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Chapter Text

In terms of their adventures in the last few centuries, Nicolo would say that they will be avoiding England again once they find their way out of this situation.

It’ll be a close call, with as weak as they are- death after death at the hands of misguided zealots leaves little strength for fighting back, and even less for long term planning. But they are together and Nicolo can still follow the thoughts racing behind his beloved’s eyes, even when they haven’t spoken in hours. There will be an opportunity, and he will act before his mind can catch up, and then they will be free of these chains and back on their way.

Nicolo knows this, just as he knows that there is light beyond the doors of this dungeon they are trapped in, and clean air beyond its walls, and their sisters are walking the world unaware of the stories they will eventually share.

He just wishes the “getting free” part would happen a bit sooner.

“Do you think they’ll try and burn us next?”

Besides him, Yusuf exhales a breathless laugh, their hands twined together despite the grime cakes onto their skin. They do not shy away from each other, filthy as they are, it has been too long for that.

“Don’t give them ideas, Habibi, they might run out and just let us go instead.”

Nicolo can tell they make the guards restless, two men exhausted to bone but still able to draw laughter from the other under the circumstances. He knows that Yusuf’s prayers and unfamiliar accent draw attention to his love, so he tries to redirect it into bafflement by putting his own faith on display.

The ignorant know what to expect when the ones they accuse show faith differently then them. They have no idea what to do with a man who prays in Latin and who says the same words as them in equal fervor.

So when it is time for Yusuf’s daily prayer, Nicolo angles himself between the doors of their cage and his love and follows his beloved’s example and recites his own prayers so the guards can only associate Yusuf’s worship with what it is- a space for faith in a faithless place.

They have been lucky, until now, in the sense that no one tried to intervene. As do all things however, their luck ends eventually.

“The guards say you two are speaking in tongues.” The priest who stands outside the gated room is a familiar face, has overseen far too many of their executions since they were first caught. He is a angry man, shriveled in the way he seems to take delight in condemning them to another death and frustrated by their continuous revival.

“Is the Tantum Ergo considered tongues now?” Nicolo retorts tiredly, “someone should inform the pope.”

“You are heathen, making a mockery of the pope.”

“The only mockery of faith here is your continued desire to murder innocent people under the guise of fear and ignorance.” Nicolo replies, his voice cutting, and his patience with the man running thin past a few words. “You talk of judgement and sin, father, yet you fail to recognize your own face among those needing guidance.”

“And who are you to say so?”

“One who history has humbled far more than you. I learned not to trust in the absolutes of what you think god is commanding when Urban II commanded that Christians needed to free the city of Jerusalem in God’s name and instead we burned it to the ground in our hubris. One who has seen popes come and go, and with them the ideas of sinner and saint fold like paper in wind. You make a mockery of faith here, and neither faith nor history will remember you kindly.”

The priest regards him coldly, “Yet you speak like a demon as only one could, jumping above your station in life to speak of events far above your existence.”

“My station? Come, brother-“ Nicolo spits the words out, “We were both once men of the cloth, but yours has been sullied in the blood of falsely charged women while mine was shed in the blood of those who burned in their homes. God has granted you a mirror, and yet you refuse to even contemplate on its reflection. I can only pray you see the error in your ways before it’s too late and your soul has to come to account for your actions.”

“I see no mirror here but an image of sin and blasphemy, a stain to be removed from god’s good earth by those who truly follow his word.”

“Then you are a fool, for I will both outlive and outlast you, and this will all have been a spectacular waste of our lives- your’s especially.”

“Enough, I’ll have no further argument. Your wickedness will be overcome, and we will see you demons dead in time.” He steps away form the bars with a scowl and Nicolo can’t help but clearly call out the end of Gloria Patir as he leaves-

“Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum.”

The priest pauses and the guards shift nervously around him.

“You, heathen, we will find a way to kill first.”

There is little discussion after that.

Yusuf sighs besides him and speaks quietly. “While I get the sense that made you feel better, that was rather unkind.”

“He’s a fool and he should know it.”

“Not to him, to you.” He chuckles, pressing his side up against Nicolo’s once more. “Why would you ever think I care about what is said of him? But Nico, comparing yourself to a mirror for that man is beneath you.”

“Not always, not how I once was.” Nicolo says glumly and Yusuf flicks him tiredly on his ear, gaining a quiet yelp of surprise.

“But not now.” Yusuf responds firmly. “Men like him, they anger you more than anything else in this situation.”

“The world has changed so much, and yet so little.” Nicolo says, leaning his head against Yusuf’s shoulder. “I used to wonder how our darling sisters could walk the world for thousands of years and still find problems to solve. I no longer wonder.”

“You have always been rather naive”

“Beloved, you wound me. People used to say I was ‘wise beyond my years,’ if they spoke true I must be at my limit of wisdom at this age.”

“Enlighten me then, oh wise one, how we’ll make our grand escape from this particular predicament.” Yusuf teases, once again capturing Nicolo’s hand in his own.

“Easy- as we have always gotten out of such situations. Together, and with a great deal of skill and god’s favor shining upon us.” Nicolo says, a small grin forming on his face.

“That simple?”

“Absolutely, I am the world’s wisest man, after all.”

He gets a full laugh from Yusuf that time.

For that night, it’s enough to be make the future look promising.

—

The next morning they bring the coffin.

Chapter Text

Nicolo has long learned that God lives in the words of all languages; from the flowing Arabic of his beloved to the chant of Latin of his own beliefs to the numerous languages said in reverence to a higher power, spoken across countless lands and people.

Thus, Nicolo does not waste breath berating himself for using his last moments to speak to his understanding of God in the language he knows best.

“Please, if there is mercy to be given, please do not let them put him in a coffin. Please keep him safe and whole and guide him to freedom from these captors, please lord, have mercy on him, even if only him alone.”

Nicolo maintains his prayers, quiet and steady as he twists his hands fruitlessly trying to dislodge the chains around his wrists, searching the inside of the coffin for an edge sharp enough to sever a thumb with enough speed to remove the gauntlet around his hand before his body heals again.

His search comes up empty handed and he senses he’s running out of time. He can feel the rocking of the ship, he can sense the discomfort of the crew and the wide berth they give his prison. 

There is a story here, his love would say.

Nicolo knows how this particular story will end.

They’ll push him overboard as soon as they deem it far enough away from their home shores. The coffin was a particularity insightful choice. He might have been able to swim to some sort of safety with enough patience if they merely tied his wrists and dumped him overboard.

That will… that will not be possible here. Not for a very long time.

Nicolo takes a breathe, a slight stutter in his prayers. He will not give his captors the satisfaction of his anguish, he will not give them his voice or his fear or his tears.

Yusuf is not on this ship, and Nicolo will only give these things to Yusuf alone. They belong to him, after all, along with every other iota of dust that makes up Nicolo’s body and soul.

So Nicolo continues trying to bargain with god while holding a hand of useless cards.

“Keep him safe, keep him safe, keep him safe. Just him, even if I never see him again, even if this is how we part, let him live and let him be safe and free.”

Eventually there’s no more putting it off. There’s a commotion and a group of men start approaching the coffin, warily circling around it as if it was a lion rather than a man trapped in a cage. Nicolo wished he had the power of the proverbial lion in the moment.

They grasp at the edges and six or seven of them work to lift the contraption, painstakingly bringing it to the edge of the ship.

The coffin roughly clangs against the solid railing of the ship and Nicolo hears the grunts as the men adjust to lift instead of pull. By now the rest of the crew is crowded around, watching in silence as he is about to be pushed overboard.

Nicolo keeps his gaze level, his expression neutral as they levee him closer to the water.

He will not give them this satisfaction as long as it is the last thing he does.

He can feel his prison tilt and the view of the men is replaced with that of the sky above- on last mercy, it seems, to be going into the water facing up so that his last view of the surface is the sky rather than the waves below.

Nicolo exhales and hopes the wind will carry his message.

“Goodbye, my love.”

The coffin tilts completely and hits the water.

—

Metal objects sink fast, faster than Nicolo had expected and his first deaths are marked by less and less light until he is sinking in complete darkness but still feeling the sense of falling as his prison sinks deeper.

He cannot tell when his coffin comes to rest, only that the weight of the water is excruciating on his body with every revival.

Here, there is no tormentors but that of nature itself and Nicolo makes no effort to hide his pain.

There is nothing here but the dark, the cold, the salt, and the pain. He can only know that he has died and revived again by the fleeting moment as he regains consciousness where he reflexively tries to take a breathe before once again choking on water.

It takes many deaths for him to have space to think around the initial panic of that moment.

(20 ft)
The next time he awakens, he’s kicking at the coffin as he takes in that reflexive breathe, screaming out wordlessly at the prison in an attempt to free either his hands or feet from their chains.

He drowns before his hands can make contact.

He wakes up and his hands softly beat against the metal, he pulls them back and waits.

He drowns.

He slams his hands at the metal and chokes on the water as he feels a finger bead and break at the angle of contact

He drowns

He slams his hands at the wall again.

He drowns

(40 ft)

He does it again.

Drowns.

Again,.

Drowns

Again.

(60 ft)

This continues on for a long time.

Wake up. Beat against the metal. Drown.

(80 ft)

(100 ft)

(120 ft)

The funny thing about time.

