Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The stone was cold, even through the thin blanket. Quynh pulled it tighter around her shoulders, listening to the wind outside of Tuah’s hideout.

Andromache slept beside her, curled up like a stray dog on the steps. She’d tried to keep watch, to stay alert (for any sign of Discord’s return or whatever Quynh might need), but exhaustion had finally won. Now her face was slack with sleep in a way that made her look impossibly young.

For all your centuries, you’re still this, Quynh thought. Still flesh, still breakable, still vulnerable. Still so beautiful.

She couldn’t help but stare. At the world, the colors and shapes, at this woman that hadn’t left her side in a week, not once.

There was so much to see. But her eyes always seemed to return to her. Andromache. Andy. She wasn’t sure if she liked the nickname, but she understood.

They hadn’t spoken much.

Not just because of the unsaid things - Quynh’s anger, Andromache’s guilt, and everything that was between.

But because that was who they were. Quiet, like a secret. Existing in each other’s orbit was enough; it had to be. A glance, a fleeting touch, rarely more.

Quynh let out a breath of air and rolled onto her back.

She couldn’t close her eyes, couldn’t go to sleep because the truth was, sleeping scared her.

She’d spent so much time in complete darkness, she was terrified of this being just another nightmare. It was always the same pattern. Alone. Hallucinating. Screaming. Drowning. Dying. Repeat.

Dying wasn’t what people made it seem to be. Sure, it was painful and even after a thousands times, it was just as traumatizing and frightening as the very first time. And yet, the last seconds of it were peaceful. They gave everything a shift in perspective. All consciousness narrowed down to what mattered most. And thousands of deaths later, Quynh could still only see one woman.

But the darkness? She couldn’t shake it.

She’d spent days in the sun after being rescued, just to feel it on her skin. Watched it dance across her fingertips, giving way to shadows, then reclaiming the space.

And yet, she was cold. This freezing sensation beneath her skin never went away. Almost, as if the darkness and temperature of the ocean had become a part of her.

She couldn’t make sense of it.

And she didn’t understand this world. She wasn’t sure she wanted to.

While she had suffered countless years, forgotten at the bottom of the ocean, the world above had changed and was now unrecognizable.

She’d seen it before. New accomplishments and inventions had always brought changes to humanity. But not like this. Not in that capacity.

The world had grown impossibly small. Everything there was to know now fit into the palm of a hand, accessible with a few taps of a finger. Words traveled faster than the wind. There was no corner of this earth that hadn’t been explored, catalogued and raped. Nature had yielded to looming buildings in varying shapes of gray, and the noise never seemed to stop.

She was grateful for the changes. It made the changes in herself more bearable.

But nothing in this world felt familiar - except Andromache. She couldn’t really remember the time before she met her anymore. Almost all of her memories, except those five hundred years, were connected to that woman who saved her sanity that first day when they met in the desert.

Quynh turned again, back to the side. Facing Andromache.

She took in her features for a moment, tracing their beauty without the fear of getting caught. How many times had her fingertips traced the sharp line of her jaw? How many times had she kisses those lips or drawn heavenly sounds from them?

And now there was this distance in their interactions, this uncanny thing that had never been there before. Like they hadn’t spent an eternity side by side, like they didn’t even know each other.

But they did. Better than anyone else on this godforsaken planet, better than they knew themselves.

And that meant knowing what plagued Andromache‘s mind. The shame of not keeping her promise was probably even heavier than her guilt of not rescuing Quynh.

Quynh let out another exhale.

Then, out of instinct, she inched closer and draped half of her blanket over the other woman.

Andromache hadn’t moved far in her sleep, though at some point her hand had curled into a tight fist against her own chest, knuckles white.

Even in dreams, she was bracing for impact.

For the first months after being freed, Quyhn had been so angry. At the world for moving on, at humanity for being so cruel, at Andromache for not coming to save her like she’d done so many times before. The latter hurt the most. It had blinded her with rage.

Now, Quynh saw something else.

The way Andromache never quite looked at her. How her eyes darted aside the instant they met Quynh’s. How she stayed close, never more than an arm’s length away as if distance was unendurable, yet walled herself off behind silence.

It struck Quynh with sudden clarity that Andromache carried her own prison.

Not made of water and pressure and darkness, but of memory. Of loss. Of walking this earth knowing Quynh suffered somewhere out of reach. Of trying and failing to find and save her, over and over again.

We are both wrecks, Quynh thought bitterly, pressing her palm to her own sternum, feeling the strange, fragile cadence of her now mortal heart. We survived eternity, only to be ruined by it.

