Work Text:
January 5th, 2024
Sometimes, Joe will be in the middle of brushing his teeth and think, Did I kiss Nicky this morning?
And his mind will cast back to the unwelcome blare of the alarm clock, the disgruntled hurph Nicky lets out when Joe inevitably has to roll over him to shut off the goddamn alarm when Nicky lets it snooze for the eighth goddamn time—and then the soft slide of sheets, the quiet sighs, the press of his lips on the bristly angle of a jaw and he mumbles, Sabah alkhhayr, habibi—
But standing at the bathroom sink, biting down on his toothbrush and staring at his own troubled reflection, he can’t remember if that was from two hours ago or if it was yesterday, or the day before… or the day before that.
So he spits, and rinses, and goes to kiss Nicky again. Just in case.
Immortality breeds muscle memory by necessity, a brain overloaded with a thousand years of life, seizing on any opportunity it can find to run on autopilot. Joe still reaches for a waterskin he hasn’t carried in seven hundred years. He regularly finds his sword in his hand with no recollection of drawing it.
And he will never remember whether or not he finished strapping Andy’s kevlar, that day.
He had secured it the same way he always did. Muscle memory. Three straps around the waist, right shoulder, right arm, left shoulder, left arm, and collar. And he remembers that he’d been on the left shoulder when—
“Shit,” Andy had said.
“What—”
And then her gun had been on the floor, bullets spilling everywhere.
“Piece of shit,” Andy had spat, and kicked it across the room.
Joe had exchanged a look with Nile.
“I’ve got an extra .45 ACP,” Nile had said, unsnapping the Pelican case and rooting around. “I used it last week in Salinas, it’s been rock solid.”
She had eventually unearthed the gun, slapped a cartridge into it, and handed it over to Andy, who had slotted it into her own holster with a scowl.
“If you break this one, too, we’re gonna have to start checking you for curses, boss,” Joe had joked.
And then Andy had lashed out with something else, something that had made Joe wish Nicky was there with them instead of posted up on the ridgeline behind a bush a mile away, because Nile was tough and she was confident, but she still drifted in Andy’s tides in a way that Nicky and Joe didn’t. And with Andy’s mood swinging darker and darker by the week, Nile was being pulled more and more adrift.
He and Nicky were pretending they knew what was going on with Andy, for lack of any better solutions. It was the only way they themselves wouldn’t be left adrift, and as such, Joe would feel a hell of a lot more secure in this sham of confidence if Nicky were here to squeeze his shoulder, bump his hip in solidarity that something isn’t right, I know, amore. But instead it was just Nile, and just Joe, and Nile was looking to him to cast the liferaft.
The uncertainty in her dark eyes had tugged at a pit deep in his stomach, pulled at him as like recognized like—something isn’t right, something hasn’t been right for months—but the fear of what that meant had been even greater, and so Joe had broken eye contact with her and grabbed his helmet.
And.
And he doesn’t remember if he’d finished tightening that kevlar strap on Andy’s left shoulder.
Joe should have been paying attention. Nicky should have been there. Someone else should have done up Andy’s goddamn vest, because maybe they wouldn’t have been distracted and they would have made sure it was done right.
Four hours later and Joe is braced on the edge of the courtyard against a sandstorm of bullets, refugees huddled behind him and the weight of responsibility pressing down on him with enough force to paralyze if he thinks about it too long. He has to get them through this.
“COVER!” he bellows, and a second later Andy is out from behind a sheet of ruined fuselage and firing back, bringing the assault of bullets to a halt.
Joe runs with the refugees—dragging, first, then shoving them along, shrieks of terror and protest lost in the haze of gunfire, anything to get them to the exit, go, go, go he’s screaming—
And then Andy’s shots stop.
Reloading, Joe thinks. Hopes.
He pulls out his own gun as muzzles start to appear on the terrace above them, and comes to a halt in the middle of the courtyard to aim. Terrified refugees stumble past him as they flee for the exit. Joe fires once, twice at the stone, and the edge of it explodes. The muzzles pull back.
Andy still isn’t firing.
“COVER!” he yells, pointlessly, because it’s been too long and Andy is either out of bullets or incapacitated.
He fires again, the last bullet in the clip.
Misses.
Joe ejects the cartridge and bolts for the exit, joining the tail end of the stream of refugees, and with his free hand he unstraps a full cartridge from his vest and jams it into the gun and—
The woman in front of him goes down, child and all.
Two more refugees go down a meter ahead of him, as the storm of bullets from above starts up again.
Joe drags the child out of its dead mother’s arms, finds it screaming, and shoves it into the first pair of arms he sees. More refugees fall.
“Andy!” he yells
Bullets hit the ground in front of him, and Joe scurries back, firing almost blindly at the second floor windows where the ends of their enemy’s rifles are just barely visible.
Joe takes a bullet to the leg as he dives for cover behind the fuselage, but as he goes down he sees one of the enemy rifles jerk, and then fall back.
Did Nile move in from her position at the exit? Or was it Nicky, from up on the ridge?
From the ground, Joe hears screams of terror and bodies falling.
Please, he prays, to whichever of them made that last shot. To both of them. Please, get them out.
Joe takes great, heaving breaths as his femur warps and consolidates, reforms, pushes the bullet out through muscle and fat and then presses up through his skin until it splits open and the bullet pops free. Healing almost always hurts more than the injury itself.
He raises his head, panting with the pain, and sees Andy on the ground two meters away.
She’s got a hand pressed to her chest.