Time needs a reference point. Drown.

Broken knuckle against the metal. The localized pain a pin of light to the sun of pain in his lungs. Drown. Over as soon as it occurs, no further reference to it. Drown. No more a reference point than the knowledge that this had a beginning. Drown.

Had a start point, a before-drown.

The mind does strange things, faced with an unquantifiable amount of torment.

Drown.

(140 ft)

(160 ft)

He is unsurprised but disappointed all the same to learn with certainty that you do not dream in death. He once had flashes, in the early years of immortality, of his sisters- long before he and Yusuf had time to cross the lands to where they had called home. Once they had met, he never had a dream of them again, and Andromache had once put the matter to rest saying that they were guiding visions to help them find one another. She said it with certainty, and Nicolo hadn’t questioned that the oldest among them understood the matter the best. Whatever power lead to their continued existence meant for them to all find one another. This was not an experience to be had alone.

It’s a new well of anger in him, gushing forward with the force of a long awaited rain in a narrow desert canyon, once the understanding that now they have met means that he does not dream of them now that they are apart.

Snarls at his cage in between the unknowable moments of blankness in between deaths, beats at it with a rage that previously had dimmed between the start and the current moment of his imprisonment.

(180 ft)

What use are the dreams, he thinks in between deaths. 

What is the purpose of guiding them to each other-

Another death, another measureless stretch of time lost.

- if all that mattered was the meeting-

Drown, again.

-if the world cared not for anything beyond that.

(200 ft)

(220 ft)

He drowns and he screams against the water

He drowns and he rages against his chains

Against water and walls and iron and small petty men who have 

Who have locked him away

He is furious and his blood attracts shapes of teeth and fins and they can’t even

Break this fucking cage

So he screams at them as well

(240 ft)

(260 ft)

He screams until he can’t anymore for a while and all is left is cold

For many deaths he just limply lets himself drown and crash against the walls as
The water dictates.

He thinks of his beloved

And the pain of that is worse than the water

So he lets himself go numb again.
Just for a few deaths.
Just for a little while.

(280 ft)

(300 ft)

(320 ft)
Somewhere in the dark he remembers the good times- Malta, even when Malta wasn’t good that second time. 

All the miles walked in silence in the beginning and those formative first nights staring at each other from across the campfire after they came to a truce of sorts. The clip and call of their pidgin language between them, Yusuf’s Sabir heavy on the Arabic loan words while he had favored the way the Sicilians had spoken it close enough to his own tongue. The joy of finding a word that bridged them rather than stood in contrast between them.

The first time he had heard Yusuf’s laugh, when god had seen him ready to truly listen for it.

The first time he had truly look at him and realized how captivating his face was, reveled as he pulled away his scarf to make a witty quip at the situation or the road or the bandits they just left behind in the dust and another village saved.

The first time Nicolo had truly thought to himself “I could walk the world with him forever and never find myself dissatisfied with what I have been given”

(340 ft)
The first time he had kissed him, drunk on laughter and had acted without thinking, and how he was met with equal passion.

I was blessed.

You are beautiful in sunlight, I looked at you and was lost.
Its worth it, every second of agony for nearly two centuries of 
Walking by your side

It was a gift.

It was a gift.

It was a gift.

(360 ft)

(380 ft)

There is a cycle here, long stretches of merely existing punctured by thoughts.

He drowns, and he thinks of Yusuf.

(400 ft)

He drowns

He drowns

He drowns

He drowns

He drowns

He drowns

He drowns

He-

(420 ft)

He’s going to hold their heads under the waves, once he gets free.
Who ever is left.

He’s going to be unkind.

He will turn his beloved’s eyes away.

(440 ft)

He sometimes thinks.

He thinks Andromache will understand.

He thinks Quynh will still take his hand afterwards.

(460 ft)

Everything is yours; do with it what you will.

(480 ft)

(500 ft)

Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty,

my memory, my understanding,

and my entire will,
All I have and call my own.

(520 ft)

(540 ft)

Angel of God, my guardian dear,

     to whom God's love commits me here,

(dante knew nothing, hell was here, no circles could compare.)

ever this day be at my side,

(560 ft)

Did they drown Yusuf as well, or was he spared
Was he drowning besides him, only held-

-apart by distance and chains and water?

to light and guard, to rule and guide.

He hoped with everything this was his hell alone.

(580 ft)

(600 ft)

(620 ft)

He wonders distantly 
(it’s all distant)

if Andromache had ever drowned

What she would say if she could see him now

(640 ft)

She has walked the earth so long, and so alone

before Quynh

(he has never been alone, not like that not like this-)

Is he the first to experience this torture?

(660 ft)

Or just the first to have someone to remember him?

Is that better, to be remembered

To know his sisters might think him lost
If they know what in particular happened to him at all

(680 ft)

Or worse?

(700 ft)

Can you find a man at the bottom of the sea?

Could you find a specific man in all the deserts of world?

What stars must align to lead a person to another without divine intervention? How long could it take? Decades? Centuries? Millenniums?

(720 ft)

(740 ft)

In the end what does the answer matter.

(760 ft)

(780 ft)

(800 ft)

(820 ft)

He forgets-

He forgets sometimes who exactly he is 

Outside of drown and not drown and drown again.

(840 ft)

(860 ft)

(880 ft)

He wonders if Andromache-

He forgets.

(900 ft)

He drowns.

He drowns.

He drowns.

He drowns.

He drowns.

He drowns.

He drowns.

He drowns.

(920 ft)

(940 ft)

The saltwater stings his eyes and yet sometimes between deaths theres the urge to cry
Separate from the physical sensation of water burning his skin away
It’s an ache that cannot be compared
to drowning

But it lives in the memory of Quynh’s voice singing a song from where she called home

Of Andromache and the smell of iron and horse and how her hands felt grasped in his as she helped him up to stand after knocking him down.

Of Quynh and her bow, of quiet teasing and her maps.

Of Andromache and the food she made in every land, of her favor for fruits and golden honey

(960 ft)

(980 ft)

Of Yusuf

Of Yusuf 

Of Yusuf

Of Yusuf

Of Yusuf

Of Yusuf

Of Yusuf

Of Yusuf

Of Yusuf
(1000 ft)

(1020 ft)

Let faith reinforce our belief where the senses cannot.

There is no sense here.

That is no matter.

(1040 ft)

(1060 ft)

(1080 ft)

He thinks of Yusuf, he drowns
He thinks, I can endure a little longer. Just a little longer.

He drowns.

(1090 ft)

He wakes up, cold in the way of wind on skin, not water and gasping for breathe against the rope around his neck. Flashes of white white white all around and god it is so cold but the air electrifies his lungs which have only known water for so long-

Nicolo drowns into the dark and wakes again into the flash of life of another, tall, cold and hungry (how had he forgotten hunger? A sensation completely engulfed but oh how strange to feel relief at hunger and cold and choking-)

Nicolo drowns and sees a face, partially frozen and warring against the rope around his neck as it chokes him out again-

Nicolo wakes to struggling for breath against the rope around his neck.

Nicolo wakes to the sweet taste of air and cold and snow and then drowns again.

Chapter Text

It takes a few more deaths for Nicolo to reorient himself.

Each one is a metaphorical breath of air, even as his counterpart hangs and freezes and revives again until the watchful eye of his comrades? enemies? move on without him.

Nicolo knows little about this man, nothing in his uniform or his surroundings are familiar. He knows nothing but that the man is another of their family, a brother in fate, and that he spends three days in unbearable agony with the same focus and shrewed acting as a seasoned courtesan.

Nicolo sees in this man the same determination and drive as Andromache, the same cunning and wits as Quynh, and the same attention to detail as his beloved.

Nicolo does not know this new brother, but he loves him immediately.

He cannot help but cheer from his own prison when after three days the captors holding his brother by the rope have left and the man is finally able to free himself, fall to his knees, and breathe in the first full gasp of air since his initial death.

He dies almost immediately. But it is no matter, he’s free. Everything else from there can be figured out through trial and error, fate is forgiving to them in this regard. And sure enough, this brother revives and coughs out the cold in his lungs and stands like a newborn foal on shaken legs.

Welcome, new one. Nicolo can’t help but think, between deaths, caught up in the strange ecstasy of this improbable bond connecting this unknown man to him across time and distance. Is this what Andromache and Quynh had experienced when he and Yusuf had died that first time? Flashes of new immortals, weighed down with the knowledge of what it signified and the means to try and find them? The sense of nostalgia of when this was new, new, new, and could not be comprehended or explained? The sense of recognition in the flashes, as if you had been waiting to meet this person for a long time and just didn’t realize it before.

They will all see him too. Nicolo realizes and the yearning inside him caves into a void. It had taken decades for Andromache and Quynh to find him and Yusuf, and years for them to truly recognize the other and travel together. They will look for him, regardless- and Nicolo might get to see his sisters, and god-willing, Yusuf, again.

There is ecstasy and then there is unfathomable joy, the kind that makes a man weep.

This realization prompts the second, more than the first.

It might take decades, but Nicolo has patience, he can endure longer.

So he drowns and he watches flashes of his brother’s life in the moment’s between.