The realization was raw, like her throat had been from screaming into the void of the ocean.

She didn’t know how to bridge that gap between them - how to say what she needed to say without drowning in the pain of what had come between, and without accusing Andromache of things that weren’t her fault.

So instead, she inched closer. A measured breath, then another, until her knee brushed Andromache's thigh. The contact was careful and deliberate, impossible to mistake for an accident.

Andromache's breath hitched, not in fright but as if her body knew it was Quynh’s touch, not someone else’s. Her eyes fluttered open, dark and wide, and for a moment Quynh thought she’d pull away - that she’d retreat into that quiet shell she’d been these past days where Quynh could not reach.

But she didn’t. Her body stayed tense, coiled tight as a drawn bow, but she didn’t move.

So Quynh did, again. She reached out slowly and laid her hand over Andy’s clenched fist.

Andromache flinched as if even gentle contact hurt. Her gaze darted up, met Quynh’s for the first time, and there it was: the ruin in her eyes. The guilt. The grief. The terrible, unspoken fear of loving and being loved by someone she’d failed so utterly.

Quynh’s throat burned. Carefully, she slid her thumb along the edge of Andromache's hand, coaxing the fist to uncurl. When Andromache let out a shuddering exhale and allowed their fingers to tangle, Quynh squeezed her hand.

“I’m here,” she whispered, though her voice cracked on the last word. “This is real.”

For a heartbeat, it felt like they were suspended there - two ancient creatures too tired to keep wearing armor. Then Andromache squeezed back. Just once. Almost tentative, like she was testing the weight of it.

For the first time since she’d been pulled out of the water, Quynh felt a surge of warmth, and with it, a little bit of hope.

She smiled.

And Andromache smiled back.

...

Chapter Text

…

Quynh jolted awake with a sharp and tearing gasp, as if she’d woken from yet another death.

For a split second, she felt it – the pressure, the water, the freezing cold.

Salt lingered on her lips, but it wasn’t from the ocean. Now, months after her rescue, she’d learned to differentiate between that and the taste of tears, and yet, for a moment, it felt like drowning all over again.

Even miles into the land, the sea still found her, wrapping the cold hands of a nightmare around her throat.

The nightmares had become a weird companion. A proof of life. If she dreamt, Quynh reasoned, then she had lived long enough for sleep to come. And if she woke in horror, then she still woke, and that meant the ocean had not swallowed her for good.

It was a small, bitter solace. But after centuries spent counting seconds between deaths, even agony was a promise of more time. And somehow – how, she didn’t know – she still wanted that. Time. To live and breathe and walk this earth.

She stared at the ceiling, willing her body to settle.

Somewhere through the night, Andromache had curled into her side, arm draped across Quynh’s middle like it was the only thing anchoring her to the world. Her face was pressed into Quynh’s shoulder, lips parted just a little. But even asleep, she looked troubled.

Quynh stared at her. She allowed herself to feel the ghost of Andromache’s breath on her collarbone, where it was warm against skin that never seemed to hold heat anymore.

Slowly, with deliberate care, she disentangled Andromache’s arm from around her waist. The woman stirred and made a faint, almost wounded noise - but didn’t wake.

Quynh scooted to the edge of the stone steps, wrapping her arms around her knees. Far enough to breathe without disturbing Andromache’s fragile rest. Close enough that if the woman reached for her, she’d still be there.

She shivered.

How strange it was to be afraid of sleep, yet desperate for it.

How cruel it was that her nightmares made her grateful, because they proved she was still here to suffer them.

How desperately she wanted Andromache’s warmth back - and how she feared needing it. Because allowing herself to need it meant forgiving her, but did she really need to? None of it was Andromache’s fault, was it?

Quynh knew Andromache’s heart. Her sometimes foolishly vast and endlessly caring heart that loved her so fiercly. There wasn’t a mountain that Andromache wouldn’t have moved to find her if there’d been a chance. But Quynh had been so blinded by her trauma that she hadn’t thought about Andromache’s.

It didn’t take long for the silence to fracture again.

Quynh noticed Andromache shifting beside her. At first, it was small: a twitch of her fingers against the stone, followed by a furrow of her brow. But then it changed into tension in the woman’s body, like a storm passing under skin.

Andromache made a low sound, incoherent at first. A strangled word that slipped out in something that sounded like ancient Greek, then broke apart into Italian, then Chinese, then into a hush of a tongue Quynh didn’t recognize at all.

She watched, transfixed and stricken, as Andromache’s legs pulled up closer to her chest, then stretched as the woman rolled onto her back, her hands curling into fists that flexed helplessly, as if she was gripping for a weapon that wasn’t there, or maybe for a hand.