No, Joe thinks. Then, Kevlar.
She’s just bruised. It’ll just be a bruise.
He drags himself up onto his elbows. From this vantage point, he can see the pool of blood surrounding her, red-brown in the dust.
“Boss,” he calls.
In the back of his mind, he registers that the world has gone quiet. The refugees have stopped screaming. They’re probably all dead. Their mission has failed.
Joe wants Nile. He wants Booker. He wants Nicky.
He wants to wake the fuck up, because he is on his knees in a pool of Andy’s blood and seeing up close how her eyes are glazed and unfocused, how dark blood bubbles between her lips and her chest is barely rising, and this can’t be real, it can’t be fucking real.
“Andy,” he says, staring at the crimson spreading across the camouflage of the kevlar vest. It doesn’t make sense. None of this makes sense. “Andromache.”
Except that in the crease between the chest plate and the collar plate, a bullet went through. A one-in-a-million shot. An impossible shot.
“No. No, no, no, not like this, no, please, Andromache— ”
She takes in a gasping breath. Blood trickles from her mouth, and her eyelids flutter.
“Andro—”
But Joe doesn’t see her die. His world goes dark a second later as a bullet catches him through the back of the head, and by the time he wakes again, her sea-glass eyes are empty and her body is cold.
January 4th, 2024
The wind was cold before the sunset, but now it’s positively bitter. Booker has another swig of kirsch, careful not to take too much, because he used the last of his money on these bottles, and the first is already done, the second is nearly empty, and there is no third because everything in this damned city costs too much.
He’s still not drunk enough.
He’s still alone.
“Come on,” Booker rasps, gripping the bottle by its neck and pressing the mouth of it to his chin so that his hand doesn’t shake so much. “Come on, you motherfucker. Mon frere. Motherfucker, I’ve been waiting, I’ve been—I'm fucking ready."
Parisian traffic is a distant echo up here. It’s only him and the wind, just like it has been for the last four nights. He’d started out with wine on the fire escape, but it hadn’t worked, and it hadn’t worked again, and now he’s desperate on the roof with two bottles of kirsch.
“Please,” he says, and takes another miserable glug when the wind steals the words away to a place where they can't be answered.
He tips the bottle back again, but receives only droplets this time. The bottle is empty.
Booker exhales, and stares at the empty bottle. His vision swims a little, so just to be sure, he tips it back one more time.
Yep. Still empty.
He holds the bottle out for a long moment, until the wind has numbed his fingers completely. (Or maybe it’s the alcohol. Unclear.) He nods. Then he tosses it over the side of the roof, and counts.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Glass crashes against cobblestones, just barely audible above the howling of the winds.
“You’re not there, are you?” Booker demands of the swaying sea of rooftops around him. “You’re not—you’re not coming back.”
They don’t reply.
“Fuck,” Booker says, feelingly. He closes his eyes, and the world tips violently until he reopens them again.
Maybe he is drunk, after all. Drunk enough.
He wobbles his way over to the edge of the rooftop. Stares down at the alleyway below him. He thinks he sees the glint of shattered glass on the stone, but maybe that’s just his imagination. The cobblestones are moving a lot, after all.
He looks up, and looks around, one last time.
Then he jumps.
And counts:
One.
Two.
Three.
Fo—
January 3rd, 2023
“Five, six, one, five, one,” Nicky reports. “Two men in, one on guard outside the door. Two patrolling the wall.”
He’s utterly focused on the spotter scope. Doesn’t even look up when Andy’s pencil goes skittering across the dirt.
“Okay?” Nicky asks, eyes fixed dead ahead.
“Fine,” she says shortly, and snatches the pencil back up.
He’d better not press this. Andy’s knees ache, her neck is sunburnt, she’s been out of water for three hours now, and she is not in the fucking mood for it.
But he’s going to. She can see him worrying at the grooves of the scope’s focus with his index finger, restless with indecision, but after hundreds of years she knows he’s going to say something.
Right on cue:
“Boss.”
She breaks the pencil in half.
“We can do this job with only the three of us—”
“I said I’m fine."
“I just—”
“I don’t care what you just, I said I’m fine.”
“You said you were fine in Xi’an,” Nicky replies.
Andy grits her teeth. "Jobs go wrong, Nicky," she bites out. "Sometimes we lose, and people die. That's just the way it is.”
After a beat, Nicky looks away from the scope. “And you think their deaths were unavoidable?”
Andy’s temper, barely leashed to begin with, snaps.
“You know, it’s real fucking rich to hear this from the guy who sat up in his little nest the whole time,” she hisses. “You did nothing. You didn’t even make your shot, you just watched. Always watching, watching, watching, aren’t you?”
Nicky stares back coolly. “And who put me up there in the first place?”
The image of Nicolò flashes before her eyes, five hundred years ago, staring in confusion at the crossbow that had been unceremoniously shoved into his arms. The uncertainty in his voice when he’d said, “But... Yusuf and I always fight tog—” and whatever cruel words she had spat back at him to make it clear that insubordination would not be tolerated.
The fury drains out of her just as suddenly as it had come.
He doesn't deserve her anger. She doesn't know why it's always so hard to remember that with him.
“...Nicky,” she says.
After a thousand years she knows how to shape his name into an apology.
Forgiveness comes as readily as it always does from him, in the softness of his eyes and the warmth of his smile. Wordless, he takes his hands off of the scope completely, holding them out to her until Andy clasps them in her own.
“I can’t—”
“I know,” Nicky says, and squeezes her hands tight. “It’s okay.”