—

At the beginning, it’s slow going. Each sensation is still so new after so long that the cuts of hunger and wind-cold and snow-cold and daylight are in such contrast to his prison that Nicolo cannot help but welcome them like long-lost relatives, distant ancestors to ways he existed before the water, and the pressure, and the salt.

For a while, he doesn’t really pay much attention to his brother’s journey past the sensations. Once the wonder has faded a bit, Nicolo comes to realize that his new brother is rather, well, ill-suited to both isolation and the wilds.

The man is determined to walk, as one does, across an expanse of snow and forest. The man also does not seem to know much about navigating said forest and snow. He spends many a death and perhaps a moon’s cycle effectively walking in circles.

(Nicolo will carry with him to his grave the fact that he revived more than once to shout “you’ve already gone that way!” as his dream of his brother’s life ended and his began again.)

Finally the man stumbles on a town, or the remaining husk of a town, and seems to figure out his bearings. He sleeps for three nights this time, without freezing to death, sheltered by the shells of the homes still standing in the village. He wakes up gasping for breathe and obsessively rubbing at his wrists and coughing until he’s inhaled cold air like water-

Oh. Nicolo hadn’t considered that.

On his next death he tries to calm the panic of his mind and his body, at least to the limits of what he can control.

The next night his brother seems to sleep better, at least for a little while.

Alright, Nicolo can do something at least to aid him.

 His brother seems to scrap together something of a direction from the ruins of the town- he pours over torn pieces of parchment left over the town, finds threadbare clothing that escaped fire or theft, and begins his journey once again.

Andromache once would tell stories, long winded tales that required several nights of speaking around the campfire to contain the entire tale. It was made popular by the histories of great men and women, in the middle of a war, who were immortalized by words rather than in the sense of their family’s gift. She always started the story by making two statements. The first, that the events of the story were based in truth and had been changed by the years and the voices and the imaginations of each story teller who shared it, so they were no longer as true as they once were, even if the basic tale remained the same.

Two, everyone in the story would die by the end of it. They were not like the small audience listening around the campfire, and they only lived on in name alone.

She liked to tell the story of Odysseus in particular, the man who spends a decade trying to reach his home. Maybe because they were all wanderers at that point, and could relate to the man’s desire for home but not feel threatened by it’s loss. Maybe because there was value in tales that stretched over years, not mere months or days, as their long lives did. Maybe because she found small pleasure in his toils-

(Quynh had alluded once, that there was a reason Andromache only ever referred to one character in the story as “Hector’s wife” and never by any other name.)

-Maybe she just liked that story more than the rest. Either way, she recited the story so often that Nicolo could picture her voice sharing it over a smoking campfire. The picture jumps easily to his mind, broken by deaths and his brother’s life, but he can see it so easily in the dark.

“This is the story of Odysseus, king of the Ithacans, who in the victory over Troy spent the next ten years trying to make it home in reward.”

His brother looks up from the scraps of paper he’s found, glimpses of maps and lines, and looks out towards the setting sun. His face grim and set evenly.

“This is the story of Odysseus, who is clever and quick and always so curious, who’s ambition is his downfall and his guiding light.”

His brother sets out along a long road and learns to survive, with death being a gentle teacher. Nicolo watches as he begins to last longer, his deaths spacing out from one every few days, to a week, to a few weeks at a time, each one has him coming back faster, standing again and pushing forward as soon as he is able.

He walks, and he walks, and he walks.

“This is the story of Odysseus: siren-witness, giant-trickster, city-slayer, god-gifted. This is his story as he yearns for home, for his wife, and for his son, and the perils he faces to eventually reach them- older, wiser, and stripped of all he had before on the shores of Troy.”

Nicolo recalls his sister’s stories and watches.

—

In the end, it takes his brother a little more than a year.

Nicolo knows the man is home by the way he stumbles at the doorstep, the way his shoulders slump and his hands fall to his side before raising his right to trace over a small intricate box of wood affixed to the doorway before he gently knocks on the door itself.

There is a reverence of touch here that can only be found in a man who has been gone from home for far too long.

The door opens and Nicolo cheers once again from his prison as his brother falls into the arms of people who love him and cry out at his return.

He’s so caught up, so enamored in the fact that his brother has completed his journey, has made it back into the hands of those he loves that he doesn’t even consider the warning that Andromache always began her stories with.

He doesn’t consider it until much, much later.

—

Nico spends the next decades forgetting.

Forgetting who he is in-between the flashes of light, light, light. 

His brother stumbles back into the doorway of a family, and he adores them. He never catches names, nor true words of their day to day conversations, but Nicolo can tell his brother loves his family beyond death. And for a long time things just… are.

His brother lives, and watches his wife age and his sons grow and he stays relatively same.

Maybe there’s some sense of dread, some sense of otherness, but Nicolo sees none of that other than his brother’s love. He is happy, and the sensation is as sweet as honey compared to Nicolo’s salted prison. So he watches, and savors, and cheers at every mundane beauty he sees through his brother’s eyes and thinks nothing of his own existence in the moments between.

He dies so quickly and the flashes of his brother’s life are so consistent that sometimes he cannot tell if he is truly in the prison or if its just an unbearably bad dream intersected with reality.

There’s a nagging sense that he’s forgetting something, but to remember is to acknowledge the pain and the dark and the water and he did so for so long-

It is no matter.

He watches, he forgets, he ignores the growing sense of something looming out of sight as the years pass.

—

In the end though, time catches up to both him and his brother.

His brother’s middle son, the adventurer, the troublemaker, grows tall and lean and dangerous and steps into his fathers shoes as a soldier.

He is dead within a year.

It is unexpected, and the family grieves.

His brother becomes closer with the two remaining sons in result, doting after the younger and treating the older as an equal. Time passes and his wife soon follows their son, laid up in bed with a chill which will not catch on his brother no matter how many days he stays by her side.

In the last few days, she uses her hand to trace the lines on his face, as if caught in wonder by the man before her.

If Nicolo had to guess, he’d gamble that his brother’s wife is equally clever if not more so than his brother and had figured out his secret long before. She speaks softly with him when her lungs allow, and they part with a chaste kiss to her forehead as her body goes limp for the last time and death comes to part them permanently.

Its the first time Nicolo feels as if he should have the chance to look away. That this bond has gone a step too far for him.

His brother remains, his sons age and live on and for a while things just are- there’s an ache in his brother now around the spaces of his wife and his middle son. There’s a quiet realization that he is not getting older even as his sons do.

The eldest takes it with a grain of salt and they are amicable until the end. His brother in fate is by his eldest son’s deathbed as a friend, not a father, and the eldest never raises his voice against his father or his gifts.

Then it’s just Nicolo’s brother and his brother’s youngest, and things are fine, pained but fine.

And then they’re not.

The youngest is sick; pale and shriveled in his hospital bed, and when he see Nicolo’s brother, he screams in rage.

Nicolo recognizes such rage and his stomach turns as his brother’s pleas, for water, for care, for rest, for whatever reasonable action are met with fury and fire. The youngest son is dying, and Nicolo cannot follow the conversation, but he recognizes hatred when he sees it and his brother is the only possible target.

It is a hard death, for his brother’s youngest.

Nicolo can’t help but feel a sense of relief when the youngest finally passes and the shouts are replaced with silence. He had been in pain, that Nicolo can relate to, and it is a blessing in some small way to be free of that agony.

For his brother, however, it is something far worse.

Nicolo remembers that Andromache had always started her stories with a warning: Everyone at the end of this story is dead, they are not like us.

He understands now with great clarity why such a distinction should be made, why the weight of a story on lone shoulders could corrode a person from the inside out.

It was never a warning, was it?

It was a reassurance for ones too young to appreciate it.

—

For a long time, it is once again Nicolo and his brother alone.

This time his brother wanders aimlessly, more shade than man. Nicolo for his part tries to keep the same peace he held so desperately when he first saw through his brother’s eyes. He is quiet and calm and smooths over the pain of his waking moments with the flashes of his brothers life. They are both quiet, and Nicolo sometimes wonders if his brother knows he’s there in spirit if not body, step in step with him as he wanders away from his home and his family and his life.

His brother ends up wandering to a coastline.

Nicolo can’t help but feel the sense of anticipation, and of apprehension.

His brother wanders to the coast and waits.

Within the week he’s met by strangers, quiet in their approach but confident in their steps. Nicolo would know their footsteps anywhere in the world.

His brother looks up and-

And-

Andromache and Quynh look both like complete strangers and exactly as how he remembers them. Andromache has chopped her hair off but carries the same thin smile. Quynh is graceful in all the ways she always has been but Nicolo can see the stress in her shoulders and in her hands. They both wear foreign clothes that share no similarity to anything he’s seen them wear before yet they carry themselves with the same ease as any of their previous adornments.

They are his sisters and oh he has missed them so so much and-

And they are the only ones.

The beach is deserted, with his brother and his sisters as the only spectators to the sea, and the land, and the slowly darkening sky. Nicolo waits with increasing panic for a forth set of footsteps, for an easy voice and a familiar form, to join them.

No one comes, they are alone.

Nicolo has not screamed in as many years he has watched his brother since that first death in that snowy forest.

He screams now.

He does not stop.

Chapter Text

The following years are neither unkind nor benevolent to Nicolo and his brother, they simply… are.

