Chapter Text
Watching Andy die was like watching a library burn. An unfathomable amount of history was dying with her; history Nile had only caught the barest glimpses of. It felt like a crime bigger than mere murder; the extinction of something unique. She raised her pistol and ran, trying to get a clear shot at Quynh as Joe and Nicky piled in. She could hear them yelling in languages she didn’t speak, but she didn’t need to to understand their grief and rage. Quynh was still wordlessly screaming.
Booker seemed to be trying to argue with them. “It won’t help! She wouldn’t want that!” and she realised their immediate impulse was to bind Quynh and throw her in the ocean again. She understood why, but when everyone else is losing their shit you need to keep your head, her inner drill sargent reminded her. She needed to put a stop to this before more unforgivable acts were committed in blind rage and grief.
“All this eye for an eye shit,” she muttered, and swapped her pistol for her assault rifle. No one seemed likely to listen to her right now. Well, maybe one person might.
“Booker!”
He took one look at her and like a good boy, he dropped. Nile opened fire on everyone else, a suppressing spray of lead that felt like a war crime. An odd thought: Andy would have done the same. At least it silenced Quynh, and then Nile was the only one standing in the reek of cordite. She hadn’t shot to kill, and Joe and Nicky were groaning and struggling to move. Quynh was still.
Booker was unhurt and he scrambled to his feet and looked about the deck in frustration. “Why is there no useful rope on ships these days?”
“I’ve got some.” Nile had come prepared with some lightweight cord, and she looked down to take the coil off her belt, just for a moment, and heard Booker hit the deck again with a crunch of breaking bone.
Nile snapped her head up, and Quynh was right there, like something from a horror movie. She’d dropped when Nile had opened fire too. Nile was raising her weapon, knowing she was probably already dead when Quynh’s head jerked back as someone grabbed her hair and yanked her off-balance. Nile watched, mouth slightly open in shock as Andy, bloodied but apparently fine, jabbed a needle in her neck.
“No more of this,” she said softly as Quynh went limp in her arms, and Andy lowered her to the deck as Joe and Nicky shed bullets and stood up.
Booker was still flat on his face in a pool of blood. Nile ran to his side and rolled him onto his back as the others hurried past her to Andy. His nose had broken when he fell and she gazed into his sightless blue eyes, listening as Joe and Nicky embraced Andy, exclaiming over her recovery. Booker had to come back now, she decided. This wouldn’t be a happy ending if he didn’t. This wasn’t going to be some poetic justice redeem yourself and die shit.
“You’re healing again.” Joe’s voice was full of wonder. “A miracle.”
“It came back the moment I saw her,” Andy said. “But I had to see if she truly wanted me dead if she believed I’d stay that way.” She sighed, “I guess she did.”
“How did you know you were healing?” Nicky asked. “You hadn’t been wounded yet.”
“Everything stopped hurting.”
Nile looked up to meet Andy’s gaze, and then dropped it as Booker groaned to life, twisting to look at Andy and then at her with an expression of sheer relief. He sat up as his nose clicked back into place and wrapped his arms around her as if it was as automatic and necessary as breathing. Nile hugged him back like he was the most precious thing in the world. She didn’t say anything, partially because she was holding her breath. The others may or may not have been exchanging odd looks; she didn’t know or care. If anyone deserved a hug, it was Booker.
“I missed you.” Booker’s voice in her ear, quiet, just for her. She squeezed him a bit tighter.
Eventually Nile ran out of breath and released him before sucking in a lungful of air. “You smell so bad.” She wrinkled her nose and turned her head away.
“Call me Fishmeal,” he said, and as he lifted his bloody face to the sun Nile realised she hadn’t seen him smile properly since she’d only known him as Sebastien. She’d missed it more than she’d realised.
“She’ll be out for at least an hour,” Andy said, her voice reminding Nile she couldn’t just kneel there and stare at him all afternoon. “It’s the same stuff Merrick was using; nothing special, just tranquilliser.”
Nile got to her feet wearily.
“Y’all,” she said, reloading her weapon. “Are so dramatic.” She held her hand out and helped Booker to his feet. “This boat is sinking, let’s get out of here.”
