Chapter Text
Youcef ibn Ibrahim abu Hana al-Kaysani died on 22 April, 2019, at a research hospital in Germany, due to complications resulting from intracranial trauma.
That was the official story, supported by an expertly crafted paper trail and the word of a grieving husband. There were other details added to help sell the lie, but Joe forgot what they were as soon as he heard them. All he could remember was the flat sound of Kasper's voice repeating back the script Copley had given him and Hana's hiccoughing sobs drowning out Joe's desperate explanations and apologies.
The team relocated to a remote farmhouse in Ukraine, and Joe wasn't sure if they had already owned it, had purchased it for their current purposes, or were just squatting and hoping the real owners didn't stumble in. He would have asked, but Andy had wasted no time in assigning him an intense training regimen that consumed every ounce of his attention and energy. If she meant to distract him from thinking about everything that had happened and getting lost in his head, it worked.
Until it didn't.
Between fighting lessons with Quỳnh, shooting lessons with Nicky, and driving lessons with Nile, Joe had few quiet moments to himself. When those moments did come, he sometimes took the opportunity to turn on his phone - which had been carefully disconnected from anything resembling a network - to look at photos from the life he’d left behind. Whether this made him feel better or worse, he couldn’t say, but it made him feel... something.
Almost three months after his first death, a calendar alert appeared with a cheerful chime, reminding him to refill his prescription for testosterone. The notification bar dropped down from the top of the screen and covered Joe’s own face in the photo, so that only Hana was visible, sitting in his lap and grinning broadly.
With everything else going on, it had never once occurred to him to clear his schedule, and it was that innocuous little reminder that made him realize what it truly meant that his body was never going to change again.
For his twelfth birthday, his grandmother had given him a veil. It was soft and light, decorated with a beautiful geometric design in shades of green. If he’d been a girl, it would have been perfect.
Instead, the sight of it had made him feel like he’d been sprinting in cold weather, like his lungs were full of nothing and his stomach was full of acid. He’d always been allowed a great deal of freedom in what he wore, and the occasional admonishment to behave like a girl had always been quickly dismissed by his father, who saw nothing wrong with being a tomboy.
The veil was a sign that such freedom would not last, that a time was quickly coming when Joe’s body would betray him, and he would become locked into the role of girl, daughter, sister, woman.
Seven months, three weeks, and one day later, he sobbed the truth to his father.
That sick sense of dread had been a rare visitor, even at the beginning. As long as Joe had some measure of control over his outer self, he was content, and losses of that control had been few and far between. When it hit, though, he felt like he was once again twelve years old, staring at a piece of silk that would bind him forever to biology.
Forever meant something different, now.
“Joe?”
Nile’s voice cut through the cold wind howling in his head, and he looked up to find her standing in the doorway, brows furrowed.
“You okay?” she asked, frowning.
He’d gotten used to most conversations being in English, but it still took him a moment to remember how to answer. “Yeah, yeah. Fine. Sorry. Just... zoned out, I guess.”
Nile pursed her lips in a way that said she knew he was lying, but she didn’t press. “Dinner time.”
Now that she said it, Joe could smell the rich aromas of turmeric and sweet chilis wafting through the house. “Right. Yeah. I’ll be right there.”
She nodded and left, giving him a moment to put his phone away and just breathe before he followed her downstairs.
Two of the family rules Joe had been most surprised to learn were that no one got their own room - he shared his sleeping space with Nicky, which had been decided without his input - and everyone ate dinner together. In the old farmhouse they currently occupied, that meant five of them passing plates around a heavy wooden table while one person ate standing up, usually leaning against the kitchen counter.
It would take Joe another week to figure out that the person standing was meant to be the first line of defense, if they were attacked.
Tonight, Nicky stood to the side while the others crowded around the table in mismatched chairs, and he glanced up from his bowl to offer a flicker of a smile as Joe took his place next to Nile.
“Were you taking a nap?” Andy teased, passing him a pot of yellow rice with bits of dried berries and nuts mixed in.
“He earned it,” Quỳnh said, a hint of teacher’s pride in her voice. “He almost cut me, today.”
Quỳnh had been teaching him to fight with various types of knives, which Joe vastly preferred to the parade of guns Nicky had him using. If he could draw blood against her, she claimed, he’d be one of the deadliest men alive. Nicky just kept telling him to steady his breathing and take his time.
Joe would have joked that Quỳnh was going easy on him or that they should be nice to him because he was the baby, but he wasn’t really paying attention. Instead, his mind was spiraling into the horrors of an unchanging forever. He would live for centuries without the hope of ever getting any taller or finally growing a proper beard. He had never been certain whether he wanted more surgery, but having the option had always been comforting, a safety net in case he needed it.
He ate his food in a haze. Distantly, he registered that the rice was delicious and faintly sweet, that he was hungry after a day of hard training, and that he was in danger of throwing up after every bite. Conversation carried on around him.
What about the ways his body could change? Would his hormone levels drop without medication to sustain them? Would his voice rise? Would his clitoris shrink? Would the hard-won shapes of his masculinity melt back into a form predetermined by his genetics?
