Why did you never tell me that until now?”

Andy shrugs. “You never asked. And I’ve become forgetful, in my old age.”

Nile groans good-naturedly, and Andy hopes. She hopes against all else that has ever been, that ever will be.

***

Quynh gets in the car with Discord, and she wonders. There was something on the tip of Andromache’s tongue the whole time they sat there talking, something horrible. Quynh has never known a version of Andromache who could not speak her mind.

You are not the woman I gave my necklace to, all those years ago.

Quynh wonders if that’s such a bad thing, and then chastises herself for it. The woman she knew would not have abandoned her, would have destroyed the world to see Quynh smile. Or maybe that is false. Maybe that is a lie that Quynh constructed, all those years in the water. Maybe the saltwater eroded her mind as well as her lungs. She doesn’t know. The thing about lives like theirs, Quynh thinks, is that there is too much to remember. It slips through her fingers like ocean water. You cannot hold all of it in your arms. And Quynh could never hold all of Andromache in her arms, either. That woman has always been strange and unknowable, even to Quynh, who knew her so well, once upon a time. Quynh wonders if there are words enough in the world for Andromache to tell her that she loves her. She wonders if she still does.

“Are you ready, darling, for the next part?”

Discord is driving, one hand on the wheel and the other resting on the console. The endearment is meaningless; Quynh has heard her call almost everyone some variation of it at some point. Discord’s free hand looks expectant, as though it is waiting for Quynh’s. Quynh will not give it to her. She does not want to be touched outside of the comfort of a bed and the quiet of night. Maybe the darkness makes it easier to pretend, or maybe Quynh has always hated being touched. She cannot say that she remembers well enough to be sure anymore. Yusuf would remember, Quynh thinks, aching to cradle his face in her hands. She has missed him, she thinks. She has not heard his voice in five hundred years. Nicolò’s either, although she never warmed to him in quite the same way. Yusuf spent so many days wandering far from his home, same as Quynh, drawn away by the whims of their lovers. He would sketch her constantly, always enchanted by the way her eyes used to catch the light. Quynh wonders if her eyes still catch the light. She doesn’t care much for mirrors these days. Doesn’t remember if that is her, or the water. Sometimes she thinks that the ocean is inside of her. Sometimes she thinks that she never left and she wakes up screaming. Sometimes she still coughs up blood.

“Tell me, Eris. Those people, what did they do to you?”

Discord laughs and Quynh wants to sigh. She restrains herself. This woman bores her. But Quynh is indebted, so she does not roll out the car door. She could survive it, she thinks, idly. Quynh misses horses, and then she remembers the sight of Andromache on horseback, and suddenly she doesn’t miss horses very much anymore.

“Trust me, Andromache will disarm the bombs before they ever go off.”

Quynh turns, against her better judgement, to look at Discord. To appraise her. Quynh has always believed in reciprocity, and she has come to the conclusion that this should be no different. Returning favors. Same as she did for Booker just a day or two earlier. He trapped her in his own rotten memories every night when he slept, and so she trapped him. Perfect exchange. He did not even truly mind. In his heart, he knows that he deserves it.

“Then why? What is the point of setting them in the first place? If you call, she will come.”

Discord turns to face Quynh, now, something unreadable crossing her face. “And we are calling. Let her talk herself into doing the right thing. It is the only way it ever gets done, with her.”

***

Booker cradles his head in his hands, perched on the edge of a sofa that he had helped Joe and Nicky move into this house, almost six years ago. Copley is standing nearby, leaning against a doorframe. He’s more relaxed than Booker remembers him being, back when they first concocted this plan, but it has been a few years now, and he must feel the time even more keenly than Booker. There’s another man, Tuah, Booker thinks his name was, and he looks decidedly uncomfortable. He’s seated next to Booker on the cheery yellow sofa, listening to Joe and Nicky fight.

“Five years, Joe! You keep this from for me five years, and then expect all to be well?”

Joe sighs helplessly. They’re fighting in English, and Booker suspects he knows why, but he doesn’t comment. Not his place. He does his best to tamp down his sick satisfaction at the sight of Nicky’s anger. He hates himself for it. He does. And he missed Nicky. More than he knew he did. Not that he’ll tell him that. Not that he’ll admit to the sad little part of his brain that knows that Nicky was right to push for him to leave for a hundred years. Not that he’ll voice the terrible hole in the center of him that he does not know how to close.

“No! Nicolò, please. I know better than that, I know you better than that. But look in your heart and tell me that you would not have been this angry had I told you five years ago. Look me in the eye and say that you are mad about the time I kept this from you and not about what Booker and I did.”

"You are a ridiculous man. You make such a stink about what he did and then you go back on your word. But I have always understood this about you, and if you had come to me and told me you wanted to lift his banishment, I might have discussed it. But you did not. Does it matter whether or not I would have been angry back then? Does it truly matter? Because you did not tell me back then, Yusuf, and I am not sure that the what-ifs matter now.” Nicky has walked right up to Joe, right up in his personal space, and he thrusts a finger in his face. Booker can feel the rage radiating off of him in waves.

