Chapter Text
When Lykon realizes its the end, it’s a stab. With Andy, it’s a bullet wound.
The universe decided to ring in Joe’s ending with a nosebleed.
It takes a moment for anyone to notice- Joe had been rather quiet, but he was chuckling at something Nile said when she froze, gasped loud enough that Nicky turned away from the food he was cooking-
And saw blood, dripping out of Joe’s nose and crawling like a snake.
“Oh god,” Andy whispered from her seat, “no. Not yet- not-“
Joe had touched the blood, then stared at Nicky in terror. Nicky had watched for a long moment, then slowly grabbed a knife from the counter and made a small cut on his forearm.
It didn’t heal.
It didn’t heal, the blood welled up slowly and leaked down his arm. A hysterical laugh bubbles up in him, and Joe gives him a tight smile.
Nile whimpers low in her throat, and they both immediately turn to wrap her in a hug.
Nicky grabs Joe’s hand and swears, swears he’ll never let go.
Nicky wakes up the next morning to Joe climbing out of bed rapidly.
He wakes slower, feeling pleasantly sore for the first time… ever. He can’t wait to look in the mirror and see the marks of Joe’s love on his neck. After comforting the others they’d broken out the wine, made plans- unlike Andy, they didn’t want to continue fieldwork for much longer. They’d do a few more, help with logistics, but they wanted a life , a proper one. They wanted a kid and a house and a dog and a place to grow old, together.
It’s fascinating, how quickly plans can come crashing down.
And then he hears Joe throw up, and he gets concerned.
He fetches him a glass of water, teases Joe about the wine from the previous night coming back to haunt him. Joe laughs amicably and makes breakfast for everyone.
But then it happens again.
Joe gets more nosebleeds, starts throwing up everything he eats. Nicky has to rush him to a hospital after Joe passes out and the doctors…
Suddenly, mortality is a curse once more.
“There’s something I never told you,” Joe whispers later after Nicky has screamed and raged and cursed the universe. He’s sure he will do more screaming and raging later, but the shock has set in and he is silent as Joe looks at Andy and Nile “Any of you.”
In slow, stuttering words Joe describes his last solid memory of his home before leaving for the crusades. He describes the constant headaches, the coughing, how the doctors had proclaimed him ill, and told him he would die in a few months and how he’d spent the early weeks of the crusades huddled in a tent, coughing up blood and hiding it from his superiors.
“So it’s a disease,” Nile says hopefully, “that means there might be a cure now!”
But there is no cure. The doctors told them that.
Joe calls Booker two days later, deciding he needs to know. He doesn’t put the call on speaker, but Nicky can still hear the way he rages and screams at the way cancer takes all the people he loves.
The tumors in Joe’s lungs, benign for a thousand years, are growing rapidly. Copley offers to help, to set Joe up with the best doctors in the world and ensure that chemotherapy extended his life a little longer.
Nicky did research as soon as Joe’s nose started bleeding. He can recite the side effects of chemotherapy with ease and turns to Joe, about to do so as Copley awaits an answer.
Before he can, Joe smiles, serene as can be, and says “no, thanks.”
Nicky has to leave.
He manages to stay gone for all of an hour before his brain screams at him that he’s wasting time and he crawls back to Copley’s, finding Joe kneeling on the balcony of their room.
For the first time ever, Nicky has no respect for the sanctity of Joe’s prayer space. He rants as he paces back and forth (behind Joe, he isn’t a complete monster.)
He calls his beloved a spineless coward, claims he is vile and evil for daring to leave Nicky without so much as a fight, without even considering it. He’s still ranting when Joe finishes his prayers. In fact, they only get louder when Joe turns to him. His face is blank, and Nicky falls to his knees, grabs him by the shoulders and shakes him, screams “why aren’t you upset about this?! Why are you leaving me?!”
As his final words ring out, Joe slowly raises a hand to cup Nicky’s cheek.
“I don’t know,” he answers. “I don’t know. I’m so sorry.”
And that, that moment of earnest honesty is the thing that breaks him.
For all his raging, Nicky hadn’t cried since that first day. Now he pitches forward, sobs into Joe’s shoulder, and lets himself be held and comforted.
“I don’t want to spend my last months feeding chemicals into my body,” Joe insists as he rubs Nicky’s back. “I don’t want to lose my beard, or this hair you love so much. I don’t want to end up bedridden and poisoned beyond recognition.”