Time becomes Nicolo’s jailer, a new face on a well known cage. This is both a blessing and an added curse, he is no longer stuck knowing time isn’t progressing, but he is once again slave to time’s passing along with everyone else.

It is agonizing, in its own way, to be able to quantify the passage of time while under perpetual torture.

He spends a week, in rough terms, figuring out the math of perpetual drowning.

Two days of simply counting seconds between deaths and seeing how much time he can grasp in the dreams of his brother’s life, another spent calculating how many deaths fit in between sunrise to sunset, the following days spent calculating the number of deaths expanded to fit in a week, a moons cycle, into an entire year. A guess on the number of years he spent watching his brother live before he eventually joined up with Andromache and Quynh.

The sum Nicolo arrives at is incomprehensible.

He’s able to hold on to the number and all the work he put into figuring it out for a few days at most.

He’s always hated mathematics.

It’s a passing distraction though, at a time when his mind seeks distractions.

He notices this now, on ‘good stretches’ of his imprisonment, the range by which he is present for this torture and the affect it has on him. Now that he can sense the passage of time, he can sense within himself the cycle of his being to the prison.

Right after his brother joined his sisters, he was distressed.

He raged against his prison for a long time, only set on beating against the metal walls and trying to wretch apart the chains in the space between dreams. He did this until some part of his body and his mind had their fill, and what filled in the space of despair and rage was a quiet acceptance.

Yusuf is not with his family.

This is a tragedy of unknown proportion, but Nicolo has no hand in changing it.

For a while after he simply lets himself drift again.

And then, from there the boredom, and the rage, and the quiet, and the awe, come and go with the tides.

To see his brother’s life, despite the pain his beloved’s absence brings, is a blessing. He has been reunited with the vision of his sisters, beautiful and so full of life in all their causes and passions and quiet mundane moments. He has missed them so terribly and will not allow himself to feel anything other than grateful that he gets the chance to see them again, even if it’s only through the eyes of another.

And to see the world change, incomprehensible in it leaps and bounds, Nicolo drinks in the sights, the smells and the ghost-touch sense of the world above in equal-measure to each despised lungful of saltwater he breaths when no longer dreaming.

As for his brother, well… he is not well.

Losing his youngest seemed to pain his brother more than all the deaths before him, Nicolo can’t guess if it was the particular way his youngest seemed to rage against his brother or the fact that he was the last of his family; in the end the reason does not matter. His brother has been suffering since his son’s last breathe.

He hides it, Nicolo can see that. Andromache keeps him occupied with lessons or sparring or books, swinging wildly between sweet affection for her youngest brother or tough love, depending on the day. Quynh is steady in her teasing and quiet reassurances, more attune to when his brother’s mood sinks and he requires a subtle distraction from the workings of his own mind. Neither can be there all the time, nor does his brother let them.

He travels away from them, Nicolo knows, at certain times of the year he makes his way back to the town his family had lived in and had been buried in. Candles are lit and Nicolo’s brother watches over them quietly. He never invites Andromache or Quynh, this is something he does alone though Nicolo knows that they would go with him if he asked.

He aches with the fact that his brother feels the need to keep this remembrance secret from his sisters.

The rest of the time of the year, when a cause would not be endangered by it, his brother spends a fair amount of time dulling his thoughts and feelings with drink.

Nicolo knows the cycles of his imprisonment now, and he watches as his brother becomes trapped in a cycle of his own.

They are having a conversation, his brother and him, even if it’s at the speed of years and decades rather than seconds and breathes.

Nicolo will lose himself still, in the stretches of the good years or the good months, where he’s content to lie still and pretend he’s there at his sibling’s sides. A ghost at the fire, unseen, uninvolved, but there regardless.

He sucks up the sunlight of these days, and can tolerate the dark and the cold and the deep if he can die quickly and go back into the light.

His brother strays from the light and thus begins the conversation.

His brother looks instead towards the dark, towards the still and the silent, and he will isolate himself. He’ll pull away from their sisters and start a rhythm of misery instead. 

Nicolo can watch and feel himself choke out warnings of such a path when he blinks back into the world of the water. He can kick out at his prison as understanding flashes in his mind. He can think to himself, fleeting and futile, “We are not meant to be lonely.”

But he can no more set his brother off his course as he could move the lid from his coffin.

Eventually.

Eventually his brother will hit a tipping point.

He is a stubborn man- what other kind of man can complete an odyssey? And he is a stubborn man who tries and tries and tries again.

This is the crux of their conversation, the one they repeat for innumerable years.

His brother will die alone- sometimes mearly from neglect, from a rash decision, from his own hand, under the hands of others. He will die, far away from his sisters, farther away still from his brothers. He will die alone, after having been on his own for who knows how long.

And Nicolo will watch it. He sees every single death, their bond will not allow him to miss that, not when they’ve yet to meet.

And Nicolo will start screaming again in earnest.

And his brother will wake up again, eyes wide and his hands flying to his throat as he coughs up the water that will not drain from his and Nicole’s throats.

And Nicolo thinks in-between his own deaths

Good.

and

Don’t seek to see me again so soon.

His brother returns to his sister’s sides and for a while the conversation is finished. It’ll start again, Nicolo knows this now. But for now it is laid to rest, to sleep.

—

There’s one exception to their now long standing conversation.

His siblings are traveling. This in itself is not unique, they travel far and wide, never staying in the same place for long it seems these days. There’s help needed far enough to never have staying still be a concern, anyway.

They are traveling by ship, and Nicolo feels something in his chest fall sideways.

He ignores it.

Half of the world is best travelled by ship.

They stay on the ship, and Nicolo chides himself wordlessly for the sense of unease the surrounds him.

It takes time to cross a distance, it feels like eternity because he is stuck in place.

Then his brother spends a day on deck, staring at the waves only to tip his head up to the sky, inhaling the salt on the air as he does so.

Nicolo’s heart twists.

Recognition should not be possible, but it is. It is.

He knows those waves, that sky, the smell of salt.

They’re sailing over his grave.

They don’t even-

They don’t even realize it.

He’s here. He’s here. He’s right here. HERE.

There is a crescendo of thought and it’s only as he dies and dies again and again that he realizes he’s screaming once again.

He doesn’t stop until they finally make it to their destination and the endless images of his prison are replaced with a landscapes he’s never seen before.

His brother drinks himself to sleep every night after that, once he’s found a supply on solid ground.

Nicolo wonders if it makes a difference.

—

His siblings join a fight in this new land, once that occasionally holds flashes of places more familiar.

Occasionally, he begins to wonder if the dark and the salt has finally driven him mad.

The grass in the new land runs muddy with blood, the ground unable to drink more. The sky is clouded with smoke once the fighting begins, blocking out the sun as the day progresses. The sounds of people dying do not exactly match the screaming in the streets of Jerusalem all those years ago, but the sound of men dying becomes similar with enough repetition, even if it’s marked by loud bellows of cannon fire to differentiate the present from Nicolo’s memories.

It’s not the battles that shake him, but the empty spaces left afterwards. The landscapes of destruction, the mass graves.

His brother has started sharing the flask he carried on him with both Andromache and Quynh openly now.

They fight, they die, they get up and fight again.

Nicolo hopes the cause is worth it, he’s watching his family become shades of themselves in front of him.

They do this for long enough that the seasons change and come back again several times. Eventual there’s a resolution of some sort.

They work their way across the new land, trailing through deserts, endless grasslands, mountains taller than any Nicolo has ever seen, and to coastal forests with trees that could only be felled by giants.

At the coast, Andromache and Quynh make to set sail again.

His brother stays behind, in this new land filled with marvels that will one day be as familiar as the town his family lived in.

And so it’s the two of them again, Nicolo the silent observer, his brother, the silent wanderer.

The wander through the world, sometimes conversing in the bad years, and watch the world change around them.

Language has long left Nicolo behind, he has little hope of understanding the waves of sound and words that crash over him through his brother’s ears, but his vision still works the same and he’s always been one to watch quietly to understand something new.

His brother ends up at a city constructed of new buildings gleaming white in the sun with the backdrop of a sea behind them. The city seems to be the center of the world, as far as Nicolo can fathom. It contains more people than Nicolo has ever seen gathered before, and each building in the city provides new wonders on display. His brother soaks them all in like a sponge.

He spends days on end, sometimes forgoing sleep or food, walking the streets of this city of wonders. He speaks with as many people as he can, learning everything they have to offer about the technologies that are on display, the monstrous creations and the intricate work of craftsmen in every area of study.

This city has a siren call over his brother, and Nicolo can’t help but think he might be under the same spell when he watches one evening as his brother is murdered and they both treat it as mostly as a mere inconvenience to seeing more this city has to offer.

By the end of their time here, a name has been said over so many lips that Nicolo could maybe tie the place to what he sees before him, even if there is a gulf between true understanding.

Chi-ca-go.

It’s a name like nothing Nicolo haas ever heard before.

He spends many a in-between death trying out the word on his tongue, the name inaudible as the second syllable sucks the water into his mouth for the sea.

Still, it’s new and it’s in the dark and the cold and deep with him.

And as all new things do, it prompts an unexpected thought.

He’s never tried to quantify the time between deaths from the view under the waves, only how much time was passing in tandem above him.

With repetition, he can mouth one Chicago before he drowns.

Two Quynhs.

