Chapter Text
“I should have seen it,” Nicky murmurs.
Joe lifts himself on an elbow. “Can’t you sleep?”
He’s a little unnerved. Usually he knows, without needing to look at him, without even thinking about it, if Nicky is asleep or awake.
It isn’t late. There’s still light in the grey London sky. But after the shower, once Joe had finished washing the blood and worse out of Nicky’s hair, after the hasty takeaway meal which Joe ate without tasting anything, Nicky collapsed onto the bed, dragging Joe with him, and since then he hasn’t moved an inch.
The flat is quiet. Not even a clock to tick. Nile went with Copley and Andy to the hospital, and Booker …
I can’t sleep under the same roof as that man, Joe had said, before.
In a hotel, then. Or perhaps at Copley’s. Under a bridge for all Joe cares.
(Joe pictures that: Booker huddled against damp brick down by the Thames, fingers curled around a bottle. He flinches away from the image in what he tells himself is disgust.)
He can’t sleep anyway.
Booker’s pathetic hangdog face. Booker’s useless, showy self-hatred. Booker sitting companionably at his side in front of the TV and waiting for the grenades to blast in. The lower and upper limits on the length of time he must have planned it, and on the number of lies he must have told. The exact angle at which the bullet entered Andy’s back.
Of course, he doesn’t think only about Booker, he thinks about Merrick and Kozak, and Nicky smiling at him across the lab, and Nicky screaming under the scalpels, and Nicky dead on the floor. He thinks about what happened (hands on his skin, pincers in his neck, Nicky screaming, Nicky screaming, Nicky screaming) and what didn’t (tearing Booker to pieces, Nicky staying dead.) He tries to stop, to let the rhythm of Nicky’s slow, orderly breathing soothe his own, but he can’t. His heart strikes and clenches like a fist; he can barely manage to lie still against Nicky’s back. Not that he exactly wants to move. Joe is beyond exhausted; he remembers only delirious snatches of sleep towards the end of the second day, along with the handful of times they drugged him unconscious. The mattress is soft beneath him and Nicky is finally safe in his arms. But there’s no welcoming dark behind his eyes. His body feels like a faulty neon tube, buzzing and spitting with raw, ugly light.
At least he had them — the drugs, the few rags of sleep. If they ever sedated Nicky after they jabbed those first needles into their necks, Joe didn’t see it.
Beside him, Nicky lies staring at the wall, his eyes fixed and empty as when …
Joe swallows, and asks, “What should you have seen?”
“How unhappy he was. He was always hinting at it — all those jokes that weren’t jokes. All that alcohol. And I didn’t do anything. I thought … I don’t know, I thought it was a good sign that he was looking for jobs, I even thought that maybe finding Nile … but I shouldn’t have guessed; I should have talked to him. Because he must have been … in agony, to do this.”
“Stop,” Joe begs. “Please, stop.”
Every word makes his pulse hammer in his chest and his temples — a physical pain that rattles along his nerves and doesn’t fade after a few seconds but stays, stays, stays. He feels a little crazy. Is he the only one who’s angry? Did they all witness different versions of the same events? What universe is this, where the question is what Nicky did wrong?
No one argued when he said he didn’t want Booker in the flat, but if he hadn’t said it, would the others have brought him here? Pretended nothing had happened? Why did it have to be him?
Nicky falls silent.
Oh, but how can he blame the others for not saying anything? Nile’s too new, too young to understand. Andy was still bleeding. And Nicky — Nicky looks almost too exhausted to breathe.
My love, Joe thinks again, were you awake for all of it?
Slowly as if he still felt every bruise, every year, Nicky turns onto his back and studies him. He raises a hand to caress Joe’s cheek.
“We’re safe,” he reminds him softly. “It’s over.”
“Yes.”
It’s not.
Nicky smiles up at him. It’s not a natural smile, and nor is it false, any more than a bar of music is false for not being birdsong. It’s beautiful, and made just for Joe. He turns his hand to stroke Joe’s face with the back of his fingers. “Make love to me.”