“I could recognize him by touch alone,” Nicky quotes, hysterical, and Joe brushes a kiss along his brow.
“I would know him in death, at the end of the world.” Joe quotes right back, smiling at him. Maybe Nicky is imagining things but Joe already looks more tired, the lines on his face deeper as if he’s suddenly been given a large weight to carry.
Nicky leans forward to kiss his cheek, his temple, his forehead. He presses his nose into the curls atop Joe’s head and clings to him desperately.
“Don’t go,” he pleads, “Don’t leave me.”
Joe kisses his chin. He says nothing in response.
Booker comes back, and it’s the greatest surprise when he brings Quynh with him.
Apparently, she contacted him, said she wasn’t sure she was ready to go back to the others. But then she hears about Joe, and she spends an hour hugging him after she reunites with Andy.
It’s amazing, really, how such a tragedy can bring people together.
No one talks about the next job. Copley doesn’t dare mention it. They go eventually, while Nicky takes Joe to Malta and the Alps and Bali and Istanbul. Anywhere they have happy memories they try to visit. He ignores the bloody tissues, makes Joe tea every morning, and kisses him as if he can keep Joe tethered to the earth by sheer will.
If you live to see a hundred, I want to live to see a hundred minus one, so I never have to live without you, Nicky thinks. All his thoughts are quotes lately. Between them, Joe is the word keeper. Without him Nicky has none.
A full year after the nosebleed, Joe’s a fair amount of his weight and coloring. He’s curled up with Nicky in their little apartment in Sicily, warm and comfortable when he says it.
“I don’t want to die.”
For a year, Joe has been strong. He’s let everyone else react around him. Nicky’s been waiting for this, and he immediately puts his book down, curling around Joe as Joe presses his face into Nicky’s shirt. “I don’t want to die, I don’t want to leave you here alone-“
Nicky kisses his hair. He found his first greys a week ago, and he and Joe had celebrated together. That had been a good day. The number of good days was getting less and less and less…
“I won’t be,” Nicky promises, kissing him gently. “I won’t be long after you.”
He doesn’t mean suicide, honest. He simply knows without question- he and Joe are of one heart. When one ceases it’s endless beating, the other will to.
His phrasing probably could’ve been better, since Joe flails so hard he falls out of bed.
Later, as Nicky frets over the new bump on Joe’s head, Joe makes him swear up and down and left and right and all over that Nicky will not do anything stupid after he dies.
“do you want me to write it in blood?” Nicky jokes, and Joe says that is exactly the kind of foolish behavior that Nicky is not permitted to do.
They laugh. It’s not a horrible day.
The horrible days come later.
Joe gets admitted to a hospital when his legs grow too weak to hold him. His voice gets worse and worse as cancer crawls up his windpipe and steals Joe’s beloved words from him.
Nicky is valiant- he pays the hospital enough money to build a new wing, moves his ass into Joe’s hospital room, and helps him paint and holds him and sings to him while Joe coughs.
Joe doesn’t want morphine. He wants to be alert until his last second.
And, somehow, the lord in his kindness- Joe gets better.
The tumors don’t shrink, but Joe’s breathing improves with therapy. He admits that the pain medications help a lot, and his stance on chemotherapy changes from a hard no to a quiet maybe.
Why oh why wouldn’t God grant them one more miracle?
Nicky is high on love when he tells the others this, and they all gather together to prepare the house in Malta for Joe’s new wheelchair- he’d likely be in it for the rest of his life, but Joe had laughed weakly and said he’d walked enough steps on this earth.
Another good day. The last, actually.
Nicky goes back to the hospital. And the doctor-
“No,” Nicky says as the doctor tries to lie to him. “No.”
Maybe this man is like Kozak, a relative even. Maybe-
“No- Joe. Yusuf-“
Nicky is led into Joe’s room and Joe is asleep, eyes closed and-
Nicky shakes him, grabs his arm, and kisses his face again and again.
“Joe, baby, please. Baby please, we have to go home! Joe please! Hayati, il mio cuore, amore della mia vita per favore it’s time to go home! Please please please please please-“
(This is what he gets for putting his faith in God.)
The wake is attended by their family and Copley.
It was Joe’s wish to be cremated, scattered in Tunisia with the souls of his birth family. When Andy showed him the- the urn, Nicky had thrown up.