“You know, Nicky, Joe isn’t really the one to be angry at here.”

Booker is as surprised as everyone else that the voice is his own. Him and Nicky have not spoken to one another in five years. They ignored each other in the car and have been ignoring each other for hours now.

“Oh, trust me, Sebastien, I have some words for you too, but they can wait. I already knew you were a traitor.” Nicky does not even turn away from Joe as he speaks, and Booker shakes his head, almost amused. They’ll get over it in approximately two more hours, he’s sure.

“What could I do, now, to make any of this better, Nicolò? What? What has been done has been done. You of all people know that penance is often a fruitless task.”

The look Nicky gives Joe is equal parts fury and shame.

“That was a thousand years ago. You only bring this up because you cannot come up with another reason for your dishonesty. How am I to believe that you did not also know that Quynh was out and just simply failed to mention it?”

Joe gasps. “Nicolò. How could you even suggest that?”
Copley leans over and whispers to Booker, “Are they going to get a divorce? Is that something they would do?”

Booker chuckles a little and whispers back, “Don’t worry about them. They had a fight once where they didn’t acknowledge one another for seven years. This is nothing. They’re usually all over each other, but when they’re not, Lord have mercy.”

Joe and Nicky ignore the peanut gallery in favor of continuing to fight. This is why they’re screaming at one another in English. They like an audience. Actually, Nicky likes an audience, and Joe would do anything to make Nicky happy, even in a terrible fight. Joe prefers to argue in private, at least with Nicky. But when Nicky’s anger is loud, as it is so rarely, it is loud.

“How am I to know any different, Joe? How could you keep this from me?”

Joe grabs Nicky’s hands and holds them in the air. A calming motion that Booker recognizes from thousands of nights with the two of them. A gesture that makes Nicky melt into Joe’s touch in a way that no one has melted in Booker’s in years and years and years. Even Andy, on the rare occasion that she knocks on his door and slides a hand onto his thigh and asks without asking, knowing Booker well enough to know what he wants and when he does not want it, does not lay tenderly in his arms. “Because I was afraid, Nicolò.” His voice is soft, and sad, and Booker has to look away. He knows it is his fault. “I was afraid of what it meant that we had missed so much for so long, afraid of what it meant that he did not know how much love there was for him. Afraid of what it meant for us that you wanted to punish him for so long and I did not.”

Nicky looks away, and he swallows. He sighs. Booker wishes, all of a sudden, that he had never gotten drunk that night. That he had never emailed Joe. That he had not shot Andy. That he had not picked up the phone when James Copley called him for the second time. That he had never worked with him to begin with, that he had taught Joe and Nicky and Andy how better to communicate with the world so that they did not have to rely so deeply on him. That he had not let them trust him so much. His chest suddenly, unaccountably, hurts so much that it feels like it has split open. Booker has to close his eyes.

“I am going to take a walk.”

Nicky leaves the room with this quiet pronouncement, and Booker opens his eyes and watches as the four men remaining regard each other with varying levels of exhaustion and distrust. Copley does not trust Booker, Booker does not trust Tuah, Tuah does not trust any of them, and Joe trusts all of them too much. Well. Maybe not Tuah. Booker hasn’t watched the two of them enough to know yet. Booker hasn’t watched Tuah enough to know anything about him yet. He looks vaguely familiar – Booker wonders if the two of them brushed shoulders once when he had to fetch Andy from wherever she was holed up. Booker was always the one to gather the four of them. He wonders about that, now. If they still go off and do their own thing, or if they run together now in a way that they haven’t since Quynh. Booker almost wants to scoff at the idea. Maybe he was just too much for them, too sad for them to be around all the time. Maybe Nile is kinder and happier and more willing to submit in all the ways that Booker was never. He doesn’t know. He only knew her for a few days, years ago, and for all of the struggle that seemed to live in her heart back then, the way it tends to, in the early days, she seemed like a much better soldier than Booker ever has been.

“So, Tuah. Why are you here?”

Booker can’t abide the silence in the room. He has spent so much of the last five years in silence, and he would rather not do it anymore. He would rather talk, even if he is ignored, even if the conversation is stilted or hostile. He can live with those things. He cannot live with the silence.

Tuah hems and haws a little. “I have information about a potential enemy, and Andromache wanted me to discuss it with the team.”

“What enemy?”

Joe and Nicky haven’t told him anything. There’s a tension in the air here that is clearly not just from his presence, but Booker hasn’t looked into it too deeply. What does it matter? They’re just going to push him out again when Andy and Nile get back and it’s clear that Quynh wants to hurt them.

Joe, Copley, and Tuah exchange a look.

