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1993, USA
There’s the unmistakable click-click-click of blade on blade.
This is a sound that Nicky, with the exception of three other remarkable individuals, may be more familiar with than any other person in the world, but even he did not expect to hear it here.
Here is a dimly lit corridor, beige-walled, lined with scuffed linoleum and smelling vaguely of bubble-gum scented industrial cleaner and cigarette smoke.
Nicky pauses, adjusts the stack of papers under his arm, and follows the sound.
Ahead of him, one of the plywood doors bursts open, and a white-clad young woman strides into the hall, the edge of her sleek hijab clinging to her forehead with sweat, and a skinny fencing foil dangling from one wrist by a thick red wire. The sounds of fighting follow her out: the screeching of the electronic boxes, the thrumming chatter of spectators, the calls of the referees with hard edges in their voices. The young woman crosses to the drinking fountain, splashes some water onto her face, and swallows a mouthful.
She turns her head and spots him. He smiles at her. She stands up quickly, wiping her mouth with the arm of her uniform jacket.
“It’s Nicky, right?”
He flicks through his memories of the last few months at the college, but the girl seems to have slipped into deluge of centuries of faces. Sometimes it is a still pool, sometimes a landslide.
“I’m sorry, I –,” he begins.
“I’m Maryam. We have that Monday statistics class together…”
“Oh! Yes, yes, I’m sorry,” Nicky says. “I didn’t know there was a fencing club at this school.”
“Yeah, we’re pretty small,” Maryam says. She unhooks the foil from the wire, and holds it in her hand, bouncing the tip against the linoleum. Peeling lime-green electrical tape protects the lower third of the blade. “Do you fence?”
“I used to,” Nicky says. “In Italy.”
“Oh, cool!” Maryam says, with apparently genuine enthusiasm. Ah, Americans. “That’s awesome.”
“It’s nice to see something familiar.”
“Oh, for sure. Would you like to come in and watch, maybe?”
He shifts. “That would be nice. Just for a minute. I’m meeting my partner soon.”
“Yeah, of course,” Maryam says, sounding delighted with his politeness. He follows to just inside the doorframe, leaning back against it. Joe is expecting him; Joe will come looking, but that is alright. He will want to see this too.
The hall is tiny and clearly only sojourning as a fencing salle on a break from ordinary use as a squash court. This is where the last strains of swordsmanship in the West cling to life: in the yellow light of an underground hall in an administration building, at 7.30pm at night, animated by a little cluster of white-clothed students. Maryam half-jogs back to the piste – marked out with strips of black tape – where her next opponent is waiting, dirty white socks around his ankles.
In his memories, someone – another face Nicky can’t remember - affixes a vermillion sponge to the blunted end of a sword, and says, this is a practice blade. Try to target only the torso, and Nicolò picks up the sword – lighter than he is used to – and settles back on his feet.
On the piste, the fencers salute each other, and drop into loose-limbed crouches.
“En garde,” calls the referee, “Êtes-vous prêt? Allez!”
Nicky watches the feints, beats and abrupt flurries of attacks, and tries to figure out why he finds this so charming. When Nicky had first picked up a sword, he had been eleven years old, and it was meant for killing and nothing else. In another thousand years, he wonders, will mortal friends play with firearms, whilst out on the battlefield, soldiers have traded guns for another infinitely more destructive weapon?
On the piste, Maryam scores. The little blue box on the floor shrieks, and one of the lights on top flashes green. Her fist slams up into the air in triumph.
Maryam, as far as Nicky can tell, is a very energetic fencer, but a little sloppy. Her opponent is flashy and over-confident. With their layers of protective clothing, they’re bold, not shy of the other’s blade. Something about their movements is reminding him of Andromache, he thinks, and Quynh. The way they threw themselves into fights, all offense, unafraid of being hurt.
Then, Joe is behind him. Nicky knows this without turning around. He recognises the way Joe takes up space near to him, the movements in the air, the shift of his feet on the floor underneath.
Nicky glances back, like he always does, and Joe smiles at him, like he always does.
“Oh, I was wondering what kept you,” Joe says. “Making you feel old?”
Nicky huffs a smile, turning around to kiss Joe on the cheek.
“How was your day?” he asks.
“Good,” Joe says. “Better now.”
Finished with her bout, Maryam is unclipping herself from the piste. She looks at Joe and Nicky hovering in the doorway and beckons them inside. Joe sets off before Nicky can politely decline with a shake of his head, and then Nicky has to follow, feeling the slight beginnings of trepidation.
