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andy
Her team comes skidding around the corner just as Andy idly debates kicking Merrick's crony one more time, just for good measure and a little bit of catharsis. Instead she stoops to pick the fire axe up from where it'd skittered to a stop, groaning as her entire body riots from something as simple as fucking bending over, and spares the most grudging iota of respect, fighter to fighter, for a bastard cocky enough to kick at a swinging axe.
Digging her fingers into the muscle of her shoulder (where she already knows there’ll be one hell of a sore spot tomorrow, nearly seven thousand years later her body still remembers what it feels like the morning after an ass-kicking), Andy turns to look at Nile and Booker, to look at just Nile and Booker—and then she hears it.
It makes them all jump, rattling the walls in the eerie silence of the lab now that there's no one left alive to shoot at them, echoing even louder than the ringing in Andy's ears. Nile’s head whips around back the way they came, gun already swinging up to cover them. Booker doesn't turn. His eyes don't quite meet Andy's before he shuts them, the tired lines of his face creasing with devastating resignation.
For one uncanny moment she’s back in Sudan, trapped in a cold dark room and missing the bigger picture. A motherfucking bait-and-switch all over again: she’s learning some bullshit cosmic lesson about mortality too late to put any of it to good use, Booker’s never actually stopped trying to die since the very first time, not really, and she’d said it herself, Nile’s too new—
First, Andy lost Qunyh because she was so hellbent on the good of humanity that she’d forgotten people's capacity for casual cruelty. Now, Joe is screaming somewhere behind her, a desperate, excruciating animal sound that she remembers carrying the weight of in her own mouth, because she was so focused on the certainty of death that she forgot that there is nothing, ever, certain about death.
She's been here so many times before, the same question over and over again and this time—a different answer. The same fucking ending.
nile
Nile has seen famine, and cruelty, and hopeless tragedy that carves chunks out of people like snapped-off pieces of care-package chocolate bars. She's felt mortars shake the ground under her feet and set her heartbeat tripping over itself until her whole body is one giant throb, a nerve raw and exposed, but—
But she's never heard another human being make a sound like that before.
booker
He'd thought, so briefly, some small quixotic voice in the back of his head that in his more maudlin moments he thinks might be God, a voice that always, always sounds like Jean-Pierre—he'd thought maybe he might die here. Might die for the team as a pittance of a penance, because wouldn't that be a story? He'd buy that book, tell that fable to his sons before bed like a rosary against the monsters at the door: here is a man, here is a coward lonely and afraid and he has nothing left to give, nothing but himself body-and-soul, flesh-and-blood-and-bone and in the end he gives it up for them anyway—
As they pick themselves up and scramble after Andy—who’s already stormed off through the carnage like death itself, fire axe gripped loosely in the cradle of her fingers almost like an afterthought—Booker spares a moment to wonder where Joe and Nicky are, if they’re alright. But for a moment, only, because of course they are; if they're together, Joe-and-Nicky, they're unstoppable. The very idea of them somehow separated feels unfathomable. What a silly, unnatural thing that would be to think of at all.
Except in the end, it’s practically textbook. Booker’s forged enough fairytales, told enough tall tales of his own to know how to follow this trail, twist this plot: I believe it’s because we’re meant to find each other, Nicky had said, talking to Nile but looking at Joe, and Booker wouldn't have needed to check to know their legs were tangled together under the table. Even sat across from one another they were always side by side.
“What would you know of the weight of all these years alone? You and Nicky always had each other, right?”
Sébastien le Livre has eaten enough crow in his life. He's choked down enough empty promises and fruitless predictions and yet even when he plays prophet, when for once he reads aloud the writing on the wall, it turns out that in his mouth it all still tastes like blood anyway.
joe
His hands shake as he cradles Nicky's face between his palms, kneeling curled over Nicky's body—and that's all it is now, a body, it's been minutes and there's a corpse wearing Nicky's face in Joe's lap—back bowed with a grief that feels so much more like rage blistering white-hot down his spine, wailing so loudly his voice echoes back to him a thousandfold, an army of shrieking anguish. Except, it's too raw to be called wailing. The sound that drags out of him is from the pit of his belly, dug-in deep with claws that rip and tear the whole way up through teeth clenched so hard they crack like porcelain.
That had been his specialty once, porcelain. Learning to reproduce the precious technique so popular in the east, to cut and colour and shape the ceramic into coveted things, bowls and bottles and mosaic tiles. He'd always had such steady hands; artisan's hands, warrior's hands. Lover's hands, Nicky had murmured once, wry and smiling, to make such wonderful things with such care. Hands that had fit together tiles so closely it's like they'd never been cleaved apart, sketched parallel lines with such unerring precision that it drew patrons from far across the city. Steady hands that eventually drew soldiers and men of God to him too, who'd coveted his skills and turned them towards a different sort of creation—
(He and Nicky were parallel lines, Joe had thought, were walking paths stretching side-by-side from here to whatever comes next. But therein lies the problem with hands that shake, with lines that aren’t parallel, are only nearly: you never see the truth of them until you're long past the only point they'll ever intersect.)
Joe's done many things in the name of a god, things he never thought he would—but in Nicolò's name, for Nicky, there is no wretched thing he wouldn't—
So later, when he murmurs, "You shot Nicky. You shouldn't have done that," he kills Keane with hands that do not shake at all.
nicky
He hears Joe yell something over the cocking of Keane's gun and he thinks, Allora, I hope it will be quick this time—