They hurried back onto the borrowed Customs cruiser and Joe took the helm while Nile retreated to the cabin to strip off her wetsuit, which now also smelled pretty awful, and change into something less conspicuous.
Andy laid the unconscious Quynh out on the back deck, folding her jacket for her to rest her head on, and Nile had never seen her so tender as she gazed at Quynh’s peaceful face. Booker was a short distance away, keeping downwind of everyone and debriefing Andy quietly. Nile and the others decided by unspoken agreement it wasn’t their place to listen in, but Nile caught snatches of it regardless; how Booker had tried to bring Quynh back to sanity. He didn’t say much about what she did to him in response, but the state of his clothing and the dreams Quynh sent her had shown Nile enough.
They left the boat at the prearranged spot, and drove to their current accommodation in a short stay block of apartments, unlovely but clean. They’d paid for a fortnight and would leave tomorrow, but Andy had other plans.
“I have to take her away now, before she wakes up,” Andy said, holding out her hand for the car keys. “We need to work things out alone first.”
Joe handed them over. “I understand. Bring our sister back to us.”
“But you don’t get to disappear,” Nile broke in. “You contact us or Copely within twenty-four hours and tell us where you are. No more going it alone.” She stared meaningfully at Andy.
Andy smiled faintly and nodded. “You take good care of the team while we’re gone.”
“Speaking of which.” Nile wasn’t done. Booker was standing a little apart from the others, looking uncertain, and she was going to sort that out right now too. “If anyone’s gonna insist on this exile bullshit again you can exile me too, for shooting you in the back,” she said defiantly.
“It seems I missed something,” Andy said.
“Nile did the right thing,” Nicky said. “We thought you were dead, gone forever. We would have done things we regretted.”
Nile raised her eyebrows at Joe. He shrugged. “Well, we came here to rescue him in the first place.” He looked at Quynh’s unconscious form, and added more quietly. “You’re right, that’s enough.”
Booker gave her a tight, stressed smile. Yeah, he probably had things he still needed to work out with the others, but that was never gonna happen if they refused to even see him.
Andy said goodbye and they trooped upstairs to the apartment.
“I brought you a change of clothes,” Nile told Booker.
“Thank you.” That smile again, the real one.
By this time Nile had the distinct impression the entire group was so familiar with each other they’d lost all sense of modesty over the centuries, but out of consideration for her were being more circumspect—in the short term at least.
Booker obviously hadn’t been around to get the memo, and as soon as they were safely inside he started stripping his ragged, reeking clothes, and shoving them in the garbage.
Nile didn’t magically gain the ability to resist staring at Booker when he took his clothes off, even if she had seen it all before, and she watched him out of the corner of her eye, turning her head to follow him as he went to shower. He closed the bathroom door and she looked up to find Nicky watching her. She raised her eyebrows, unrepentant. No one could argue Booker didn’t have a nice ass.
No one could argue he shouldn’t have the shower first either. He’d probably be in there a while, and Nile was immediately restless. The others were still too splattered with gore to go out in public, and so she volunteered to get food.
“Anything but fish, please,” Joe said.
Nile took out the trash and practically skipped out into the warm afternoon. The clouds were breaking up, and she put in her earbuds and head full of music she strode down the street in search of anything but fish.
She found a pizza place, because you can find them almost everywhere, God Bless America. She ordered extravagantly; her lack of Swedish was not a hindrance, and nodded along to her music while she waited outside for her order. This was such a nice afternoon.
Pizza acquired, she walked back. People kept smiling at her, and she realised it was because she was smiling herself, at nothing in particular. She was just simply happy. So fucking happy.
So very fucking-fuck.
She stopped dead, and if she hadn’t had a stack of pizza boxes on her hands she would have been tempted just to sit down in the street. Instead she took a breath and kept walking, far less carefree than a moment ago.
She had it so bad for Sebastien, or Booker, or whoever he was. Holding him again, seeing him smile, she wanted more of that, wanted more than that. She couldn’t work out if it was just that simple or not. Sebastien was a professional, Booker is a mess, or at least he was. She missed her friends, the ones she’d last seen looking at her like she was patient zero in a zombie film. She had no one to give her any perspective on the situation.