He hates this, hates that Joe’s beautiful body and soul has been reduced to a fancy jar of dirt. He hates that Joe’s laugh is gone and hates that his stupid body is taking so long to follow.
They scatter him. Everyone cries. Andy gets drunk and yells that she was supposed to go before her baby brother, Quynh mourns the time she missed with him, Booker raises his glass silently and Nile rages.
Nicky sobs and sobs and sobs.
And then-
The wind whips at his face. It doesn’t sting as much as it should. It’s warm, and smells… oddly spicy. They’re near a city, it’s probably just food.
But some hysterical part of his brain screams Joe, Joe’s trying to kiss you one last time.
Nicky’s sobs hitch and pause. His knees buckle and he wraps his arms around himself.
Somehow, he knows he isn’t going to die yet.
He has more work to do. The thought disgusts him.
Grief sits on his shoulders like a heavy robe. He returns to Malta with a tiny jar of Joe’s ashes that he didn’t have the heart to scatter.
He wears it around his neck with their wedding rings. Joe’s pendant sits on the dresser.
His family stays for a month, patiently dragging him out of bed for food and water and company and forcing him to shower when his body is too heavy without Joe to bolster him. Nicky doesn’t speak to them, just cries. He exists in the darkness of grief every time he remembers that he will never see Joe’s smile again. His world is frozen and cold and dead. The sun is gone even in sunny Malta.
After they leave, Nicky spends a week in bed eating only junk food that he can eat without leaving. He closes the blinds, drinks water from the tap in the en-suite, and cries every time he wakes up without Joe’s arms around him.
He gets crumbs in the bed. Joe would hate that.
On the seventh day (when the lord rested, ha), Nicky ventures out of his room for a new bag of chips and…
It’s raining. Pouring in sheets. The sky is dark and grey, but there’s no thunder. It’s like the world is crying with him, mourning the loss of one so bright.
And suddenly, Nicky is outside. He steps off the porch and stands in the rain. His socks get soaked and his hoodie grows heavier and heavier as it absorbs more and more water.
It’s refreshing, to have something other than tears running down his face.
That night he dreams of Joe. He always does, every night- strange, half-remembered things where he’s running and can’t reach him- it didn’t take a psychologist to interpret that one-
But tonight, as he runs to Joe, Joe is standing in the rain. Water drips down his face and for the first time he looks at Nicky.
Nicky wakes up, cries again, and forces himself to make breakfast.
Nicky stays in bed another week, but he makes himself meals. He throws it up a few times, but he’s surprised by how much of it stays down. It’s nothing fancy- bland soups, toast without jam, a piece of barely seasoned chicken. He works himself into a schedule and forces himself to stick to it.
It’s progress.
Being out of bed comes with its own challenges. Standing in the kitchen means he expects Joe to be at the table, or in the living room. He expects to hear him sketching or talking or teasing or laughing.
Their home is silent for the first time in centuries. It’s painful, so much so that Nicky takes to playing music just so that he can hear something other than the unbearable silence and his own sobs.
He’s glad that Nile taught him how to order groceries through an app. The idea of seeing other people makes him ill.
He stands outside every time it rains. Some distant part of his mind- which sounds like Joe, although every part of his mind sounds like Joe. This part sounds like crusades era Joe- yells at him that he needs a proper fucking shower, his hair is gonna fall out and he smells.
The rain feels like cleansing, like Joe is trying to tell him he grieves with him as Joe misses him too.
He realizes during one of these sessions in the rain that his vegetable garden is sprouting. Joe had started the garden on a whim, a project for while he was…
Was dying.
Nicky had to start thinking the word at some point, Joe had finished dying. Had successfully died and was probably annoying each one of his seventy-two houris with poems about Nicky’s eyes.
That was a bad day, he started crying again.
But he digresses.
Nicky notices the garden needs weeding, and thinks that Joe would’ve never stood for that. He crouches down in the rain-wet soil and weeds.
The rain stops. The sun peeks out as he finishes.
So the next week, he does it again. And again. And again.
The first time he calls his family since they left, it’s to ask them in an underused voice if they want his first yield of tomatoes.
They invade his house, eat tomatoes and mozzarella, and bring him pizza.
He finally showers before they come. He dreams of Joe’s smile.
He’s horrified the first time he turns to tell Joe something and realizes he isn’t there. It’s a major setback, actually. He breaks a mug and crawls back into bed for three days.
Eventually, though, he just starts… talking.
