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After, it's the usual logistics—leaving the country in a hurry, cleaning up all of the blood—coupled with the newness of Andy having to patch herself up. She hasn't given any serious thought to how her body works in several millennia, but she's travelling with people who used to be field doctors, who could detach their own perpetual, unaided healing from the jagged wounds in front of them needing tending. And, of course, hovering diplomatically, there's Nile with whatever training they give Marines these days, watching in the wings.
Andy wonders if she, too, will arrive at a point where the disconnect takes over, her hands shaking as the immortality leaves her and the blood gushes up, but perhaps Nile will be an exception, ageing gracefully into a peaceful, unbloody death. Perhaps all the rest of them will, too, Andy and Lykon the real exceptions in the end.
Seems unlikely. But she wonders nonetheless.
For all that it's Nile who suggests taking time away, she sticks close, and it turns out that time away means Joe and Nicky off retracing their steps from centuries ago while Andy shows her whatever safehouses still remain somewhat intact, most of them derelict nooks in secluded villages, broken furniture and outdated clothes and the few possessions worth keeping littering wall-less rooms.
They travel by night and by train, looking at the world for chances to help. Andy isn't sure if Nile feels compelled to stay, her promise that Andy will spend the rest of her life with them weighing on her but unable to walk it back.
Nameless hotel after nameless hotel turns into a pattern of moving around each other in sync. They wake up at uneven ends of the night to the other sleeping. Mostly, Nile startles awake from dreams Andy doesn't want to ask about from the next bed over.
Then another night where Andy startles awake, rolling onto her back, too quickly, to stare at the ceiling with absolutely no memory of the world, until, a fraction of a second later, she remembers where she is and what she is, and then her face cracks into a tired smile.
She doesn't notice when Nile rises with a creak of the mattress and joins her. Or, well, she does, but it's the sort of notice one has of shadows moving near the corners of rooms—barely within sight and out of mind until something skips right at the edges of the eye.
Andy glances up, anticipating the kiss before it has a chance to come. The fact that it does is testament to the way her eyes have adjusted to find the shadows and greet them well.
She's not going to find the salve to her wounds in anyone else, and she doesn't believe Nile wants to be anyone's cure, either.
This isn't what this is about.
This is about feeling the thudding of Nile's heart and the pulsating of her lungs and the contracting of her diaphragm, in every way but the most literal, as if they were Andy's own.
Nile's lips move on hers, a soft you should sleep mumbled into Andy's waiting mouth.
Eventually, she does. They both do.