Chapter Text
Nile makes it to the highway before she throws up.
It happens all at once: one moment she's buzzing, barely aware of her body, her mind back in the lab calculating angles and covering sixes and watching Andy, always watching Andy--and the next moment her stomach is churning with that same sick swoop of oh fuck that she'd felt when she had turned around in the lab and Andy was gone, Andy had disappeared, where the fuck was Andy--
And then Nile was in the back of a car, wedged between Nicky and the door, and the air was stuffy with blood and sweat and car-smell and a wave of cold prickling nausea rolled from her toes up to the tips of her hair, and before she had time to warn anyone she was bent double over her own thighs and vomiting into the space between her boots.
There's a hand on her back and she leans into the touch even before processing who and what it is: Nicky, stroking between her shoulder blades. "It's okay, Nile," he murmurs.
The smell of vomit joins the blood and sweat and car-smell, and Nile retches again.
"I'm… sorry," she croaks.
"It's okay," Nicky says again. He sounds like he means it. Like nothing truly fazes him anymore, and how can it, he's been alive so long, century after century after century, as people aged and died around him—
Nile gags so hard she has to fight to breathe.
"Water in the trunk," Booker mutters from Nicky's other side.
It's the first time Booker has spoken since the lab, and the air in the car changes. Nicky's grip on her shoulder tightens, Joe makes an aborted noise, Andy growls quellingly, Booker shrinks. Nile barely registers any of this. She's still free-falling from a penthouse suite, the only thing tethering her to the present moment the rank taste in her mouth.
Without looking at Booker, Nicky unbuckles himself and twists around in his seat. Joe, in the front seat, scooches his chair up as far as it will go to make room for Nicky's big shoulders and long legs as Nicky works open a hatch built into the back of the middle back seat that leads into the trunk, and sticks his arm inside.
It seems that even in his betrayal Booker was thorough; from inside the brown duffel bag containing the empty gun Booker had handed to Andy, Nicky pulls out a bottle of water, a ration bar, and a spare tee shirt. He opens the water bottle and hands it to Nile.
Nile sips. The water tastes like her mouth: blood and ash and bile. She gags. Nicky's hand is back on her shoulder, his touch comforting without being overbearing. Nile breathes through her nose and sips again.
Nicky takes the bottle from her and replaces it with the opened ration bar.
"I can't," Nile says. She knows she should try, but…
"You can," Nicky says.
Nile isn't proud of the little whimper that comes out of her at the thought of consuming food. But she puts the corner of the bar in her mouth and bites it off.
"Very good, Nile," Nicky says, and she should be annoyed with how much he's coddling her, but all she feels is terrible, pathetic gratitude. She takes another bite, only so he'll rub her back again.