Chapter Text
Joe twitches when Nicky releases his hand. Blinking through the numb haze that had descended upon him, he watches through the rearview mirror as Nicky wraps his arm around Nile again. Nile's breathing has gone shallow, her face oddly blank. She doesn't react to Nicky's touch other than to turn her face into his shoulder and close her eyes.
Nicky holds her steady. He's grateful, Joe knows, to have someone to take care of. Some purpose toward which to channel the great iceberg restlessness in his heart.
Joe turns his eyes back toward Andy. He still hadn't asked if she would let him drive. It's too soon after that odd swerve she did, just before she changed course for Blackpool; if he asks now she'll take it personally. Her blood-spattered lip will curl in a snarl. It's an expression he could picture well, could draw with his eyes closed.
The look on Andy's face now, though—that is not a face that appeared in any of the sketchbooks Joe had ever filled, neither the burned ones nor the ones he'd hidden away. No, Joe realizes, he's never seen Andy like this.
She looks… in pain. And he's seen her in pain before, of course, but this… this is the clenched-teeth, furrowed-brow look of moderate but persistent pain, the kind of pain that just won't go away. It's a grim, granite-carved expression: unchanging, unyielding. Joe's seen this look on other people—too many other people—but never Andy.
That's because Andy had never been in pain for this long.
Because for the first time in millenia, Andy is mortal.
If she notices Joe looking, Andy doesn't react. Joe doesn't think he could stop himself from looking, either. Part of him wants to look away, wants to keep this unnatural sight from sketching itself into his mind's eye, but it's too late. It's there. It will always be there. It'll make its way onto his sketchpad eventually, and first he'll hate the sight of it, but as centuries pass and his memories of Andy's face fade he'll treasure that sketch more and more. He'll draw the same expression over and over again, whole volumes filled with Andy in this one terrible gossamer-dangling moment. Eventually Joe will realize he's been redrawing Andy's face based not on his memories, but on his previous sketches. Until even the memory in his mind is rendered in faint charcoal lines.
A sudden swoop drops through his chest. Joe blinks his eyes, suddenly buffeted by great gusts of centuries blowing back upon him. This feeling—this gray, hourglass-like dread—he had felt it only three times before.
The first was the day the doctor told him his father was dying.
It had been a slow death, months in the making. Yusuf was already immortal, then—he'd fled the burning ruin of Jerusalem and the monster with ocean eyes who had killed him over and over again in its flames, made his way back across the Mashriq and the Maghreb to Mahdiya and launched himself into his parents' arms. Even then his father had been waxen and thin, prone to coughing fits.
Two years after the doctor's diagnosis, his father was dead. One of his mothers—Zeyneb, his father's other wife, not his birth mother—had never been the same. Overnight she became frail as a dove; she clung to Yusuf's arm when she moved from room to room. One long, terrible year later, she died too.
Joe spent the next fifteen years, every single day of them, dreading his mother Tawenza's death, dreading it up until the day she went to sleep and didn't wake up. That was when he left the city of his birth and, in the way that feels truest to him, he never went back.
And then, centuries later, Quynh. Oh, Quynh. The shape of his grief for her is different than those of his parents'. Losing Quynh had been sudden and brutal. No anticipation, just the sucker punch of her absence, an earthquake with no warning before it and only devastation behind it. That's how Lykon had gone too, from what Andy and Quynh had told him.
There would be no earthquake death for Andy. It was to be another landslide death, visible long before the end.
Joe had loved other people in his life: Nicky, of course, and Andy and Quynh and— a loud ringing in his ears —but also other people he'd met over 900 years: friends, colleagues, brothers-in-arms, and every loss had hurt, every single one. But none of them had loomed quite so large in his life as his first family and his immortal family.
Joe's eyes feel wet. The realization fills him with a sort of furious petulance—how could his eyes not be wet?
Without conscious thought, he finds Nicky in the rearview mirror. Nicky is asleep, his head lolling on Nile's. It almost—absurdly—makes Joe smile. Nicky: who on safe, quiet nights will often roll out of bed to read instead of chasing sleep that wouldn't come, but who can always find the rest he needed on a battlefield or in a crisis.
Nicky is an orphan. There were monks at his monastery who were like father and brothers to him, but Nicky had never watched someone he loved die slowly, over years and years. The way Joe feels now—Nicky has never felt that way before. He's not prepared for this. Joe wants to take him in his arms and hold him, to unzip Nicky's skin and crawl inside him. But he can't, all because of—
Booker. Booker knows.
Booker knows what it feels like to watch a family member skip away, what it feels like to spend years trying to hold back a landslide that can't be stopped. And still… and still... and still he….
"Joe?"
Andy's voice yanks him back.
She's looking over at him, her eyes ticking between him and the road. Her brow is even more furrowed than before.
"Are you okay?" she asks him. She asks him.
" Andy ," Joe whispers.
Andy just raises an eyebrow. "What?"
Joe swallows. Looking at her, he forces his lips into a smile, finds it's easier than he thought it'd be.
"Yeah," he says. "I'm okay." A beat. "Are you o—"
"I'm driving," Andy interjects.
Joe's lip twitches even as a fresh mist of tears rises in his eyes. He shakes his head. "You are."
For a moment he thinks she's going to say something. But then her jaw shifts and she's looking back out through the windshield.
Joe drags his fingertips across his filthy jeans. Lifts his hand. And covers Andromache's where it covers the stick shift.
A moment. Then Andromache flips her hand up and twines her fingers around Joe's.
Joe pours every fiber of his attention into this moment, this living moment of holding hands and sharing breath. The feel of her skin, dusty and cool, against his.
When Andy lets go, it's because she needs her hand to work the stick shift. They're exiting the motorway. An hour has passed.
Joe raises his other hand to his mouth and bites down on the knuckles, hard.