He’s run through all of Nile’s Spotify playlists. The horrible silence is back and he needs to fill it.
So he… he starts talking. He tells Joe about his day and the garden and how much he misses his smile.
Joe gave him his words, Nicky realizes one day, and the thought doesn’t make him cry.
Andy loses a leg.
Quynh storms through his door that same day, ranting about her idiocy and instance on dying in the field.
Nicky loves her. He’s so happy she’s home. He really loves her and he really is happy.
But he’s selfish. He’s had a bad day. His peppers died and he hasn’t had a rainstorm in weeks. He has a pain in his back that Joe isn’t there to listen to him bitch about and dammit, Andy got years. She got seven thousand years of life, several of them with Quynh. She got years after her mortality even as she stayed in the field and got blown up.
Joe hadn’t even reached a thousand. He left the field immediately and still died within fifteen months.
He tells Quynh as much. Screams it, actually, and she screams back and they scream and then they throw things.
Needless to say, Nicky ends up with glass in his leg.
Quynh apologizes as she patches him up, says she wishes Joe were here too. She makes him promise to call more as she leaves.
Nicky doesn’t cry. He’s proud of himself.
Nicky goes to a grocery store for the first time without Joe. It isn’t as much fun, really. He’s used to Joe teasing him and cuddling him and sneaking stuff in the cart like a five-year-old.
It’s another bad day. He’s nearing the anniversary, all the days are bad.
They gather again as Nicky hits a year without Joe.
Nicky chooses this day to get wasted .
“How do you do it?” Nicky asks Booker in a slur. “How do you heal? My heart’s a gaping wound, I want it to close.”
“It never does,” Booker tells him as Nicky suffers through his hangover the morning after. “It aches. But with time, the ache lessens. You love again.”
Nicky tells him without firmly, he will never love again, is he insane? Booker bursts out laughing.
“Are you kidding?” He says, wiping his eyes, “Nicky, you couldn’t date someone else if you fucking tried. You’ll find other things to love.”
Nicky thinks of his garden. He thinks of Nile and Quynh and Booker and Andy. He agrees.
He certainly agrees with the first part. Joe had brought it up once near the end, and Nicky had pleasantly reminded him that it was Joe’s idea to get married.
Love someone else. His heart burned up and was scattered amidst the Tunisian winds, thanks.
It still takes him another two years to realize that he’s healing.
He cries for most of it. He still has days and even weeks where he crawls back into bed. But he starts going to the grocery stores again. He reads more. He even goes out for a coffee once or twice.
His family visits often. He becomes somewhat of a therapist, a neutral party in arguments and debates. Andy learns to putter around on her prosthetic leg and gets relegated to strategic planning.
Mid-year two, Nicky finally ventures up to the attic.
During that first year, when Joe was weakening and he and Nicky were traveling around the world, they sold each of their safe houses except Malta. Joe had finally donated some of his painting collection, but most of them ended up in the attic. A few had ended up on the walls, but they’d been too painful to remember after Joe had passed.
Nicky runs reverent fingers over paintings of his face, of Andy, of sketches of Booker and Nile. He remembers the way Joe dragged brush and charcoal over canvas, and he cries.
He finds a portrait Vincent did of Joe, eyes crinkled at the corners as he gazed off to the side of the painting- probably at Nicky. It’s a smaller one, and Nicky frames it and puts it on his bedside table.
For the rest of his life, Nile teases that upon Nicky’s death she’s donating his one-of-a-kind, original, special made Van Gogh to a museum, frame and all.
On the year three anniversary, Nicky’s family is too busy to come see him. They’re deep undercover. There are no phone calls and Nicky is…
Not good.
He sits at the table all day and doesn’t eat. He’s impressed that he doesn’t stay in bed. His heart is in a vice grip and he feels unmoored, far away from his heart and mind and body.
He can’t keep doing this. He can’t keep shutting down. He’s physically thirty five now, nearing a millennium on this earth. He’ll most likely live to see the next century and suddenly, the idea of spending that long without Joe strangled him until he can’t breathe.
Don’t you dare! Nicky’s heart screams, don’t you dare break your promises!
“Shut up, Joe,” Nicky whispers as he clutches a bottle of pills in his fist. They were just painkillers, mostly for Andy, but enough of them would let him see Joe again.
Joe.
Joe, his light in the darkness. His tether to the shore. His everything.
His husband.
