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"How can I know you're not going to just slit my throat?" Nicolò joked softly.
"You can't." Yusuf smiled from ear to ear. He placed his thumb on one side of Nicolò's jaw, grabbing him so he could examine his lover's face better. Yusuf used all his willpower to hold himself back from abandoning his incredibly important mission by kissing his Nicolò. "But I can't kiss this sad excuse for a mustache. So, it's your choice, really."
His Nicolò handed him his koummya. A wonderful blade by any means, a dagger about half the length of his forearm, which Yusuf's mother gifted to him three centuries ago. The silver scabbard he removed was made from fragments of old coins forged together, with his grip on the wooden hilt that became too natural to him. He ran his fingers over the engraved ferrule, down to the curved steel blade that knew his Nicolò's body better than he did.
"You never told me how you obtained this blade." Nicolò said after a few minutes of silence as Yusuf ran his blade over his now nonexistent facial hair. His legs were crossed, his bare calves pressed against the cold stone floor. A nightgown draped over his body down to his knees, the faded white fabric making Nicolò's skin appear pinker than usual. The sounds of blade scraping skin were like a scratch through the Venetian lagoon's harmony outside their home.
"My mother." Yusuf looked distant; he furrowed his eyebrows in concentration as he expertly ran his blade over Nicolò's stubble. He sat with his knees apart, placing himself as close as he could to his lover, his free hand cupped Nicolò's cheek to hold him in place. His thumb grazed over his love's lower lip, gripping him by his jawline. His blade was unhurried, his hands flowed in a repetitive motion over Nicolò's jaw.
"What was her name?"
"I fear I'll cut you if you keep talking." His concern was earnest.
"I don't mind. What was she like?"
Yusuf sighed, frustrated with his soulmate's awfully Catholic habit of self-sacrifice. "Lina, and she was nothing like me." He chuckled into his words. He put down his blade, the steel clanking as it came in touch with the stone floor. Self-diagnosed martyr or not, he was never going to injure his Nicolò again.
His lover turned his back to him, only to lean against Yusuf's chest and nestle his head in the crook of his neck. Yusuf smiled at his impossible man and followed his embrace, wrapping his arms around his shoulders. The streets of San Marco were a labyrinth – when they squeezed their path between the towering orange houses, Yusuf playfully wondered whether one mythological creature or another is hiding in one of the corners. Managing to find their way back home was, in itself, a daily miracle.
"Well, light o' one, my mother was short and fat." He ran his fingers through Nicolò's inconceivably straight hair, lifting it from his eyes, as his lover picked up the koummya that killed him so many times. "She had long hair-"
"With curls like yours?" Nicolò questioned as his fingers softly fluttered over the intricate etching on the blade itself.
"A bit less curly." Yusuf chuckled. "And she usually wore it in a braid. She was a beautiful woman." He leaned back, nourishing the thought of his mother. He felt a gentle kiss on his inner arm.
"Go on."
"She married my father after his wife died, so I had five older brothers and two sisters, but I was her only child." Yusuf explained. "I was her little angel, she used sing for me every night before I fell asleep." A bittersweet smile spread between his cheeks. "This koummya was her father's, she gave it to me before I-" He swallowed his spit.
"Before you left."
Loving Nicolò was difficult at first. Loving each other was challenging for them both, each for different reasons, both fighting to find a way through. To find a way to truly, thoroughly love each other. Nicolò's fingers softly grazing over his skin was almost too much. Yusuf didn't know how many people perished by those delicate hands, and what was worse, far far worse, was that Nicolò didn't know either. Yusuf told him that. He knew it was bigger than him, bigger than the both of them, he said as he pressed tender kisses to Nicolò's palm. It was bigger than him, but that doesn't matter, Nicolò answered, acknowledging he was indoctrinated does not better the lives of those he hurt. His apologies do not better the lives of those he hurt, his Nicolò understood almost too well, the only thing that remains for him to do was to prevent others from suffering.
Nicolò's struggle originated from how he was taught men should and shouldn't behave with each other. Not because Yusuf fought against him. Even if Yusuf weren't Muslim and Amazigh (although Yusuf couldn't bring himself to imagine himself without those aspects of who he was), even if he didn't kill him. He was still another man. Nicolò had his own past betray him. Betray them both and so, so many others.
Nicolò seemed at home in this city he has never seen before. He found joy in holding Yusuf's hand as he guided him throughout networked alleys, following the mental map he pieced together from strangers' directions. One day Nicolò led them to the Chiesa d'Oro, a golden basilica that barriered a large plaza, with a tower that reached up to the heavens. The plaza itself seemed to inhabit more pigeons than believers, aside from a couple of elderly women who flung crumbs of yesterday's bread for the birds to feast on.
They sat on the edge of one of the canals with their legs wading in the water. Nicolò silently peeled the leaves off an artichoke, giving well over half of them to Yusuf. He would often question Nicolò regarding the significance of religious art they came across, to which his love rarely had answers. Nicolò explained that the Basilica towered over men, to embody how miniature and meaningless they are next to the almighty. When asked why it was covered with gold, Nicolò assumed its purpose was purely aesthetical.
"There's no such thing as art that serves no purpose." Yusuf argued.
"Beauty is in itself a purpose."
The winged lion, he learned, the one painted and embroidered and etched and sculptured everywhere artists could fit, was the protector of the city. The angel of Venice, Nicolò called it, after silent moments where he tried to find a term to describe an entire city's obsession with a fictional beast.
"But who chose the lion to be the angel of Venice?" Every answer he found simply raised more questions.
"Perhaps the one that chose you to be mine." Nicolò's poetic tendencies were simpler, far less floral than his love's. His confessions weren't planned, whispered through cold evening winds with fingers intertwined, they were almost… casual, a 'by-the-way you're the most beautiful man I've ever seen, greater than my wildest dreams, what do you want to drink?'
Yusuf slowly taught him more and more of his native love language whose magic he could not properly translate. I shall be your atonement, Nicolò. I will place myself as sacrifice for your soul, my beloved, time after time. Nicolò would laugh, still perplexed with the experience of being loved so sincerely.
"It's been over a century," Yusuf muttered into the curve connecting Nicolò's shoulders to the nape of his neck, his atonement's skin warm against his cheek. "How come my love still takes you by surprise?" The night washed his sight with darkness, the cold wind fluttered over their skin and caused his love to nestle even tighter into Yusuf's embrace.
"Not surprise," Nicolò clicked his tongue, searching through his mind to draw out the correct word. "Wonder. You never cease to amaze me."