"I’m not sure that it’s your business.” Joe is the one who speaks, and Booker has to tamp down the acidic taste of disappointment in his throat. Joe has not exactly been forthcoming with Booker about their lives over the past five years, and now that Nicky is angry, Joe will of course tell Booker as little as possible, but still. Booker had hoped. He had hoped. It is such an unfamiliar thing to him these days. In those early months of his punishment, he used to throw himself off of roofs, or out of windows. He spent the first three months in an abandoned housing development in the countryside outside Paris, drowning himself over and over and over again in a backyard swimming pool. By the time he got there, it had already started to turn green with algae and other microorganisms, but he didn’t much care. What did it matter to him what the water looked like? He wasn’t exactly there to have a good time. He wonders if Joe would change his mind if he told him about that. If he choked out the words of his children’s deaths. If it might even melt Nicky’s cold, cold heart. It isn’t cold, his mind chastises. You have just never been open to its warmth. Booker shrugs off the thought.

Booker sighs bitterly. “You still too much of a good Muslim to keep liquor in the house?”

Joe rolls his eyes, but there’s affection in it, and Booker feels briefly bad about it. To be fair, he’s over any old ancestral hatred for so-called heathens and pagans. He used to make fun of Nicky in equal measure for his ridiculous Catholic faith, but that is neither here nor there. Booker and Nicky have never quite known how to talk to one another properly, and Booker is not going to be the first to admit fault.

"Andy is here; where do you think?”

Booker watches the quiet smile Tuah cracks at that, the first Booker has seen from him, and he wonders. There has always been too much of Andy for him to know her, really know her, but sometimes he meets one of her lovers, and he thinks that he has never even known her favorite color.

“Whiskey?”

“Always.”

 Joe leads Booker into the kitchen, and clearly lacking anything better to do, Tuah and Copley follow. Joe pours each of the men a generous glass. Nicky doesn’t like whiskey; he prefers his alcohol to be of the grape-pressed variety, always insufferably Italian (and significantly less depressed than Booker). The used to argue about it, mostly good-naturedly. I would put good money down that you would not know a red from a white blindfolded, or the difference between well-aged French wine and a cheap thing that came out of California last year, Nicky would say, a glass of Cabernet in one hand, and Booker would groan. I’m from France, asshole. I think I know French wine when I taste it. Andy and Joe would roll their eyes and go on playing cards, and Booker would pretend like he and Nicky understood one another. Sometimes, he thinks that they simply can’t. Or rather, he thinks that Nicky simply can’t. He never had children. He never had a wife. He never understood what it was like to live an existence outside of God, outside of any concept of divine mandate. How could he ever understand Booker’s pain?

Booker sips his drink.

Copley opens his mouth, closes it again. Joe looks at the bottle, considering, before pulling another glass out of the cupboard. Booker raises an eyebrow. Joe shrugs.

“Long week.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

All four men startle at Nile’s voice. Andy stands behind her, shell-shocked.

“Y’all really need to get your shit together. I can’t keep cleaning up your messes.”

Joe and Booker exchange a glance, and they both know that they’re all in much deeper trouble than they had bargained for.

Chapter Text

Quynh stays quiet for most of the flight to Jakarta. They fly private, not wanting to risk getting seen. Quynh privately thinks that it’s a pointless measure, given that they’re trying to draw Andy and her little gang to them anyway, but she declines to say so. Discord absently pets her hair as they sit next to each other, and Quynh feels sick. There’s a half-drunk can of Diet Coke resting on the arm of her seat, and Quynh thinks idly of knocking it over. She and Andromache used to keep housecats, on the rare occasions where they settled for longer than six months. They would do that, sometimes, stalking into whatever room Quynh was in and knocking over her cup of wine. Quynh learned to stop wearing white if she was going to drink. Andromache would laugh and laugh and Quynh would smack her and Andromache would kiss her and Quynh would let her. Quynh always let her. Maybe it was because her kisses used to taste like apologies, when they were both still young. Maybe it was because she never took more than Quynh offered. Discord has taken every inch Quynh has given her and turned each one into thirty miles. Quynh wonders where her fight went. A thousand years ago, she would not have stood for this. But there was so much that had not happened yet a thousand years ago. Perhaps it is unfair to judge herself by that standard. Andromache has certainly changed from a thousand years ago, and she has far less of an excuse.