Who he misses.
Who would kill him if he did this and Nicky forces himself to walk into town and shove the pills into a dumpster behind a bookshop.
His neighbors from across the street are waiting when he gets back, say that one of his siblings (Booker, apparently) mentioned that he wouldn’t be available to visit on the anniversary of Nicky’s husband’s death, would Nicky like a casserole?
Nicky accepts the food and cries. He’s really sick of crying.
He asks his neighbors to take his knives and not give them back until next week. The casserole is the richest thing he’s eaten in a long time. All Nicky can think is how Joe would love it.
That night, he dreams of Joe smiling and holding him. He hears him whisper about work to do.
Nicky wakes up in a foul mood- what possible purpose could there be, except to punish him for the people he’s killed?
There is no purpose without Joe.
Nicky gets Bronchitis a week later. He gets dragged to the hospital by his neighbors and instead of signing out against medical advice he simply shrugs and settles in to wait for Joe. He signed his DNRs when Joe did, he’ll see him soon.
Unfortunately, modern medicine is a little too advanced to let someone die of bronchitis. Nicky curses the universe as he suffers through his disease- if they could cure this why, precisely, could they not cure Joe? He goes home before the doctor tells him to and ends up getting a high fever and going right back to the hospital a week later.
His family frets and Nicky dreams again and again- work to do work to do.
“Alright,” Nicky grumbles as the doctors declare his fever broken, “I can take a hint, Dios Joe.”
He swears he hears Joe’s laughter.
Copley helps him make arrangements using the true story- Nicky is a rich widower whose husband died three years ago. He’s looking for purpose and companionship. He has a large house with a lot of rooms in a good neighborhood.
The social worker assigned to him introduces him to Marcello.
Marcello is an infant whose mother overdosed two days after he was born. He’s underweight, and most likely asthmatic, and in need of a good home with a lot of love.
He has a small fuzz of curly hair.
Nicky’s heart, cold and dead since Joe had died, kickstarts into frantic, beating wakefulness.
And sure enough, things get better.
Marcello is a much-needed breath of fresh air in Nicky’s life. Caring for him drags him out of bed, making him smile means Nicky can’t cry every hour. Nicky sings to him and tells him stories about a brave knight who fought for good and righteousness and was best friends with an angel.
Marcello’s first word, in fact, is “knight”, and Nicky laughs and holds his son close and says “do you hear this Habibi? You're his favorite and you aren’t even here!”
The comment is careless, and Nicky cries a little, but it isn’t as heavy as before.
Everyone loves Marcello. Quynh teases that now that Andy is getting grey hairs they should hop on the baby train and have one, and Andy cheerfully tells her to fuck off.
Marcello grows up surrounded by loving aunts and uncles, but most of the time it’s just him and Nicky.
Nicky dreams of work to do and looks at his empty rooms.
“Alright Joe,” Nicky sighs as he pulls up the paperwork, “you’d better not send me a Venetian”
His first foster child is Christophe. He’s a 10-year-old from Venice, because of course he is. He’s angry and upset, his parents abandoned him and he has too much energy . Most foster homes have rejected him.
Nicky teaches him tahtib the way Joe would’ve, then signs him up for a local judo class. He practices origami with him and patiently listens as Christophe talks about the dynamics and graphics of a video game he loves.
When Christophe gets adopted at age 14, he emails and visits Nicky constantly, sending him pictures of his Judo trophies and inviting Nicky to his graduation from graphic design school.
Marcello is indifferent to his big brother, but even though they only have one another for a few short years they stay friendly and brotherly for the rest of their lives.
The same cannot be said for the twins.
Roberta and Vince come to them when Christophe is twelve and Marcello is starting school. They’re both sixteen, and they know they’ll never get adopted. They’re tired, and disenchanted with life.
Nicky adopts them, just to prove a point.
They never really connect with their other siblings, but Andy and Roberta get along like a house on fire, as do Vince and Nile.
In the end, they both join the military. They have long and successful careers there.
Not all of his foster kids keep in touch- some come for a few weeks, some stay for a few years. Some leave and never call and some leave and then return.
Nicky doesn’t care. He loves every child who comes into his home, because he knows Yusuf is sending them his way.
Every child who is young enough for stories hears of the brave knight and his angel.
Marcello is 7 when he first draws them for a school art project. Nicky is certain that his baby was sent directly from his husband.
“Papa, who is that?”