Maryam is talking to a British-accented sabre fencer, who has a halo of wispy blonde hair that’s escaped from her ponytail. She introduces the sabre fencer as the club president.
“You know,” Maryam says to Nicky, “if you were interested in coming to training, we meet this time every week.”
“Don’t mind her,” says the president. “She’s always trying to recruit people.”
“It’s not my fault we never have enough foilists –”
“No, no, you don’t want him in your club,” Joe says. “Don’t you know he’s Italian? Just the worst. Throwing his mask –”
“Pero –”
“Arguing with the referee –"
“Thank you, Joe,” Nicky says drily, and Joe flashes him a smile that’s gotten Nicky killed before. Nicky turns back to the girls. “This is my partner, Joe. This is Maryam, she has a class with me.”
“Hey,” Joe says, his American accent already flawless, a point of no small envy for Nicky.
“Do you fence too?” asks Maryam.
“Yeah.” Joe’s eyes flick to Nicky’s. “It’s how we met.”
“That’s awesome,” Maryam repeats. Nicky has been getting a feeling about this word, awesome, that it is here to stay. It certainly doesn’t mean what it used to.
“I don’t usually use this one – uh, fleuret?” Joe points to the weapon in Maryam’s hand. “May I see it?”
“Foil,” supplies the club president. Maryam hands hers over to Joe.
“He likes the sabre,” Nicky says. “Doesn’t get on with the – the grip.”
“I remember when this was introduced,” Joe says, absolutely on purpose, because he thinks it’s funny to give Nicky the air of ageless mystery. He has to wrap his hand around the pistol grip twice before getting the right arrangement of fingers.
Maryam and the club president exchange a look.
“In Tunisia! He remembers when it was introduced in Tunisia,” Nicky adds.
Joe balances the blade across his palms and weighs it up. Nicky can hear him joking about how light it is, my shotgun rounds weigh more than this. He rolls it over in his hands, the rectangular blade spinning jerkily. He looks up at Nicky with the same expression he used to give Nicky in smoky town halls, leaning against the wall and looking devastating in his braces and shirtsleeves.
It’s a look that, without fail, led to Nicky downing his glass of champagne and letting Joe drag him into the middle of the dancefloor, amidst the colourful frenzy of exuberant couples.
No, Nicky tells him emphatically with his eyes.
No? Joe responds, and Nicky hesitates for just a moment.
“Want to go a round, caro mio?” Joe presses his advantage, apparently set upon giving Nicky a reputation at this school that he will never shake.
And, well. It’s not that they don’t fight one another.
Nicky and Joe have sparred with assaya on the rooftops of Cairo at night, with rapier and dagger under the midday sun in the courtyards of the Milan, with small swords in front of a crowd of gentlemen in frock coats in the fencing salons of Paris.
So, yes. Nicky and Joe spar. Frequently, even. They just don’t usually do it in front of a bundle of excitable teenagers at the college where Nicky is trying to get a grasp of the finer grammatical subtleties of the English language.
“Yusuf,” he says. He’s aware of the two young fencers watching this exchange.
Joe raises an innocent eyebrow. Nicky looks steadily back.
God, fuck, he’s going to cave.
“Just one hit,” he says.
“Why are we doing this?” Nicky whispers to Joe in Arabic as they change into borrowed kit.
“To feel young again,” Joe replies in the same. Joe shifts to zip up the lame jacket, and over his shoulder, Nicky catches Maryam watching them with a vaguely puzzled expression.
“Is this the one with the rule of priority?” Nicky asks, and realises he’s made a mistake when Joe smiles conspiratorially.
“Habibi, you’re always my priority.”
Nicky hits him with the too-large glove he’s been lent.
“En garde,” Maryam says, “Êtes-vous prêt?”
Fencing, the maestri used to tell them, was as much a game of the mind as of the body. Detach yourself. Nothing that came before this one hit matters. Release your ego. Your opponent becomes a knot of strengths and weaknesses. Pull on each one until you find the one that will unravel. Don’t hesitate. Breathe.
Aim straight. Dead straight. Just above the heart, and slightly to the right.
All of this is made rather difficult by the person opposite you being the cradle of your very existence, but. Life is impossibilities.
“Allez!”
Safe to say, Nicky will have to come back to the club, if only to pay for the blades they broke.