The Indian Ocean glitters blue beneath them, enormous clouds drifting in the late afternoon sky, and Quynh remembers the first time she saw it. It was not long after she had died the first time, maybe, and started dreaming of two foreign women, both from the Far West. She had not known, yet, how to stay still. How to lie in wait. She was a terrible archer back then – so was Nicolò, when he was young, and Quynh had taught him patience – but she knew how to spear fish, so she speared fish on the shore of the Indian Ocean, long before it was called that, and kept moving west and moving north and moving towards her home. Quynh hadn’t known back then what her home would be. Quynh wonders, as she watches the waves, if it will ever be her home again. If she can ever find home again. She misses their last cat. His name was Hector, and Quynh had groaned when Andromache had announced that with that stupid grin of hers, but she had loved the cat and it had been long enough by then that she did not even truly mind the name. They had been living in Constantinople then, Quynh thinks, or Thebes. Maybe Alexandria? She cannot for the life of her remember. There was Greek everywhere, though, and many years later, when Andromache and Quynh had brought Yusuf and Nicolò back to that house to show them, Yusuf had declared that they must stay a while so that he could tile a beautiful mosaic on the wall of the kitchen. Nicolò had made him tea and Andromache and Quynh had gone out and found work and fucked in the garden while Yusuf arranged colorful clay tiles on their walls and Quynh had finished after only five minutes of careful attention from Andromache, so in love with the thrill of making love in the open air, a delight they had not indulged in since they were still running through the Eastern Steppe and the mountains of Central Asia. Discord doesn’t seem like the type to enjoy the simple pleasure of bare skin in the grass. Quynh thinks that’s a pity. Maybe she should suggest it.

“Want one?”

Quynh looks up from the window and finds that Discord has untangled her fingers from Quynh’s hair. She has a pack of cigarettes and a book of matches in one hand, and Quynh shakes her head.

“I heard those turn your lungs black.”

Discord laughs a little and Quynh relaxes. She hadn’t realized how tense she was.

“What does that matter for the two of us?”

Quynh just shakes her head again.

“It’s distasteful to smell like smoke.”

Andromache used to keep a pipe. Sometimes, she and Yusuf would share it, packing it with hashish and passing it back and forth between the two of them, letting the smoke curl in the air while the two of them laughed and spoke and Quynh and Nicolò worked on shooting. Quynh misses that. Nicolò has never made sense to her in the same way that Yusuf does, but she loved those moments, just the two of them and a bow. She has seen his handiwork with a gun for the past several years. She wonders how much of that she can take credit for.

Discord lights the cigarette anyway, and Quynh has to admit that she doesn’t mind the smell all that much. It’s almost comforting. She doesn’t say that out loud, though. She likes to leave Discord on her toes. It’s the least she gets to do, really.

“Are you sure you can have that here? I thought there were rules about that sort of thing.” Quynh could drop it. Maybe she should. But there is no fun in that, and Quynh has so little fun in her life, these days. The closest she has gotten was slamming Booker up against a wall, or thrusting and parrying with Andromache in that Roman alleyway. She misses motion. She needs motion. After all, she has half a millennium of stillness to overwrite.

“Bah. We’re paying quite a lot for the pleasure of private service. Surely they can handle a little tobacco,” Discord says, voice so dry it could parch the ocean beneath them.

Quynh gives an almost-chuckle and resumes looking out the window.

“It can’t hurt you anymore, you know.”

Quynh doesn’t look up at the sound of Discord’s voice. The plane is so quiet that she can hear the sound of Discord’s lips closing around the cigarette and sucking in a lungful of nicotine. Quynh wonders idly if they can still addict themselves, or if the sickness purges itself from their bodies on its own. She’s never tried a drug that she liked enough to keep using it, so she wouldn’t really know. Unless Andromache counts. Maybe she’s Quynh’s drug.

“Oh?”

“There’s no ocean on this plane. No coffin. You can breathe just fine here. You are so easily distracted from our goal, darling. I worry for you.”

Quynh wants to snort. She doesn’t.

They disembark and Discord drives the two of them to a house not far from the hangar. Quynh changes from her comfortable traveling clothes into something a little nicer while Discord runs a shower. Quynh does not care much for showers; she usually opts for a wet sponge and some soap. She has not indulged in the joy of a hot bath since Andromache still loved her enough to share it with her.

The house is plain, with unadorned grey walls and functional furniture. Their final destination is still another twenty miles away, as far outside civilization as anything can get on Java. No one is supposed to know about it outside of a very select few Chinese and Indonesian government officials. It’s an alliance that Indonesia has a very vested interest in keeping under wraps, given the country’s close relationship to the United States. Quynh is horrified by modern geopolitics. From what she’s gathered, so is everyone else. It’s not as though the world was any less complicated the last time she was in it. There has always been suffering, and war, and famine, and pain. It is simply magnified now, with eight billion people living and breathing in the same space with the same air. Quynh understands people better than Discord gives her credit for, but sometimes she wonders how hard it truly is to see the bigger picture. It has been too long for her to remember if she could see it, all the way back in her first life.