“That’s your baba, Marcello.”
“What’s that mean?”
“He’s your other papa, but I’m your papa, so he’s baba.”
“Why can’t I see him?”
“He’s in heaven, tesoro, but he’s always watching you.”
“Like Santa?”
“Yes, exactly like Santa.”
Nicky’s kids don’t comment when Nicky celebrates his grey hairs, or the ache that forms in his knees and back after years of carrying children to their beds.
Booker on the other hand? He calls him an old man and teases him relentlessly without any of the jealousy or alcohol that he would’ve cling to years ago. Nicky is unspeakably proud of him, and when he tells him this Booker laughs.
“I think,” He mumbles quietly, “I think Joe would be too. That’s why I-“
“Aw, Sebastien-“
Nicky wraps him in a hug and reassures him that yes, Joe would be intensely proud. He knows he would be, can’t wait to tell him how Booker honored him.
He tries to avoid thinking about death. For the obvious reasons, of course. He has his kids to think about. When he isn’t caring for them he organizes jobs for the team. When he isn’t doing that he gardens, or rereads his favorite books or, on really bad days, sits in the attic for hours and craves Joe.
He wishes that he’d convinced Joe to draw more self-portraits, or taken more pictures. They’d always been so nervous about taking them and then getting hacked, or taking them and losing them. He has one that he keeps almost constantly on his person- a picture taken by Nile, at one of their wedding nights. They’re dancing. She caught them both looking intensely lovestruck with one another.
Joe is about to kiss him, in the picture. He has his smile on and a hand on the back of Nicky’s neck. Nicky traces the photo and remembers kissing Joe.
Andy and Quynh get married when Marcello is 12, and Nicky is very glad to have his son as his plus one.
No one comments on the supposed age difference, but Quynh makes a million “isn’t my wife such a beautiful silver fox?” Jokes, exactly ten cougar references, and at one point nudges Nicky and whispers “imagine what they’d say if they knew she was older.”
They save Joe a seat at the reception, and Nicky stares at it quietly.
They’d eloped just before Joe died. They didn’t have the energy or time for a big reception and ceremony, so it was just the two of them and an officiant. They’d made a point of it- Yusuf Al-Kaysani had exited this world married to Nicolo Di Genova. Legally and truly.
Marcello touches his hand, then hugs him. “I wish baba was here too. Aunt Nile says he was a great dancer.”
“Much better than me and my two left feet,” Nicky agrees, kissing his head. For the millionth time, he says “I wish you could’ve met him.”
He catches Marcello talking to Joe, sometimes.
He’ll find his son curled up on the corner of Nicky’s bed, talking directly to the portrait. Over the years he talks about Nicky, his siblings, school, part-time jobs.
They never talk about it. Nicky is so worried he’ll stop.
He’s terrified that one day Marcello will decide that his baba never existed, or stop caring about him, but that day never comes.
Nicky catches him talking to Joe’s picture one day when he’s seventeen, ranting about how “the school said I could only have five tickets! That’s bullshit, I mean- I need at least six. I can’t just not invite one of my aunts, and uncle booker would be crushed! You and Papa might have to sneak aunt Nile into my graduation in a suitcase.”
Nicky has to go to the attic and cry a little. He did so well, he hopes to god Joe is proud of him.
Marcello goes to college to become a teacher, Nicky keeps fostering kids until he’s in his sixties.
Andy keeps on getting older, with no signs of going anywhere any time soon.
“You have to go,” She jokes one day as she and Nicky sip tea and teach themselves to knit. “You’ve got an appointment to keep. Me? I’m living to two hundred.”
“You’re already over eight thousand years old, my love.” Quynh calls from the kitchen, and Andy shouts back “then what’s another century!”
Nicky laughs so hard it makes his back ache.
Despite being excited about aging, Nicky does not age with grace.
While he relished the little aches and pains that brought him closer to Joe at first, he misses being able to move without worrying about his joints. He strongly dislikes his cane and refuses to admit he needs a hearing aid, despite Marcello’s teasing.
The worst part is, it isn’t that he doesn’t want to go.
He knows that’s terrible, that he’s raised so many children and he should be happy with his life, that he should want to stay with his family.
But in the end, he misses Joe.
He hates that he’s become accustomed to the pain of life without him. He hates that he doesn’t search him out at night anymore and hates that Marcello never got to meet him. Then he hates himself for hating that, because he’s lived a good life. He did the work he was meant to do, and he shouldn’t be craving death just so he can see Joe again.
