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They find a safehouse in the aftermath, a moderate-sized place on the outskirts of Cardiff that only looks slightly abandoned as they drive in. Andy wants to go farther, put some real distance between themselves and London, but Andy is also recovering from a gunshot wound and slightly high on the morphine Nile swiped from a hospital on their way out of the country, so she can shut up as far as Nile is concerned.
“You’re going to fit in so well,” Joe tells her brightly as he parks the car.
The house is apparently one of Nicky’s, in so much as anything can be only Nicky’s between him and Joe. They apparently haven’t been there for any length of time longer than a few days since the early ‘20s.
No one elaborates on which ‘20s and Nile decides she’s too damn tired to be shocked by how old they are today, so she keeps her mouth shut while she and Joe open windows and air out linens and Nicky helps get Andy settled somewhere she can’t do anymore damage to herself or others.
The next two weeks are an exercise in patience that Nile is pretty sure she loses. Repeatedly. Andromache the Scythian hasn’t had a scratch that didn’t heal itself within a minute in over six thousand years.
She is, without exaggeration, the worst patient in the history of the world.
She does some approximation of behaving for three days. By behaving, Nile means ‘sleeps the sleep of the recently shot and occasionally harasses Joe or Nicky into making her food’. When she wakes on day four, the hell begins. She refuses to rest, or stay put, or do any of the normal things that people who have bullet wounds in their sides are supposed to do. Either by virtue of being the youngest, or simply the only one of them that actually understands a hint of modern medicine, Nile ends up in charge of her care.
Nile has worked retail and fast food. She’s scrubbed toilets and burned her fingers on fry oil. Her last job literally ended with her choking on her own blood.
This is worse.
At the start of week two, Andy starts making noises about being bored. Twice, she tries to sneak out of bed and nearly tears her stitches. On the third attempt, Nile, who has lost any semblance of bedside manner by this point, gives up and just sits on her — literally plants herself firmly onto Andy’s shins and refuses to move.
It works, but only because Andy seems to find it hilarious in its creativity.
Somehow, despite everything, this is not actually the worst of it. Nile is used to living in close quarters over longs stretches; military life will do that to you. She even has her own room here. It’s kind of a novelty. She’s cool with it.
Her new-found immortal team, on the other hand, apparently take their cues from Andy.
Nile doesn’t figure this out until week three.
It’s a Tuesday when it starts. This feels like an odd thing to be aware of, but it sticks out because the radio is on and the morning news is just wrapping up as Nicky emerges from the bedroom he and Joe share, looking more asleep than awake.
Nile has learned a lot about her new team during this forced downtime. Those first couple of hellish days after meeting them had been a crash course of rapid-fire learning, filing away information on combat styles and weapon preferences and holy shit these people are older than dirt. This is different. This isn’t about picking up the details she needs to avoid dying; it’s about the fact that Joe likes his coffee with so much milk it’s almost white, Andy has a sweet tooth that would make a dentist cry, and, if given the chance, Nicky will happily lounge in bed until at least noon.
It’s about the little quirks that make them people, and Nile finds herself absorbing each new discovery in fascination.
This morning brings something new and unexpected.
Joe is cooking, because Nicky is never particularly human this early until he’s had at least two cups of coffee and Andy can’t be trusted not to burn water. Nicky plasters himself against Joe’s back as soon as he shuffles into the kitchen and then seems to fall back asleep where he stands. They’ve done this every morning since they arrived, and Nile is only just on the verge of finding it more exasperating than cute.
Joe lets Nicky hang off him like a limpet for a few moments before gently nudging him with an indulgent smile. “Your coffee’s on the table, habibi.”
If Nile hadn’t been in the chair closest to them, she wouldn’t have noticed: a certain look in Joe’s eye she hasn’t seen before, something beyond the fond affection his face always takes on whenever he’s looking in Nicky’s direction. It makes her pause.