In theory, it’s exactly what Joe needs. Usually, it’s what they do, after a mission, after a death. He needs to kiss Nicky everywhere, pour love into all the places he was hurt, wrap himself in the living warmth of his body, and transform a little of this blaze within him into light.
But Nicky is still too pale. His fingertips on Joe’s cheek are oddly cold. There’s something still stricken and unfocused in his eyes. It can’t be blood loss or a concussion. Is it only that he’s been too unnaturally still for too long, his blood cooling while the memories continue what Kozak, and Merrick, and Booker began?
“That’s not what you want,” says Joe.
“I want these thoughts out of your head,” Nicky whispers. His fingers slide upwards to Joe’s temple. “They’re so loud.”
Joe shakes his head and Nicky’s hand drops away. “Don’t make a gift of yourself. Not today.”
“Hayati,” Nicky murmurs. “Don’t I have the right?”
Of course, over nine hundred years, there have been times that they’ve made love without a perfect symmetry of passion, when sex has been an act of comfort or indulgence or praise from one to the other. But now the idea makes Joe shiver. “Today, no,” he says. “Today no one is going to take anything more from you. I will not be one more person to make use of you.”
Abruptly, Nicky’s eyes overflow with tears.
“Oh,” Joe feels a sob, a scream, clawing its way up his own throat. “…love…”
Nicky wraps an arm over his eyes before Joe can wipe the tears away. “Joe,” he says from behind it, “you could never, it could never be like that.”
Joe waits, fighting the temptation to pull Nicky’s arm away from his eyes. They don’t usually hide from each other.
“Talk to me,” he whispers, when he can’t stand it any more.
Nicky lowers his arm in order to squeeze Joe’s hand. He gives him another lovely smile which he clearly can’t afford, and says, very softly, “No.”
It hurts, and for a moment Joe wants to protest. Then he remembers that Nicky was talking barely a minute ago, and Joe told him to stop.
And he can’t take it back. Yes, he sees Nicky’s compassion for the man who betrayed them and part of him loves him all the more for it, but that is excruciating too; it makes him wants to fly to Booker and scream at him, You see? You see who you did this to? He cannot listen to Nicky blaming himself. Oh, of course he does, Joe thinks bitterly, and then again, with helpless love and protective rage, of course he does. It’s one more wound, another region of damage.
It isn’t over at all. It goes on and Joe still can’t stop it.
“Anyway, you already know,” Nicky adds wearily.
But Joe doesn’t know everything. There were those hours when they drugged him, when he doesn’t know what happened to either one of them.
“Then what can I do, what do you want?”
“I …”
And it’s like being catapulted back nine hundred years, when he’d demanded an answer to the same question because Nicolò came to his bed and then retreated into absences and silences and refused to say if caresses exchanged at night meant anything in the day. Yusuf had been angry then, he’d thought Nicolò was playing with him; it was only when he heard that low, tremulous note in his voice, the way his body stiffened as if it hurt physically to force the words out, that he understood how difficult it was for Nicolò to say what he wanted, how hard he had to fight to do it.
I want you, he’d said finally. Don’t you know that? How can you not know? I want you, I want to be with you.
But nine centuries are a long time. There’s almost nothing Nicky could hesitate to say to him now. Almost nothing except this.
“Nothing — I want … quiet, I just want to lie here for a while and you … you want to hit something, or scream, don’t you? And I can’t … I’m sorry — I want — I think I want to be alone.”
Joe nods. He gets up in silence from the bed. Nicky seizes his hand again, and says, “I’m sorry.”
He seems so desperate for understanding. As if, after centuries, he might not get it.
Joe crouches beside the bed, and presses his forehead against Nicky’s. He’s still so cold. “It's all right. I understand.”
It’s true that he understands. All those hours pinned down under the pitiless lights, helplessly exposed not only to the needles and blades and the scientists’ indifferent gaze, but also to each other, terrified of being separated and aware how much every cut and puncture and every cry they couldn’t choke back hurt the other. A little time to suffer unobserved. It’s not much to ask. He understands, even if it’s not what he wants, even if it’s never happened before.