He grows melancholy in his old age, perhaps even a bit crotchety.
The first time he falls and breaks his hip, it’s because a carpet has ridden up. And as he lays there waiting for Nile to come pick him up he curses at it.
And then he realizes, he’s cursing at a carpet. For tripping him.
Nile finds him laughing hysterically, claiming that his husband kicked his butt out of his sad state.
Nicky is suddenly more sure than ever that Joe never left him.
He gets a life alert and has to start taking heart medication. He’s survived world wars and nuclear bombs, and his son is certain that blood pressure will be what takes him out.
“You were always so high strung, Habibi” Joe laughs in his ear, and Nicky smiles. It’s gotten much easier to hear him, lately. He could always imagine Joe’s voice, never forgot what he sounded like, but now it feels like he’s actually talking.
That is the one singular part of aging that he fears, actually. Losing his mind, his memory. He’s seen dementia patients crying, seeking out spouses who weren’t there. Or worse, not remembering them at all.
He clings to Joe more than ever before.
Marcello gets engaged. Her name is Christina and she’ isn’t good enough for him. When they talk about wedding details she refuses to save a seat for Joe, so Marcello takes his ring back.
When he does marry, his new wife is named Jenna. She’s American, beautiful, a doctor, and also is not good enough for any son of Nicolo Al-Kaysani Di Genova. But then, no one is.
Still, Nicky walks him down the aisle. He sits in his seat next to the one Jemma had gladly reserved for Joe.
Nicky dances with each member of his family, possibly for the last time. He and Andy sway when they would’ve swung, and laugh about how old they are in a family full of beautiful twenty-somethings.
“Beautiful twenty-somethings and Booker,” Joe teases, and Nicky laughs so hard he almost falls over.
Nicky is, admittedly, bad at taking his heart medication.
Which is probably why he’s here, on the floor, chest tight, at age 72.
Marcello just had a baby named Joseph, Andy turned 102, Booker and Nile and Quynh just stopped world war three from breaking out. Nicky has no foster kids, and…
Well.
He’s ready. He’s ready he’s ready he’s ready.
“I’ll say,” Joe muses from where he’s sitting on the counter. “You sure took your sweet time, my heart.”
“It’s only been 40 years!” Nicky insists, laughing and sitting up. His chest is no longer tight, and his back doesn’t ache. Joe’s smile is filled with tears, and he hops off the counter.
“Too long,” he whispers, “every single second is far too long.”
He holds out a hand, and Nicky swallows.
Then he takes it, and Joe pulls him to his feet and out of his body.
Nicky is young, exactly how he was when Joe died and Joe’s hand is warm, and solid, and perfect and-
And-
Nicky stares at him as Joe cups his cheek and thumbs away his tears.
“Hello my moon,” Joe coos, “I missed you.”
And then Joe slides a hand around to the back of his neck and draws Nicky into a kiss.
The spell of shock breaks, and Nicky makes a desperate noise against Joe’s mouth, throwing his arms around Joe’s shoulders and kissing him.
He shoves Joe up against the counter, frantically trying to touch every inch of him at once, as if he’d disappear again. Joe laughs against him as Nicky realizes they don’t need air, he can literally just kiss Joe forever and ever and ever-
He grabs Joe by the thighs and lifts him up, clutching him tight enough to leave bruises were they mortal and alive.
“I’m so proud of you,” Joe finally pulls back to say. “I’m so, so proud of you, my love. I’m so proud of you.”
“I missed you so much,” Nicky sobs, burying his face in Joe’s shoulder. “I missed you every second.”
“Oh hayati,” Joe kisses his head. “I never left.”
Nicky doesn’t set him down. He keeps Joe there, lifted, held. He presses his face into Joe's heart and says “If you haven’t left, does that mean that when we crossover I have to deal with your 72 virgins?”
“Love me, love my seventy-two houris .” Joe demands, and Nicky laughs so hard he nearly drops him.
And finally, when the light appears, Nicky carries him through. Exactly how it was supposed to be.
Marcello Di Genova finds his dad later that day.
He grieves, but at the funeral (which is attended by the entire town, not to mention every foster kid who ever met Nicky) he and his aunts and uncle can’t stop smiling at the in-joke.
He’s with Joe now. He’s probably so much happier anyway.