Half of one Andromache.

Two brothers, having no other name for him.

Three Yusufs, strung together like prayer beads by his lips.

It becomes a passing interests game of sorts under well defined agony. He scours his vocabulary for every word he con remember in as many languages as he knew before he was entombed, tries and tests them all under the weight of the water.

Learns he can string the short ones together, learns that the long words need several deaths and the repetition of focus to come back and follow up on what was said before the previous death.

Sentences are beyond him, which is fine, he was never much of a poet.

Somehow he loses track of what’s been going on beyond him and realizes with a start that his brother has left the white city far behind him, and is wandering once more.

Chicago, he says and drowns again, committing it all to memory. A bright spot worth cherishing.

—

He and his brother continue on.

The years are neither generous nor terrible, they simply are.

His sisters weave themselves into the journey at different turns and twists in time. Yusuf never makes an appearance. Nicolo learns to mourn it silently, he will not burden his brother with his misery over the absence.

Instead he chants his beloved’s name like praying the beads to a rosary.

There’s years of peace. There’s also years of war.

Nicolo had thought the war that brought them to the land where Chicago lies was devastating.

It pales in comparison to the one they embed themselves in next.

There are many moments that Nicolo wishes to unsee, and one he cannot despite his best intentions.

His brother stands in a village, abandoned and desolate. He wakes the streets in a daze and eventually ends up staring at a mass of rubble.

There was a house there once. Nicolo knew the shape of the mezuzah on the doorframe.

His brother stumbles away to another destination.

The graveyard is little more than a reclaimed field.

It’s been many years since his brother was here to light candles.

His sisters do not allow him to wander alone much, after that war. They keep him close. Nicolo thanks them for it.

The years pass, and pass, and pass.

—

And one day, Nicolo dies and wakes up suffocating.

Not on water, or on air, but on blood. Blood mixed with salt and with sand and the heat of a sun he hasn’t felt so strongly in centuries.

The face that meets him is not his brothers.

It’s a woman, her eyes are wide and obsidian and she’s drowning in her own blood.

Nicolo dies along side her and can’t shake the surprise that their family has grown again so soon.

—

After that it’s disorienting, his perspective shifting to try and follow two different siblings in very different circumstances.

His brother is separate from his sisters when he wakes up choking on air from their newest sister’s death, alone in a bare space and stumbling over himself to get to the door. Then the scene shifts to the new sister, her baking away from others dressed similar to her for a moment before Andromache’s familiar shadow intercepts and has their new sibling in hand.

After that it’s flashes of awareness like mosaics overlaid to create new new colors of light. Traveling across a sun scorched landscape. An uncomfortable seat of a hard material and badly woven fabric. A ship that gleams in the sunlight, reflecting off the hull like a mirror. Tall grass up to the knees that’s still wet with dew. The taste of blood and flashes of a match between his sisters, the new holding her own against Andromache longer than Nicolo would have guessed. A stone church, something far more recognizable and grounding than Nicolo could have guessed, an ache of longing inside him for the cool stone.

And then the visions merge, and he sees his sister, and he sees his brother, through the other’s eyes.

Like reflections of each other, distorted by a rivers gentle flow. One tired, like a worn flame that keeps on burning. The other tremulous, like stormy waters.

And the ache only increases in its ferocity.

—

He has to wonder, how long this new sibling will stay with the group. He does not know if she has family, her death was surrounded by others in the same uniform as her, and he wonders how far she has been brought from home. If she has family, it would make sense that she would go to them, do as their brother has done and spend what time remaining she has with them. It’ll hurt, but Nicolo has to hope it’ll somehow end better than what his brother experienced.

She already has met the others, shared a meal with their brother and their sisters, so she won’t be alone- one way or another.

That is if she has people to return to, Nicolo had no such thing when he died the first time and perhaps she’s of a similar blood. But if she does have family, their brother will be able to understand it best.

He wonders how long this double vision will last, catching glimpses of his siblings through the others eyes, like spirits in the shadows of the field of vision. Something about it makes his skin, long dead to sensation, itch in his few moments of consciousness between drownings. He’s spent so many years seeing the world through one pair of eyes that the new perspective leaves him spinning.

It’s not uncomfortable per se, but it’s a new flood of light with ever switch, a delay in understanding what he sees and feels as the visions before him switch.

A rooftop, the breeze light and sun warm on skin-a slight chill on the back of his neck as his fingers work a metal weapon, the air carrying the smell of oil-her hands cradling a small rectangle in her palms, the item reflecting an image of two smiling people who look like his sister ah that answers the question of family-his hands setting down a part and leaning back in the chair to sigh, gaze following over to the stairs leading up to the roof-a hand clasped around her wrist and a voice-

Wait.

Wait.

The chill of the church and Nicolo strains against the familiar murmur of Andromache and Quynh in the background, he thought for a second-

There is a hand clasped around his sister’s wrist, holding her steady on the uneven roof and Nicolo looks at the ghost of his Beloved, innumerable distance and time between them but suddenly close enough to touch, close enough to hear, to see in the blinding light of day. And still unreachable to Nicolo himself.

And Nicolo weeps.

Chapter Text

There are things one forgets, trapped beneath the waves.

The exact curl of his beloved’s hair, the way his beard changes the shape of his face, the sound of his laugh, the garbled lilt of his voice speaking in this new language of the present moment that does not roll off the tongue like his own. The cool touch of his shadow, the blinding silhouette of him against the sun. The way he mummers to himself loud enough for Nicolo to hear, so be it. And like that Nicolo has heard his first comprehensible sentence since he was lost.

He is reminded of all of these details and more, in the short flashes he gets as he sees the world through his sister’s eyes. They’re over far to quickly, but he wants to hoard them like a king- hold them close and make them last for however long the rest of his life is.

Yusuf is alive. Yusuf is free. Yusuf looks both awful and beautiful beyond compare.

The soul rejoices, the body knows no way to comprehend than to reiterate this knowledge like a hymn. He can fit his beloved’s name in his mouth three times before he ultimately drowns. So he does, over and over and over, not sure if the compulsion will ever truly end when he’s been given the knowledge that he may have been suffering but his love is not suffering the same fate.

He rejoices, and he rages against his coffin with renewed fervor. He weeps, and he pushes back against the water, and the salt, and the dark to protect the vowels forming against his teeth in between deaths.

Yusuf. Yusuf. Yusuf.

Light, and sometimes the subject of his prayer within his sibling’s field of view, a vision and a ghost.

Yusuf. Yusuf. Yusuf.

—

The new one’s point of view becomes Nicolo’s. He’s a ghost now, following her, hovering just past her shoulder and stealing moments of her life. Because the new one is with Yusuf.

—

His stomach still twists with dread when he sees them board the ship. This one is shining metal, a different beast from the ones of wood he remembers but a ship is a ship and that means the sea.

He’s grown so tired of the sea. He’s grown so tired of this sea in particular.

He tries not to let the knowledge that they are on the water bother him, tries to clamp down on the screams in his throat, the sobs that shake his shoulders in the dark.

His sister spends a day on deck, watching the waves he knows so well and under a sky he remembers on the good days and his resolve crumbles.

He feels terrible later, when he watches his sister wake gasping and shaking in the dark of her room. He tries to quell the whimpering of his own throat as she makes her way around the ship, and nearly starts sobbing again around deaths when she passes by Yusuf.

The night is calm, and full of stars, and Nicolo whispers his apologies to her as she settles onto the deck.

And then,

And then there is Yusuf. Laying on the deck next to her, staring up at the stars. 

It’s a balm on the agony of being trapped, after all these years, to have Yusuf so close. To be the unseen guest at his side now, instead of just in the shadows of their siblings. Nicolo hopes his beloved knows, knows that the mere proof that he is alive and free does more to calm Nicolo’s soul than any other wonder he’s seen in his time separated from him. Knows that he will love him forever, even if he never understands a word the falls form his lips now. 

And then Yusuf looks at his new sister, almost as if looking at Nicolo directly, and as he speaks his voice is clear, clear, clear—Nico—

And can one die from shock before one drowns? It’s close. Like being hit by lightning. “-sef!”

And then a minute or so later, the curl of his name from his beloved’s lips is unmistakable—Nicolo—. 

He’s talking about me. Nicolo realizes belatedly. He’s telling our sister about me.

And his love is transformed, softening at the edges and an adoration that extends past language visible on his face as he speaks. 

He, oh, he has no words for this. Nothing but grief, and love, and a yearning that could swallow the sea whole if given the chance.

—

His beloved spends more time with their new sister now, since the night they spent on the deck of the ship. They talk frequently, and every time his name is spoken it’s a bell in the dark, and the cold, and deep. A ringing noise to remind Nicolo that he is there, and he is loved, and his love seems content to speak of little else. He is not merely remembered, a recollection from a long ago time, he is in the air of his lover’s lungs with each time his name is spoken.

And he is spoken about as if they can see his ghost, hovering over the new sister’s shoulder. As if they are counting down the days until he is returned to his beloved’s side.

It’s this realization that makes him view everything else he has seen in a new light.

They are on a ship, they are on a strange ship somewhere above him on the surface. They spend most of their time on that ship, with the occasional trip back to land.