He didn’t see Nicky watching him with tightly knit brows, didn’t see Nicky catch Nile’s eye and tilt his head slightly, and didn’t notice Nile look at him from the corner of her eye. He didn’t notice much of anything until he heard Nile say his name.
“Driving around a field in the middle of nowhere is nothing,” she was saying. “Joe needs to get some practice on an actual street with other cars.”
Joe had the vague sense that this wasn’t an entirely abrupt change of subject, but he couldn’t say for sure. They had talked about driving around the nearest town, just for a change of location, but he thought they still needed to lay low, since the events in London and the downfall of Merrick Pharmaceuticals were still very much featured in the global news cycle.
Sure enough, Andy shook her head. “Give it a few more weeks. Let Copley finish cleaning up our footprints.”
“It’s done,” Copley chimed in. “I’ve caught a few traces, here and there, but the past few years are completely clear.”
Copley had built himself an office to rival any spymaster in one of the house’s tiny bedrooms and had spent the past two months dutifully erasing every piece of digital evidence that the five elder immortals had ever existed. His place in the family was still a matter of contention, but, if Joe was the new little brother, then Copley was a tolerated distant cousin.
“I’d stay away from urban areas,” Copley went on. “But a quick trip into town won’t do any harm.”
“Supplies would be good,” Nicky suggested. “Fresh food. Real eggs.”
“We’ve got plenty of food!” Andy protested. Quỳnh and Nicky shared a look, then looked at Andy, and she rolled her eyes. “Don’t start. Either of you.”
Before today, Joe would have jumped at the chance for a change of scenery. Training routines didn’t offer much in the way of variety, and downtime with the others often left him feeling tense and uncertain, no matter how much they tried to put him at ease. Yesterday, a trip to civilization, no matter how small the town or mundane the errand, would have sounded ideal. Today, the thought of strangers looking at him, seeing him, judging him as a man, made him want to crawl under the threadbare blankets of his little cot upstairs and never have to face anyone again.
“Think you’re up to it?” Andy asked, and it took a second for Joe to realize she was asking him.
Refusing would require an explanation, and he didn’t have it in him to lie or argue, so he just shrugged. “Sure, if Nile says so.”
It took a little more prodding from the others, but Andy relented and agreed that Joe could drive Nile and Nicky into town the next morning, so long as they were all very careful and very well armed.
A good night's sleep did nothing to improve Joe's anxiety, but it cleared his head enough to think of possible solutions. What he needed, he decided as he steered the car down the pitted dirt road away from the farmhouse, was a new penis.
"Can I ask you guys a question?" When Nile gave him a nod, he went on, "How exactly does money, y'know, work?"
Frowning, Nile raised an eyebrow. "Pieces of currency are assigned a certain value and can be exchanged for goods and services?"
From the backseat, Nicky snorted, and Joe rolled his eyes. "I mean for us. Do we get paid, or is there some kind of fund, or something?"
"Oh! Right. Yeah." She nodded again, understanding. "Some jobs, we get paid for, and that money usually goes into one of the international accounts. Andy and Quỳnh have been at this for so long, though, they've just sort of accumulated a lot of money. Most of it's spread around different bank accounts, and the rest is in caches and safehouses all over the place.
Joe's heart sank. He wasn't sure he would ever be able to do the kind of work the others did, and, even if he could, it would take years of training. Relying on their generosity in the meantime didn't seem ideal.
"So what do I do for money?" he asked. Nile frowned and shook her head. "Well, I'm not ready to join the family business, and I can't exactly dip into my savings. Am I supposed to get a regular job? Do I get an allowance? Do I submit a written request every time I want to buy a pack of crisps?"
Nile's frown deepened, and she turned to Nicky, clearly puzzled by the question. Joe couldn't see what look passed between them, but Nicky was the one who answered.
"The money belongs to all of us, together. What we have is yours, and what you need, you take. There is no need to earn your keep or beg for scraps."
Joe paused. Since some of them were older than most forms of currency still in use, and they didn't seem to have a permanent place to store cash, that seemed like a logical arrangement. It still didn't answer Joe's real question, though.
"And if I want to buy something…?"
He heard Nicky rummaging around behind him, and a moment later, a small stack of Ukrainian banknotes appeared at his shoulder. "There is cash a few places in the car, mostly euros," Nicky explained. "Take this for today. I will show you in the house where there is more."
"Oh. Oh, okay. Thanks." Joe took the notes and shoved them into his jacket pocket. He was too busy driving to look closely, but they seemed to be marked with large numbers. "Alright. What if I want to buy something online?"
"That gets a little trickier," Nile said. "Especially if you want something delivered out here."
"What do you need?" Nicky asked. He had leaned forward so that Joe could see him from the corner of his eye. "Odessa is not far. We could go there to look."
The idea of explaining to them what a packer was, where to get it, and why he needed it made the back of Joe's neck burn. "No. It's nothing. I was just wondering."
