Chapter Text
Quynh was surprised at the enthusiasm in which she threw herself into the wedding preparations. It was, by decree of Nile, Booker and Joe, going to be a huge affair. The biggest party since the roaring 20’s , Nicky had teased.
They spent days in the safehouse like this, busying about with venues and clothes and food and security measures. Of course, all this was between the greatest experiences she’d known since escaping the sea. She spent hours napping in Andy’s arms, sprinting between trees in the early morning dew, pulling Booker’s elbows back as she taught him to yield a bow correctly.
She swirled into Nicky’s orbit in the kitchen as they listened to Italian ballads, snapped photos with the new camera Nile had brought her, watching Joe paint the pictures she took, swimming in a nearby lake with Nile.
The days were filled with light and warmth and laughter. Their nights spiraling into long, weary talks of war interspersed with amusing moments from their time apart.
Slowly, Quynh felt the protective barrier she’d erected around herself melting under the warm love of her family. As it melted, so did the indifference she used as a shield, and slowly, she realized she was excited for the wedding. Exhilarated in fact, despite Andy’s grumbles that it was all too much.
“Please tell me that’s not the guest list,” her fiancé groaned as she leaned against the back of Quynh’s chair to stare at the screen she shared with Copley and Booker. Her breath brushed the back of Quynh’s neck, and she craned her neck back to smile lazily.
“It’s only four pages,” she teased.
Andy groaned and bowed her head. Thin brown hair fell over her face, shadowed the aquiline features in darkness that made Quynh’s heart race. It was Andy’s darkness which she saw as her most beautiful attribute, because despite it (or maybe because of it) Andy still led them with integrity and affection. She was the strongest woman in the world.
“We don’t even know that many people,” the strongest woman in the world protested. Quynh arched a brow.
“Speak for yourself. I make friends easily,” she gentled the words by reaching up to press a hand to the back of her neck and tug at the baby hairs there until Andy leaned her forehead on Quynh’s shoulder.
“I don’t see how we’re going to get all these people to Belize, though,” Copley continued. “Half of them are in different countries altogether.”
Quynh shrugged. “We invite the village people then.”
Booker chuckled deep in his throat. “This is a real party, isn’t it?”
“I want to dance at my wedding,” Quynh harrumphed. “Andromache, what say you?”
The other woman sighed against Quynh’s shoulder but did not raise her head. “Is it too much to ask that we just have Joe read a poem by a cliffside and call it a day?” She mumbled into the thin fabric of the T-shirt Quynh had stolen from Nile. It had a picture of some blonde woman staring seductively from an emerald couch.
“It’s our first wedding,” Quynh pointed out. “The next one can be simple. This one, I want a carnival,” with a jolt, she swiveled to Copley and Booker. “Can we have a carnival? What about elephants? Can we have elephants?”
Copley choked. “Where...?”
“I can find you horses,” Booker offered. “Elephants might be too big.” Quynh pursed her lips. When she had first rejoined the team, she had been terrified to ask for toothpaste, all too aware of how badly she’d hurt them, the terror she’d waged against the only people who could understand her.
“The only way forward is to forgive yourself, dear Quynh,” Nicky once told her.
As if the thought had summoned him, they were interrupted by the thump of footsteps along the stairs. “That’s not funny, Joe!” Nicky cried past a round of giggles.
Joe chuckled, following Nicky down the stairs with a wide smile. They had taken their own room an hour before, and Quynh knew after-sex good spirits when she saw them. “But you remember, yes?”
“ That’s not what happened!” Ah good. Her greatest assets.
“Joe, can I have an elephant for my wedding?” She called.
Joe gave a start, as if he’d forgotten other people existed besides Nicky. He turned to her with a wide smile. “As a gift or to ride down the aisle?” This was a good question. Quynh thought it over. She’d not ridden an elephant since the ancient wars of India but she remembered that she’d enjoyed it.
“To ride.”
“Of course you can, sister. It’s still in Belize, yes? There are zoos there. I know a guy.”
She beamed. Andy groaned. Booker rolled his eyes. Copley spluttered.
“ What guy?” he demanded.
“How do you know all these people?” Booker added.
Quynh did not care to know either so she ignored the men. Joe did likewise, even as Nicky swatted his backside and quickly escaped into the living room before Joe could retaliate. Andy raised her head and snuck a kiss behind Quynh’s ear. “You’re seriously going to ride an elephant to meet me?”