“It’s not,” Andy says, closing her eyes against the compassion on his face. She can feel her hands twitching in his, feels her eyes burning, and she hates it more than anything .
“It will be,” Nicky promises.
November 15th, 2023
The growling of Nicky’s stomach sends Joe on a deep-dive into their backpack, and after several minutes of shuffling through knives and maps and somehow the rangefinder three separate times, he emerges triumphant with a fistful of granola bars. He hands one to Nicky, and opens one for himself.
They’re far away enough from the attic’s lone window that they’ve risked a little light, so Joe can see Nicky’s face as he glances at the granola bar’s packaging.
“Yours is ‘Cardboard Which Aspires Toward Strawberries’,” Joe says, nodding his head. “Mine, I think, is… ‘Paste That Was Once Maybe Near a Blueberry’.”
Nicky’s mouth quirks upward slightly as he unwraps it.
Joe does not like it.
Nicky is supposed to reply with something like, “Well at least it’s gluten free cardboard,” or “But was it an organic blueberry?” because Nile’s health food crusade is a regular source of entertainment for them both.
But Nicky eats his brick of non-GMO proteins and grains without complaint.
Joe wants to prod him with a joke of his own, maybe about the kale chips that they’d been saddled with repeatedly for the better part of last year, but instead he peels the wrapper off of his own bar and takes a resigned bite.
It's stodgy and it sticks to his teeth long after he swallows the last bite. He uses his tongue to try to dislodge a particularly stubborn bit on his bottom left molar, and reminds himself that Nile’s motives for keeping them on healthy diets are… well-intentioned. He even agrees with it, in spirit, because he understands the reasoning behind it. But at the same time, Joe survived for nine hundred years on gruel and moldy bread and salt pork, and it is an inarguable truth that Lucky Charms Cereal Bars are genuinely delicious.
“Play a game?” he asks, when most of the protein bar is out of his teeth.
Nicky lifts one shoulder.
“Antakshari?” Joe offers.
“On a mission? ”
“Six degrees of saracens?” Nicky makes a face. “Initials? Rhyming journeys? Oh! Tower of Babel, we haven’t played that in ages.”
Nicky, though, shakes his head. “Another time.”
“I’ll let you pick the first word,” Joe offers.
“No thanks.”
“I even promise to let you have all your made-up Dutch words.”
Nicky’s eyes raise slightly at that, his mouth twitching into another smile, but he shakes his head again. “Another time, Joe. Can we not sit and enjoy the quiet?”
“You’re not enjoying it,” Joe says frankly. “I know you. You’re sitting here stewing something miserable in that head of yours.”
Nicky doesn’t reply. He folds the granola bar wrapper slowly, pressing the creases sharply with his fingernails, half upon half upon half until it can be folded no smaller, and then he holds it between his thumb and forefinger, and stares at an empty spot on the ground. Joe sees his fingers tense and un-tense as he squishes it over and over.
As long as Joe has known him, Nicky has always been soothed by little repetitive actions such as this. He caps and uncaps bottles. Runs a fingernail back and forth through the divots of a zipper. Worries at the clip of a pen until it inevitably snaps off. Joe is forever slipping paperclips and empty keyrings into Nicky’s pockets, because when there is nothing on hand to fidget with, Nicky will resort to his own flesh instead, chewing on his lip, or picking at his cuticles, sometimes until he bleeds.
It’s just one more blip on Joe’s radar, one more proof that there’s something wrong with Nicky, the same way there’s been something wrong with Andy for months, now, and Joe hates feeling so useless to help the people he loves.
Eventually, he clasps a hand around Nicky’s wrist, thumb landing just above his pulse point, and squeezes gently. “Hayati.”
Nicky’s hands go still, and he turns his head. Gives Joe the smallest of smiles.
"Do you remember Basil?” he asks. “At the house by the river in Lamia?"
Joe has to dig through his memories.
Basil was… a dog, he knows that, but they've had a dozen dogs, they’ve had a hundred houses by the river, and Lamia is in Greece and when he thinks of Greece he thinks of pulling fishnets from the sea day in and day out under a roasting sun, and… the nutty, dense sweetness of halva… one truly specular night in an olive grove—or had that been in Izmir, before it fell to the Ottomans?
“It was the merchant’s dog, and she got her leg caught on a wheel,” Nicky reminds him gently. “And the merchant took her to the side of the road to cut her throat, but you—”
“Basil!” Joe says, as his brain finally manages to unearth the memory of a floppy-eared blue-eyed dog. “My little rescued princess. I loved that dog!”
“She was the worst dog we’ve ever had.”
“She wasn’t so bad,” Joe says immediately, although if memory serves, she was .
“You spent a week getting bitten and scratched, and wasted half our money on poultices that she would immediately rip apart.”
“It wasn’t half.”
“It was.”
“And you can’t blame her for tearing her medicine apart, how was she supposed to know any better?.”
Nicky gives him a look of fond exasperation. “She absolutely did know better, and she enjoyed every second of it. That dog was a demon. You could see the evil in her eyes.”
“She’d had a hard life on the road!” Joe protests.
“You died twice from infected dog bites. Twice.”
They haven’t done this bit in probably four hundred years. Joe is amazed at what they can pull from the depths of their memory sometimes.
“Well, she was worth it.”
“We nearly starved that winter because she wouldn’t stop digging up the garden. And she only had three working legs, so it wasn’t like it was easy for her—it was a targeted attack on our well being.”