When she got back to the apartment she kicked at the door and announced herself, and a very short while later Booker opened it. He’d scrubbed himself pink, his hair was still a bit damp, and he’d even trimmed his beard. He no longer smelled of seafood, and while all Nile could smell was pizza she already knew he normally smelled really good, and she realised she was smiling again. He grinned back at her, thanked her fervently, and immediately took the pizzas off her hands and marched to the kitchen. Nicky was getting plates, and Nile could hear Joe in the shower.
Booker didn’t wait for either of them; he opened the first box, took out a slice, and started eating. Nicky put a plate in front of him, and only then did he think to sit down. Quynh hadn’t bothered to feed him, it seemed.
Joe and Nicky wanted to talk about Quynh, Booker wanted to stuff his face, and Nile wanted that too, in a manner of speaking. He looked so much more like Sebastien now, and on the rare occasions he looked up from his food it was at her. Nile frowned. Sooner or later the others were gonna notice something was up with them, and she’d like to figure out what it was before they did.
Clean and fed, Booker yawned and said he needed a nap before wandering off to take one.
“He seems to be doing better,” Nile said cautiously.
“That’s not the point,” Joe began.
“I get it,” Nile said. “It’s how you guys think about justice; crime begets punishment, no matter how sympathetic the criminal. I’ve been paying attention.”
“That she has,” Nicky said pointedly and Nile ignored him.
“Where I grew up, I’ve seen the other side. People who don’t have any choice, or feel like they don’t. Punishing them doesn’t help. He knows that.” She jerked her head in the direction he’d gone. “You heard what he said about Quynh. She was torturing him and he didn’t give up on her-” Oh God, she might cry if she thought about that too much. “He is a good man,” she said. “I believe that.”
“We believe it too,” Joe said, after some eye-contact with Nicky. “We wouldn’t have put up with him for so long if he wasn’t.”
“Perhaps we even took it for granted,” Nicky said.
That would have to do. They talked about Quynh into the evening; Nile hadn’t asked about her much, knowing she was a source of pain for the others, but they were more forthcoming with stories now, revealing a side of Andy in the process Nile wasn’t aware of.
“Once we know where she’s taking Quynh we should have Copely keep an eye from the sky if he can,” Nile said. “Quynh had that boat and a crew, so someone might be looking for her. They might know she’s immortal, too. We still don’t know how she came back in the first place.”
“We should mention that to Andy when she checks in,” Nicky said. “Copely might be a bit busy tidying up our latest mess.”
“It’s so nice not having to do that ourselves,” Joe said. “The only thing is, what do we do with all this free time?” He looked pointedly at his lover and Nile understood they had things to discuss in private, and she told them she was going to wash the salt off and wished them goodnight.
When they’d arrived that morning they more or less chucked their gear in random rooms, and when Nile went to get a change of clothes she realised Booker was sprawled on one of the beds in the one she’d picked, still fully clothed. When she opened the door and let the light in he lifted his head and squinted at her.
“It’s me,” she whispered. “I’m just grabbing my stuff, you can go back to sleep.”
“No, I’m up,” he said, not entirely convincingly, and asked what time it was. “Have we heard from Andy?” was his next question. Nile answered the negative and Booker scrubbed his hand though his hair and made good on his plans to get out of bed.
Nile decided against a shower for now and accompanied him back to the kitchen. She leaned against the counter on the other side of the dining table, which felt both too far away from him and far too close.
Booker opened the fridge and contemplated the leftover pizza for a moment before closing it again. He turned to look at her, his pretty eyes kind. “So how have you been, Nile?” he asked seriously. “It’s been a while.”
Nile took a deep breath. “All kinds of ways,” she said, the sheer number of things she wanted to say all jammed together in her chest. Where to even start? It was too much for this little kitchen. “Do you want to go for a walk?” she asked. She needed to move, needed air.
He did.
They turned off the lights, collected the keys by the door and went.