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“Really?” Yusuf asks incredulously as he watches them. “I mean, really?”
Andromache grins at him over Booker’s shoulder as they complete another careful quarter-turn on the space cleared out on the wood floor of the cabin.
“It’s very…decorative,” Nico allows. He’s sat next to the oven smoking a pipe, which is a nasty habit he picked up at some point in the last decade acting as a manservant in a half-dozen failed peace talks across Europe.
“It’s romantic,” Booker protests. “The British thought it was scandalous fifty odd years ago.”
Impatiently, Yusuf waves a hand. “The British think ankles are scandalous.”
Booker grimaces, shrugging as best he can with his arms still locked in position to lead Andy. He’s the last who would defend the British, which is one of the few things it has been easy for them all to agree upon as they adapt to being a quartet once more.
Still, romance this is not, in Yusuf’s humble opinion.
His eyes meet Nico’s across the room. Nico knows, of course, what he thinks of the romance of dancing.
Quickly, Yusuf turns away. It is the fire in the oven that makes his eyes burn, that is all.
Diplomats cannot resist a fancy party. No matter how serious the issue they are debating, the war they are trying to end—diplomats talk drunk and sign treaties hungover. These are facts that they have learned over the course of invasion after invasion, and this particular set of diplomats are particularly heinous.
Therefor, if they need to learn the new ways to dance and drink and mingle without being suspected, well, so be it.
It does not stop Yusuf from complaining.
“I don’t think anything could achieve that feat, tesoro,” Nico says dryly as he helps Yusuf don his costume. “Certainly nothing in the last eight hundred years or so has.”
Yusuf pinches his side in revenge.
“The style suits you,” he allows. “Perhaps the dancing will as well.”
“I think I shall take that as an insult,” Nicolò says seriously. The sleek black of the suit does suit him, though. It emphasizes his broad shoulders, the nip of his waist. The domino mask however—that, Yusuf cannot condone. It hides the strength on Nico’s profile far too much.
“Shall we practice, then?” Nico asks, holding out his arms as Booker demonstrated.
Yusuf’s mouth takes on a pinched, irritated thinness, though he tries to hide it. “Whatever for? This style of dance utterly prohibits that I should so much as touch you.”
The point is hard to swallow for them both, and they leave it at that.
The party is a glittering, dazzling affair. It would be more enjoyable if Bismarck had thought to invite anyone actually from Africa; as it stands, Yusuf is here alone and biting out his frustration at the state of the world on the inside of his cheek.
He is also posing as a waiter, which doubles the indignity.
Booker and Andromache are mingling with the best of them. It’s rare to catch Andromache in a gown; the freedom of movement is so severely inhibited it makes most of her pastimes impossible. Not to mention, which she has said no less than seven times in the last two days, it’s very hard to visit the lavatory.
This, at least, Yusuf can agree with, from his own experiences in gown-wearing.
All the same, she looks lovely, chatting and laughing. Lovely, but not at all herself. Perhaps it’s the domino mask she’s holding over her eyes; more likely, it’s the company.
Yusuf’s stomach is tied in knots by the time the hors d'oeuvres have been served. With his platter of tiny, delicate offerings, he has an in to listen to most conversations, and he’s heard far more than he’s comfortable with about what might happen to the Congo.
He has brushed past Nico no less than four times, impersonating a low-ranking colonial administrator, and they cannot so much as touch or make eye contact. It always chafes against Yusuf to play a role, but tonight, it chafes especially.
It’s a relief to take a place by the wall when the music starts up.
He notes, in an idle, silent way, which couples choose to take the floor together. It’s good to know which couples are in crisis among Europe’s leading war criminals.
Booker and Andromache dance.
They have to, of course. They’re posing as a couple.
It just doesn’t look entirely right.
“What are you thinking?”
Nicolò’s voice in his ear, low and undetectable by the crowd, is both a balm and an irritant.
Yusuf sighs. “I am thinking,” he says, “of how we danced in the Steppes, when we were all young.”
For a long moment, Nico looks out at the floor, observing Andromache and Booker as they make delicate quarter-turn after delicate quarter-turn. At length, he observes, “Andromache was not young, even then.”
It makes Yusuf smile ruefully. “I suppose,” he says. “She looked young.”
They had been traveling with merchants at the time, a group not so entirely reputable that all the goods were properly taxed and above-board, even by the far looser standards of the time. The days were long and arduous, and the nights were freezing cold. The campfires more than made up for it.