Orange-pink sunlight wakes Nicky. He waits. He hears the muted guttering of cars, drifting up from the street, the bedroom door rattling gently in the draft.
He uncurls his hand from around the gun.
There’s another sound under the traffic and the wind. Bare feet moving rhythmically over ceramic tiles. Nicky opens one eye, and Joe dances sideways through his vision, framed by the balcony doorway. He spins, saif held above his head, and lunges out of sight.
It’s times like these that Nicolò is reminded that he is a separate entity from Joe, sealed firmly inside his skin and quite cut off from the warm, familiar haze of joeandnicky. This happens when his body gives over to physical need – sludging exhaustion, the hollowing knife of hunger, or when Joe does something completely mundane and completely inexplicable, like leave his poor lover alone in bed and spend the dawn hours waving a sword around.
Nicky would never be so cruel.
He sits up, wiping sleep from his eyes, and slides out of bed to go and make coffee. It’s only when he realises he’s ground enough beans for two people that he properly comes awake, and he wanders out on to the balcony to see whether Joe wants coffee after all.
The balcony is empty.
Nicky blinks for a moment in bleary surprise. There’s nothing out here but their breakfast table, tomato trellis, and the city, haphazardly stacked around him like children’s blocks.
A sliver of metal cools the hair on the back of his neck as Nicky realises about four seconds too late that he has walked into an ambush.
“I was making you coffee,” he says, and turns around.
“One has to wonder why such an accomplished warrior,” Joe says in Persian, for some reason, “would leave himself so open to attack.”
Joe, it seems, would like a rematch.
Joe gestures downwards with his chin, and Nicky obliges, sinking smoothly to his knees. His arms fall loosely at his sides.
“You would like to lose again so badly?”
The blade presses upwards against the underside of his chin, and Nicky lets the sword tip his head up to look at Joe.
“It doesn’t look very much like losing from here,” Joe says, and grins.
A familiar thrum of adrenaline pulses under his skin now, but Nicky can’t tell whether it’s from the sword point at his throat, or the fact that the man who is holding the sword is very beautiful and very shirtless. There’s a sheen on Joe, his chest is rising and falling, and the way he’s looking at Nicky is, well.
Nicky usually has to pay close attention to whether Joe is flirting or starting a fight, because the line for them has, historically, always been rather thin.
But in this case?
Nicky’s eyes travel up Joe, and he says, “It all depends on perspective.” He grabs Joe’s wrist and twists; Joe drops to one knee rather than let go of his sword.
Nicky hooks his ankle behind Joe’s bent knee and Joe goes down with a grunt. Nicky clears the breakfast table, then he has his hand around the grip of his longsword, pulling it free of the umbrella stand it has been living in in one seamless arc.
Joe cuts down from above, as he likes to do, and Nicky parries low, as he likes to do. Joe feints right, but Nicky’s longsword is already in a close left guard, and they clash with a ferric screech. Nicky lunges into the gap, already feeling that this may be a mistake as his bare foot leaves the wood floor. Joe spins and kicks him in the elbow, and Nicky goes stumbling.
So, Nicky thinks, that’s how it’s going to be.
Sometimes when they spar, they keep their sword forms tight and controlled, and push at one another with balanced aggression. Sometimes, they slip between martial styles like they do languages, clashing with big, exaggerated sweeps, and grinning through the ridiculous combinations. And sometimes, it’s like this, that is to say, about as a clean and honest as a back-alley brawl in Victorian East London.
“What’s the matter, Joe?” Nicky says. “Can’t win a fair fight?”
Joe allows Nicky to push him towards the balcony with a flurry of attacks, edging Joe onto his back foot. He continues to parry effortlessly. He seems perfectly placid, but once they pass out into the sunshine, suddenly drops, sweeping for Nicky’s feet.
Nicky jumps onto the balustrade to avoid the hit. He throws out his left hand for balance and parries several attacks one-handed. Joe whistles low. He twists and renews his efforts, and Nicky steps onto their table, the wrought iron creaking under him, continuing to trade blows. Joe laughs out loud.
Nicky smiles as well, because if the question is what’s it’s like to pit yourself against your companion of centuries, the man who contains your soul, the answer is, well, pretty fun.