Quynh could see it - the fight inside her, clawing at old wounds that had never healed.

But there was something else too. A crude and terrible restraint. Andromache didn’t thrash or cry out. Even in sleep, she fought herself, kept herself guarded and controlled, as if refusing to let the nightmare spill out where Quynh could hear it.

That struck Quynh the hardest. How even in her most private suffering, Andromache was holding it in. Protecting her.

For a moment, Quynh just watched, trying to etch every movement into memory. The way the lines around Andromache’s mouth pulled tight, the way her chest rose too fast with breath that never quite seemed to fill her lungs. She looked centuries older like that.

Quynh felt it in her own chest, squeezing until her ribs ached.

She reached out, almost without thinking, letting her fingers hover over Andromache’s wrist, wanting so badly to wake her.

Afraid, equally, to rip her out of whatever battlefield her mind had dragged her into.

And then Andromache muttered her name, and Quynh moved without a conscious thought. Slowly, carefully, she unfolded her body from its perch on the steps and lowered herself back down beside Andromache.

She faced her fully, their knees brushing, her chest aligned with Andromache’s as if trying to match the erratic rhythm of her breath.

Gently, Quynh raised her hand to Andromache’s face. Her thumb ghosted along the hollow beneath Andromache’s eye, tracing the fragile skin there, then came to rest against her cheek.

For a heartbeat, she watched the way Andromache’s lashes quivered, a shudder moving through her shoulders like a silent sob.

Then Quynh pressed their foreheads together. Let her own breath steady, hoping it might give Andromache’s trembling somewhere to go.

“Wake, my love. Be here with me.” She whispered her words in Vietnamese because it used to be the language they spoke most.

Quynh had spent almost a decade teaching it to Andromache as they traveled the world. Only much later, she’d realized that Andromache had tricked her into thinking she was bad at it, because it made Quynh try harder and distracted her when they had to leave yet another life behind.

She felt Andromache’s breath catch at the familiar tongue, a ragged inhale that seemed to pull all the air from the room. And then, Andromache’s eyes fluttered open, wide and dark and so clearly drowning in ghosts.

When they met Quynh’s, for a long moment, nothing else existed.

No centuries. No guilt. No oceans. Just this: two ruined creatures, tethering each other to the world by the sheer force of looking at each other.

And slowly, Andromache’s breathing began to calm. Her hand lifted, hesitant, as if unsure it was allowed, then curled into Quynh’s hair, pulling her infinitesimally closer.

Quynh let out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding.

For a moment, it was enough just to breathe together. To exist in this fragile pocket of closeness where the world’s sharp edges couldn’t quite reach.

But then something seemed to ripple through Andromache, and Quynh felt it like a spark in dry tinder.

Their eyes met again, and this time there was no gentleness in it. Only a searing ache that had been waiting far too long for release.

Andromache surged forward the same moment as Quynh did, and their mouths collided.

It wasn’t soft. It wasn’t careful.

No, Andromache kissed like she fought: with all her heart.

But her heart was filled with centuries of silence and pain. With love that had festered in grief and fury and longing until it was this wild thing, and yet able to teeter them both to this life when nothing else could.

Andromache kissed her like she hated how much she needed this — how much she needed her.

Her teeth scraped against Quynh’s lower lip, almost angrily, and Quynh swallowed every ragged sound like it was the only thing that could keep her alive.

But Quynh had always matched Andromache’s fervor, the two of them equals in all aspects – their intensity, their stubbornness, their refusal to budge, and their passion.

So Quynh answered in the same fashion, one hand clutching at the back of Andromache’s neck, the other curling around her ribs as if to hold her together. Their bodies pressed close, desperate to erase the distance that had been forced between them by oceans, cages, and time itself.

When they finally pulled back, it was only because neither of them had any air left to give.

Their foreheads fell together again, breaths mingling, mouths still parted.

Quynh’s heart thundered in her chest, her pulse a frantic drum she hadn’t felt in so long.

She opened her eyes to find Andromache staring at her, eyes bright and wild and wet with tears.

For this fragile little space in time, there was no anger, no guilt, no haunting weight of all the years lost. Just them, in this impossible, ruinous love that refused to die, no matter how much the world had tried to bury it.

And Quynh, she wanted to stretch this moment to an eternity. So she said the only thing that came to her mind. “Make love to me.”