Great, roaring flames, they were, because the group was large enough to not fear detection; the kind of fire that stuck to your skin and your clothes, left your skin feeling a little roasted by proximity. And every couple nights, someone or other would pull out a fiddle or an oud or even just begin to drum on the blocks of wood they sat on and the dancing would begin.
It was as if Andromache knew the steps to every dance already, as if she’d grown up with them. Perhaps she had. She led them through it, wildly swirling, allowing herself to be tossed and catched from one partner to the next, and the more she did it, the more they caught on.
“Do you remember the look on Quynh’s face, when she first tried?” Yusuf asks. He tries to bank the naked longing for an easier time in his voice. He fails.
“No,” Nico says.
Yusuf glances over at him.
“I was distracted,” Nico says, with his patented half a smile in self-deprecation.
“Ah,” Yusuf says, shifting slightly. Nico was distracted, true, because at the time, he had just allowed himself to be caught by Nico’s strong arms. It was only a moment, only a blink of an eye before the dancing continued in circles around and around each other and the fire, but it was a moment they both treasured, the chance to touch and be touched in public.
Yusuf had happened to glance ahead, and he had seen the same look of awe on Quynh’s face, the same joy and disbelief that she could have this, right there out in the open.
Those had been good nights.
“I wonder what she’d think of this,” Yusuf says. Asking twists the dull knife of her absence, true, but even if he doesn’t ask, it’s still there.
“Not much,” Nico says instantly. “She’d like the dancing well enough, though.”
It’s probably true. She would appreciate the delicacy of movement, the finery, the opulence of it all. She’d always eyed the supremely wealthy with a mix of envy and violence.
Yusuf sighs and turns his head away.
“Come on,” Nico says, and slips through the doors by the wall they were leaning against.
Yusuf follows, as he always does.
“You have been in a temper all night, my heart,” Nico says softly when they find themselves in the relative safety of a small library where no merrimaking is meant to take place tonight.
Yusuf shrugs. “Can you blame me?”
“No,” Nico says, “But your scowl rather gives away the game.”
“I just…” Yusuf starts, and then stops. What should he say? That he hates the futility of their work in an ever-changing world? That he longs for something quiet and uncomplicated? That he is filled with fear, every time they enter this world, that he or Nico will be the next ones captured and caged? “I hate the dancing,” he says instead, petty and mulish.
“You love to dance,” Nico says.
“Not like this.”
Yusuf grew up on dancing, and he loves it, it’s true. It was nothing at all like this. He remembers holding his mother by the hand on one side and his brother by the other, a full circle of people he loved with their hands clasped, walking slowly forward and back and sideways to tunes he has long since forgotten.
When he thinks of it, he cannot see their faces, he only barely remembers the touch of their hands.
Nico sighs, heavy and put-upon and almost certainly joking. “I see it now,” he says. “It is my own fault. I should have forced you to try it.”
“Whatever for?” Yusuf reminds him. “I'm a servant here, and we're not supposed to be touching at all.”
“So you remember to find joy in things,” Nico says quietly, and holds out his hand.
It takes a moment to remember what Booker demonstrated, how to place their hands on each other. Nico leads; he was the one who asked to dance. The strains of music from the ballroom are far away, but still enough to judge a rhythm by.
Nico counts under his breath as he attempts to waltz.
Against all odds, it warms Yusuf’s heart.
It is intimate, he realizes, this posture with both arms locked with your partner. He has no choice but to look at Nico as they move. With each step, Nico’s right foot is placed carefully between Yusuf’s.
The tiny turns that look so staid and controlled are enough to make him dizzy.
“Imagine it,” Nico says. “If you were young, now. How it would feel to meet someone new and hold them like this before you even knew each other.”
Wordlessly, Yusuf nods.
They cannot stay for a whole dance. It was needlessly risky to do this at all. Yusuf allows himself another moment to be held in Nico’s grip, and then they step away and return to the cool, hateful society gathered outside.
Booker and Andromache have split to continue their mission; she is in the arms of one of the worst men in Europe. He is dancing with someone else’s wife.
Yusuf allows himself to watch the line of Booker’s arms as he dances, the measure of his steps. Perhaps he met his wife like this, or perhaps he simply liked to dance with her in their little kitchen in Marseille while the heinous fish stew he loves so much cooked.
Perhaps Yusuf could tell him about what it meant to dance when he was young; perhaps he will manage to remember a tune from the Steppes. Perhaps, if they could remember old families together, they could become a new one together.