Chapter Text
The tomatoes are beautifully done. Tart, charred to perfection, plucked off the vine just a day before their ripest peak in the height of harvest season. The pasta is just as lovely as the tomatoes, seasoned lightly with salt and pepper and parmigiano, warm, al dente. A flourish of basil on the top, swirled around a centerpiece of halved tomatoes like the leaves of a flower. His favorite pasta, prepared in his favorite way, and Nicky’s stomach turns at the sight of it.
Because before anything else, it is an apology.
Some would argue that Joe actually was a better cook than him, all those centuries ago when they first met. But Nicky enjoys the process of it in a way that Joe never quite did, preferring to spend his creative energy with charcoal or paintbrush in hand, and hundreds of years of practice have turned Nicky into a far better cook than the rest of his family.
When Joe cooks, these days, it is for a special occasion. An anniversary, a particularly bad death, a week off after a grueling mission. Or, as the case is today, when he knows he has done wrong.
Nicky eats the pasta. Of course he does. It is delicious, and it was made with love, and he is hungry. He washes the bowl in the sink and leaves it on the counter to dry and feels a hollow pit in his chest at going through the familiar motions like everything is normal. Nothing is normal.
Joe lied to him.
And then cooked him dinner instead of talking to him about it.
-
Nicky feels like a passenger in a car being driven by somebody else. Fate, maybe. Or a force even more sinister—inertia.
I was thinking of having some time alone, Joe says, like he has been able to lie to Nicky in any convincing way since the thirteenth century, and Nicky lets him get away with it. He knows, as he has known for weeks, that something is off, but he says only ti amo into the rise of Joe’s shoulder and watches him walk off. Joe does not say it back, and if there was any doubt that he is intensely preoccupied keeping up a lie, it is gone now.
Getting in the car and directing the driver to follow Joe is as simple as breathing—he has followed Joe since the moment they laid down their weapons on that sun-dried, blood-crusted sand nine centuries ago. The active choice would be to turn away and let Joe do whatever it is he is doing with such secrecy until he feels ready to share, but Nicky is a passenger. He follows the current like a trout in a river; the current always pulls him to Joe.
He’s alone, Joe says outside Booker’s apartment, as though six months of physical separation could touch what true loneliness feels like, as though exile is the same as isolation. Nicky imagines Booker has already set up a wall of screens to monitor their every move and catch glimpses of the corners of their faces in CCTV footage from all over the world, tracking his family every day for a hundred years as a kind of tantalus-style penance. Or perhaps that is just what Nicky would do, if he could bend a computer to his will as Booker can. Is Booker lonelier than Andy all these decades without Quỳnh? Lonelier than Nicky in the cursed years of his life before he drove a blade into Joe’s chest? Lonelier than Nile in those few days between realizing she could not die and meeting another like her? Is Booker lonelier now than in the immediate aftermath of losing his wife? No, Nicky chose exile as the punishment that day in London because it is the appearance of loneliness without the haunting bleakness of it—there is no man he would condemn to true loneliness, not least one he loves so dearly as Booker.
He made his choice, Nicky says instead of any of that, and then none of it matters anyways because Booker’s blood is on the ceiling and the walls and the floor and Nicky can taste it in the very air when they step inside the apartment. Nile and Joe do a quick search of the place to check for any clues—there are none, unsurprisingly—and Nicky just stands there in the kitchen with iron in his mouth, the lingering reminder of his death at Keane’s hands far too close to the surface. He wants to help them; he doesn’t. There’s nothing but static between his ears.
Joe keeps looking at him in the taxi to Rimini, and Nicky does not look back. Looking is a choice, and Nicky is a passenger—he stares out the window like a good passenger should. There is a lot to untangle between him and Joe, the Booker of it all and the lying and the lying, but this is not the moment he wants to do it.
This is not a safe house he knows, one of Copley’s newer finds he presumes, so Nicky cannot find a place to hide before Joe corners him by the window. To say they fight would be wrong. In the open like this, Nile just a room away, they cannot have the argument that is needed. At most, they squabble. You lied to us, Nicky says sharply when Joe continues to act as though what stands between them is merely Booker—it is the first time he feels as though the fog has lifted around him and perhaps he is in fact driving this car off the cliff himself instead of merely watching as it falls.
Something flickers across Joe’s face before Nile interrupts them to announce Andy’s arrival, like maybe he finally understands why Nicky has barely looked at him all day.
And then Nicky finds himself once more in the passenger seat, a spectator watching this day pass him by like scenes from an awful movie, when Andy brings with her an old friend. An old friend. Another lie, another betrayal, another tangle to unravel. Nile does not miss the emphasis on old—Nicky loves her dearly, in that moment, for pushing back when he cannot. You knew there was another, and you never told us? Joe asks, the sting of betrayal sharp in his voice. Nicky looks at him when Andy tries to defend herself, knowing Joe will feel the weight of his gaze even if he cannot see it. A lie of omission is still a lie—he hardly thinks the words before they slip past his lips, another brief moment where he feels his hands on the wheel.