Nicky hums and presses a kiss to Joe’s shoulder before he makes a beeline for the cup waiting for him. He takes a sip, eyes closed to appreciate it—
—and promptly chokes, gagging almost violently.
Joe immediately loses whatever internal struggle he's been waging and begins to cackle.
"Really, Joe?" Nicky demands. He sets the cup down heavily onto the table, expression thunderous.
Curious, Nile leans close and sniffs, only to rear back at the unmistakable scent of hot sauce pouring out of it. It’s strong enough to make her eyes water.
Across from her, Andy, only recently deemed healed enough to be allowed in the kitchen, sighs.
Joe is still laughing.
Nicky glowers at him. "Do not begin something you are not willing to let me finish, Yusuf," he says ominously, before he stalks away.
Nicky’s retribution is swift. Joe goes to grab a mug out of one of the kitchen cabinets the next morning and jolts back with a shout. Nicky, sitting at the table reading the paper, smirks without taking his eyes off the business section. Joe glares as he reaches into the cabinet and pulls out a rubber snake.
“Really?” Nile asks. Not that it isn’t a decent enough choice, but she’s a little surprised that any of them would fall for it.
“Joe died of a snake bite once,” Andy explains.
Nile looks back at the snake and frowns.
“Don’t feel bad for him,” Nicky tells her firmly. “It was entirely his own fault.”
“Sweet Mother of God,” Joe mutters darkly in Italian. “Please don’t start this again—”
“I told you, didn’t I? I said, Yusuf, that is poisonous. And what did you say to me?”
“—it was four hundred years ago, Nicolò—”
“—It’s fine, Nico. I know the desert, Nico. You worry too—”
Nicky breaks off and very calmly takes a sip of his tea. Nile waits until it becomes apparent he has no intention of continuing. “’Too’…?”
Nicky glances up, eyebrows lifting, before he seems to remember that unlike Andy and Joe, she hasn’t heard this story enough times to know how it ends. “Oh,” he says casually. “That was when the snake bit him.”
He looks intensely smug about this.
Joe grumbles as he comes over, the snake in one hand and his freshly poured coffee in the other. He pauses to drape the toy around Nicky’s neck like a scarf before he takes a seat. To Nile, he says pointedly, “He ate the snake.”
“I did,” Nicky says, with no small amount of pride.
Nile glances between them uneasily, then to Andy for support. All she gets is a cryptic smile in response.
Naturally, things escalate.
Joe hides the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle Nicky has been working on since they got there, and doesn’t stop laughing even when Nicky begins to pummel him with a couch cushion out of frustration.
Two days later, Nicky is sitting in an armchair reading while Nile plays video games when Joe begins swearing loudly from the bathroom. When he storms out a moment later in nothing but a towel and soap suds, the first thing Nile notices is that the skin of his face is now a very bright green.
“That’s a very good color on you, my love,” Nicky says, the picture of innocence.
Joe slips a red sock in with Nicky's whites on laundry day. This one backfires, however, as it turns out that Nicky looks very good in pink. He spends three days wearing almost nothing else and finds convenient excuses every time Joe tries to corner him, until Joe begins to look so frayed around the edges that Andy barricades them into their room.
When they finally force their way out the next morning, Joe looks much less stressed and Nicky has the smug dishevelment of the well-fucked.
Nile tries not to think about it too hard.
"Are they actual children?" She demands on the afternoon she finds an honest-to-God whoopie cushion on one of the dining chairs.
“They’re a pair of men who have been perpetually 30-something for a thousand years,” Andy says reasonably. Sometime in the last two days she found where Nile hid the vodka and is now shamelessly drinking it straight from the bottle. “What do you think?”
“How long does this usually last?” Nile asks at the end of the fourth week, after Joe has tied the laces of all of Nicky’s shoes together and Nicky has in turn programmed Joe’s phone to play animal noises every time he clicks on something.
