Chapter Text
(cover art by polarcell)
“We’re lost,” Joe moans. “It’s too fucking dark, I can’t see the street signs.”
“We aren’t lost. El Rinconcillo is just up the hill and around the corner.” Nicky only slurs his words a little — a testament to his power of concentration, given the amount of wine he drank over dinner. He hasn’t tripped over a single cobblestone, either.
“Up the hill? This whole city is nothing but hill,” Joe laughs and snags him by the belt, pulling him into the shadows of the nearest door stoop. It’s so late, the street is deserted, all the shops and cafes closed hours ago. Nicky lets himself be pushed against the wall. Joe takes his face into his hands, fingertips curling against his stubble. “Nico, we stayed at El Rinconcillo the last time we were in Valparaíso. It doesn’t exist anymore.”
“Did we?” A deep crease forms between Nicky’s eyebrows, his gaze fixed on Joe’s mouth. “It is so hard to keep track.”
“Especially after two hundred years and two bottles of pinot,” Joe replies, leaning in to lick the taste of wine off his lips. Joe is perfectly sober, but nibbling Nicky’s earlobe makes him giggle and grind their hips together; this creates a pleasant buzz for Joe, no alcohol necessary.
Smashed between Nicky’s ass and the alley wall, a cell rings tinnily. This has the unfortunate side effect of instantly sobering Nicky up.
“No,” Joe breathes into his ear as Nicky tries to arch far enough from the wall to pull it from his pocket. “Let it wait.”
“Andy,” Nicky replies simply, shoving harder with his hips and snatching the phone. He isn’t concerned about Andy calling; he’s concerned that it might be Nile, reporting some mortal disaster from their girls’ trip into the Chambal Valley in India. Joe huffs in resignation and rests his forehead on Nicky’s shoulder while he answers.
“Pronto. Oh, hello Copley,” he says with obvious relief, and the knot in Joe’s stomach loosens. Turning his head, he tucks his nose into the warm spot beneath Nicky’s jaw, basking in the rumble of his voice through the rest of the conversation.
The call is short; the file Copley sends to both of their phones is long. A confirmed case of human trafficking and suspected organ harvesting being run through a Silicon Valley tech mogul’s development labs — technically, in the bunker beneath them.
After they finally find the hotel (La Fauna, not El Rinconcillo), they check out and take the next flight to California, with a quick stop-off for supplies at their safehouse in San Francisco — one of several dozen the group has collected over the centuries. Copley’s intelligence puts the hostile count at around twenty, not including the tech mogul. Joe and Nicky leave a message for Andy and Nile, but they don’t bother waiting for backup. Time is of the essence, anyway; people are being held prisoner in this bunker, they can’t twiddle their thumbs for a flight across the Pacific.
The night they breach the compound, things go as well as can be expected. Half the hired muscle does the only logical thing and deserts their post, running into the hills the instant they come face-to-face with two gun-toting, sword-wielding, death-defying maniacs. The other half goes down easily enough, after that.
The most difficult aspect of the operation is figuring out how to open the bunker door. (Neither of them mentions how much quicker it would be with Booker, although both of them think it — Nicky with grim resignation, and Joe with still-simmering rage.)
Joe is putting the finishing touches on the knots tying the unconscious tech mogul to his chair when Nicky’s horrified voice comes from the next room: “They’re children, Joe. Madre di Dio, they’re all children.”
With a last, rough yank on the rope, Joe follows him inside. Four children are crammed into a cell, varying in age from toddler to teen. There are no visible signs of abuse, and the lab is free of any medical equipment; there’s definitely been something going on here, but not organ trafficking.
Nicky has already shed his weapons and is picking the lock, speaking gently to them about how they’re safe now, this is a rescue. On a nearby desk, Joe finds a stack of drivers licenses. He sifts through them, squinting at the names. “Looks like there were adults here at some point. Sara Williamson, Pedro Yglesias, there were four of them, too.”
One of the kids, a girl, stands up. “How do you know my name?” she asks, a sharp eye on Nicky as he pulls open the door and steps back, gesturing for her and the others come out.