The sun sets and Discord slips into the big bedroom to sleep. Quynh sits at the kitchen counter and stares out the window over the sink. There’s a garden behind the house. She wonders who tends it; it’s green and full of tender new shoots and leaves. There’s a sudden sick feeling in her stomach. Someone lives here. She has taken someone’s place. She closes her eyes against the currents of her unimaginably long life. Quynh has not often felt tired in the way that Andromache so often felt tired, the way she seemed so tired just hours ago, in Rome, but it creeps up on her now. All of the years. She does not know whether or not to call them kind, so she sits at the counter in a strange house, in a country that she has not laid eyes on in centuries, and she watches the night steal through the space between the leaves of the garden. The faint impression of Discord’s snores travels through the house and Quynh thinks about leaving. She could buy herself a plane ticket; she has some money. She could fly back to Italy and find Andromache and pull her to the ground and beat her bloody. She could see Yusuf and Nicolò again and hold their warm faces in her cold hands. She could live, again.

Quynh dismisses the thought. There is still too much anger living inside of her to do that. She clenches her fist and then unclenches it again. She wonders what it will be like to be blown to pieces by an exploding reactor. She heard about black holes recently, and Quynh thinks it might be like that. Instant. All-powerful. Unknowable in scale. She has never had radiation poisoning before, either. She wonders if Andromache has. If she and their boys went to the hot deserts of New Mexico and hid in trenches so that patriotic young men never had to. If she was in Japan in August 1945. If she ever tried to stop what it would become.

There aren’t any lights on inside, so the only illumination comes from the digital display on the oven. The green glow sets the room in odd shadows, and Quynh thinks about the way sunlight became distorted under the water. The weird shapes of fish and the shadows of boats. There was a shipwreck in her line of sight when she was cast off, and she watched as it sunk lower and lower and lower, eventually succumbing to the sand around them. It had been her constant companion for so long, and then it just disappeared one day, in between death and waking, and Quynh suddenly had nothing to look at anymore. That had hurt almost more than the abandonment of Andromache. Humans are flighty creatures, but hardwood and nails? They were supposed to be constant. Quynh had forgotten that wood can rot. She can’t, not anymore, so how could anything else? Her family had thought she was monstrous when she came back from the dead. There was no worship for her. Not yet. Yusuf, much, much later, always said that there were no monsters. Only men. Quynh wonders, sometimes, though. Is Andromache not a monster for what she did? Are you not a monster for what you’ve done? The thought has left her queasy more times than she’d care to count. She is about to do something awful, she knows. What’s worse is that she does not even hate herself for it. She wants to. She wants to be angry with herself for this, but all she can find is a bitter taste in the back of her throat. She misses Andromache. She hates Andromache. She hopes Andromache dies. Quynh sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose. She wants to run that woman through with her sword, and maybe Discord too, when she’s done. But Andromache first. Her betrayal stings worse than Discord’s clumsy manipulation. Really, she may be older than Quynh by a thousand years or so, but how daft does she take Quynh to be? She isn’t exactly subtle.

Quynh stands up suddenly and walks towards the window. She slips the latch and pushes it open, and all of a sudden she is taken by a need to be consumed by the outside air. It is autumn here right now, the inversion of the hemispheres setting her mind spinning. When she was young, so many years ago, you could not travel from one season to the next in a single day, and certainly not spring to autumn in mere hours. It’s still jarring, after five years of running back and forth between continents. Quynh wonders if the rest of them have ever gotten used to it.

She walks out the back door to the garden and she just stands, bare feet curling in the dirt. It’s still moist from the last few storms of the wet season, the air humid but cooler than it was in Rome. If she closes her eyes, she can live again in the village into which she was born, four thousand years ago. They grew rice and raised pack animals. Up in the mountains, they were distant from most other civilization, and once a year, her father and the other men would travel into the valley to trade. She did the math once, many years ago, and her birthdate worked out to be something like 2550 BCE. Andromache’s was well back towards 5000. The distance between them has become almost negligible over the years. Neither learned how to read or write until well into their immortal lives. They had learned it together, actually. It couldn’t have been long after they finally find one another, each interested in the new technology and scared of the change it could represent and comforted by the other’s presence – five hundred years of dreaming of each other’s faces had made each weak to the other’s touch. All of this to say, the autumn here is not terribly unlike the ones Quynh knew once, many years ago.

Discord spends much of the next morning barking orders into her cellphone. Quynh isn’t very good with cellphones. She thinks that the telegraph is hard enough for her to grasp without introducing wireless connections to the mix. By nature, she must be good at adapting to innovation, but Quynh can hardly recount a five-hundred year period in her life that has changed so much about society. Sometimes, she thinks quietly that it would have been easier to disappear for any other time. Life might still have been a little recognizable when she got out.

Armored trucks start pulling up the long drive sometime in the late afternoon, after Quynh has emerged from her nap. Quynh had missed sleeping for pleasure. She is an early riser by nature, never very interested in sleeping far past dawn, but an afternoon rest has long been one of her favorite delights in life. Sleep of any kind was so foreign to her for so many years that Quynh thinks she may have forgotten what a joy it is. Not quite enough of a joy for it to remain unspoiled by the sight of Discord’s unnaturally straight spine, but still a joy.