They can be alone, obviously. They can be apart. There are missions that require it. Every now and then they take normal, separate jobs — they’ve been scribes, fishermen, teachers, nurses, they’ve worked on building sites. And sometimes it’s pleasant to wander alone through an art gallery, a market, a stretch of woodland, if only for the sake of describing it to the other afterwards. Nicky likes to attend lectures almost without regard to what they’re about, while Joe needs to know in advance that he’s interested if he’s going to sit in silence for that long. There’s football, which bores Nicky to death but which Joe loves —
(Oh. No more football for a while.)
But Joe can’t remember a time that Nicky’s wanted to be alone after being hurt. Which means this is worse even than 1941, and Moscow, when …
Well, he already knew it was worse.
He’s not so stupid nor so immature as not to understand this isn’t a rejection in any sense that counts, but it feels awful to leave Nicky alone like this, all the same.
He slips on a pair of jeans and leaves the room.
* * *
Nile enters as he’s closing the door to the bedroom. Looking past him, she must see Nicky’s curled back as he rolls back onto his side.
“Is he okay?” she asks in a whisper.
“No,” Joe answers, blankly.
She winces at herself. “Stupid question.”
There’s a thermostat on the wall of the little passageway that leads to the living room. It’s May, but Joe thinks for a moment, and then turns on the heating. For some unfathomable reason the act makes him think of Quynh, which in turn prompts a surge of grief for Andy, who is dying, dying even if it could take decades, but — given who she is, probably won’t.
Then he realises Nile is alone.
A horrible wave of adrenaline floods him. “Where’s Andy?”
“Oh — no, Joe. She’s OK. She will be OK, I mean. They wanted to keep her in overnight.”
Joe tries to get his breath back, tries not to have a breakdown right there by the thermostat. He wasn’t thinking, he realises. This isn’t how Nile would be acting if Andy had died.
“And … she let them?”
“Well, she didn’t want to.”
“So, how …?”
“So I told her she was being an idiot and she had to.”
“And that worked?”
Joe is seriously impressed, even more than he was when Nile rescued them all from the lab. He knows how to raid a building. He has no idea how to make Andy do something she doesn’t want to do, particularly not when it’s “lie down.”
Nile shrugs as if she hasn’t just testified to a greater miracle than immortality, and heads towards the living room.
Joe follows. The furnishings are a little dated, he realises, now that he sees them through Nile’s eyes. The wallpaper had seemed rather elegant in 1998, and perfectly fine even in 2011 when he was last here, but the damask print looks fussy to him now, and it’s peeling away from the wall in places. The swagged pelmet above the curtains is inexcusable, good for nothing but gathering dust. The air smells faintly stale.
Nile picks up the TV remote, then glances at the closed door to the bedroom where Nicky lies. She puts it back down, and Joe is grateful not to have to say anything.
It’s awkward. He owes her so much, and knows her so little. And he is so very tired, and he doesn’t know, now, what there is left to welcome her to.
But he’ll try, at least.
“How are you, Nile?”
Nile has to think about it for rather too long, and makes a face. “Well. I guess the fact that I have no idea how to answer that question isn’t a great sign, but also, I think I had the best day out of all of us, so there’s that.”
It warms him a little that she says all of us so naturally.
“Tomorrow will be better.” It has to be, surely. “Nice dress,” he adds, before she can ask how he is in return.
Nile, incongruously with his last memory of her, is wearing a navy dress with white polka dots. It’s a little too tight at the shoulders and loose at the waist, but it suits her. Her braids, still a little dishevelled but rinsed clean of blood, fall girlishly over her shoulders. For an immortal soldier who just demolished a private army before diving out of a building with a sadistic pharmaceutical CEO in her arms, she looks oddly demure.
“Oh, yeah. Thanks.” A little self-consciously, Nile plucks at the skirt of the dress. Complicated expressions flash across her face. “It was Copley’s wife’s. He said he couldn’t bring himself to get rid of any of her clothes before, but I needed it, so …”
“There are excellent tailors in Deptford,” says Joe, imagining how the dress could look with a few alterations, so as not to think of what Copley is trying to atone for, who his accomplice was. “But you will need things you’ve chosen yourself. We should go shopping.”