“Oh, don’t exaggerate. We didn’t starve.”
“Nearly. I said nearly.”
Joe grins, and squeezes Nicky’s hand. “And then we were all the more grateful for the spring. Stop speaking ill of our dead dog, it’s not polite.”
“She wasn’t polite.”
Joe flicks him on the wrist.
“Ow,” Nicky complains.
“What in god’s name had you thinking about Basil, anyway?” Joe asks.
“She was a very memorable dog.”
“Hayati, after all these years, surely you’ve learned that I’m not quite as dumb as I look.”
Nicky shrugs, and his eyes slide back to the floor.
Joe waits.
“I don’t know,” Nicky says, eventually. He hunches his shoulders a little, and his fingers start squishing the little folded granola wrapper over and over again. “Just. Thinking about how much—” He exhales, slowly, and then lifts his eyes again to meet Joe’s. Gives him a small smile. “I love how much you loved that damn dog, even though she was horrible. You took care of the stupid mongrel for two years until she got killed on a hunt. Anyone else would have put her down, but you… you just saw an injured dog that needed love, and gave her two more good years.”
Joe is pretty sure that his whole heart is shining through his eyes right now. “Nicolò…” he says.
“You’re a good man, Yusuf,” Nicky tells him, earnest and plain. “I love that about you.”
And—Nicky isn’t one for poetic declarations and endless sweet nothings, not like Joe is. He’s quiet and dedication wrapped fast around a steel core, held tightly in reserve. But every now and again, when he feels he needs to and not a moment before, Nicky wields that steel like a broadsword, and every time it takes Joe to the fucking ground.
(Joe is also aware that he’s being distracted. There is something bothering his Nicky, something that has been festering for weeks, and it takes a lot to upset someone as old and patient as Nicky.
But he lets Nicky get away with it, this time. This is truth enough for now, and they have a million tomorrows stretching out ahead of them. One of them will bring his answers.
Joe can wait.)
November 1st, 2023
On a fire escape in Paris, Booker sits and drinks from a bottle of cognac.
Any anniversary. Any birthday. Any possible significant marker of time, and he’s out here. He’s sat through sleeting rain and baking sunshine. He’ll sit through blizzards this winter.
He’ll wait forever, if he has to.
(Or, you know, ninety-seven years.)
October 15th, 2023
"So, while you and Joe were in Barcelona last week, I tried and failed to get Andy to go for a Pap smear," Nile says, mid-assembly of the G22 they're going to use in a few hours. "Advice?"
Nicky stops unpacking the spotter scope to give her a blank look. “A what now?”
“A pap smear. You know. For the cervix.”
“What is—the… neck?”
Nile sighs, and pulls out her phone, but Google Translate’s best offering for an Italian equivalent is “pap test”. She tries “cervix cancer” instead.
“Can-gro allah service,” she says.
Going by Nicky’s expression, that didn’t help.
Nile waves a demonstrative hand at her nether-regions instead.
“Ah! Il tumore del collo dell’utero,” Nicky says, looking relieved to finally be on the same page. “Yes. What about it?”
Nile takes in a breath. “Doctors have a really easy way to check for it, now, called pap smears,” she says, almost verbatim what she had said to Andy a week ago. “Women are supposed to get them every couple years, so that they can catch it early and, you know. Treat the cancer early. So they’re really important.”
Nicky nods agreeably.
“And Andy should get one,” Nile continues. “But she’s refusing.”
Nicky frowns. “Well, does she really need one?”
“Yes! She does! And also, like, maybe a mammogram. And a colonoscopy. I don’t actually know how old she was when she became immortal, but she probably wasn’t the pinnacle of health back in six thousand BC or whatever, so it wouldn’t hurt.”
“Nile, Andy went to the doctor two weeks ago, and he said she was fine,” Nicky reminds her. “If she needed a test, the doctor would have said so.”
God save her from these ancients.
“Right. That was an orthopedist, for her broken arm,” Nile says slowly. “But she also needs a regular doctor, or like, a gynecologist or something. Orthopedic surgeons don’t know about things like blood pressure and diabetes and stuff.”
Nicky looks skeptical.
“Look, who’s the expert in mortal stuff here?” Nile demands.
“We were all once mortal.”
“I’m serious!”
Nicky raises his hands in surrender, amused. “Nile,” he says, “mortal or immortal, you’re still not going to make Andromache do anything she doesn’t want to do. In fact, the more you want her to do something, oftentimes the more she’ll refuse to do it on sheer principle.”
Nile grits her teeth.
“Like a mule,” Nicky adds helpfully.
“But this is important!” Nile bursts out, frustrated and really fucking tired of no one taking her seriously. “This is—Nicky, this is what’s going to keep her alive! Why don’t any of you get that? All the health food, the vitamins, the vaccines, the fucking—fucking BPA free water bottles! I’m just trying to keep her alive, and none of you care, not even Andy, she doesn’t even—”
Nicky pulls her into a hug.
“Oh, Nile,” he sighs, holding her so, so tight.
Nile hiccups against him, breathing hard and fast and refusing to let the tears fall.
“We care. I promise we care,” Nicky soothes, thumb moving in slow sweeps between her shoulder blades.
“Then fucking act like it,” Nile spits.
Nicky tightens his arms around her. “It’s… Nile, these things you do… It’s admirable, that you mean to keep her alive with salads and doctors and… non-BPA water bottles. But do you really think Andromache of Scythia is going to die of cancer? Of diabetes?”
“She damn well could, if she doesn’t go to a doctor and get checked,” Nile mutters.
