Archive of Our Own ^beta

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01.

Joe’s fingers hover above Nicky. His instinct is always to reach, but the silhouette of spreading blood makes him hesitate. He’s seen Nicky die a thousand different ways. Many are still so horrific that they shatter Joe.

He waits, each second an eternity dragging across his nerves.

Big wounds take longer.

He resists the temptation to start rocking. Something clicks in his throat as he finishes healing from Keane’s blow to his neck.

Big wounds take longer.

He starts to become afraid that Keane will come back before Nicky is upright. He doesn’t know where the others are.

Big wounds take longer.

But this is too long. Fear rises up like acid in the back of Joe’s throat, and his fingers finally come to rest along Nicky’s cheek. He doesn’t feel any of the subtle shifting that usually comes with healing from a wound like this.

“Nicky?” Joe whispers.

Still nothing, and Joe is beginning to contend with the knowledge that this is not his usual panic. This is genuinely too long. Maybe Kozak threw something off in them. Maybe Keane used some sort of special bullet—

“Nicolo,” Joe says, voice rising in volume. The single word is still strangled. His hands fly over Nicky, smoothing desperately over his face, searching for a pulse in his neck or wrists, trying to feel for the rise and fall of his lungs.

“Nicolo!” Joe finally full-on shouts, a disregard for his own safety. He pulls Nicky into his lap, blood forgotten. He clings. He quakes.

Footsteps approach him from behind. They don’t belong to Andy, Nile, or Booker, but Joe doesn’t move.

The last thing he hears is the firing of the gun. But the last thing he feels is Nicky in his arms.

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02.

Nicky isn’t moving. Joe is numb, a wild roaring in his ears. He can’t see Nicky’s face. He can only see all that blood, still slowly crawling across the ground.

He needs to move, but his entire body is a stranger to him. He doesn’t know where the others are. They were left behind. Again. Joe has a whisper of a memory that Booker had shouted that they were moving out.

He’s breathing too fast, breaths shuddering out of him, fingers clawing and clenching at his own pants. He must black out momentarily, but when he comes back to himself, he’s standing. He still can’t feel anything of his own body, but he stumbles out of the room, implicitly following the path Andy and Booker would be most likely to take.

If he encounters anyone along the way, he doesn’t remember. A gun in his hand – but unclear from where, but not from Nicky –

He finds the three of them pinned down. Andy and Nile turn toward him immediately. Andy immediately goes stiff. Nile, though, sweet Nile, doesn’t know him well enough to read everything he’s feeling just from the look in his eyes.

“Joe?” Nile asks. “Where’s Nicky?”

Joe doesn’t answer her. He goes straight for Booker. Grabs him by the back of his neck and starts slamming his face into the glass in front of them – over and over again – he’s watching this all from a distance, uncomprehending, lost to stopping anything –

“Joe!” Andy cries. She and Nile try to grab him, but he shrugs them after, fire focused on Booker.

He remains so until Keane’s men storm in during the chaos.

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03.

Joe’s sobs echo off the walls and the dust. He rocks back and forth, head pressed to Nicky’s forehead, heedless of the blood and viscera.

He wants to lie down on the floor, curl around Nicky, and not get back up. The cruelty of it all chews at him, that it could have just as easily been him who had caught Keane’s bullet – they had been going back and forth in the fight. Why did Nicky have to grab Keane that last time?

Andy would understand. Andy would forgive him, because she has gone through something so strikingly similar and never full roused herself again.

But – Andy. Andy.

Andy might forgive him, but Nicky would be disappointed. Nicky would want him to keep getting up and fighting for their family.

So, Joe draws in a few shaking breaths and stops the worst of his tears. He’s getting Andy out of here.

He tracks her, which isn’t exactly difficult considering the trail of carnage they’ve left behind. Deftly, Joe finishes cleaning out the soldiers who have them pinned down.

Andy blinks when she sees him by himself. She knows. She doesn’t push, though, and it’s a comfort to fall into the motions with her, to be so utterly understood by someone else in this moment of deafening loneliness.

“Nile,” Joe says clinically. “You’re going to get Andy out of here. Booker, you’re coming with me to finish this.”

At any other point in their history, Andy would have argued with this. But in this rare alignment of circumstances, she yields. She gives this to him, as if sensing it’s the last thread he has tethering him to anything. Sending her out of this building is the closest thing to peace he will ever know again.

When she’s gone, something does settle in Joe. He checks over the guns he’s collected, aware that Booker is watching him warily.

“You owe me a lifetime of penance,” Joe says as he hands Booker a handgun. “You’re going to pay it back by getting Nicky’s body out of here.” He can’t bear the thought of Nicky being left here. At best, an anonymous body among the throngs. At worse, taken back for more experimentation. Joe swallows bile at the thought.