There is no time to discuss who this Tuah is and why Andy kept him secret and why they have never dreamed of him. There is no time to discuss this unfamiliar Discord whose very name strikes unease or what she may want that necessitated painting Booker’s blood all over the surfaces of his home. Booker calls Joe—and it jolts him, the conversation, when Nicky has not heard a French word in six months—and then they are off to see him, because Nile is too new and Andy is too mortal for whatever surprises might be coming.
Joe does not say anything on the ride there. Nicky looks out the window and lets the silence hang over them just the same. No time for that now.
As it turns out, the only surprise is to see Booker’s face. Hair a little shorter, beard a little longer, a little haggard from whatever he has been put through (and maybe a bit too much drinking), but otherwise he looks much the same. Nicky did not expect otherwise, but it remains a shock to see those familiar features staring back at him and realize he has missed the swoop of Booker’s hair and the stodge of his nose and even that unhappy curl to his lips that Nile once called a resting pout face.
I need to see Andy, Booker says, and Nicky hears the unspoken name that lingers in the air; there is only one news it would be unconscionable to let anyone but Andy hear first.
His heart is in his throat until the moment they are back at the safe house and Booker says the words that damn them all to whatever comes next—she’s out.
Andy is undone just like that. That she lingers even another minute, her fingers shaking as she traces Quỳnh’s calligraphy, is likely more from the shock of the news than because any part of her is capable of being where Quỳnh is not. (Nicky has not forgotten, in the beginning, how Andy drowned herself in the ocean day after day after day to feel a fraction of what Quỳnh was feeling, surrounding herself in the same water that surrounded Quỳnh as though in some way that would hold them close together; has not forgotten how the last time he and Joe pulled up her limp body she begged for them to throw her back without a rope, preferring to drown with Quỳnh than live without her)
It’s Quynh, Andy says with the weight of millennia in her voice, and Nicky makes no move to stop her. If it was Joe—if it was Joe, nothing would keep him away. To die at the point of his beloved’s sword after five hundred years would be a death he would welcome, and he cannot begrudge Andy for feeling the same.
So Nicky does not move. He is a passenger, he is a statue, he is merely here to bear witness to whatever is to come. It is Nile who goes after her, because Nile is the best of them—and because Nile is the only person who can stand between Andy and Quỳnh with the clarity it will take to keep a mortal Andy safe.
After they leave, however, Nicky cannot bear to be in the room any longer. Between Booker and Tuah and Joe, there is nowhere to look that feels safe. He spits Booker’s betrayal back in his face, because at least there the anger is uncomplicated and easy, and walks away to find a garden to hide in. Copley’s safe houses are all like that, well-decorated and soulless and boasting easy access to at least one private outdoor space.
When he comes back inside several hours later, there is no word from Andy or Nile (or Quỳnh), and his favorite pasta is sitting on the table.
-
The hours stretch and shrink as he waits for Andy and Nile to return. Maybe with Quỳnh by their side. It is a thought he cannot hold onto for long without losing the shape of its edges, having abandoned the faintest hope of its possibility centuries ago. That Quỳnh is out, that Quỳnh and Andy will reunite again, that a Quỳnh who is out and reunited with Andy might still be a threat to them all.
(If Nicky were a better man, he would remember that he has wished desperately for Quỳnh to return every day for five centuries. As it is, Andy is mortal and Nile is slowly learning the meaning of immortal grief and Joe is lying to him and Booker—well. That Quỳnh has forced Booker back into their lives ninety-nine years and six months early is not even in the top three reasons of what causes his stomach to twist unpleasantly as dusk creeps closer, but that does not mean it is not on the list somewhere.
He has wished every single day for five hundred years that Quỳnh would return and Andy would smile again, but today he feels only fear)
Darkness falls outside, still with no word, and there comes the question of sleep. He and Joe have very rarely slept apart under the same roof, but it has happened. Contrary to what Nile might believe about them having invented love, as she calls it, they have had disagreements in the past just as any two people who love each other might. But Nicky feels so weary; everywhere he turns there is a face that inspires apprehension, and the only man under this roof he trusts with his whole heart is still Joe. Always, always Joe.
Nicky waits in the garden until he is certain Joe has gone to bed, tracing patterns in the dirt with a stray stick and watching the stars slowly come out behind the clouds. He knows his heart’s routine more than by heart, by rhythm and by rote and by the padding of his footsteps on the floor. But nothing feels quite so certain today, not even the weight of the ground beneath his own feet, so he waits twenty minutes as a buffer before going to the room he expects Joe has picked for them. Second floor, nestled in the back, with a window view of these very same gardens.
(His beloved is nothing if not predictable. Nicky likes defensible corner rooms and multiple escape routes, and Joe likes to wake up to the light of the sun)
There are two small beds in the room. Joe has taken the one by the window, leaving the one in the corner—pressed securely against two walls, a tight angle to anyone intruding through the door, good sightlines to both exits—open like an offering.
Nicky does not take it.
He slips into Joe’s bed and curls around his body like a shield, putting his own back to the open room. Neither of them speaks; there is nothing to say. The lies of the daylight will be resolved in the daylight, but here, in the dark of night, Nicky knows no greater truth than to hold Joe in his arms.