Nicky pulls back a little and she makes herself look up at his stupid, sympathetic face.
“She runs into warzones, Nile,” Nicky says gently. “Every week. She wasn’t made to die of disease, and she knows it—she’s a warrior, and kevlar or not, one day she’s going to die a warrior’s death.”
Nile shudders with the suppressed sob.
She isn’t ready. She can’t lose Andy. She can’t lose any of them, but especially not Andy.
Nicky hugs her again.
“I think something’s wrong with her,” she whispers against his shoulder.
It feels like a betrayal just to say it out loud.
Nicky’s thumb pauses. “You mean besides the broken arm?”
Nile nods against him. “She’s been… different. Quiet. Angry. When we spar she’s—she’s really angry. You know?”
“I’m sure it’s nothing.”
“You have to have noticed. I’ve never… never seen her like this before, Nicky. It’s like… She keeps losing her temper over the littlest things. Stupid shit, shit that didn’t used to bother her at all. And she’s always going off on her own—and I know she’s got the whole lone wolf thing going on, but she used to hang out with us, you know? And now it feels like… sometimes… she hates us.”
Nicky is quiet for a long moment.
“I think,” he says eventually, “maybe the broken arm was a bit of a… how do you say? A wake-up call. She’s confronting weakness after thousands of years of escaping death. It’s not easy to deal with.”
“But didn’t she do that, like, three years ago?”
“I think she’s allowed to have more than one mental health crisis about her own mortality, Nile.”
Nile sighs. “You really think that’s all it is?”
“I do,” Nicky promises. “Just give her some time. If there was anything really wrong, she would tell me.”
Ugh.
Nile reminds herself that Nicky has known Andy for almost a thousand years. She herself has only known Andy for three. She’s probably just over-reacting. Andy probably talked about this with Nicky, anyway—with the broken arm, Andy has spent almost all their missions side-lined as his spotter, so if anyone is going to have any insights on her mental state, it’d be Nicky.
And Nicky would never lie to her. Not about this.
“Fine,” Nile grumbles. She doesn’t like it, but she’ll trust Nicky.
“Good,” Nicky says. “Now finish aligning your scope, we’ve only got an hour before sunset.”
Nile reluctantly goes back to her scope, and thinks—warrior or not, Andy is going to get a damn Pap smear if Nile has to personally knock her out and drag her to the office herself.
September 27th. 2023
Andy watches Nile take out another soldier and shout something Andy can't hear and dart towards the door. Seconds later Joe comes into view and follows her in, and the door swings shut behind them.
Beside her, Andy hears three quiet percussive pops about a second apart, and the three remaining soldiers outside the base drop dead in rhythm—one, two, three.
She focuses again on the door, but it remains closed.
It takes an age before Andy finally pulls the binoculars away from her face. Her eye sockets throb as the skin peels away from the plastic, and she's fairly certain that she's been left with angry red rings from pressing them too close. Annoyed, she raps the binoculars against her plastered wrist, over and over, until Nicky says, "This is always the worst part."
Andy makes herself ungrit her teeth. "Yeah."
Nicky flicks the safety on his scope and switches to his own binoculars. His free hand takes up the paracord of the binoculars, and starts twisting it around his index finger in a neat little helix.
Andy closes her eyes and visualizes the blueprints once more, pictures the hallways and the stairwells and the exits, sees the footpaths of the guards and the sight lines of the security cameras. She opens her eyes and looks through the binoculars again.
The door is still closed.
She watches for as long as she can stand it, and then glances over at Nicky again.
He's still flat on the ground, binoculars steady in one hand, eyes unblinking.
"Let's take it in shifts," Andy says, knowing herself and knowing that she needs a sense of structure right now or she'll do something… regrettable. “Ten minutes and I’ll switch you out.”
Nicky gives her an American OK—or a “thumbs up”, as Nile keeps insisting they learn to call it in English. Andy has spent millenia lumbering after contemporary terminologies, and with so very little time now left to her, she really feels like at this point she should be able to use whatever the fuck names she’d like to, thanks.
Andy makes it to seven minutes and seventeen seconds on her watch before she raises her binoculars and checks the door.
“Anything?” she asks, like she isn’t staring at the same deathly still base exterior that Nicky is.
“Sorry, boss,” Nicky replies.
Andy inhales quietly, and exhales quietly. Makes herself lower the binoculars, and rocks on the balls of her feet. Her casted arm is heavy and sweaty and she hates it so much .
“It’s a good mission for her to lead,” Nicky tells her. “Well-chosen.”
Andy knows this.
“You’ve trained her well.”
“Yeah. Only took me three tries to get it right,” Andy mutters
Nicky looks over at her briefly, like he’s pretending not to understand. Probably as a ploy to get her to talk about it because he thinks if she says it out loud, she’ll feel better.
Damn him.
“Booker,” she sighs, eventually, and gestures with her binoculars to encompass the two hundred years of failure that had come to such a spectacular head three years ago. “You,” she adds, more quietly.
Nicky shakes his head. “Andy—”
But Andy decides that it’s been close enough to ten minutes, and quickly pulls her binoculars up to watch the base.
She’s never actually apologized, not with words, because she will never use words when actions will suffice—and she knows that Nicky understands this. They’ve always understood each other.