Andromache’s eyes went wide, and something in her face crumpled — the fierce warrior’s mask slipping to reveal a vulnerable softness underneath. Wonder. Agony. The haunted look of someone who had imagined this moment a thousand times, in lifetimes spent believing it could never truly come again.

“Please,” Quynh whispered, voice breaking, her forehead pressing harder to Andromache’s.

For a few seconds, Andromache just stared at her like she’d been offered something she didn’t know how to take.

Her hands trembled in Quynh’s hair. Not from fear of this, Quynh thought, Andromache wasn’t ever afraid of their love — but of all the things this might break open inside them both. Like she was terrified that touching her would make this real.

Quynh understood. She was afraid, too.

But more than that, she knew they needed this. Not as forgiveness - maybe they were still centuries away from that. But as proof. That they were still here, both of them, with hearts still capable of wanting and being wanted, of being human when the world had tried so hard to take that away from them. Proof that they still loved each other, that they still could and chose to.

Andromache let out a shaky exhale, eyes squeezing shut for a second as if to keep tears at bay, but nodded.

And just like that, the whole mood changed.

“You sure?”

Andromache nodded again and rolled onto her back, the message clear. She wouldn’t be the one to make the first move, not after everything. But she offered. Herself and her heart.
And Quynh didn’t hesitate.

She rose and swung one leg over to straddle Andromache’s thighs, moving slowly and deliberately – but only because she enjoyed being granted permission to do so without arguing about it first.

The action drew a laugh out of Andromache, small, unguarded, almost startled at the sound coming from her own mouth.

It loosened something beneath Quynh’s ribs, too, and she chuckled softly, causing Andromache’s expression to soften further as she smiled back at her.

Quynh leaned in, letting their noses brush, her hair falling around Andromache’s face like a curtain, shielding them from the world, locking them in this moment - the only cage she’d ever allow them both to exist in.

She traced Andromache’s jawline with kisses, taking notice of how it caused Andromache’s hands to curl into her hips.

“Tease,” Andromache mumbled, but another beautiful chuckle fell from her throat.

For a brief, perfect moment, Quynh felt as if every agonizing century spent desperately clinging to her sanity had been repaid in full, in the warmth of this single, soft, throaty chuckle.

“You like it,” she shot back, but not without wonder at getting to have this.

“You know I do.”

Quynh brushed their noses together once. Just a playful little nudge, so Andromache opened her eyes to look at her.

Their eyes met, and in that space, a whole conversation passed between them. One, steady like the earth beneath their feet, patiently waiting for the other, whose green still flickered like sunlight struggling to break through the canopy. Two pieces made to fit, unable to exist without the other.

Andromache’s breath caught - Quynh felt the hitch against her skin - but then came the exhale she’d been waiting for.
So Quynh pulled back just enough to grip the hem of her shirt without breaking their gaze. She dragged it up and over her head, leaving her bare to the cold air – and to Andromache’s stunned but still unsure eyes.

For a heartbeat, neither of them moved.

Then, Andromache’s hands moved on their own, as if they’d found the courage she hadn’t dared to claim yet, and settled on Quynh’s ribs. Warm palms against cold skin, taking their rightful place.

They both shivered at the touch.

Quynh let out a sound, soft and breaking, and that was all it took.

Andromache surged up, mouth finding hers with a crushed sort of urgency. Their teeth bumped, noses pressed awkwardly close, but neither cared.

Hands wandered, mapping the heat beneath skin and the shape of their bodies, relearning what neither of them had forgotten.

Quynh’s fingers buried themselves in Andromache’s hair, holding her there like she might vanish if let go.

There were small, helpless noises — sighs, intakes of breath, tiny moans that sounded like relief or grief or maybe both, Quynh couldn’t tell.

Andromache’s mouth traveled along Quynh’s jaw to the place just below her ear that made her gasp.

More clothes fell away in slow, clumsy motions. Hands fumbling with laces, with hems or buttons, with each other. Somewhere in the tangle, Quynh whispered something in Vietnamese, not even words, just a tender, breaking plea that got caught when Andromache’s lips skimmed down her throat, parting against her collarbone like a question.

Quynh answered by guiding Andromache’s hand to her heart, pressing it there until they both felt the wild, terrified beat of it.

For a fragile moment, the world seemed to pause, holding all its weight away from them.

There was just this. Them.

Then, Quynh pushed Andromache back with a hand on her chest and watched the way her dark eyes flared wide, pupils blown, mouth parted.

She loved her like this. Unguarded. Wild. Eyes spilling everything they’d buried: loneliness, pain, longing, wonder, and a fierce, aching love that had survived a hundred lonely lifetimes.

Then there was nothing left between them but skin.