“You know, I’m not actually sure,” Andy admits. She’s doing much better these days, the hole in her side finally closed, leaving behind an ugly scar that she’s taken to wearing crop tops to show off. “The last time they started up, I got sick of it after three days and shot them both — in the knees, kid, Jesus — and then fucked off to Denmark for a while.”
Nile looks over to where the other two sit at the couch. She’d been concerned, when things started, because what Joe and Nicky have seems precious and she’s seen couples break down over slights far less intentional than a prank war. But in between the mischief, very little has changed from what she can tell. Even now, Nicky has tucked himself into Joe’s side while they watch a movie. Every few minutes, she’ll catch some movement out of them: Joe brushing his fingers through Nicky’s hair or kissing his forehead, Nicky wrapping his arm around Joe’s middle and settling his head against Joe’s shoulder.
Maybe that’s what a thousand years together will do for people, she figures. Give them enough space that they can do things like replace their whipped cream with shaving cream or unscrew the lid on the salt shaker before passing it over and still let them be in love in the end of the day. Small stakes in a big game.
She shakes her head and picks at the snack she fixed for herself before she sat down. It’s still hard to wrap her head around.
Andy takes pity on her. “We’re not usually idle for this long, you know. You spend a few hundred years finding ways to keep yourself busy and you’ll see what a couple of weeks with nothing better to do will do to you.”
Nile doesn’t even want to think about that right now, the idea of years in the hundreds. She focuses elsewhere. “So, what, this is their version of cabin fever?”
“It’s some kind of fever. Booker and I—” Andy pauses at the mention. Her eyes go soft around the edges, a little bit of pain in the middle. This is something else that Nile has been learning, all the little places where Booker fit and is now absent from. The spots that he’ll fill back in at the end of a century. Andy clears her throat before she continues, “We’re usually gone before it gets to this point. It’s preferable to the alternative.”
“The alternative,” Nile echoes, picking up her toast and taking a nibble out of it. “Which is…?”
“Sticking around while those two fuck like rabbits on every surface they can find for about, oh, two weeks.” Nile chokes on her food. Andy pats her on the back and helpfully adds, “You’re new. They’re trying to be courteous.”
“Are you actually telling me,” Nile says, once she’s no longer coughing around burnt bread, “that all of this is because they haven’t been able to have enough sex?”
“Well, that, and the shit with Merrick was… something else. Processing something like that can be weird.” Andy hums. “But mostly, it’s the sex.”
Nile puts down her toast and leans back in her chair as the reality of it dawns on her. “I’m gonna have to deal with this for forever,” she says, horrified.
Andy smiles and pulls Nile’s plate closer to steal her fruit. “Welcome to immortality, kid.”
Breakfast the next morning is blissfully prank-free. Joe and Nicky sit across from each other and Nile tries to ignore the way their game of footsie occasionally knocks into her ankles. Andy tells her a story from their time in the early 17th century that involves a now-extinct bird, a priceless vase, and a small civil war in a town in France that doesn’t exist anymore. Joe occasionally interrupts to bicker with her about the timing of certain events.
Nicky says nothing, because he’s only half-way through his first cup of joe — ha — and won’t be capable of words until he’s at least three-fourths finished with it.
It’s nice. Nile laughs until she feels like she might cry, and then she thinks about the mornings with her mother and brother that were just like this and thinks she might cry for an entirely different reason. Joe makes her pancakes with strawberries rather than the chocolate chips everyone else is getting because he knows now that she likes her breakfast with fruit. Andy actually shares the syrup. It feels like family.
“So,” she says, when the food is mostly gone but the mood is still upbeat. “I’ve been thinking. There’s some stuff I always wanted to do, before. And now seems like a really good time to start.”
They all nod along encouragingly. “Anything in particular you had in mind?” Andy prompts.
“Chile,” says Nile. She spent most of the night before considering her options. Chile had been at the top of her bucket list, back when that had meant something, and seems like as good a place as any to start.