Quynh had always told her that it was because she and Nicolò were so much alike, that she hated him so much in those early days. Andy had nearly taken her head off at the time for saying it. But where Yusuf had been a welcome addition to their lonely treks—bright, loud Yusuf with his raucous stories and lively drum beats—Nicolò had been quiet and awkward and always fucking watching with his too-big eyes like he could see right through her. Too soft for the life they lived. She’d wanted to carve out all the tender places inside of him, strip him bare until there was nothing left but sharpened bone and sinew to march into battle.
(Lykon had only been dead for eighty years, then.)
So Nicolò had been Quynh’s, the way Joe had been Andy’s. It had worked. She’d made her peace with him, the way one makes peace with the rocks under their bedroll.
But then Quynh had gone to the bottom of the ocean.
(Andy doesn’t handle grief well.)
She'd torn Nicky away from Joe with vicious pleasure and put him up in the trees, in turrets, at the crests of hills and the wedges of the crows nest. Shoved a slingshot into his hands, a crossbow, a flintlock, and eventually Nicky had emerged from the Boer War with a Swedish Mauser rifle that could take out a target five hundred meters across the field with what passed for startling accuracy at the turn of the 20th century. He’s been behind a scope ever since.
She and Nicky have been at peace for a long time, now. She needs him just as much as she needs Joe, or Booker. Loves him just as well.
Still, as she crouches in the baking sun and watches, waits minute by minute by minute for any sign that her family is okay, powerless to do anything but hope—she says, “I’m sorry.”
There’s a beat, and then Nicky grasps her hand and squeezes it tightly. She thinks her hand twitches a little, but she’s not sure. Doesn’t want to be sure.
“Don’t apologize. Not to me.”
Andy swallows. “But if ye forgive not men their trespasses,” she says, without taking the binoculars away from her eyes, “neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. Isn’t that how it goes?”
“I didn’t know you’d finally gotten around to the New Testament. I thought anything published after The Aneid was too postmodern for your tastes?
“Fucking hilarious, Nicolò.”
She feels soft lips on her knuckles, there and gone again. “There’s nothing to forgive, Andromache.”
July 1st, 2023
There’s a tree root digging into Nicky’s ribs, and with every inhale it pushes the bruise a little deeper into his bones. But there's no better position they found for the scope, and this angle allows them to minimize any interference from the wind while giving them the best coverage. The chamber is loaded, and Nicky’s finger is featherlight on the trigger. Through the scope, he watches the comings and goings of the encampment, but he’s fixed on one door in particular.
Behind him, he hears the thwip of a silenced gun.
“Got ‘im,” Joe announces. “I don’t know how much longer we can hold out, though. I know Copley said this mission was important but that’s the third scout I’ve taken down. Eventually they’re going to send out a team.”
Nicky doesn’t reply. His sole job is to wait for their target to appear on the scope. Joe’s job is everything outside of the scope, and Nicky will keep doing his part until either he’s hit the target or until Joe decides it’s too dangerous to continue.
He hears Joe crouch down in the dirt next to him, reloading his own gun.
Ideally, Joe would be on the ground with him—giving Nicky wind speed and temperature updates, switching him out with binoculars to prevent eye strain—but this entire area is under constant patrol, and it made more sense to Joe to be on protection detail rather than truly spotting. It leaves Nicky to do his own calculations, but he has enough experience that he can multitask.
Also, Joe thinks that they’re here to take out the cartel leader, and according to Nicky’s calculations, it would be best to not disabuse him of that notion.
To be a sniper requires a certain flavor of morality that doesn’t always sit well with Joe’s palate.
They wait in perfect silence for another age. Nicky doesn’t know how much time passes. Sweat is trickling down his temples, the tree root digs into his ribs with every breath, and still on the scope he keeps one eye on the door and the other on a nearby flag, watching it billow and sag as the wind comes and goes. At some point, Joe kills another scout.
Then the door opens. Two guards step out, followed by a man in a suit, who is in turn followed by a pregnant woman, who is in turn followed by two more guards.
Nicky lines up his shot. The flag has just started to billow again toward the southwest so he aligns the scope two degrees left for wind but not three degrees because these bullets tend to have a left-hand spin—bah-dum—twenty degrees up for gravity—bah-dum—no adjustment for temperature and humidity because it should be canceled out by the rotational forces of the earth, given that he’s shooting almost straight west—bah-dum—
Between one beat of his heart and the next, he fires.
When he readjusts his scope, the woman is on the ground, and the man is hovering over her, shouting. The ground is already stained crimson. She is dead, and the fetus will follow within minutes.
“I hope that hit,” Joe breathes, next to him. “Because I see an armored truck coming our way, we’ve gotta go, Nicky. You got him?”
“Right through the heart,” Nicky replies.
May 17th, 2023
Booker is sitting on a fire escape in Paris with a bottle of kirsch in one hand, and a glass in the other.
This isn’t the first birthday he’s spent alone. He didn’t even have to spend it alone; he could have let Farah stay last night instead of kicking her out with a half-assed apology and instructions to return another day with more condoms. But she’s warm, and sweet. Can’t have a proper wallow with a lady like Farrah around.
He is two hundred and fifty-three years old today. He’ll be three hundred and fifty years old when he sees his family again.
That’s ninety-seven more years.
He’s so good at math.
“Three down, eighty-seventeen to go,” Booker mutters, and raises his glass of kirsch up to the sky in a mockery of a toast.
The glass flares laser red for a split second, and then it explodes.
Booker freezes.
But, no.
It didn’t explode. It was shot, right out of his hand.
The smile comes to his face slowly, then all at once.
“Don’t you fucking shoot the bottle, mon frerre,” he calls, in no particular direction because he has no hope of pinning Nicky down. “It’s fucking expensive, all right?”