“You can ride the horse,” Quynh offered.
“Have you seen the dress Nile found? We’ll need to get a tailor,” Joe asked. Quynh shook her head, though excitement sprouted alive in her chest. She loved Nile’s sense of style.
Quynh had already declines all white dresses, instead preferring the deep maroons or blacks, and Nile had been most helpful in finding the tight-fitting dresses she adored. Quynh didn’t know how the internet worked, but she liked it.
“I hope you don’t expect me to wear a dress,” Andy sniffed.
“Wear what you want, beloved. So long as you are there, I will be content,” she put her chin in her hands and leaned forward. “Did we invite the homeless man from Brooklyn?”
“ Oui. I don’t know how we’ll get in touch with him or transport him to Belize, but he’s on the list,” Booker jumped as a sudden vibration echoed between them. He dug around in his pockets and squinted at the caller ID. “Ah. Its Gwen. We should take this, James.” Joe rolled his shoulders back.
Quynh scowled. “Do they need you back?” She didn’t want to leave the security of their safe haven, but she would if it meant they could watch Booker’s back. He was still a baby, after all.
“I don’t know. Excusez moi, ” Booker dipped his head and surged from his seat. The wheels of Copley’s chairs whirred as he followed. Joe frowned, eyes tracking Booker across the room and outside.
Quynh tugged at his sleeve. “Little brother, how is my crown coming along?”
“I drew the basic design. Once we leave, I’ll buy the materials to make it,” he made a thoughtful noise in the back of his throat. “I haven’t stepped foot in a forge in years. I’ll need to practice. Habibi! ” He called into the living room. “Do you remember how to blacksmith?”
Nicky, leaning against the cushions with a book in his lap, shrugged noncommittally. “I remember the bare basics. I’m sure there are videos online.”
“Online, online,” Joe grumbled. “Whatever happened to learning through trial and error?”
“Not everyone can heal crippling wounds like we can,” Andromache pointed out. She abandoned her spot on Quynh’s shoulder, depriving her of the warmth and wonderful scent of her closeness, to steal Booker’s seat. She took Quynh’s hands in her own and bounced them lightly, as if weighing them on a scale.
Quynh stared down at their hands, curious. Joe noticed the intimate motion as well. With an arched brow, he wisely left them to it, choosing to pounce over the couch and land atop Nicky. As they bickered and laughed, Quynh turned her attention to her future wife.
Wife. How it sent a shiver of delight through her.
Quynh studied the ring on Andy’s finger, how dull and disfigured it looked compared to the rings she’d seen on the internet with Nile. “Quynh, you know I want to marry you,” Andromache began in a near whisper.
Quynh gave a start at the stilted words coming from her, a mixture of ancient tongues they’d created in the decades after their meeting. How long had it been since either of them used it? Seven centuries? Eight?
“I just don’t understand why we’re making such a fuss about it. The only people who matter are right here in this house. We could marry here, now, under the stars and it would be magical. Why the extra nonsense?”
Quynh pursed her lips. “It isn’t nonsense, Andromache!” She hissed. “You are too used to the shadows. For millennia, we have traveled the world as ghosts, never seen, never known. For too much of our lives, I have not been able to kiss you in public,” fury rose inside her, a fire always ignited by the injustices of the world.
“This one moment, this one celebration , I want to share with the world. I want them to see that we are not broken, our love has not been extinguished by the cruelty and hatred of men. Let the entire world come and watch. Let them see me kiss you and be consumed alive by jealousy!”
By the end of her monologue, she was panting. Andromache studied her with barley hidden affection. “They will not understand, beloved. They can watch, but never know how hard we’ve fought,” she pointed out, rational as always.
Quynh bared her teeth in a feral smile, and if Andromache matched it, then all the better. “Maybe not, but let them watch anyway. I want to feel, for one night, as if we are seen .” She cocked her head.
Andromache had never been one for attention. Not since Quynh had met her in the scorched desert all that time ago. Perhaps it had been scoured out of her by the overwhelming worship of ignorant people. Perhaps she’d just always been a private person. Nevertheless, Quynh did wonder if perhaps she was going too far with her own aspirations.
It wouldn’t be the first time.
“Does it offend you?” She asked. In their tongue, offend took many forms, a force of either anger or indifference or anxiety.
