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If there’s one thing Joe has learned about humanity in all his long years, it’s that mankind has never truly abandoned its quest for immortality. People are so fascinated by the idea of eternity, they have filled most of their stories with it – myths, legends, books, movies, all of them built around the same, arrogant, alluring promise of walking through life with forever in your pocket, and death somebody else’s concern.
They don’t know, they can’t know, that the true measure of eternity lies in this. In watching the life bleed out of Nicky, pooling thick and crimson beneath him, and in crawling over him like the most abject of God’s creatures, waiting, waiting, powerless and spiraling into madness because of it.
“Nicolò, please…”
Eternity is watching as time stretches by endlessly; as two minutes turn into three, and three into four, and the seconds keep trickling by, drip. drip. drip., slow and dark like molasses, and still Nicky won’t wake up.
It’s not knowing if this is it, this is where they run out of luck at last; it’s wondering if tomorrow, and all the tomorrows from here into infinity will look just like this, stilted and wrong with the empty shape of Nicky cut out of them,
until–
– until Nicky is gasping for air, his whole body jolting with the shock of being alive, again, alive.
“Nicky!”
Joe is all over him in a heartbeat, tears blurring his vision as he grasps for Nicky, feels Nicky’s chest stutter with new breath under his hand.
“Joe,” Nicky croaks out, half-blind still and already reaching for him, and before he knows it, Joe is crumpling into him, sobbing as Nicky’s arms come up around him.
“I thought this time, I’d lost you for sure,” he rasps breathlessly, wetting Nicky’s cheeks with his own tears. “I thought, this is it, I’ll never– never see his eyes again, never–”
“Oh Joe, my Joe.” Cool like a balm, Nicky’s touch envelops him, cradling his face as Nicky reaches up to press a kiss to his cheekbone, then his brow. “No, vita mia, no,” he murmurs, brushing one more kiss over Joe’s nose, the corner of his eye, the softness of his beard. “I’m so sorry, so sorry I scared you, so sorry, love.”
He leans up to capture Joe’s lips, and this kiss Joe melts into, with everything he has.
Nicky’s hands are slick with his own blood, but they get warmer, warmer as he holds Joe close, palms the nape of his neck with a gentleness no creature on God’s green earth deserves – and the gentler he is, the harder Joe clutches at him. He grips Nicky’s blood-soaked shirt so tight, heart racing desperately behind his ribs, and Nicky–
Nicky’s here. Nicky’s mouth is salt and iron and honey-sweetness on the flat of Joe’s tongue, and his arms are a cradle, and oh, oh, tenderness was born with him, Joe knows– born with Nicky, for him and for him only.
When they part, Nicky rubs the pad of his thumb over Joe’s cheek, regretful. “I got blood all over you.”
Joe grasps Nicky’s hand gently, dropping a kiss on the soft inside of his wrist. “Leave it.”
Nicky clicks his tongue, but he doesn’t question it. He understands.
When they go, they’ll go together. They’ll be as they have been since the day they found each other, one flesh, one blood, one death between the two of them.
“Yusuf.”
“I know. I love you, too.”
Until then, they’ll walk side by side, and make eternity as sweet as they can.