There is no answer.
Booker lifts the bottle of kirsch up and takes a swig, and then nearly chokes when there’s a thwip and then a sudden flare of heat across the top of his head like a burn. Booker reaches up with his free hand, and feels the bullet hole in the top of his wool cap.
Grins.
“Missed!” he yells.
He hears the shatter a second before his right hand lights up in white-hot agony and Booker swears, yanking his injured hand in close to his body and curling around it protectively. Kirsch drips down his face and soaks his pants, and his hand throbs as the bullet hole knits itself back together.
Fuck, it hurts.
But despite it all, there’s a smile still on his face, and he can’t help the laugh that bubbles up. He laughs. He laughs, and laughs, and then at some point he starts to cry.
Booker is two hundred and fifty-three years old today.
And he is not alone.
March 12th, 2023
“Taghayar.”
“Veränderung.”
“Changement.”
“Commutatio.”
“Cambio.”
“Cambia.”
“Canvia.”
“Veranderang.”
“Ah-hah!”
“What?”
“I said that one already.”
“Yusuf, my love, you said Veränderung. I said veranderang. It’s Dutch.”
“It is not. You don’t even know Dutch, Nicolò.”
“I know that word.”
“You guessed! Everything in Dutch is probably just -ang instead of -ung.”
“Ah, so you admit that it is veranderang.”
“I don’t know if it’s veranderang, because I don’t speak Dutch, and neither do you, so it doesn’t count.”
“I let you have canvia, even though we both know you don’t speak Catalan.”
“Why do you always insist I don’t know Catalan?”
“Because I’ve never heard you speak it, amore.”
“Maybe if you would let us visit Barcelona.”
“They burnt us at the stake, Yusuf.”
“Half a millenia ago! It’s a lovely city. I hear they hardly burn any homosexuals at all, these days.”
“We’re off topic. I let you have your Catalan, so you let me have my Dutch. Fair?”
"What is this, Rahba Kedima? I'm not haggling for points, the only words that count are ones you actually know."
“Yusuf. You wound me with your distrust.”
Joe’s eyes narrow. “You know what, hayati—if you’re so sure of yourself, let’s look it up when we get back to civilization. And if you’re right, I’ll never bring up Barcelona again.”
"...I’m sure a good Muslim man such as yourself would never dishonor God by making a bet—rajs min eamil alshaytan, naem?”
“Fugit impius nemine persequente iustus autem quasi leo confidens, Nicolò.”
Joe waits.
“And if you win?” Nicky finally asks, reluctant.
“If I win,” Joe says, “I buy us tickets for La Familia Sangrada, and you start packing your swim trunks.”
There is a long, long pause, and then eventually, Nicky sets his jaw, and holds out a hand.
They shake.
“Veranderang,” Nicky says slowly, as their hands drop away.
“Biến đổi,” Joe replies.
“Allagí.”
“Değiştirmek.”
February 9th, 2020
Andy waits until Nicolò has secured all the latches on the Pelican case and pulled the zip on his backpack and is, in general, completely packed up, before she says it.
“I need a favor.”
Nicolò stops what he’s doing and looks over to her. “What’s up, Boss?”
Andy makes her way over to him—it’s a small office they’d been camped out in all day, it doesn’t take more than a few steps. “Nicolò,” she says, and gently pushes him back until he’s sitting on the empty desk.
Nicolò goes where he’s directed without question. As always. Her loyal, loyal soldier.
“I need a favor,” she says again, but feels better about it this time because they’re eye to eye now. Nicolò's eyes are bright green in the setting sun.
In their earliest days, Quynh would describe her own eyes to her—like the stormy sky, like the summer sea, like giant glass beads. And then they had met Nicolò, and she’d said, his eyes are yours .
“Before I was immortal,” Andy says, shoving her hands into her pockets because she’s got no knife to twirl and no gun to clean as she speaks. She should have brought one. Stupid. “Before I was immortal,” she presses on, “I lived in a small village. We’d been there for generations—two hundred of us, maybe. And. My family was cursed.”
Nicolò stares at her.
Andy shrugs. “Not really. But thousands of years ago, that’s what it was, you know.”
“And… what was the curse?”
“That the women in my family—when we reached a certain age, we would be… touched by the gods.” She glances at him again, and his eyes are unblinking. She swallows, and says, “Usually the hands first. My mother’s hands were touched first. They would tremble—a little at first, and then more and more, until she could hardly hold a bowl. Could hardly feed herself. And her soul trembled right with her, she got—angrier and angrier. Irrational. Throwing things, slapping her children, running through the streets… Until one day she ran right off a cliff.”
Nicolò's sea-glass eyes are wide, wide, wide.
“It killed my grandmother, and her mother before that,” Andy says, slowly. “And when my sister’s hands started to tremble… I left for war before the gods could get me too.”
“But it wasn’t the gods,” Nicolò says, white as paper.
“No,” Andy says, wryly. “Though it might as well have been.”
“What—do you know what it—”
Andy shakes her head. “No. I looked a few times. Parkinson’s. Lewy Body Dementia. Other weird shit. I don’t know what it is, I don’t know if it died out in my village or it evolved into something people get today or—or what. Doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it matters.”
“None of those diseases have cures, Nicolò,” Andy says.
He stares at her helplessly. “Maybe. Maybe you don’t have it.”
“Maybe,” Andy agrees. She holds out her hands, steady as anything, and Nicolò grabs onto them for dear life. “Maybe it skipped me.”