“Are you ready for tonight?”

Discord keeps moving about the kitchen as she speaks, pulling out a few bowls and stirring something on the stove. It smells delicious. Quynh wonders who got groceries; Discord employs so many staff that it’s hard to keep track of. Quynh tries to remember all of their names, but none of them expect her to, and Discord is not much help on that front. She is isolated, and insulated, by her wealth. Quynh hasn’t asked how, exactly, it was amassed, and she has not asked how, exactly, Discord convinced so many people to work for her criminal enterprise. Quynh has learned over her many years of existence that it’s best not to question the people you find yourself working with too much. Andromache never did. And as much as Quynh hates the constant violence, she can’t deny that Andromache’s work is effective. Pointless, in the grand scheme of things, but effective.

“Have you sent out the message?”

Discord hums in assent and Quynh takes a seat at the counter again, a false mirror of the previous night. The blonde woman sets a steaming bowl of noodles in front of her, and Quynh eats, grateful to be fed. There’s a quiet smile on her face as Discord watches, and Quynh realizes, perhaps for the very first time, that there is real affection in Discord’s gaze. Not love, not anything remotely romantic, but affection. Quynh does not meet her eyes. There’s something nauseous in her stomach, knowing that she has never felt anything of the sort in return. She is not the worse party here by a long shot, but Quynh thinks back over the past five years, and she wonders how she has come to this. She wonders.

It’s dark by the time they pull into the long, secluded drive that leads to the nuclear facility. Discord presents falsified credentials for the two of them, plus a hefty bribe for the gate officials, and Quynh shoots down the guards in the front of the facility with ease. Someone else will clean up the mess later. They stride inside and find the place as empty as they wanted it to be. Some coordinating was done with Beijing, Quynh thinks, but she does not comment on it. Whatever Discord promised the Chinese government is her own business. They direct their hired accomplices to set up the explosives, and Quynh sits in the very center of the reactor, and she waits. There are thirty-five million people inhabiting the city. None of them even know that this place is there. None of them know what happens if Andromache does not come. Quynh can only hope, for the sake of her own soul, that Andromache is still as much of a loyal dog as she used to be, in the days before the ocean ruined them both.

***

It’s still early when Copley bursts into the room that Andy shares with Nile, something frenzied in his eyes that Andy does not quite recognize, even after five years of living with him and working with him. Nile bolts awake at the sound, Andy having been up for a while by now, just sitting and waiting for… something. The past five years have brought with them a sense of slowness that Andy doesn’t understand, at least not yet. But she will soon, she’s sure. Always soon with her. She doesn’t have much time for it to come any later than that.

“What is it?” Her voice is low and urgent. It’s too early for this. She is done with urgency. Andy thinks she could go the rest of her now-mortal life without urgency. All she wants is to sleep. All she wants is for Quynh to come home. She would give up every worldly possession she has ever had if Quynh would just come home. After that, there would be no more need for early-morning wakings. Andy hasn’t slept past seven in the morning since she still had someone to keep watch.

Nile stifles a yawn and Andy watches Copley hesitate for a split second.

“It’s Discord. We have to go to Indonesia.”

Joe, Nicky and Booker are sitting on the yellow sofa in the living room, all looking deeply uncomfortable with and distrustful of one another, while Tuah stands, leaning against a doorframe. All four men have bags under their eyes like they haven’t slept at all, and Joe cracks a wide yawn as Copley sighs and tries to explain for the third time. Andy walks back into the room with a bowl of cheap cereal and pretends not to notice the way that Tuah’s eyes still soften at the sight of her.

“They’re threatening to detonate the explosives, the ones that we have been trying to track down, inside the reactor, yes.”

"Hold on,” Tuah starts, holding up a hand. “There is no nuclear reactor in Jakarta. I have friends on the physics faculty at the University, and the closest facility is almost two hours away, in Banten.”

“It’s being operated covertly by the Chinese government. No one is supposed to know about it.”

“This is like the plot of a really bad ‘80s action movie. You know, if you replace the evil Soviets with the evil Chinese. They’re both Communist, so I guess it doesn’t make a whole lotta difference to the average white American consumer,” Nile says, looking absolutely dead inside. Andy feels a little bad. This has been a hard week for Nile. God, it’s only been a little over a week since Croatia. Andy doesn’t know what to do with that. Her life has been turned upside down so many times in the past several days that she isn’t even sure that she knows what’s real anymore. She chokes down a bite of her cereal through her laugh, and the smile that flashes across Nile’s face, self-satisfied and proud as always, is enough to untangle a few of the knots in Andy’s stomach. However angry she is at herself for what her ancient actions are bringing upon their family now, however afraid she is for what comes after, Andy is still liable to be caught out by her love for these people. Even Nile, whom she’s known for five years, a tiny fraction of Andy’s never-ending life. Andy finds herself glad, not for the first time, that Nile will be here at the end of it. She can’t fathom losing her, losing any of them. Not ever again. Even Booker, Booker who shot her, Booker who sold her family out to be tortured, Booker who has been tormenting Joe and Nicky (in Nicky’s words) for the last five years – Andy has missed him so much that she can’t breathe sometimes.

