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It's only when the sunlight comes streaming into the room through the boarded windows, casting stripes of gold across the floor, that Yusuf realizes he hasn't slept all night.
He untangles himself from Nicolò, who makes a muffled noise that sounds almost like a "No" but doesn't wake up, and sits up with his back against the wall.
With his eyes squeezed, he tries to hear something, anything: the rustling of the wind, the song of a bird, the voices of the two women in the next room — there's nothing. Everything is quiet, as if the whole world was still asleep. That's exactly why they chose this place, after all: it's far from the road, further still from the city, unimportant, forgotten — safe. But right now, Yusuf would rather be in some crowded tavern or fish-stinking marketplace or anywhere loud enough to drown out the voices inside his head.
(They dreamed of Quỳnh and Andromache for years — dreamed of them fighting, dreamed of them dying, dreamed of them kissing and making love — and not once did they stop to think that these women were dreaming of them too.
Not until they finally met them.)
He stretches an arm over to his bag to get his journal — a leather-bound book Nicolò bought him in Baghdad — and in the process manages to find a piece of charcoal nestled between a dagger and a half-empty bottle of ink. It's no more than a stub, but it'll do.
He stares at the blank page for a while, and then, after taking a deep breath, he starts drawing.
The charcoal moves against the parchment almost of its own accord, following the line of Nicolò's profile, from his forehead down to his nose, and then caressing the shape of his lips and his jaw. After all, Yusuf has drawn him more than he has anyone or anything else. He could probably do it with his eyes closed, if only he could bring himself to look away from him for that long.
("I like your stories," Quỳnh told him as they walked to the house. Her voice felt already familiar, like something he remembered faintly from another life. "The one about the drunken prince, in particular. It's very sweet, and very sad."
"How do you—"
"He dreamed of it," she explained, gesturing toward Nicolò, who was walking a few feet ahead of them, side by side with Andromache. "He dreamed of all of them… I think I'll miss that."
"Miss what?"
"Your stories," she answered. "Now that we've met, I mean — I'll miss him dreaming about them."
Yusuf had no idea how to respond to that, so he just said, "I can tell them to you, if you want. Whichever ones you like."
"Thank you, that's very kind," she told him with a smile. "I'm just not sure it'll be the same.")
Once he has the basic shape of the face down, he starts sketching the beard — thick and wild and itchy against Yusuf's lips with every kiss, and against his thighs on every good night they've had together — and then the hair, soft and just long enough to reach the shoulders. He can almost feel the strands between his fingers as he puts them down onto the page.
And that's when it really hits him.
("His name was Lykon," Andromache explained. She waited until after they'd eaten to tell them. Perhaps she hoped they already knew. "We met him when Alexander conquered Judea."
"We'd been dreaming him for weeks," Quỳnh continued, her eyes fixed on the floor. "We were already close, so it wasn't hard to find him… We worked together for almost a thousand years."
There was silence, and then Nicolò asked, "How did it happen?"
His voice was firm, but Yusuf could hear the fear beneath the words. It was his own fear.
"It just did," Andromache answered. "We'd seen him wounded so many times by then, and he'd hardly notice. But this time he went down and didn't get up again."
"Was he scared?" Yusuf heard himself ask.
Quỳnh gave him the kind of smile one uses to hide their tears. "Lykon wasn't scared of anything.")
A memory you draw in charcoal lasts longer than one that exists only in your head, but it doesn't last forever. It'll flake off, eventually, as everything does, as everyone does, immortal or not.
He's lived much longer than he should have, without being so much as brushed by age. He got to meet the most extraordinary man in the world — a man he should've hated, a man he did use to hate, and who used to hate him too. A man he loves like he loves the sun, that he needs like he needs air, and who loves and needs him just the same. Together, they've built a life as they could only have outside the man-made constraints of what's natural and right and sacred… He's been blessed with so much already, and yet he dares ask for more.
"Please, let us die together," he whispers, begs, prays. "I can't stand the thought of a world without him, and I can't stand the thought of ever making him cry."
("You two were lucky," Andromache told him, later, as Nicolò showed Quỳnh where to sleep. "I was alone for a very long time, and so was she."
"That must've been— I can't even imagine what it must've been like."
"We found each other in the end," she said, too matter-of-factly to really mean it. "We always do, all of us, for whatever reason."
A moment passed.
"Do you believe in God?" he asked her. "In any god?"
"Not really, but I was one for a while."
He laughed at that. She didn't.
"I do," he said, even though she didn't ask. "Nicolò does too — different gods, different enough to start a war… or so we thought."
She chuckled. "God, then — that's your answer for all this?"
"What's yours? Besides luck, I mean."
"Who says there's one?"
"I do," he tells her. "The love of my life and I found each other in the chaos of a battlefield, and today I met two women I've spent countless nights dreaming about— Nicolò says everything happens for a reason, and if I have to believe in anything, I believe in him.")
His hands are shaking, but he keeps drawing, adding in the last few details — the moles and the wrinkles and all those little things that make Nicolò's face look… right .
He leaves the eyes for last, as always. They're the hardest part, the one that can turn a portrait into something that looks almost alive. And with Nicolò's eyes, it's not so much about the shape or the size, and certainly not about the color. It's their depth, the effortless way they pierce through your skin and through your soul, leaving you naked of any pretense. In all the time they've been together, Yusuf has never even come close to replicating that. He probably never will, but he'll keep trying.
Not right now, though. Nicolò is sleeping. His eyes are closed, and that's how Yusuf wants to remember him, as he dreams of drunken princes and maidens with stars for eyes and happy endings. Peaceful, untroubled.
But when he finally looks up from the parchment, he finds Nicolò staring right back at him.
(Later still, when they were alone in their room, Nicolò held him close as he thrust into him, both of them turning all the things they couldn't say — or didn't want to say — into kisses and curses and scratches.)
"Promise me something," Nicolò says, his voice hoarse and not yet completely awake.
"Anything."
"Promise me I'll never wake up alone."
"Only if you promise too."