“Andy,” Nicolò says.
Andy takes in a fortifying breath, and looks at this man that she’s hated, and punished, and fought beside, and laughed with, and loved, and says, “I need a favor.”
January 21st, 2020
It was only recently that Nile found out that Nicky was the team sniper—and, look, okay, she gets it, there are a lot of things to explain to her, and this is a group of people that haven’t had to explain themselves to anyone in about two hundred years, but. Like. She felt like this was kind of a big one to leave out of the orientation packet.
Mostly, she’s salty because two weeks ago she’d found Nicky in the living room polishing a Barrett M82, and she’d been so surprised that what had come out of her mouth was: “What are you doing with that? ”
“Cleaning,” Nicky had replied calmly.
“We own a sniper rifle?” Nile had said, flummoxed, and then immediately felt like an idiot, because these people also owned throwing stars and and hook swords and maces, so of course they had a sniper rifle lying around.
“I own several, actually,” Nicky had told her.
It was much further into the conversation that Nile realized the pronoun change wasn’t incidental—these rifles were truly Nicky’s, because while the others in the group were passable at long-range projectiles, Nicky was the specialist. It doesn’t really make sense to her.
Nicky? A sniper?
In the Marines, snipers had been almost completely separate from other soldiers. They got headhunted out of basic training about halfway through and were rapidly shunted off to sniper school, only to be seen again on the outskirts of the base, eating alone or in small groups at the mess hall, being shuffled through unit after unit and never staying in one place for more than a few months. What everyone knew about snipers, though, was that they were weird.
They were usually loners. Quiet. Smart. Their jokes were too dark, and their eyes were too cold.
Nicky isn’t like them at all.
Nile herself had been passed over during bootcamp. Her marksmanship had been above average but not top of the class, and anyway, she’s never been one for math. Not to mention, she’s got no patience for the kind of waiting around that job requires—give her a knife fight any day.
Nevertheless, when Nicky announces that it’s time she learned the basics of long-range weaponry, Nile can’t say she’s not excited.
He takes her out into the Black Rock Desert (Andy and Joe stay behind in Reno for what they assure Nile is arduous training but she suspects is actually a day on the ski slopes), and when she expects to be handed a rifle she’s instead handed a battered spiral-bound notebook.
“First rule of long-distance shooting,” Nicky says, handing her a pen. “You handle a different weapon every day. You think you’re just shooting a bullet out of a gun, but you’re actually shooting it through the gun, and then through all the atmosphere that sits between you and your target—the wind, the air pressure, the rotation of the earth. All of it affects your shot. So, every time you shoot, you document your conditions. The world is a part of your weapon. This is how you learn to use it.”
So Nile dutifully records the temperature, their coordinates, and the wind direction and speed. Then she sights her target (a particularly unlucky rock, in the far distance), and learns to use a rangefinder.
“They don’t show this in the movies,” Nile grumbles.
Nicky laughs. “The fun part is coming, I promise. Let’s start on the scope.”
This, at least, is a little more interesting. Nicky walks her through setting up the bipod, attaching the bolt carrier, and affixing the telescope to the top. He pulls out a little black cylinder from the backpack that he explains is an angle degree indicator, which he doesn’t need to use but apparently beginners do. She wonders if anyone on earth is not a beginner when compared to Nicky.
Then, she lays down, and brings her eye up to the scope for the first time.
“This hand here,” Nicky says, wrapping her right hand around the pistol grip. “Remember, it’s not loaded, don’t be shy. Finger on the trigger guard. And—other hand here.” He places her left hand against her right collarbone—tucked in, like a chicken wing. “The best steadiness is this way, I promise. All your body is in line with the gun.”
“This is so cool,” Nile breathes, staring at the rock through her cross-hairs. It’s larger than life through the scope.
“Now, you see your rock?”
“Yeah.”
“Remember, we calculated that it should be about 4 mil-dots high on your scope. Is it?”
“Yeah.”
"Go ahead and center the tip of it. Your wind speed is about ten kilometers per hour north right now, so adjust four clicks left, and your angle of degree is about ten, so cosine ten is zero-point-nine-eight, so adjust one click up.”
Nile moves the scope accordingly. The rock is completely off the center of her scope now, barely in the corner of it. She tells Nicky as much.
“That’s normal,” he tells her. “Even in ideal conditions like these, the earth is going to pull your bullet in the wrong direction, and chances are you won’t even hit your target the first few times.”
“Are you telling me,” Nile says, pulling her eye back from the scope, “that we are in this flat-ass desert, with no wind and perfect visibility, and the best sniper rifle that money can buy still can’t hit a damn target?”
“I’m telling you the person behind the rifle won’t hit the damn target,” Nicky says, but because it’s Nicky the mocking is gentle and Nile just laughs.
“Okay, fair,” she agrees. “But, also, what the actual fuck. I can’t imagine doing this on a moving target. You’re seriously telling me that in the middle of a battle you’re up on the hilltop doing AP calculus in your head?”
“I miss shots all the time,” Nicky says easily.
“Uh. I’ve seen you, man.”
“You’ve seen the shots that hit. But even I miss about twenty percent of the time, depending on the conditions. That’s why you’ve got to judge your shots so carefully—every time you pull that trigger, you need to be prepared not just to miss, but to hit the wrong target entirely.”
Nile grins up at him. “You ever hit one of us?”
“I did.”
“Did you ever shoot Andy? ”
Nicky smiles. “Once or twice.”