His love spends most of his time in a room that’s covered floor to ceiling in parchment- charts Nicolo knows enough to recognize as those used for seafaring journeys. They’re all heavily annotated, crossed off and circled in various places.

His love walks the deck of the ship like a man more accustomed to being at sea than at land, and his sister spends more and more time browsing the same charts and drawings of the sea as it is for him, dark and quiet.

They are searching, they are looking for something.

It seems so obvious in retrospect, so terribly obvious, it makes every other excuse he told himself when they stepped foot aboard the ship crumble away against the weight of the truth.

They are looking for him.

Where has his love been for all these years?

Where has his love been, every breathe taken separate from his sisters and his brother? The innumerable years that have at least spanned a century or two since that cell in England. Has he been above Nicolo this entire time?

Oh, god.

He doesn’t-

He never expected-

He

Oh.

Drowning filled to the brim with love somehow feels different than dying drowning on sorrow.

He revives calm, calm despite the water once again flooding his lungs and the dark. Dying is second nature now, habit like breathing had been for the centuries above the waves.

His love and his sister are above him, looking for him.

What will he do?

Fighting the coffin hasn’t produced many results, the metal is old and worn but the salt of the sea has calcified and seemed to fill in the spaced where the iron has been eaten away by the water. He may be close to a day where the metal finally gives way completely, but it’s no more certain than anything else.

He doesn’t know where he is, so trying to communicate a guess of a location would be pointless.

He doesn’t know if he can do anything of value-

Well.

The connection between him and his new siblings is not merely one directional. He knows they can see him, knows they drown along with him in their dreams or after a death. Knows that the actions he takes can impact the intensity of the connection.

He can do one thing.

He can’t know if either sibling will see enough to know, but he can try all the same.

He can say “I see you” in the space between one death. There’s room enough between heartbeats and his water filled lungs.

I see you. Drown, I see. Drown. Yusuf Yusuf Yusuf. Drown. I see you. Drown I see you, drown, I see you-

Until it becomes mantra, until he’s already moving his lips upon waking,  until it’s the only thing his body knows in the dark and the cold, no effort wasted even trying to move except for the force of shaping his words against the pressure of the salt water constantly fighting against his lips and his lungs.

I see you. I see you. I see you.

Yusuf,

I see you.

—

Broken zeneize greets his ears, strange to suddenly understand after so long being lost in the ocean of language that his siblings now reside in. His name was a bell, an island on an endless sea- this is equivalent to finding land, the shore as long as the eye can see.

“We are looking for you. We are going to find you.”

—

I know, I know, I know. I see you.

Where you? Remember place? Any memory?

No. No memory of where. Here is dark. All I know.

His sister’s zeneize is rough, the vowels stressed in strange places and repeated enough to mirror Nicolo’s short replies like a chant. The call and respond to each other in clipped words, enough to draw meaning between them but not enough for detail.

He hasn’t spoken, truly spoken, to anyone in centuries and the short sentences are in themselves almost too much for him to comprehend after so long with just his thoughts and his voiceless screams. Every revival has a purpose, a message to be conveyed or decoded between the time of his sibling’s dreams or his own deaths. His deaths have had a purpose since he woke up seeing from his brother’s eyes, since he started to reclaim the knowledge that there was an existence beyond his prison.

His sister reminds him that his life, the few precious second between deaths, are as equally treasured. He sees it in every glimpse he catches of Yusuf’s face when his sister imitates his words for translation.

His beloved’s zeneize is like seeing the sun again. Blinking and realizing the dark was only a memory, and he was awake on an afternoon day.

Nico, nico, nico. I am so sorry my love. I’m sorry I haven’t found you yet, I promise to never stop looking, not until I have you in my arms again. I will make sure you have the world, nothing will every tear us apart again.

He feels somewhat inadequate, answering his love’s full sentences with the words he can. He saves up all the words he wants to speak for later, for when he can say them himself.

I know, love. No apologies. Seeing you is enough.

And he thinks to himself, well. I can endure a little longer.

—

The trip to the galleria is unexpected, but Nicolo can see how it lifts the weight from around his sister’s shoulder. He hasn’t asked, but he can feel his sibling’s sorrow over the last few days. Something ails her, and Yusuf is doing his best to gently coax her into not letting it hold her under.

He is grateful, so incredibly grateful, that they have each other. Their lives are not meant to be spent isolated.

Partway into the trip, Nicolo realizes he recognizes the art. Had seen it being painted onto some of these canvases. His smile is unpracticed, pulling at his cheeks with more effort than he’s ever remembered before.

Michelangelo’s studio had always been a joy, the chaos of the painter’s social life had always seem to add to the charm.

And there’s-

Huh. There is them.

He hadn’t realized they had been painted, he and Yusuf had usually preferred staying on the sidelines rather than anywhere near the light for the painting models. And yet, there they were, painted in heavy darks and blinding lights, the two most rendered figures on the canvas.

It takes him a moment but he realizes he remembers that day.

(“He’s a peacock.” Nicolo says under his breathe, “A swooning peacock.”

Besides him, Yusuf giggles and then coughs trying to cover up the noise. The main model for the piece Michelangelo was working on today is in his own words “love sick, he has been captured by venus’ sweet touch and can not stand a minute more without the kiss of his beloved.” Matteo had recently slept with a new working girl, and she wasn’t impressed enough to follow up except to take his money at the agreed upon sum for the experience. Matteo, obviously, distraught. Michelangelo had to threaten him into following his commitment to stand for the painting today.

“Have mercy, Nico. Have you never been swept under the sweet spell of Venus?” Yusuf asks, faking disappointment so he didn’t laugh openly and draw the model’s ire. “I’ve heard it’s pretty distracting.”

Nicolo snorts, and that does gain a look from the offended model. He doesn’t particularly mind. “That’s what we’re calling the dance of two soul-bound lovers now? The stuff of legends, the romances that bridge across all time? “Pretty distracting”? I don’t know, Matteo makes his condition sound so serious.”

Yusuf ducks his head in close and his voice levels out to lowest octave in his register. “I’m willing to bet a handful of giulio that I could make it pretty distracting for you.”

Nicolo’s smile is a ghost on his lips, keeping his expression in check for those around him. “You’ll have to be more specific than that, habibi, if you expect me to take on such a wager.”

Yusuf is not touching him, but he might as well be undressing him with his eyes alone, the way his gaze slowly passes over Nicolo from head to toe, evaluating. “I think I could make you forget your own name, if asked.”

He is not going to fuck Yusuf in the studio. He is not going to fuck Yusuf in the studio. He is not going to fuck Yusuf in the studio. They are guests and will be polite.

He will most certainly be fucking Yusuf back in their room.

“Hmm, sounds like a challenge.” Nicolo concedes, “I’d like to see how you plan to accomplish that.”

He did love a good competition.)

Of all the experiences he’s forgotten, it’s a surprise to realize that his body still can still react to memory and for a second he is almost warm.

He voices his reply without thinking.

It’s a good painting.

Remember that wager I lost?

You had me forgetting more than my name.

It’s only after he’s said the words that he realizes he may have overstepped a bit.

Yusuf’s face awash in a blush is worth it, watching him stammer as he tries to explain to their sister is worth it. He’s truly the most beautiful man in the world, his laughter warms something in Nicolo he had forgotten.

The response is clearly from his sister.

NO SEX TALK.
NO.
NO SEX TALK PLEASE.
DO NOT INCLUDE ME EVER.

She sounds so angry. God, he deserves it. He’ll apologize. He’ll make sure to apologize and let her know that he’ll behave. He owes her that, and he’ll follow through.

Once he’s done laughing.

Chapter Text

In retrospect it was foolish. They spoke often enough of looking for him, of pulling him from the water. He had no doubt in his love’s conviction, or his sister’s perseverance. He had that alone. What else did he have, now stripped of everything but his faith? What was he at the core of himself other than his beliefs?

And yet somewhere along the way, Nicolo had stopped thinking about escape as something that would happen to him, the Nicolo trapped beneath the water, verses the Nicolo that would eventually return victorious. 

The mind after so long cannot fathom the return from the dead. Not like this, voiceless and invisible, his love walking before him in dreams and unable to look back. Andromache has shared this story as well, the one of the lovers, where one goes searching and still loses at the end. Nicolo knew what role he played. The Nicolo in the dark would not be the same one that walked the shore again, hades wouldn’t let go so easily.

When he was freed, the Nicolo he will be would see it coming. Would feel it in his bones. Would rise up from the sea like one of the saints. Or a hero in a story.

400 years below the sea, and he’s as foolish as he was when they first drowned him.

His first thought is, why does the light hurt?

He’s never felt pain watching the lives of his siblings in his deaths. The bright sunlight in their view has never left him blinking, eyes watering to mix with salt- and. Oh. Oh he’s awake. 

There is light at the bottom of the sea. And it’s extremely painful to try and view whatever object has been illuminated in his vision.

He drowns and revives to find everything blindingly bright, the metal of his coffin pulled away, and dark hands are gently pulling the chains that have kept him locked in place taut and then to pieces. He drowns.

There is a man, here at the bottom of the sea with him. Cloaked in the dark of the sea, an impossibly bright light clipped to the front of his chest which throws the rest of him into shadow. His gloves are thick, like a blacksmith’s garb, but his touch is featherlight when he stops his work cutting the chains holding Nicolo to the coffin long enough to brush against Nicolo’s cheek as their eyes meet through salt water and some sort of mask of tubes and what must be glass, clear as it is.

