Work Text:
The dam broke when Andy got her first sunburn in millennia.
They’d been lying low since London, resting and recuperating. Andy had needed to heal from her wounds, a slow process she was still getting used to, and everyone else needed some time to heal from wounds of a different kind. Even as skin healed without a blemish, their time at Merrick Pharmaceuticals had still left behind scars.
They had a safehouse on the coast of Portugal. At least, Nile heard the others call it a safehouse, but it was more of a vacation home. It was the kind of house Nile had only seen in travel agency pamphlets and commercials for timeshares. The west side of the house practically led into the ocean, with only pristine beach sand between the back door and the Altantic.
Andy had spent the previous day lying on said pristine beach, refusing company in favour of dozing alone in the sun. It seemed to have been good for her, the time alone to process things, until Andy had hobbled down to breakfast the next morning, bright red and clearly in agony.
“Did you not put on sunscreen?” Nile asked incredulously, watching as the most deadly woman in the world gingerly shifted herself sideways into a chair at the table, trying her best not to irritate her burned skin.
“Never needed it before,” Andy said curtly, her new mortality as much of a sore spot as her red skin now was.
“We can’t get sunburns?” Nile didn’t entirely mean to, but she looked at Nicky across the table when she said it, the palest immortal of the three of them there.
“Sun damage happens so gradually,” he said with a casual shrug “and we heal so quickly. We don’t have a chance to burn.”
Nile nodded. That made sense. But, wait – her head stilled, expression turning into a frown.
“But if we can’t burn,” Nile began “Why can we tan? You’ve definitely gotten a tan since we got here.”
It was true. Nicky was a bit more brown than he was before, just in the few days they’d been here.
“I mean, that’s not really the same thing, is it?” Joe said. He’d already finished his breakfast, arms folded on the table in front of him. “Skin doesn’t need to heal from a tan.”
“It’s still skin damage,” Nile said, suddenly feeling the weight of being the only person here born since the invention of the tanning bed, despite having never used one. She still remembered the public service announcements, warning white teenagers not to cook their skin cells on purpose to achieve a darker look in time for prom. “You can still get skin cancer from both.”
Joe looked over at Nicky in concern, as if momentarily forgetting they were above such things. If Nicky hadn’t had so much as a suspicious new mole after nearly a thousand years alive in the sun, Nile thought he was probably safe.
Nile suddenly remembered her mother, slathering her with too much sunscreen before sending her to summer day camp as a kid. Nile’s face had turned ashy from the sheer amount of lotion rubbed into dark skin. She’d had a great uncle that had a melanoma scare, so convinced of his immunity to sun damage that he never wore so much as a hat under the hot August sun, and her mother had taken that lesson to heart, much to Nile’s annoyance. She appreciated her mother’s efforts more now, even if thinking about it made her chest ache.
“Don’t waste your time trying to figure out the rules of this,” Andy interrupted Nile’s thoughts, sounding miserable. “Most damage heals and some damage just doesn’t. It’s the way things are.”
“Don’t you ever want to figure out the rules, though?” Nile asked, aiming for a playful tone to disguise her genuine burning curiosity. “Maybe our skin doesn’t heal tans because the only weakness of immortality is radiation. I kind of want to know about the loopholes before I go around dying from things.”
“You sound like Booker,” Andy said. It didn’t sound like an accusation, just a plain statement of fact. “And for the record, we come back if we die from radiation.”
Nile hadn’t known Booker for long, and wouldn’t see him again for a hundred years if the others had their way, but she could only imagine what trains of thought he had already gone down, so desperate for an end to his immortality that he was willing to sell out his own family. She wondered how many different ways he’d died before looking elsewhere for answers. She wondered if he was the reason Andy was so confident radiation couldn’t kill them for good.
Breakfast continued in bleak silence after that, the others clearly following the same morbid train of thought, until Joe finally spoke.
“I think we can tan,” he ventured, lips curling up into a smile “Because whatever higher power granted us our existence knows my Nicolò looks excellent with one.”
Nile couldn’t help but laugh. Nicky gave a slight smile in response, looking charmed as he pushed the last of his eggs around his plate. Andy didn’t smile, but her frown lessened just a bit.
Mood lightened, the breakfast conversation took a more pleasant turn, discussing a trip into town for basic groceries, along with plenty of sunscreen and some aloe vera.
Still, now that the topic had been broached, Nile couldn’t help but think about the rules of her new immortality. The dam had broken, and Nile couldn’t stop staring at the mental breach, wondering what rules stopped it from repairing itself.
...
“Why are my ears still pierced?” Nile asked later, at the supermarket “What’s stopping my body from pushing the studs out like bullets?”
“You’re still thinking about this?” Nicky asked. He didn’t sound judgmental, only surprised. Maybe even slightly curious.
Nicky was cooking tonight, and apparently didn’t trust anyone else, not even the other half of his soul, to pick up what he needed from a list. Nile had opted to tag along, while Joe had offered to stay home to keep Andy company as she wallowed in her sunburn. Nicky was quieter when separated from the others, not really one to initiate small talk, but Nile’s new train of thought couldn’t stand the silent contemplation over the fruits and vegetables any longer.
“Is it because I pierced my ears before I died?” Nile continued, unable to stop the rush of words “Like if I had any scars from before I died, would those heal or would they stay?”
Nicky paused, still holding a tomato in his hand that he had been checking for firmness.
“I don’t think that is it,” he finally said after a thoughtful silence “Andy got her last piercings in the nineties.” Nicky smiled at her. “The 1990s, I mean. They did not heal, then.”