“South America!” Joe crows, delighted. “There’s this little restaurant in Valparaíso that you’ll love, I swear—”
“Actually,” Nile interrupts, pointed but not unkindly. “I was thinking maybe it could be just me and Andy.”
There’s a pause as this settles over them. Nicky wraps his hands around his mug and looks thoughtful as he takes a sip. Joe looks from Nile to Andy and then back again. A look of understanding crosses his face.
“Ahh,” he says slyly. “Girl talk, eh? No room for a couple of old men. I see how it is.”
Nicky settles a hand on top of one of Joe’s, smiling when Joe twists his wrist until his palm faces up and they can slot their fingers together. “It’s a good choice,” Nicky tells her warmly. “We look forward to hearing your stories.”
Nile relaxes where she sits. She hadn’t realized that she was worried about their reaction until she feels it ease out of her in the face of their easy acceptance.
Nicky helps her pack later, while Andy and Joe argue over airlines and flight schedules. It surprises her, how long it takes. They’ve been here over a month now, and Nile has never before had an issue with packing her life up and moving on, but somehow she’s accumulated enough things here to make it difficult.
Nicky gets a distant, distracted look as he helps her choose a book to take for the flight.
“It’s been a while,” he tells her, “since we made a place feel this much like a home. I think I will miss it.”
Nile can understand that. She’s been feeling that odd sink in her stomach since this morning, a sort of pre-homesickness brought on by the anticipation. She remembers feeling it back before she left for her tour, too.
She understands other things too, though.
“Home is where the people you love are,” she says, and knows she’s got it right by the way Nicky’s eyes brighten and shine at her.
Joe and Nicky see the both of them out. It’s been agreed on that she and Andy will take the car and take a brief road-trip before they fly out, something Nile tries to protest but is waved off on.
“We’ll be here a while yet,” Joe says. “We can find our own way when it’s time.”
“Besides,” Nicky says, a certain glimmer in his eye that Nile now recognizes as the look he gets before he turns the TV onto a channel that only caters to soap operas and hides the remote batteries just as a sports game that Joe wants to watch is about to start. “There’s always Uber.”
Joe immediately begins to say very impolite things in at least three languages while Nicky smirks and pulls her in for one last hug. There’s obviously a joke there that she’s not in on. She doesn’t feel left out, though, because Andy hooks an arm around her shoulders as soon as Nicky releases her and says, easy and cheerful, “C’mon. I’ll tell you about it on the trip to the airport. You’ll love this one.”
Nile glances back at them just before she gets into the car. She sees Nicky, laughing openly now as Joe, exasperated and besotted and ridiculously in love, takes his face in his hands and leans in to pepper a dozen kisses across his face, nudging Nicky backwards until he can kick the door closed behind them.
She shakes her head with a smile and makes a mental note to find out who wins the next time they see each other.
EPILOGUE
The hotel Joe picked out for them is a nice one, all classic South American architecture and posh modern luxuries. The bath is spacious and tempting. Nile treats herself to a deliciously long soak, feeling like she’s earned it after almost 15 hours on a plane.
She’s just toweling dry when she hears a thump from the main room, and then Andy starts to curse.
“Andy?” She calls, stumbling out and thinking about the nearest exit and how quickly she can get to her gun if she needs to.
She stops short when she sees it; glances from Andy to the cellphone that was apparently dropped in surprise, and then to the open duffel bag on the bed.
Then she starts laughing.
“Ha fucking ha,” Andy grumbles, as close to embarrassed as she’s probably capable of. “I’m killing them both the next time I see them, I don’t care how unfair it is.”
Coiled innocently atop her clothes in the bag, the rubber snake sits and hisses at them cheerfully.
“I’m absolutely telling them that you freaked,” Nile announces, delighted. Andy mutters something under her breath, but Nile can tell now, just by the set of her mouth, that she’s trying to hide a smile. “Best vacation ever.”
“Just wait, kid,” Andy tells her, losing the battle and finally cracking a grin. “We’re just getting started.”