Of course Yusuf would come free him himself.

Nicolo laughs in disbelief, with nothing else to do and drowns again.

He wakes up still choking on water but it’s lighter now, and his blood is on fire. Yusuf is holding him in his arms and pulls his head close as Nicolo spasms in his hold until the sea takes him one more time.

He wakes up, laying on his back and opening his eyes to a world that is bright bright bright and far too big for him to handle, he sucks in a breath and chokes on air on air on air.

He wakes up and Yusuf is half folded over him, the mask from his suit ripped away and his face grim as he hovers over Nicolo’s limp body. Nicolo realizes after a moment that his beloved’s lips are moving, rapid fire, and none of the sound is registering.

He weakly moves to grab at his love’s wrist, the words on his own tongue garbled and weak after so so long. “It’s ok. I’m here. I’m here.”

He dies again, he thinks.

He opens his eyes to Yusuf holding him close, still on the deck of the ship, still impossibly bright, and still impossibly real. He can hear his love now, his voice sharp, and present, and vibrating through his chest. “Nicolo, habibi, wake up for me, Nico.”

“I’m awake. I’m awake.” He manages to speak, still not quite ready to open his eyes for fear of being drowned in the enormity of it all. “You found me.”

His voice barely carries, seeming to stick to his tongue but Yusuf’s shoulders drop and there’s his forehead pressing against Nicolo’s as the tears start to fall.

He shudders as he feels the water drop on his face, and Yusuf pulls back, murmuring an apology and Nicolo can only laugh or sob, or whatever it is that comes out of his throat. He breathes in air and even if it tastes like salt it’s his first breaths unhampered by the water in so long. He blinks and sees the sky and starts sobbing again, cradled in the lap of his love. “You found me.”

“Always, and never again, I will never let anyone pull us apart again.” 

And oh it the most holy of choirs, to hear his love, unobstructed by time and distance and death and the damned fucking salt water. The world shrinks down to just them, the heavens aligned and the world set right, some terrible absence, some grievous fault repaired flawlessly, like it had never existed, like there was no moment between when they last touched in the cell in England and this moment now, on the deck of a ship, cradled and protected from the sun by his love’s shadow.

Yusuf must read his mind, he captures his lips in a kiss a second later, as Nicolo thinks of the actions and bemoans the fact his body refuses to listen to him under the new weight of the air after so long underwater.

He forgets that he needs to breathe now. That it is a function he can forget, after so long without, especially when single-mindedly focused on the wholly consuming press of Yusuf’s lips against his own.

Pulls away coughing and reaching for his love at the burn in his lungs. Feels the shake of his love’s laughter in his bones. Hears the sound of his smile, “I swear Nico if you die suffocating because you forgot how to breathe-”

“Mercy, my heart-” Nico chides between coughs as he regains his breath, “It’s been a long time, hundreds of years of not having the pleasure of breathing forms a bit of a habit.”

And Yusuf softens, the tide of all his thoughts clear on his face. The crash of I’m sorry, and too long, and I should have found you sooner all ready to fall from his tongue once again.

It’s Nicolo’s turn to smile, to reassure with a light tough to his beloved’s cheek, though his limbs are rapidly feeling more and more like lead. “No apologies, my love.”

His body loses track of everything after that.

—

—His mouth—not his mouth—is awash with the sensation of bubbles popping along his tongue and throat. The seating his is on is plush and comfortable and the room is lit from large windows filling up a wall, the room is not home but in the absence it at least means safe, secure, almost—

—

He wakes up with a grimace, his body aching, every inch of his skin feeling sharp and prickly as if he has been stretched over his frame, with too little material to do the job properly.

There’s a hand holding onto his, the thumb rubbing small circles over the joints of his fingers.

He sighs and still gets caught on how scratchy his voice is, like shards of glass against stone. “Ow.”

The hand holding his brings his hand to a mouth and a soft kiss is placed against the back of his palm. Nicolo turns his head—which if the pain of not moving was notable, the pain of actually moving far outweighs it—and drinks in the sight of his beloved, dry and dressed in the clothes of this era.

His sandpaper voice will have to do for the moment. “This is real?”

His love nods his head, still holding his hand to his lips and looking like he’s going to cry again. 

“Did I steal the poet’s tongue away?” Nicolo says on habit, and is rewarded with a surprised bark of laughter from Yusuf. “What was it this time: my dazzling good looks or my endlessly sharp wit?”

He must look half-dead if not a little more than a corpse, and his wit so far has been less than spectacular. The joke is in the audacity of it all.

“Really, Nico?”

“Such a handsome face, how could I resist?” It’s more familiar than breathing, using his words to make his beloved flush and make the lines of worry melt from his face. He exists to bask in the sunshine of Yusuf’s happiness and its so easy, so simple, to immediately follow the pattern of conversation they held for centuries, to speak freely knowing it was by his own tongue and for Yusuf’s ears alone-

Oh, God. He forgot his siblings.

Yusuf must see the change in his expression, the worry lines returned as if never left, his eyes darting across Nicolo’s body as if looking for the cause and oh he hasn’t even asked-

“What are their names, our new siblings? I’ve spent years watching the world from their eyes and I don’t even know their names.”

Yusuf’s concern settles, turns into something fond on the edges of his expression. “Nile. And Booker.”

Nicolo can remember the river, how it fed the cities along it’s shores and could destroy them on a whim with the same power, the flow of the seasons raising the banks or pulling them back. Nile is a fitting name for his sister, thoughtful and grounded. Booker is... Well he doesn’t understand it, can’t parse it’s meaning, but he didn’t understand “Chicago” until he heard it repeatedly either. He can learn. He owes his brother that much, owes him significantly more.

He tries both out, his tongue stumbling over the unfamiliar combination of vowels and consonants. Yusuf regards him like he’s still waiting for the dream to end, but will not wake until forced.

“Are they here, on the ship?” Nicolo finally asks, wondering if he has met them already, if they were a pair of hands pulling him from the sea and he missed them completely.

“No,” Yusuf answers quickly, and Nicolo is both disappointed and gladdened, to know he gets to see them the first time completely aware and can give that introduction the care it deserves. “They’re both on shore, we were there when one of my crew found your location and Nile told me to go ahead without her and not to worry about— never mind,  you want to meet them?”

“I feel like I already know them, but yes.” He says, feeling the words slip easily from his mind to his mouth to audible in the air around them, another change that reinforces the reality of the situation, the presence of sound. “I would like to meet them, very much.”

Yusuf pulls out a small rectangle from his trousers, tapping at it with his fingertips before turning his attention to Nicolo once again. “I can have us start the course to return to port. It’ll take a day or so, but then you’d be able to meet them.”

“I wish I looked a bit more presentable.” He sighs, weakly holding out one hand in front of his face and noticing in detail the way his skin clings to his bones. The hand comes to feel along the sharp lines of his jaw, hidden under his beard and tangled in with his hair.

Yusuf captures his hand once again, “It’ll take time, habibi. You’ll have to  be patient with yourself on that.”

His expression is grim, knowing in a way that can only come from experience. And while the great injustice of their separation has been corrected, the history of it is written across them both. Yusuf is thin, thinner than the early days of their meeting, thinner than when Malta tried to tear them apart and failed. He carries worry lines across his forehead that were not there when locked in England’s cellars. He looks like a man who hasn’t known sleep in years, and is still only upright through sheer will alone.

Nicolo grips Yusufs hand tighter in his own.

“It’s a good thing we’ve got all the time in the world then.” Nicolo replies softly, “We can take as much time as we need until we’re ready.”

“I can trim your hair and shave the beard away, in the meantime.” Yusuf gives a half-smile, a one sided grin that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “You’ll at least look slightly less like I pulled you out of that water that way.”

“I was worried you’d never offer and I’d have to beg for it, please. I’m ready to be free of this thing.”

His love’s laugh is still the same.

—

There’s an uneasiness in his stomach, a growing sense of dread. Leg bouncing, fingers fighting against the urge to tap, the lights bright but not in the way of sun, something is off with the tone and something feels wrong-

—

Nicolo wakes up thrashing. 

Hands on his shoulders, voices in his ear say that he is fine but it is dark, dark, dark and he cannot see and he is going to drown-

“Nico. Habibi. I’ve got you, you’re ok.” And he recognizes Yusuf’s voice but the dark is suffocating, soon to be replaced with salt and water and.

The lights flicker on, the room is awash in light and Nico heaves in his next breathes as if he has only now been given access to the air. There’s hands running down his back, his shoulders, grounding him to the bed and the sensation of the moment. He chokes out an apology in between shaken breathes, and Yusuf hushes him.

“I didn’t think about the light, I’m sorry. We’ll keep it on all the time now, alright?” Yusuf says quietly, rubbing circles into Nicolo’s skin until he can feel himself holding onto the bed and lets go with a conscious effort.

They stay there until Nicolo can find it in himself to breathe without expecting the next to be stolen away.

“Did I wake you?” He asks, eventually.

“I’ve slept very little these days, it’s a hard habit to break.” Yusuf mumbles back, his eyes occasionally glancing towards the small rectangle he’s placed near the bed.