Andromache squeezed her hands. “No. It worries me, but... Maybe you’re right. I’ve spent so long in the shadows; the light scares me.”
“Fear is a mere insect compared to your courage,” Quynh scoffed and enjoyed the bright flush that stole up Andromache’s cheeks. “Besides, Booker and James are being diligent in security. And we’ll have an elephant there. Who will challenge us atop the largest beast on Earth yielding our swords and bows?”
“You miss the Indian wars of 860, don’t you?”
Quynh gasped. “Don’t you ?! We rode elephants into battle, Andromache! Elephants!”
Andromache snickered. “You mean we stole them to escape being prisoners of war. We stole elephants and rode them into the jungle...” Quynh waved a dismissive hand. History was shaped by those who stole elephants, and she remembered that it had been her idea, so it was her story.
“You’re only saying that because the gentle beast liked me more than you.”
There was no argument on that front. Andromache had never been popular with their animal friends over the centuries, the only exception being horses and dogs. “You know scientists say the elephant isn’t the largest animal on Earth anymore.”
“I don’t know why I insisted on marrying you,” Quynh threw up her hands in exasperation. Andromache just laughed at her. As usual. Quynh pressed a kiss to the side of her mouth. “We’re good?”
“Always,” Andromache nodded and then leaned forward until their mouths were just barely touching, the thin skin scratching against Quynh’s own lips. They sat there for a moment, just breathing and staring into each other’s eyes. A million emotions crossed between them, too large for words in any language.
They were so enamored they didn’t notice Booker reenter the room, Copley and Nile tight on his heels. “At least we have a head start,” Nile was saying, voice pitched low.
“Boss, we have a problem!” Booker called. Nicky and Joe craned their heads to peer at them over the sofa’s edge. Andy blinked once, twice, before straightening.
“What is it?”
Booker ran an agitated hand through his hair. “Just got a call from the Crow’s Nest. The government forces sent out a mercenary to collect Nile and I, dead or alive. The Crow’s Nest tried tracking them but can’t get a lock. This guy is good.”
Andy’s face hardened. Quynh stood. “Where was he last?”
“Nevada,” Nile reported grimly. “Heading North. We might have some time if that’s the case, but...”
“He’ll figure it out, if he’s that good,” Booker heaved a sigh. “ The Crow’s Nest wants me to hide in a secret bunker for a while.”
“That secret Bunker can be Belize,” Copley interjected with a stern look at Booker. “The U.S wouldn’t dare invade their sovereignty without due cause, especially not since the government stabilized and imports sixty-five percent of the U. S’s fresh water.”
“James...”
“We’re not having our wedding without you, Booker,” Andy interrupted. “Copley is right. Everyone, start packing. We’re moving safehouses. There’s a place I know not too far from here along the border of Mexico.”
They all knew an order when they heard it. Joe and Nicky sprang into action at once. Joe grabbed Booker by the arm and dragged him upstairs, no doubt to collect their clothes and meagre belongings. Nicky and Copley headed into the kitchen to prepare travel food.
Nile wrinkled her nose distastefully. “It’s not another cave, is it?”
Andromache caught her in a loose headlock. “We all have to make sacrifices for the greater good, kid. Now get going. I’m not going to wait around to get attacked.”
Nile shoved Andy away, but she was smiling. She spun on a heel, murmuring something about nabbing the motion sensors. Quynh exchanged a long look with Andy. She would miss this house, with its light and fresh air and beauty, but having been a nomad for centuries, she knew also the acceptance of abandoning an old place for a new one.
“It may take us a little longer, Andromache, but I will marry you,” she vowed. Andy’s mouth quirked at the corners.
“Can’t wait, my love,” they shared a chaste kiss. “I can’t wait.”
It was rare that they had multiple cars to choose from.
As Copley pointed out, leaving even one at the safehouse would only be an advantage for their adversary, so they took them all and abandoned two along the highway south.
Then the seven of them piled into two cars. It was decided that Nicky, Andromache and Booker would ride in one car, always behind the others and Nicky sitting in the back seat with his sniper rifle trained out of the window.
Joe drove the car upfront, humming along quietly to the music Nile chose. She and Copley sat in the back on computer, communicating with the Crow's Nest. The highways were surprisingly empty. Travel abroad was strictly regulated by the government.