Nile frowned, the rules evading her understanding once again. Before she could ever think of a new idea, Nicky began to speak again.
“Also, I had some scars from before,” Nicky said. “I was injured in battle a few times before I was first killed in Jerusalem. When I was resurrected, it was as if they were never there.”
Nile’s first thought was, oddly, that resurrection might be too grandiose a word for the produce section of an ALDI. Her second was that, now that she thought of it, she had some acne scars on her jaw, left over from a particularly bad breakout in high school. She rubbed at her face automatically, even though she knew that they’d since disappeared, the skin there smoothed down.
“Maybe it has something to do with intent?” Nile suggested, grasping at straws.
“Maybe,” Nicky said. It was clearly a dismissal, but not an unkind one. He left Nile to her thoughts once again, resuming his careful inspection of the tomatoes.
...
“So, hypothetically,” Nile began. Before she could even finish her thought, she caught Joe smiling at her from the other end of the couch. He’d been expecting this and was clearly delighted by it. “If I were to get some kind of cosmetic surgery, would my body heal back to the way it was, or would it let me?”
“Do you plan on getting cosmetic surgery, Nile?” Joe teased, knowing that avoiding answering her question would annoy her. “Seems like a big risk for not much reward.”
“I’m not,” Nile said, successfully annoyed. “That’s why I said hypothetically.”
Nile had decided to sit in the living room while Nicky made dinner, close enough to be comforted by the sounds and smells of someone working in the kitchen while trying not to think too much about her mother. Andy had retreated to her room, presumably to cover every inch of her body in aloe and lie completely still for as long as she could get away with. Joe had been in the kitchen originally, but had eventually been banished by Nicky for hovering. At least, that’s what Joe had claimed afterwards, sinking into the couch next to her, Nile having not understood the heated conversation in Italian coming from the other room.
“You don’t need surgery, Nile,” Joe smiled, ignoring her again. “We love you just the way you are.”
Despite the playful, joking tone, Joe sounded sincere, and Nile couldn’t help but be a little bit warmed by the reassurance.
“Okay,” Nile started again, changing tracks. “Say a new immortal wakes up right now and he’s transgender. He’s already had top surgery. When he dies the first time, do his chest scars stay? Do they heal? Does the surgery completely undo itself?” Nile knew she was sounding a little frantic, desperate to map out some sort of meaning to all this. “Does immortality care about intent at all?”
“Guess we have to wait for the arrival of our new transgender brother to find out,” Joe said, still smugly refusing to help Nile pin anything down.
After a moment, though, Joe hummed thoughtfully to himself, clearly turning something over in his mind. Nile was reminded of the same expression on Nicky’s face earlier, in the supermarket, when he’d considered her theory. The two of them were more similar than she’d realized.
“I don’t think intent is the right word,” Joe said finally. His smile had a grim edge to it now. “If intent mattered, we’d be able to kill ourselves if we truly wanted to die.”
Nile thought of Booker again and winced. She hadn’t meant to keep inviting the comparison.
“You can look at it optimistically,” Joe continued, “and say that maybe no one truly wants to die, so the intention isn’t there. But I think it’s more about the distinction between an act of creation and an act of destruction.”
Before Nile could even ask what he meant, Joe was already continuing on his train of thought. Nile wondered if this was something Joe had already privately thought a lot about, or if beautiful speeches just came to him as easy as breathing.
“If the reason you draw your own blood is only to do harm to yourself,” Joe said “I would consider that a destructive act. Your body would rebel and close your wounds.”
“But drawing your own blood to mould yourself into a different shape?” Joe added, smiling again. “That is an act of creation. That is art. Stone doesn’t rebel at being carved into a beautiful sculpture.”
Nile didn’t even have time to wrap her head around Joe’s words before he was dismissing them. “At least, that’s what I think. I don’t think I’m nearly old enough to say anything for certain.”
“You are the oldest man in the world, amore mio,” Nicky said matter-of-factly, drying his hands with a rag as he entered the living room. Whatever had led him to throwing Joe out of the kitchen had evidently been forgiven. “There is not much room to doubt your expertise. Dinner is in the oven.” The tone of this voice didn’t change, even as he added the last sentence as an afterthought.
“I think the oldest woman in the world might still have something to say about it,” Joe laughed, opening his arm wide to invite Nicky to join him on the couch, which he did. “To her there is only chaos, and everything happens for no reason at all. No room at all for something as romantic as destiny.”
“Not one to question gift horses,” Nicky added mildly, stumbling slightly around the idiom. “We are not meant to think about why things are the way they are.”
Nile suddenly remembered Andy, looking her in the eyes and saying that she thought Nile had become immortal just as Andy’s immortality had begun to fade. Confessing that she thought Nile had arrived for a reason, to help her remember what it was like to feel invincible again. It had sounded an awful lot like destiny, then. Nile suspected that Joe and Nicky, despite their teasing of Andy’s lack of faith, knew that, too.
When the oven finally beeped, Nile asked, “Do you want me to bring some up for Andy?”
Nicky shook his head as he rose from the couch. “She will come down.”
“The boss wouldn’t want to miss our discussion,” Joe added with a wink to Nile, a final confirmation that they knew just how full of shit Andy was about her stated beliefs.
“The boss just doesn’t want you all taking about her while she isn’t there,” came Andy’s grumble from the hallway, making Joe laugh. Andy emerged, looking just as red and miserable as she had this morning, but now covered with a slight sheen of aloe gel.
Nile smiled, and moved to help set the table.