This is why Nicky lets Joe drag him onto smoke-swirling dancefloors, and fence him in underground squash courts, and jump around sunlit balconies with ancient weapons; for joyousness of it, for the sound of Joe’s laughter. And because Joe had been right: it does make them feel young. In their life, happiness doesn’t always come in through the front door. They have to reach for it.
Nicky double feints, and this time, Joe falls for it, taking a few leaves off their mint plant in his hurry to parry.
They disengage and survey one another.
Nicky is going to get his revenge, he decides. They’ll keep going until it’s Nicky’s sword to Joe’s throat, and it will happen, because for better or worse, Nicky has always been unshakeably single-minded.
Nicky jumps down from the table, and Joe circles him. Nicky knows the whole history of Joe’s tells, every epoch of new ability, and equally, Nicky has only successfully lied to Joe four times in nine hundred years. The warning comes from a double tap of Joe’s left foot, and then they’re off again, a whirling back-and-forth through the kitchen.
Nicky makes his only mistake when he steps backwards to bring his sword up into seconde, and the rug slips out from underneath him. He loses his sword and is sure he’s about to lose consciousness as well, but Joe saves him from cracking his skull on their very nice laminate countertop with arm around his waist. Nicky grabs for the back of Joe’s neck.
It’s exactly how Joe will dip him suddenly in the middle of a tango.
“Mind yourself, habibi,” Joe says, and, oh, Nicky wants to do something about that smirk. As he folds himself up small, and topples Joe, he has a distant feeling that Quynh taught him how to do this.
Joe sprawls onto his back, the saif sliding out of his grip across the hardwood. Nicky kneels over him, his weight pressing Joe to the floor. Joe tests him anyway, arcing his neck, searching for leverage.
Nicky leans down.
“Yield,” he murmurs into the curls above Joe’s ear. He nudges Joe’s head to the side; Joe lets him.
“No,” Joe breathes, then, “Ah, Nico,” as Nicky kisses down his neck. “Now who can’t fight fair?”
Nicky is about to reply when, out of the corner of his eye, there’s a flicker of movement, and he looks across the floor to see Joe’s hand stretching towards the grip of his saif.
Nicky shifts back onto his right knee and pins Joe’s wrist down under his bare foot. Joe’s breath hitches in his chest.
“Yield.”
“Not yet,” and with a burst of strength that’s a little surprising even to Nicky, Joe twists to get his feet flat on the floor and flips them. Nicky realises it the split second before it happens, and rolls away, grabbing the saif on his way up.
Joe rises deftly, Nicky’s longsword held expertly in one hand.
Nicky takes half a moment to adjust to the lightness of the saif and swings for Joe. Joe ducks low, and staggers coming up, backing into their bedroom. Joe lunges for Nicky, and Nicky deflects with just the right amount of force that the edge of the longsword buries itself in their doorframe and sticks there.
Nicky takes the opening, fishing for Joe’s ankle with his bare foot, and Joe’s back slams into the wall so hard the painting above their bed – a bright acrylic of the view from the Valletta villa – shakes. Nicky braces one against hand the white painted plaster above Joe’s head, the other holding the saif to Joe’s throat.
“One has to wonder why such an accomplished warrior would put himself in such a vulnerable situation,” Nicky says.
Joe glares at him as well as he can, with his head tilted back as it is. He watches Nicky lean in through his dark eyelashes.
“Now,” Nicky whispers into the very slight space between their lips. “You yield.”
Joe makes a small noise.
“Hm?”
Joe looks Nicky in the eye, all pride having vanished from him like it was a magnesium flame – bright, burning, gone in seconds. “I yield.”
“How did you lose this one, Joe? You had every advantage,” Nicky wonders. “I didn’t even have café yet.”
Joe shakes his head as much as he can with the blade between them, which is nothing. It’s more like an allusion to shaking his head. “Maybe I wanted this result.”
His hand is curling in the hem of Nicky’s t-shirt – or really, it’s Joe’s t-shirt, but it’s the one Nicky slept in and is still wearing.
“What I am hearing,” Nicky says, speaking now right against Joe’s mouth, “is that you have given up on even trying to beat me.”
“Nicolò,” Joe sighs in the way that Nicky knows will end in his doing whatever it is Joe wants. “Nicolò, finish what you start.”
“I should put this down first,” Nicky says, but before he can shift to move away, Joe’s hand tightens in his shirt. “Oh. No?”
“Nicky,” Joe says, savouring the sweet, sharp points of his nickname. “Please just kiss me.”
Nicky does.