“…Shopping in London,” Nile echoes. He has scarcely seen her smile. It feels good to make her do it now — to see her permit herself a small, wary pleasure in the strange turn her life has taken. “You mean like … Oxford Street?”
“Absolutely not,” says Joe, horrified.
“Ah. Tourist hellscape? I get it. But I gotta see it anyway. You can show me the nice places after.”
They examine the bookcase together. It’s less than half full — none of them have ever spent more than a couple of months at a time here, and that not often.
Nile picks a book about Toulouse Lautrec and leafs through it.
“Are you hungry?” Joe asks.
“I got a sandwich at the hospital. It was gross, but I’m good. And it’s like eleven at night, Afghan time.”
“You must be exhausted.”
“Yeah, but I won’t sleep if I go to bed now.”
She settles on the sofa with her book. Joe gazes at the shelves a little longer; the colours and words swim before his eyes and it takes a while for them to settle into meaning. Behind him, Nile puts in her earbuds. The buzz bothers him, it scratches at his nerves, but the least she deserves is her music and his patience.
His eyes snag on a handsome 1890s edition of La Celestina on the bottom shelf. He recognises it, having bought it, though not for himself.
There’s a leather bookmark, still protruding between the pages.
When he can breathe again, Joe takes the book from its place, transfers it to the kitchen bin and then returns. He feels Nile’s eyes on him as he does it, but she doesn’t comment.
He finds a book about the Russian Revolution of 1917, which Nicky bought twenty years ago in the hope that a historian could render it less confusing than living it had been, but then neither of them ever got round to reading it. He joins Nile on the sofa and opens it, and immediately discovers that reminding himself of Moscow, at any point in its history, was an incredibly stupid idea, because Moscow reminds him of today.
He sees arms dragged taut, he sees beautiful eyes left empty. He barely manages not to run back into the bedroom to make certain that Nicky’s really there, that he’s really breathing and all this isn’t some desperate hallucination and Joe isn’t still kneeling over him in a pool of blood on that floor. It seems possible enough, because none of this feels real. It doesn’t feel real that Booker could have done this to anyone. To anyone.
He leans back against the sofa and tries again to slow his breathing, and when he fails, remembering what he’s learned of meditation over the years, to observe its frantic rhythm, to wait the agitation out. But he’s too exhausted to concentrate; he keeps forgetting to even try to call his thoughts back as they fly away to Nicky. To Booker.
Hit something, or scream, Nicky had said. But it is antisocial to scream in the middle of Zone 2 and there is nothing to hit. Perhaps he should find something. Someone. At this point, why not give serious consideration to the idea of finding Booker and beating him to death a few times? It wouldn’t take and it might make Joe feel better.
He would let you, says a voice in his mind that sounds like Nicky’s.
The charm of that idea evaporates instantly.
But the anger doesn’t, it grips and burns. He wants to crawl out of his skin to leave it behind. If he had something to do, a job —
But he isn’t so far gone as not to realise that he can’t trust himself in any kind of fight in this state, even in the unlikely event that he could stumble out into Bermondsey and find a problem suited to their particular skills on the doorstep.
There’s nothing he can do with this feeling, then.
A tapping sound jolts him out of his thoughts. Beside him, Nile isn’t reading either. Her eyes are closed, and her fingers are drumming a tense, rapid rhythm against the glossy cover of her book.
She must feel him looking. She opens her eyes and exhales, shakily. “I guess I’m still kind of wired,” she says, taking out one of the headphones.
“Wired.” It isn’t an unfamiliar expression, but it’s one that’s still relatively new to him; he wouldn’t have thought to use it himself. Joe tilts his head, taking a moment to appreciate it. “Yes, me too.”
She smiles ruefully at him and he finds himself smiling back.
“What are you listening to?”
Nile offers him an earbud, and he shifts closer to her. Her shoulder is warm against his.
He doesn’t hate the instrumentation, though to him the melody seems uncomfortably fragmented and the singer’s voice is distorted by that warped, digitised effect that’s everywhere these days. Still, it’s certainly much better now that he can hear more of it than a rhythmic hiss.