“Joe,” Booker says, warily.

“I’m not asking,” Joe says.

In the end, Booker does as Joe asks. But he’s wrong about it being the extent of Booker’s penance. He will repent for the end of his days, because while Joe does kill Merrick and Keane, he’s recaptured in the process and Booker never sees him again.

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04.

Nicky still isn’t entirely sure what happened. Only that Joe had once more grabbed Keane away from him. There was a gunshot and then all other sounds of fighting stopped.

Nicky crawls across the floor, the air itself still burning his eyes and lungs. Joe is on the ground, not far, the ground haloed a dark red with his head. Nicky flinches, practically able to feel the ghost of that bullet ricocheting in his own skull. It is not a pretty way to die and an unpleasant way to revive.

He reaches for Joe’s hand and curls their fingers together so that his love will know he’s here.

The minutes drag on.

Nicky simply knows before he’s able to torment himself with the possibility: Joe is gone. Everything inside of Nicky goes very still all at once. He’s the eye in the center of the hurricane, a lie in the middle of all of the chaos.

Nicky stares hard at Joe’s face, ignoring the spatters of blood that do nothing to hide Joe’s bravery and beauty. He lifts each of Joe’s palms and kisses them tenderly. Taking care not to jostle Joe too much, he retrieves Joe’s necklace and slips it around his own neck, ignoring the line of already cooling blood that kisses the back of his neck.

He moves mechanically, killing soldier after soldier before they even know he’s there. He manages to even startle Andy when he appears beside them. She narrows her eyes at him, looks over his shoulder at where Joe is not.

“You’ll let me take care of this, yes?” Nicky asks, even though it’s not truly a question. In return, Andy acquiesces but doesn’t truly give him an answer. She does step almost tentatively forward and lean into him to press a kiss to his forehead. He closes his eyes in acceptance.

He waits until they’re safely out of the building before he goes to work. He heads back to the lab first, where Kozak has propped herself up and is holding her head. She looks up in alarm when he enters.

“You are going to wish, very much, that he had survived instead of me,” Nicky says, “because he held all my mercy.”

Nicky knocks her out once more and gathers what he needs from the extensive lab. He drugs Kozak so that when she wakes she’ll be conscious but unable to move. He takes everything else up to the penthouse where Keane, Merrick, and the rest of their forces are dug in. He blocks the door so that there will be no exit for them.

That done, he sets off his makeshift bomb. It’s time for everything to burn.

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05.

It’s been so long since Nicky has seen Joe so still. He’s gotten used to the benefit of their age, where even after a few seconds, they’ll start to twitch with healing. Joe is not a person made for stillness. Nicky has to close his own eyes to look away from the blank, unseeing expression on his face. He doesn’t want it to shadow the thousands of memories of Joe’s smiles.

In the background, there’s still rapid gunfire. He breathes out hard through his nose. Now that he’s paid the price of Joe’s life, Andy has to make it out of here. Losing her would be hard enough, but if that happened now, it would feel like Joe has died for nothing.

“Rest well, my love,” Nicky whispers and then makes himself stand.

He lifts guns as he passes bodies and is almost stunned when he finds Andy by herself, fighting one of the soldiers hand to hand. He dives in to get the man away from her. As he kills the man, Nicky wonders just where the hell Booker is – he had one job, and that was to get Andy to safety. Wasn’t that why he had left Nicky and Joe behind again?

He checks Andy over once he’s done with the fight, and she lets him, keeps trying to get him to meet her gaze. Before she can say anything, Nile and Booker reunite with them.

They head to the penthouse and finish off Keane and Merrick and the rest of their army. Nile keeps glancing around, obviously trying to figure out where Joe is.

“We still need to get the doctor,” Nicky says, trying to keep his voice clipped and businesslike. “Nile, go with Andy and find a car and get out of here. Booker and I will follow. We’ll be harder to track then.”

Booker has to know the inherent danger of being left alone with Nicky, but he doesn’t protest. He does as he’s told and leads the way when Nicky gestures at him to get in front.

The building is strangely quiet after all the chaos. Within minutes, they’re back at the lab where Nicky and Joe had been tortured for hours. Nicky notes that Kozak is gone.

He levels his gun at the back of Booker’s head. Booker raises his hands slowly.

“Nicky—”

“You have no idea how much he loved you,” Nicky says sharply, not wanting to hear whatever Booker is going to say, whether apologies or excuses. It’s all irrelevant to him now. “You want unending grief, Booker? Here it is.”

He shoots Booker twice in the back of the head, catching his body before it hits the ground. He tilts it back onto the table that they had forced Booker to leave not so long ago and puts the straps back around his once brother.

He doesn’t so much as flinch when Kozak steps behind him, obviously thinking she’s being stealthy, and jabs him in the neck with a needle. He welcomes the abyss.