“It’s all right,” he says in his most soothing tone. The two toddlers start wailing; the other kid, not much older, stays warily planted in the corner of the cell.
“Sara Williamson?” Joe repeats, holding out the license for her inspection. The woman on the license is in her fifties, and this girl is in her teens. She edges past Nicky, who is busy picking up a toddler and checking him for injuries, and comes to snatch the card from him. “Hey, are you ok?”
“Earlier, were those gunshots? Are you guys SWAT or something?”
“Or something,” Joe replies, reaching into his backpack offering her a bottle of water. She stares at it but doesn’t take it. Smart girl, he thinks. “How long have you been here?”
“I don’t know. I went to sleep at Shauna’s house in Encino and woke up here an hour ago. They were already here.” She gestures at the younger kids. “They haven’t been very talkative, obviously. Where is this place? It looks like a spaceship or something.”
“Not a spaceship. We’re just outside of Saratoga,” Nicky says.
“What? Like, in San Francisco?!” she says, shrill. She should have been panicking long before this, probably, but adrenaline does strange things to the human body. “I’m supposed to be at Shauna’s! My mom’s going to be so pissed!”
At this point, Nicky has a crying toddler on each hip and is bouncing them, humming a lullaby under his breath. “Call the police,” he says to Joe, tipping his head at the landline on the desk, beside the licenses. “Let them be returned to their families.”
Joe makes the call while the girl stands beside him, breathing shallowly and staring at the picture of the other Sara Williamson on the license.
“What do you suppose this is?” Nicky asks, after Joe leaves an anonymous tip with emergency services and hangs up. Joe comes to take one of the toddlers from him, shushing her and swaying as they stand together in front of the obvious centerpiece of the lab.
It’s a thick acrylic box — bulletproof, Joe’s certain — the size and shape of a briefcase. Inside is a black rock. It’s weird, for sure; the light seems to bend around it, instead of reflecting off it, but it doesn’t look particularly precious. Certainly not worth building a bulletproof case for and a lab around.
“We’ll take it with us back to the safehouse,” Joe says, absently reaching over to thumb a smear of blood off of Nicky’s perfectly healed cheek. “Copley might know what to make of it.”
The black rock remains stubbornly, mysteriously inert through the rest of the job — the careful dance of fading away just as the locals arrive; the ride back to the safehouse; stripping and cleaning of all the gear they had used. Joe leaves Nicky puzzling over it in the kitchen while he gratefully stumbles into the single shower and turns the water up as high as it will go.
Dirt, blood, and brain matter sluice down in rusty rivulets. Joe closes his eyes. They won. They won. They did the right thing. The children are safe. Alhamdullilah.
“Leave some hot water for me!” Nicky yells through the door.
“Nothing is stopping you from coming in here and sharing!” Joe yells back, feeling the tightness in his chest loosen. Nicky snorts, but Joe can hear the telltale soft thump of gear hitting the floor so he knows it worked.
“Either you stop grinning, or I can remind you of what happened the last time we tried having sex in this shower,” Nicky grumbles, yanking aside the plastic curtain and stepping in. “The mark in the drywall is still there.”
“It was a memorable experience!” Joe steps out of the water so Nicky can rinse, lathering soap over the deeper stains. “Better than staring at that strange rock all night.”
“I don’t think it is a rock. It does not look like any rock I have ever seen.”
“Maybe we should put it in the safe?”
“I doubt that safe will stop anyone who can fight past us to get it.” Nicky holds out his hand for the soap, and Joe takes a turn under the spray to rinse off the suds.
“It’s not that.” Joe frowns. “I just don’t like leaving it out in the open. What if they were developing a new weapon, some kind of ... explosive, maybe?”
“True. But then in that case, I do not think the safe will protect us either.”
The hot water chooses that moment to cut off, so both of them hastily step out. Joe is trying to dry the last fistful of curls with his threadbare towel when he turns around and catches Nicky’s eye.
Nicky. The love of his life. Who is smiling that very particular not-smile as he leans forward gently and licks a stray drop of water running down Joe’s neck.
“I think there are better places for us to be than the shower,” Nicky murmurs.
Joe agrees. Completely.