Copley huffs out a laugh, but it’s half-hearted. “We need to be in Rome in four hours. Our flight leaves in six.”

Joe whistles. “Tight turnaround.”

“Tight deadline,” Andy says, mouth still full of cereal.

“Now, hold on,” Nile interjects. “What’s this ‘we’ business, Copley? You’re staying here. It’s way too dangerous for you to be busting into this place with us. I thought we went over this after Croatia.”

Copley opens his mouth to argue and then closes it again. Copley is all-too in love with throwing himself in the path of danger. Andy, along with Joe, and Nicky, and Nile, have all tried at separate points to convince him to at least just be the van guy. Copley is very against being the van guy.

“I’m a trained CIA operative; I know how to handle myself.”

Nile raises an eyebrow. “And how did the CIA’s assassination of Fidel Castro go, again?”

Copley coughs, cornered, and Andy has to stifle her laughter. She can see Joe and Nicky doing much the same. Even Tuah looks amused. James looks so uncomfortable that Andy has an even harder time holding it in. She swallows her current bite of cereal. “We gotta get packed and hit the road if we’re going to make our flight.”

“So,” Booker starts, something almost sheepish in his voice, “am I coming with, or –”

“Yes.”

The answer is immediate and unanimous. Even Nicky chimes in, surprising Andy, and probably Nicky too.

He sort of turns his head to the side and looks out the window, cheeks flushed. Andy thinks she can see a small smile playing at his lips, but she’s not sure. It’s such a foreign sight.

When she looks away, she locks eyes with Tuah, and her heart sinks. “Tuah,” she starts. “I need you to stay here.”

He blinks a few times, bemused, and closes the few yards between them, Andy suspects it’s so that they aren’t talking over everyone’s heads. She knows him well enough to know how much he despises that. “I came all the way from Seoul to help you, Andromache. I’m not going to just sit here and twiddle my thumbs the second there’s real danger.”

Andy sighs. She looks away, then back. When she speaks again, her voice is soft. “I can’t let you get hurt.”

“You have no control over my life or my actions. I know how to handle myself.” Tuah rests a hand, gently, on her forearm, and Andy does her best not to melt into the familiarity of it.

Andy can feel everyone’s eyes on the two of them. She ignores it. “I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if something happened to you while trying to help me.”

"Andromache, you are as mortal as I am. If I can’t go, neither can you.”

You have not fought the way that I have fought. You have not died the way that I have died. You have not killed the way that I have killed.

Andy sighs and rubs her forehead with her free hand.

“Fine. But you’re staying in the van. James, too.”

Copley almost protests, but one stern look from her and the words die on his lips.

Andy locks eyes with Nile. “We’re gonna need a mission control for this one.”

***

Joe slips into the big bedroom as Nicky is packing their bag. They discovered, some years ago, luggage that allowed them to conceal weapons from metal detectors and X-ray machines. Nicky is stowing a pair of handguns in the compartment. Joe misses the days when it was inconspicuous to travel with a sword. We used to be a society, he thinks, longing, and a little amused.

Nicky’s back is tense as he places his rifle inside of their shared suitcase. He’s facing away from the door as Joe walks in, but Joe knows that he can sense Joe’s presence, a blood-sniffing shark, as always. He wonders absently if there are sharks in the North Sea. He’s never cared enough about marine life to check. The only life under the water that Joe has ever cared about, is, well. But she isn’t underwater anymore, and she is furious in a way that Joe doesn’t think he recognizes. Having not seen her himself yet, he can’t know for certain, but it pulls at him. He knows that it is pulling at Nicky, too.

"Nicolò,” Joe starts. He keeps his voice soft as he closes the door. They have ten more minutes before they have to walk out the door, and Joe has so much that he needs to say.

Nicky says nothing and tucks two travel toothbrushes into the suitcase. Joe approaches him and when they are standing face-to-face, Joe reaches for the socks in Nicky’s hands (Allah help him, Joe loves this man – who else would remember that he always needs an extra pair?) and sets them gently on the bed. He takes Nicky’s hands in his home, beckoning him to look Joe in the eye. “Nicky.”

Nicky finally meets Joe’s eyes, and Joe is – surprised. They’re glistening with tears, and Joe has to steady himself. For all that he can handle Nicky’s anger, Joe has never quite known how to soothe his sadness. His fear. Perhaps because it is so often an echo of his own. Joe doesn’t know. It doesn’t truly matter the reason; it has never stopped feeling like a failing on his part, and Joe is so tired of his failings, right in this moment. He is so tired of their collective failings, the ways in which they are always ruining someone’s life. It follows him around and sneaks up on him when he least expects it, until it surrounds him and there is no escape.