Eight hours later, and they reached their new safehouse. Joe screeched to a stop on the western front, and Quynh glared at him. She still hated cars and everything they represented, and Joe’s fanciful driving didn’t help matters.
He smiled back at her, eyes twinkling, before he opened his door and slid from his seat with a long groan. Quynh studied their new safehouse. It was an adobe house, no larger than a Roman bathhouse. The sloped roofs and smooth walls shone gold in the sun.
Around them stretched an inhospitable desert. She arched a brow as the second car hissed to a stop behind them. “Where did this safehouse come from?” She asked as Joe stretched his arms above his head.
“I have no idea. Nicky and I stayed out of the states for most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Even then, we rarely ever traveled this far West.”
“At least it’s not a cave,” Nile supposed, bending in a slow backwards arch to crack her back. When she straightened again, she moved aside as Copley’s strange wheel seat untangled from its box-like state back into a chair. Quynh watched it, fascinated at the jerky movements. “It gets pretty cold out in these deserts, so I brought you extra blankets Copley.”
Copley stuck his head out. “I should think Joe would need those more than me. He’s the old one after all.”
Joe jerked his head to her. “Quynh is older than I am.”
“Better looking, too,” Andy added as she stood from the driver’s seat. It had only been a few hours and Quynh had missed her soothing presence at her side. She waltzed over to kiss her cheek. Andy wrapped an arm around her waist and deepened the kiss until they were both flushed and bleary-eyed.
“To be fair, you’re a little biased there Andy.”
“No, no, she’s right,” Booker pretended to gawk at Joe’s face. “You’ve got some wrinkles popping up there, my friend. And are those warts ? I might have to take Nicky in to trade you for a younger model.”
Joe cuffed him lightly on the back of the head. “Says the man who can get sunburnt from a strong lamp.”
Booker opened his mouth to reply but Andromache cleared her throat. “Unpack the essentials. We’re only staying for the night while Copley fakes our passports. Nile, bring the makeup kit. We have to look like we have money.”
Nile pulled out the large box of their disguise kit. “Sorry Andy, but there’s no way I’ll be able to cover Joe’s warts.”
“Hey!”
“Please tell me this place at least has mattresses?”
Andy slung a bag over her shoulder and smirked. “It has a mattress. If we all snuggle close, we can fit. Except Booker, who has outlandishly large shoulders. One of us will need to keep watch over the fire.”
She opened the door of the adobe and as Quynh had predicted, it was no more than a single large room and a small bathroom. She hauled in their bag of weapons and set it down by the door.
“Since I have the broad shoulders, I’ll take first watch,” Booker volunteered. Andy knelt by the fireplace to get it started and Nicky started unpacking the tub of fresh vegetables he’d brought to cut them, bare feet scraping against the dirt floor.
Quynh collapsed into the single mattress in the middle of the room. Andy was right. It was large enough for them all to sleep, albeit cramped. They’d slept in worse places before. Joe sat beside her and started tugging off his shoes.
“Tired?” Quynh asked in Greek.
He nodded. “I’ve been to a lot of safehouses the past three years,” he replied in the same language. “I wish we could have stayed another few days.”
“Me too,” she sighed, then placed a hand on his back. The strong muscles there contracted, tightened. “I remember when Andromache and I first found you... You were confrontational and immature and buzzing with fury, like a vengeful puppy,” she gently ran a finger up his forehead, across a bushy eyebrow. “You’re old now.”
Joe huffed a small laugh. “Ah, yes... I was quite the handful, hm?”
“Are you joking? Between your waspishness and Nicolò’s self-righteousness, I thought we’d surely kill you both many times over before the second week.”
“As I recall, you were hardly the calmest soul in the sea. I’d never met anyone so prepared to shoot people in the kneecaps.”
“I did enjoy shooting kneecaps,” she agreed with a nostalgic sigh. Quynh sagged over and laid her head on his shoulder, watching as Booker and Copley bickered over new motion sensors, Nile helped Nicky cut up cabbage and Andromache stared into the jumping flames with a thoughtful expression
“I’m glad you’re marrying her. You both deserve happiness, a moment to look forward too,” she hummed agreement. “Are you nervous?” He teased.
Quynh snorted. “Were you ?”
They laughed together, well aware that there was no reason to be nervous. Not for the likes of them, who had been married to their partners in all but name for centuries. “I missed you,” Joe suddenly blurted.
