Chapter Text
It was a beautiful and peaceful morning. Snow floated outside the window with a lethargic air, reflecting light off the windowpane as it fell. Nile should have been quietly appreciating all of this with a cup of coffee, or warming up for a bout of training, as was usually the case around this time of the morning. In the few weeks since she’d helped them escape Merrick, she had built a routine for herself. It helped ease her anxieties and gave her something to focus on that wasn’t the life-altering situation that she had found herself in.
But that morning, Nile decided she couldn’t keep numbing herself with familiar drills and patterns, not anymore. She had something to say, something she’d been wanting to say for days now. And if she didn’t say it, she was at risk of shaking right out of her skin. Out of what – anticipation? terror? excitement? – she had no idea. But she knew she couldn’t go about pretending this wasn’t eating at her.
Leaning against the doorframe, Nile looked out onto the domestic scene she was about to interrupt. At first glance, there was nothing unusual at the sight. Joe was in the kitchen cooking a great-smelling sausage, Nicky lounged on the couch and watched the snow fall outside the window, and Andy leaned over the kitchen table reading a book. Compared to the storm of bullets and glass she’d dealt with in London, watching them relax in their remote safe house in the Alps was almost picturesque.
It wasn’t the humans that troubled Nile. It was their daemons.
Her own daemon, Jordan, sat behind Nile’s feet. The black tips on his ears stood straight and alert, his paws firmly on the ground. The bobcat had stood this way a hundred times now, at careful attention as sergeants barked orders at them at boot camp, and then in the field. They were surrounded by dog daemons back in Afghanistan, and Jordan stood out as the only bobcat daemon in their ranks, but Nile never floundered under scrutiny then and she wouldn’t now.
Of course, this was a different sort of army, and they were giving her a different sort of attention, one not based on paper-thin assumptions and ranked hierarchy, but their mutual respect. Rationally, she knew that. But the people she was with now, they weren’t like anyone Nile had ever met before, and a remnant of her old self wavered in the face of it.
She saw an image transposed on top of the one in front of her: a shadowed, crowded section of an old French church where she first met these immortals, instead of the bright and open living room lodge they were in now. But her gut reacted to both images the same way – that everything she saw was wrong. Humans and daemons, casually breaking every rule she thought everyone knew.
Andy’s daemon – they hadn’t known his name, not back then – transformed in the blink of an eye from a leopard into an owl as soon as they entered the musty main room, landing comfortably on another man’s shoulder before he started to absently groom his blonde hair. Not one of them looked so much as perturbed. Someone else’s daemon, a jackal-looking creature, came prancing up to get scratches from Andy, and Andy just gave them, even grinning as she put her hands on someone else’s soul. Nile was worried for a second that she might throw up.
Immortality was huge and impossible and terrifying, but so was this.
Watching their daemons twist and transform and touch other humans so casually, as if it weren’t the greatest taboo on the planet… on that first night, Nile had no idea what to make of it.
And she still didn’t, not really. The difference was that now, one rescue mission later, Nile trusted these people well enough to stop watching them with apprehension. Nile knew better than to doubt their humanity, now that she saw the wall at Copley’s place, seen what good every one of them had done in just the past hundred years. And Nile knew that Andy was as human as they come, for all that she probably wished she weren’t sometimes. Nile didn’t see a soulless killing machine or an abomination when she looked into Andy’s grey eyes, or when she looked at any of them. She saw the love Nicky and Joe shared, saw the grief Booker carried, and it all struck Nile as very human.
They were the oldest humans alive. So, if Nile was still uncomfortable around their daemons, it served to reason that Nile was the one who had to change.
Learning fighting techniques, drills, even languages and code-cracking, all of that felt routine to Nile. It was difficult, but she didn’t worry if she’d eventually master it. She had pushed herself to learn such things before, and she would do it again.
But the fact was, all those skills didn’t matter if her daemon didn’t learn what he had to. Not only to learn the tricks of the trade so that they could work well together – memories of a whirlwind of daemon transformations at Merrick’s still blurred in her eyes sometimes when she tried to sleep – but to be a member of this group at all.