“Is there something keeping you awake?” Nicolo prods, remembering how Yusuf usually was a fine sleeper except in cases of stress.

“I haven’t heard back from Nile.” He confesses after a pause. “The wonders of the modern age habibi means that we can connect with people over longer distances than what we travelled in almost no time. And I haven’t heard anything back from her since the afternoon.”

He can absorb the rest of the information later, digest it slowly and wonder about the world, the message is clear here. “You’re worried.”

“More than I thought I would ever be over another person who isn’t you.” Yusuf says and the self-deprecation is clear. “I told her once when we first met that you were my priority, and that I’d leave her behind in a heartbeat if she slowed me down or distracted me from finding you and now I’m sitting here, with you back in my arms, and all I can think about is worrying why my little sister isn’t answering my texts.”

He slips then, away from the Zeneize they’ve been speaking into the Tunsi of his childhood, and Nicolo remembers enough, even after all this time, to recognize the word little sister. He’d heard Yusuf say it constantly in their early years of traveling, when he was speaking about home and Kahina.

And maybe that is the real problem.

“Yusuf, do you feel guilty because you’re worried?” He asks calmly, trying to ignore the heartbreak of watching Yusuf’s expression change to something defeated. “Habibi, my love, why? She’s our sister, I haven’t met her yet but I adore her. What is there to be guilty about in worrying for her?”

“You’re my priority.” Yusuf says as if the answer is self evident in his words. “You’re supposed to be my only priority.”

Oh, love. 

“You know we are not meant to live like that, my heart.” It’s gentle. An offer extended.

Yusuf looks away and will not meet his eyes, “It’s not been living, Nico, not without you. None of these years have been spent living.”

Nicolo turns Yusuf’s face back towards him. “And yet, we both lived through them. And neither of us would have made it without our siblings, not through what we have endured. Try contacting her again, I’ll wait with you.”

So they sit, woven together in a tangle of limbs while Yusuf taps away at the amazing little rectangle of the future and Nicolo watches light glow from the surface of it, the characters vaguely familiar but mostly illegible. At one point Yusuf, huffs under is breathe and his annoyance is evident. “Fucking Booker.”

Nicolo sleepily rouses from where he’s perched his head against Yusuf’s shoulder, “What about Booker?”

“Nile said she was staying with him, and she hasn’t responded at all since then, and neither is he.”

“Well, better together than alone. They’re probably fine.” Nicolo yawns and settles back against Yusuf’s shoulder, his eyes heavier with each passing moment.
—

He is being torn up from the inside out, he registers the slice of a blade before the pain slams into him after it. Straight through his chest until he’s choking on blood as his lungs drown. His body tied to a cold surface and seizing from the violence against it and a woman’s voice high and alarmed and incomprehensible but familiar now oh so familiar. The room is bland, all grey and white and he can barely focus on the strange triangle that is stitched into the gown of the person presumably stabbing him.

They are not fine.

—

Nicolo wakes this time to a stuttered breathe, his body weighed down and his nerves alight with the memory of his dream-

Yusuf is asleep behind him and he wastes no time in grabbing at his shoulder, shaking him awake without preamble. “Yusuf, I was wrong. Something is very wrong. Booker was killed and Nile-”

“What?” Yusuf’s sleepless haze is blinked away as Nicolo’s words register and he sits up fully, grabbing for that rectangle once again.

“I think someone has them.” Nicolo says, as he puts together the restraints and the pain and the colorless room. “Booker was held down and someone was stabbing him, I could hear Nile but not see her. The person holding them captive was in white, almost like a white dress from what I could see, there was a small triangle on the clothing.”

Paper and charcoal are pulled from the nearby desk, Yusuf has the rectangle up next to his ear now and is using his shoulder to hold it in place as he hands the paper over to Nicolo. “Draw the symbol, as much as you can remember.”

He sketches out three triangles, lines interlacing and directing his eye to the next side. Yusuf has started swearing and is jabbing at his rectangle once again before returning it to it’s spot next to his head. He sweeps over the sketch before checking to see if Nicolo remembers anything else, his body in motion until the moment he’s at the door.

Nicolo looks at him with confusion, “What are you waiting for? Go, go, I’ll be fine. Figure out where our siblings are.”

Yusuf grimaces and practically runs through the door, and Nicolo can hear him from here, shouting in that incomprehensible modern language. 

There’s a knock at his door shortly afterwards. A woman with a short haircut and a serious expression enters the room, “Hello, Nicolo. Sorry to disturb you but Joe doesn’t want you alone. My name is Genevieve.”

“You speak Zeneize?”

The woman smiles softly, before resuming her serious expression. “It’s a family tradition at this point. I’m happy to see it’s come in handy. Do you need anything?”

“Water?” Nicolo says after a moment, constantly aware of the raspy quality of his voice. “An explanation of what is going on would be good too. You’ll have to start simple but I’ll ask questions if I get lost.”

“I think I can do that. Let me get a glass for you and then we can try and catch you up to speed on the world.”

—

He pulls the soft fabric of his clothing closer to his body, fighting away the chill of the morning air. The dawn has broken and Yusuf is pacing the deck and they are a few minutes from shore and Nicolo cannot go back, not just yet.

There’s a man waiting for them at the dock, and Nicolo could swear he’s seen the man before, if only in quick glimpses. Someone from Nile’s memory? Or Booker’s? Either way the man has his hands raised in a placated gesture after a few minutes of speaking with Yusuf and Nicolo knows his love must have jumped straight to the threats, his sibling’s safety hanging in the balance.

Whatever the man replies with is enough to keep his life, Joe listens for a bit then quickly returns to the ship, phone (Genevieve was a fantastic teacher) in hand once again. “He knows where they are, can get a team in to rescue Nile and Booker and help hide the fact we were there afterwards.”

Nicolo stares out at the sea and thinks of every word of comfort he had been given. “What next?”

“I have to call our sisters.”

—

The Zeneize comes easy, he has never quite lost the feel of his mother tongue, despite the years. He knows he might lose it one day, far in the future when he’s walked the world as long as Andromache has, but for now it will arrive at his ears an old friend.

“We are looking for you, brave hearts, we will find you.”

Yusuf speaks into the phone with Quynh and Nicolo can catch snatches of the conversation, but his attention is in hearing his own voice speak in repeat. The same way his sister always spoke to him.

“Booker and Nile are captured, Nicolo saw them-”

Nicolo jumps as he can suddenly very very clearly hear his sister’s voice,   and Yusuf stands there, the phone held as far away from his ear as he can manage as Quynh’s voice echo’s through the cabin. “What do you mean Nicolo saw them?! Is Nicolo there? Is he free?!”

Yusuf looks like he has made a mistake and does not want to be on the receiving end of his sister’s scorn so Nicolo clears his throat and attempts to speak as loudly as he can without losing his voice. “Hello Quynh.”

“Yusuf hand the fucking phone over right now, put him on the phone now.” Quynh’s voice has dropped to a serene volume and Yusuf is handing over the phone without a sound. “Nico, Nico is that really you?”

“Hello, little sister,” he says with a slight laugh, “I have missed you more than you could imagine.”

“Nicolo?” And there’s Andromache’s voice overlapping with Quynh, and Nicolo can see them in his mind eye, sharing the phone between them, heads bowed together.

“Andromache,” and isn’t that satisfying, to finally be able to say her name without having to rush it in the space between deaths. 

“Where are you? How long have you been free from the ocean?” The questions are overlaid coming all at once and Nicolo needs to try and untangle the words from each other, though he knows what he needs to say next regardless.

“In truth, I don’t know exactly. We didn’t call you for me though, Nile and Booker need help first.”

Andromache has him hand the phone back over to Yusuf after several promises to see him as soon as possible, and many reassurances from him that he is alright, all things considered.

Later, Andromache and Quynh gone from the phone and on their way to reach England from wherever they are in the world, Yusuf has Nicolo held close once again, both exhausted from the day and using the wall to hold them up as they sit in the cabin. “They’ll be in London in roughly 12 hours.”

Nicolo hums acknowledgement and listens as Yusuf says it again in the modern English, even though he doesn’t understand it truly.

“Do you think they’ll hear you?”

“It can’t hurt. How are they?” Yusuf asks.

“Booker is in pain, Nile is scared.” Nicolo reports tiredly, “God willing, Andromache and Quynh will end this before either suffers more.”

They sit in silence and Nicolo poses his question to the air, only half aware that he’s speaking. “They will not understand me.”

“Well, not in Zeneize, Booker speaks some Florentine so you could probably try that. For Nile, we should probably have you learn how to say “hello” in English.” Yusuf answers, eyes closed and head gently pressed to the side of Nicolo’s head. They sit there, shoulder to shoulder, tired and with their hands clasped tight.

“Why does he speak Florentine? Is our brother from Firenze?” Nicolo prods at the comment, and Yusuf laughs softly.

“No, he is from, fuck what was it called back then, Francia. Roughly. But Florentine has become a dominant language of sorts, so he knows it enough. We might want to use it as the first bridge to finding a common language for you and them.”

“If I must. But that can come later,” Nicolo says with a dramatic sigh. “First, tell me how to say “nice to meet you” to them in this new English.”

And so Yusuf does.

And for the moment, it’s enough.