“I missed you too. Nicky may be Andromache’s favorite,” she pressed a kiss to his head. “But you’re mine, Yusuf.”
He smiled. “Oh, I know.”
“I know you stepped up, and took care of my Andromache when I was taken. I know you kept her from losing her mind. She told me.”
“I promised you, didn’t I?”
He had. Neither Andy nor Nicky knew, but they’d once promised each other that should anything happen to either, the other would look after their spouse until... Well, until the end. Whenever that was.
“What kind of trouble are you two plotting over here?” Nile demanded. She pushed the small pile of ribboned cabbage over to Nicky before sashaying over. She wriggled between them, wrapped an arm around Quynh’s waist. “Joe, you’re gonna get your wart juice all over Quynh.”
Joe slapped his hands against his chest with a gasp. “Am I no longer loved? Is that why you wound me so?”
“To be fair, I never even liked you,” Booker announced as he also dove headfirst onto the mattress, making the rest of them bounce. Despite his words, he landed so close to Joe that their hips knocked together. “Hey Nicky, what’s for dinner?”
“I do not serve people who do not love Joe,” Nicky replied calmly.
Joe pumped a fist in the air. “ Thank you, Nicolò!”
Booker shrugged noncommittally. “Guess I’ll just have to eat Joe then. What?” He splayed his hands helplessly as Nicky glowered. “He’ll grow back!”
Nile shivered. “Honestly, I wouldn’t even be surprised if all of you told me you’d eaten people at least once.”
Joe’s expression was a blend of horror, disgust and fascination. “What, do you think it’s like trying on a new shoe? You do it once to make sure it fits?”
“Sixty bucks says Andy’s done it,” Nile dared, and Booker’s eyes widened. He couldn’t resist a good dare.
“Deal, but intentionally or accidentally?”
“I’ve done both so give the girl her money!” Andy replied from the fireplace. Quynh laughed as both Nile and Booker swiveled to stare at her with jaws agape.
Nicky gasped and dropped his cutting knife with a clatter. “Andromache! Shame on you!”
“Calm down, Nicky, it was only a small bowl. Everyone was doing it.”
“Yeah, Nicky,” Joe piped in, imitating Andy’s flippant tone. “Don’t you know it was all the rage back in the cretaceous?”
Quynh couldn’t help but snicker with the others. Andy narrowed her eyes at Joe, fierceness sparking behind the green orbs. Ooh. This would be good then.
“Hey Nile,” she called sweetly. “Did you know that Joe has ticklish ribs?”
Quynh had not seen Joe pale so quickly since the inquisition.
Nile gasped in delight and swiveled. Booker chuckled darkly. In the next breath, they were both dragging Joe down, wrestling him into submission as he bucked and writhed like a feral cat.
Quynh stood and abandoned the mass of thrashing limbs, Joe’s frantic laughter ringing across the space.
“No! Nohohoho!”
“I can make dinner if you’d like to join the festivities, Nico,” she offered. Nicky was watching the scene across the room with a fond smile. Quynh had a feeling that he would videotape it if he could, and she bandied around the idea of doing so with her new camera, but Joe would inevitably find a way to “accidentally” destroy the footage.
“N-n-nic-ck-y! aiutami per favore!” Joe shrieked.
Nicky turned back to the meagre contents of their meal, shaking his head. “I think Nile and Booker have it under control, but could you please prepare the carrots? I need them minced into small pieces, and I’m sure there’s a cauldron around somewhere...”
They were found that night.
The fuckers, whoever they were, interrupted dreams of Quynh’s wedding, where the sun illuminated them all in soft pink light and there was no death or water near. She held Andromache tight against her chest, smiling into the crook of her neck, as they swayed in rhythm to an elephant’s strong march.
As it was with most good things in her life, it didn’t last. Quynh jolted awake with a sharp inhale, the hairs on the back of her neck suddenly electrified by warning. Sirens started to rotate in her head, a subtle warning, warning, warning honed by centuries of battle.
Andy stiffened in her arms, alarm zipping down Quynh’s spine into her beloved’s conscious. Neither of them had time to uncurl from their tight embrace. Suddenly there was a hoarse shout and a warm chest landed on her ankles.