No one had said so outright. There were no ultimatums, and Nile didn’t expect them anymore. Still, as days turned into weeks, none of them so much as mentioned a next job. At Copley’s, Andy had been so eager to get started, but as far as Nile could tell, none of them had made a move to actually prepare for another mission. There wasn’t even a specific reason they were in Switzerland, as far Nile could tell. Andy had pitched it, and they had said yes, and that was it.
Nile couldn’t help but feel that this hiatus was because of her. Not that anyone had implied as such, but Nile could connect the dots. There were things that their daemons could do that hers simply couldn’t, and that left their team at an obvious disadvantage.
Her body was immortal, whether she liked it or not. But to be like these people and their daemons – to transform easily, to travel such great distances apart – was not something that naturally occurred to Jordi. He would have to learn how to be like them before she was a real member of this team.
As time passed, Nile felt a mounting pressure towards herself. Now, she knew she couldn’t put it off any longer. So, she strode to the doorway of the living room and said, sternly, “I have to ask you something.”
Five sets of eyes, both human and not, landed on her at once with a sort of terrifying synchronicity. For half a second, Nile debated rescinding her words, the weight of those stares was so daunting. She didn’t fear them, not anymore, but she wondered if it was inevitable that her lack of experience would cause her to buckle under the weight of such ancient eyes.
Nile set her shoulders and took a breath.
“I think it’s obvious that before I can officially get started with any of… this,” Nile gestured to the air, indicating their general immortal situation. “Before I go back in the field and help you guys, I have to get trained.”
Nicky, who was leaning back against the couch, nodded but looked a bit confused. “I thought that was what we were doing already.”
Nile shook her head. “No, I mean… Jordan and I, we have to learn how to do what you do.”
And she said this while staring into the silver eyes of the leopard sitting at Nicky’s back. His long, lithe form stretched the ridge of the couch, a large paw draped casually over Nicky’s shoulder in the mimicry of a housecat – he wasn’t Nicky’s daemon, he shouldn’t be touching him, wrong, part of Nile still hissed – and he flicked his spotted tail as he regarded Nile. The leopard’s intimidating form didn’t scare her. He was Andy’s soul incarnate, and Nile was getting used to seeing what was behind both sets of grey eyes.
A brown-feathered hawk perched on Joe’s shoulder as he cooked in the kitchenette, and they both froze at Nile’s statement. Looking at the two of them now, an almost perfectly matching set of curious brown eyes, Nile almost wanted to laugh. Of course she had assumed the hawk had been Joe’s daemon when she met him, and by the way she comfortably perched on Joe’s broad shoulders at all hours of the day, any reasonable human being would have assumed the same thing – until the falcon opened her mouth and a thick Italian accent came out. Nile was pretty sure she didn’t imagine a barely-hidden grin on Joe’s face when the falcon had spoken for the first time in front of Nile, leaving her stunned.
( Wrong, wrong – )
And where there should have been six pairs of eyes, there were only five. Joe’s actual daemon was nowhere in sight, and that should have been impossible. You weren’t supposed to go farther than a few feet away from your daemon. It wasn’t supposed to even be physically possible to be separated without feeling intense pain. Even the most rigorously trained soldiers couldn’t stand to be apart from their daemons for long. But Joe’s golden wolf was nowhere in sight, and something in Nile’s chest sang wrong, wrong, wrong —
And that was precisely why she had to learn: in the context of this band of immortals, somehow, every rule they broke was right. No one knew what it meant to be human like they did. And if she and Jordan didn’t figure out how to be like them, then... well, they didn’t know what would happen. But Nile’s future was tied with theirs, now. She had chosen them, so she had to do right by them. That meant training her daemon to do all those impossible things she once thought no daemon was meant to do.
Even though Andy was sitting at the kitchen table, Nile kept her eyes locked with the leopard from across the room. He blinked only once.
“Sure, we can train you,” the daemon – Rex, as he was called – rumbled lowly, and Nile let out a breath. But when she turned to look at Jordi, his back was stiff, his eyes wide and unblinking. He’d been like this for days, now, and Nile found it impossible to relax when he was this tense. This training should help, she told herself. They needed some direction, that was all.
Still, as Nile felt her daemon’s tension like it was her own, she wondered if they would sleep any easier that night.