“I am sorry, my heart,” Joe whispers. He pulls Nicky’s head in until their foreheads are just touching, and they both close their eyes at the same time. “I should have told you years ago.”

“Joe,” Nicky starts. Joe opens his eyes and pulls his head away so that he can look at Nicky. He brings his hand up to cup Nicky’s cheek. “Yusuf.”

Joe’s breath catches in his throat. He so rarely hears that name anymore, so rarely hears any reminders of the life he once had. There is no space, in their world, for Joe’s past, and there has always been more than enough for Nicky’s. Such is the trouble of the West, he thinks. They will learn it one day. They have time. They will always have time. And Joe knows better than to pin the moral failings of an entire quarter of the world on Nicky. He is one man, one man who once perpetrated terrible harm. But then, so is Joe. Nicky knows that, too. There’s a tremble in his jaw that Joe can tell he is trying very hard to hide. But Nicky never was very good at hiding anything from Joe, even in those early years, running from one another and killing one another and pretending with one another. Oh, how good the two of them were at pretending, once upon a time. Not anymore. Not in a very long time.

"Yusuf, I am so afraid.”

Joe swallows. “I know. I know, caro.”

“Do you think… do you think she will come back to us?” Nicky sounds so heartbroken that Joe almost forgets his own immense grief. He has only survived it this long by putting it out of his mind. It is all he has been able to do with it, tuck it away in its little box, since they first dreamt of Booker, since they realized that they could not search an entire ocean, that they had to move on, and hope that she came back to them one day. The past day has smashed that box to bits. Joe is trying to pick up the pieces, but he knows that it will be a fruitless exercise until he can see her again. He has not seen her in so long. He misses her so much that he could lock himself away to sketch her face over and over for thousands of years, one for each day that she has been gone, until he can no longer be sure what is her and what is an invention of his mourning, griefsick mind. He has not seen her face in five hundred years. He wonders if it has become as much an invention as the face of his mother, or his sister, so many long years ago. He wonders if his mind can still call up the grain of her voice. He worries that it can’t. He worries that he might never hear it again.

“I do not know. But I hope. That is all we have ever been able to do.”

Nicky tries to smile, but it does not quite work. “Your faith in people, Yusuf – it astounds me. Even after all these years. Your faith in us, in our family… I am amazed by you every day.”

Joe opens his mouth and then closes it again, caught out in the vulnerability of it. He knows how Nicky feels about him – how could he not? – but Nicky has so rarely put any of it to words, always so afraid of the weight of them, Joe knows. When they were still very young, in that first century, when the years in which all they did was chase and kill and die and pretend that they did not want a different existence with one another were only very recent history, Nicky was afraid of being misunderstood – the linguistic barrier between them left a fear in Nicky that has never quite gone away. Joe has never minded; he can write enough poetry for the both of them. But it is so infrequent that Joe has heard Nicky put his own mind to words. He has always been the quieter one of the two of them, and Joe has come to love the plainness of his speech. But he can appreciate this, too, the raw emotion that cuts Nicky’s voice. Joe is so in love with this man. He will never not be.

"I love you, Nicolò. We will bring her home, one day. When she’s ready.”

“When she’s ready,” Nicky agrees, and then he reaches for Joe slowly. Their mouths, both equal parts hungry and remorseful, meet and Joe can feel the press of Nicky’s teeth through his thin lips, and he marvels. The world is so often cruel, especially to their family. But there is also this. Joe hopes none of them ever forget that again. There is not time enough in the world to forget, even for them. Nicky tastes the same way that he has for a thousand years, and Joe marvels at this, too. They do not use the same soap or eat the same food or drink the same wine that they once did, and yet. The taste of this man, this strange, cruel, kind, miraculous man, has stayed just the same since Yusuf was thirty-three years old and had not yet learned that people are shape-shifters, constantly forming and reforming and washing away with every passing tide. Some things stay the same – Yusuf is every bit the hothead he was in those days – but they are both different men now, for better, and for worse. Yusuf would like to think that it is mostly for the better. Joe knows that the world does not work like that, not anymore. Not for them. There is blood on both of their hands – the lives they took in Jerusalem, so many years ago; Quynh’s multitude of deaths; the grief that Booker has carried alone for almost two hundred years; the life Nile could have had, if she had gone home to her family; all of the people, real, breathing, feeling people, that they have killed in their many long years of existence – but here, all of it is simply noise.

Joe pulls away first, and Nicky does not object. They have somewhere to be. They have lives to save, and maybe a few to take. It’ll be a cold day in Hell when the two of them truly get to be still again. Joe can only hope that their family is finally whole again when they do.