She could feel the thin hardness of a ribcage pressing against her toes. She had no sooner yanked her feet away that the air was split by an ear-shattering hiss . Like a tea kettle that had come to boil.
She sniffed, stupidly, and immediately recoiled from the harsh, sour scent. Her lungs seized, as if trying to buck away from the tainted air, but there was nowhere to go. She was trapped, choking and gasping for breath. As if underwater. Her lungs filled with weight, with acid thrumming through her veins…
Quynh had died many, many times and in many ways. Drowning never ceased to make her either freeze or thrash, and in this moment, the waves destroyed all sense she had. She bucked, brought her knees and fists up to beat against the cold, unyielding metal trying to force a scream... Then she was dead.
She resurrected in a daze while her throat was still healing from being scalded by toxic gas. The muscle and sinew chorded its way together as a spider wove its web, with painstaking slowness.
When her eyes snapped open, the air had been newly baptized in smoke. It was better than poison gas, but it still made her cough and hurl herself upright. “Damn it!” She tried to curse, but the words came out as a croak.
Besides, she wouldn’t have heard her own voice over the noise anyway. It was coming from outside the adobe house. The loud, jolting pops she’d learned to associate with the new bullets of this era.
A machine gun followed by the familiar and comforting zing of a saber through the air. There were men screaming – both in pain and determination- interspersed with grunts and the tight, metallic commands of a leader. This was a coordinated attack.
Andromache! Quynh twisted in the bed. She could survive the toxic gas, and evidently so could others, but Andy was vulnerable, and the smoke could kill quicker than the flames.
“Andromache! Beloved? Beloved!” She hissed into the gloom, scrambling around in the abandoned blankets for familiar flesh.
In the next moment, nimble fingers clenched around her ankle. She gasped and reached out, locking hands with the woman lying at her feet. Andromache stared back up at her, and even in the pitch night of the desert Quynh could make out the red tint to her cheeks, hear how she panted in quick, wheezing gasps.
Quynh’s heart stopped for a moment. She knew the sensation well enough.
She scrambled up, ignored how her shirt slipped below her breasts and pooled round her stomach. The man who had landed on her earlier had a dagger protruding from his chest. Booker, probably.
Quynh knelt by Andromache’s side, hands roving over her cheeks, her hair, her forehead. “Breathe, love. Slowly. Breathe. No, look at me, there’s nothing in your chest, I know it feels like it, but there’s nothing there…” She rambled, pulling Andromache into her arms, where the other woman spasmed with the gas’s ill effects and her breath rattled in seizing lungs.
Damn it. She wished she knew what gas it was they’d used.
Quynh stuffed Andy’s face into her chest, trying to block her from the worst of the smoke with her own body. She looked up for help, but the others must have already stumbled outside to defend themselves. In fact, she was relatively certain that it was Nicolò’s broad sword singing, and Nile’s low grunts and Booker’s labored heaving.
“C-C... Cop...” Andy wheezed. Quynh shook her head and started to lift her wife into her arms.
“Save your strength. I have to get you out of here.”
“No!” Andy shouted at last. “Copley!”
Copley. Fuck.
The only mortal among them, and an old man to boot. He’d been sleeping on the outskirts, safely bracketed between Joe and Nile. Surely one of them would have gotten him away?
“I’ll come back for him,” she promised, though she doubted he would have survived the gas attack. “Come on,” without waiting for Andy to protest further, she flung her over one shoulder and quickly dashed outside.
The battle looked fierce. There were ten assailants. An easy enough target for one of them on a good day, but their attackers had evidently possessed the element of surprise, not to mention they were the government sponsored military-androids.
Notoriously hard to kill. They did not have soft flesh and human joints to attack, no body armor to tear away, just cold metal and eyes which could process and anticipate their movements in a millisecond.
Fuck.
Nevertheless, Nile, Joe, Nicky, and Booker had pressed back-to-back in the middle and were so far holding their own admirably. Andy was in no position to fight right now. Quynh surreptitiously slipped round to the back of the adobe and set her against the smooth surface of the outside, heart pounding.
Andy’s sharp, tiny breaths sounded as if she had knives clattering round in her lungs, and the agony on her face was like a million fire ants in her stomach. She gripped Andy’s hand hard. No. Please, not now. Not like this...
A timid face peeked round the side. “Quynh?”
Finally, some good news. She waved him closer, into her reach of protection. “James?”