“Well?” she asks as the song ends. Joe pulls his mouth sceptically to one side, and she sniffs indignantly, snatching the earbud back. “I guess it’s a little ahead of the curve for you.”
“I have an extensive collection of modern music,” Joe informs her.
She looks at him with the ruthlessness of the young. “Twenty says every song’s older than I am.”
Joe opens his mouth to cite Zahouania, Franco Battiato, and Nirvana, and then does some mental arithmetic. He shuts his mouth.
“Ha!”
“In fairness,” he appeals, “almost everything is older than you are.“ Nile laughs and it’s definitely the first time he’s witnessed that. “I would open my wallet,” he adds, “but I suppose it’s in France.”
He regrets it as her smile fades. “You’re off the hook. It was the principle.”
“Oh no. A bet’s a bet.” He wishes Nicky had been here for it. “I pay my debts. Try me with another.”
She gives him both headphones this time. This song is gentler, sadder — no drums and hazy, shimmery guitars that remind him of the sixties.
“The start of nothing
I could hate you now
It's quite all right to hate me now…”
Almost, he pulls out the headphones. But then he doesn’t, lets the music pour over him, the pain in it smarting and soothing at once like ice water on a burn. It makes his eyes sting and he closes them until the song ends.
“Better,” he concedes softly.
“Then there’s hope for you,” Nile says. Then she gives her knees a decisive clap and stands up. “OK. I’m gonna take a walk.”
It’s only then that Joe realises that it’s not just that he hates being away from Nicky: he doesn’t want to be alone at all.
Nile says, “You wanna come?”
* * *
Nile sets a brisk pace, marching with a determined air as if she had some important goal in mind, and Joe is content to follow her without caring about their route. His body protests at the speed, his muscles begging for the rest they refused during the hours he lay against Nicky’s back. But the effort of keeping up with Nile gives a purpose to the adrenaline that burns like acid in his veins, smooths the jagged edges of the rhythm of his heart.
I’ll be fine, Nicky had said. Go with Nile, make sure she’s OK.
A gust of wind casts a scattering of rain onto his face. He glances ahead at Nile, but it doesn’t seem to bother her, she doesn’t suggest turning back. He tries to focus on the little points of water on his face, the breeze stirring his curls. He runs his hand over a wet metal railing, through the stiff, cool leaves of a laurel hedge, along a rough brick wall. He can move. There’s nothing holding him down, nothing between him and the sky.
They’re crossing a little park when Nile stops in her tracks, wheels round and cries, “Wait, where are we going?”
Joe catches up to her. A stitch twinges in his side. “Nowhere in particular, I thought.”
“Yeah, yeah …” Nile looks around unsteadily at an array of rose beds, a children’s playground: “But where are we?”
“…London,” Joe responds cautiously.
She rolls her eyes. “Dude, I know. I’m not dissociating, I’m just …” her lip trembles, “…lost.”
Slowly enough that she can move away if she wants, he takes hold of her arm. He waits until she looks him in the eyes. “You’re not lost. You’re here with me.” Nile grasps a handful of the sleeve of his jacket as if it’s all that’s keeping her from sliding off a cliff. “This is Southwark. There’s the Shard. We’re five minutes’ walk from the Thames.”
She stares at him, breathing hard.
“You’re not lost,” he whispers again. “I won’t let you get lost.”
Nile nods shakily, and it’s only now that it’s working that Joe notices he’s slowed his breathing for her to imitate. He couldn’t do it for himself, or even for Nicky. But now, somehow, he finds the calm she needs easily.
They hold each other’s arms and breathe.
“And … you know the way back?”
“Yes. We came down Long Lane, and then Weston Street …”
She sighs, closing her eyes, and he feels her relax. “OK. Thank God you’re here, because I don’t even remember what the building looks like.”
“Do you want to go back now?”
Nile hesitates. “No. Not yet. If you’re not too tired?”
Joe shakes his head.
“Then can you show me some of London?” She smiles crookedly. “Not Oxford Street.”
He smiles back. “Of course. But no more power walking, okay? I’m old.”