His wheelchair carefully inched from around the corner. When he noticed Andy struggling to breathe, he gasped with his old man chest and then he was hurriedly untangling something with tubes and clear machinery. “Damn, but you have nine lives Andy! Here, here, put this to her mouth. Its good air. It will help clear her lungs.”
Quynh had never been more grateful for Copley. She snatched the contraption he held out to her and shoved it against Andy’s mouth. The clear surface fogged up as she desperately gulped for air.
Every shuddery inhale squeezed her heart in a tight fist. The world narrowed to Andromache, to her pain, to her fight for life, to the only person who’d seen Quynh in every possible way and loved her anyway.
It took more eternities than she was willing to live, but slowly, Andy’s breaths evened out. Quynh caught her as Andy’s eyes rolled into her head and she slumped into her arms. “Copley!” Quynh gasped, even as she pressed two fingers to the pulse in that pale, long throat and felt a hammering beat.
“Her body is probably in shock,” he replied.
She nodded and hugged Andy close, cradling her head. As long as she could feel a heartbeat... “How’d you get out alive?”
He didn’t appear to be out of breath or even particularly skittish. “I’m the one who let Booker know one of the motion sensors had been set off. It woke me up and he had just stood to see what it was about when some bloke rushed in, and Booker stabbed him. Nile threw a blanket over my head, to hide me I think, so I was saved from the worst of the gas’s effects. I crawled out shortly after.”
It seemed they were one blessed family. She nodded and cringed as another spray of bullets lodged into the walls of the adobe. A few ripped into the mud and whipped past her legs and over Andy’s arm.
She looked up to make Sure Copley hadn’t been hit, and he appeared a bit more startled than before, but unharmed. Blessed, indeed.
“They’re all droids?” She demanded.
“Except for the commanding officer. He’s human. I’ve been trying to hack into their software to give the others an advantage,” he glanced down. “Andromache will likely be out for a few hours. You should help the others.”
Quynh knew that. She understood that it was what a good commanding officer would do, and she was now the eldest awake and in fighting shape. However, the others were hardly incompetent and hadn’t seemed to be losing the fight. Besides, Copley could hardly protect Andy himself if something happened...
“I’ll stay. You get those droid assholes,” he knew better than to argue. He tapped on the armrests of his chair. Something slid away and he plucked a small pad from the hidden compartment.
He tapped at it urgently while Quynh stood and took up watch over them both, listening for any shouts or cries of pain from her family. There was quite a bit of cursing coming from Nile and Booker, but nothing worrying.
She listened anyway.
Minutes passed, though they felt like hours, and Quynh’s anxiety was growing with every second. Even immortal warriors had their limits. The longest any of them had fought this hard was, as of now, fifteen minutes. After that, they began to die of exhaustion. The machines did not. “Copley, would you...?”
“Q-Quynh?”
She jumped and pivoted on a heel. “Andromache?”
Her fiancé was now struggling upright, tugging weakly on the breathing mask. Quynh didn’t move from her sentinel position, though she yearned to touch Andy. “No, leave it my love. It’s good for you. How do you feel?”
“Ugh... I have a... A Motherfucking headache,” came the pathetic groan.
There was a sudden shriek from the battlefield. “Damnit!” That was Nile, voice strained with pain. She’d probably been hit. Quynh’s protective instincts flared. She jumped on her toes urgently.
“Any day now , James...”
“I’m almost there!”
“Surrender!” An animatronic voice demanded. There was a harsh grunt, as if someone had been kneed in the kidneys. Their family was undoubtedly tiring, getting sloppy, making mistakes that could mean capture.
“You need... To help them...” Andy panted.
As if Quynh didn’t know that. She wanted to tear those stupid robots apart with her bare hands for daring to attack her family, but if Copley was killed, who was going to deactivate them?
“And abandon you two without protection!?” She snapped.
“I’m fine!” She certainly didn’t sound fine. Rather, she sounded as if she had just run a marathon and was close to passing out again, but that wouldn't occur to this strong, stubborn, controlling asshole Quynh had decided to marry.
“Damnit Andromache! Just wait!” She barked.
Copley exhaled a puff of anxious air. “I’ve got it!”
He’d no sooner announced this than there was a scream from the other side. “YUSUF!” Quynh froze.
It was Nicolo, and he’d not sounded so terrified in centuries.