"If you want something, we can get it," Nile told him. "Doesn't matter what it is. We just have to know what we're looking for."
"I don't need anything," Joe insisted, feeling his face heat. "Really. I just wanted to know."
"Small comforts can be just as important as essential things," Nicky said.
Nile nodded in agreement and counted off on her fingers as she listed, “Music player, moisturizer, and good socks.”
“Good shoes,” Nicky added. “And coffee.”
Joe knew that they were trying to be supportive and show that they understood, but he didn’t think going without good socks would send Nile into a debilitating depressive spiral. He kept his eyes fixed on the road and grumbled again, “I really don’t need anything.”
He could practically hear the glance that passed between them. Nile sighed and said, “Okay, look, we obviously know something’s going on with you, so you might as well tell us.”
His father once joked that God had given Joe a heart so big it could never be hidden. Joe told Nile, “I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not,” Nile replied. “You barely said a word at dinner last night, and now you’re being weird and snippy. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing!”
“Bullshit.”
“Then it’s none of your fucking business,” he snapped. Immediately, the heat in his face flared with shame. “Sorry, sorry. It’s just... It’s really personal.”
To his surprise, Nile snorted. "I hate to tell you this, but personal isn't really a thing, with this crew. Everything belongs to everybody, and there are no secrets, especially…" She paused and shared a brief glance with Nicky before she finished, "Especially now."
They had allowed Booker to hide his suffering until it was too late, and now they weren’t going to let Joe hide anything. It made sense, but it still added another drop to the simmering bitterness that surrounded Booker in Joe’s mind. “I just don’t want to talk about it, okay?”
Nile narrowed her eyes and stared at him for a long moment before she assented, “Okay. For now.”
She sat back in her seat, looking out the windscreen, and they spent the rest of the drive in silence.
By the time they reached the little town, Joe’s imagination had conjured four different scenarios in which his failure to pass led directly to various catastrophes, including dismemberment, captivity, and all-out war. He wasn’t sure he could make himself get out of the car, even if he wanted to, and his companions mercifully didn’t demand an explanation when he asked to stay behind.
After a few minutes, Joe’s imagination was starting to warm up with all the things that could happen while he was alone when Nicky opened the front passenger door and sat down next to him.
Joe was equal parts relieved and annoyed, but before he could decide which to express, Nicky asked him, in Arabic, “Do you know why we are here?”
Not the question he was expecting. “What?”
“We could have chosen anywhere to hide. We have caves, bunkers, places so hidden or so remote that no one has set foot there in a century. Instead, we are here, in a modern house, going to shops, living as if all is well.” Nicky turned to look at him, green eyes sharp and unreadable. “Do you know why?”
Joe shook his head, and Nicky’s face softened.
“For you,” he said. “The rest of us came to this life alone, surrounded by war and death. We had no time to understand what was happening and no one to guide us or...” He paused and took a deep breath before he went on, “For you, it can be different. You have the time to rest, to... process. You are not alone.”
On some level, Joe knew this. He knew they were doing everything they could to help him adjust, but he hadn’t considered that they might be trying to give him something none of them ever had. It was hard to picture self-assured, self-contained Nicky being lost and alone, but that must have been the case for a long time.
“You may not wish to speak of what is troubling you,” Nicky continued. “But know that nothing you say will be met with scorn, and anything you ask will be given, great or small, so long as it is within my power to do so.”
Joe didn’t think he would ever get used to the way Nicky had of speaking so plainly and so dramatically at the same time. The same declaration from someone else would have felt saccharine, but Joe had yet to witness Nicky express anything less than absolute sincerity.
But how to explain any of the mess in his head to someone whose most frivolous needs were good shoes and good coffee? After a moment, Joe asked, “Do you know what dysphoria is?”
He wasn’t sure what answer he expected, but it certainly wasn’t for Nicky to frown and reply, “It is a sickness, yes? From feeling as though your body is not your own.”
Joe blinked at him, surprised. “That’s pretty much it, yeah.”
The sharp line between Nicky’s brows deepened. “You have this sickness?”
“Yeah. I mean, not usually but now...” Joe sighed. "When I started to transition, it was all about making my body match the version of myself I saw in my head. And there were all these different paths I could take to get there, whether it was clothes or medication or whatever. As I got older, my body changed, my perception of myself changed, and I would take whichever path I needed to keep them mostly in line.”
He remembered being overwhelmed, at first, by all the options, all the ways he could rewrite himself from the fiction he’d been told to be into a true story. Over time, he learned to navigate the maze of choices and found comfort in the possible twists and turns. There were inevitable setbacks and moments of dissonance between the inner and outer versions of himself, but they never felt insurmountable, as long as there were still options he could try.
Nicky’s expression tightened as he listened intently to Joe’s attempt at an explanation. All of this must be so far outside his realm of experience, Joe didn’t know how much of it made any kind of sense to him.
“Now, those paths that have been open to me since I was thirteen are just... gone,” Joe went on. “There’s always been something I could do to change my body, and now there’s nothing.”
He didn’t even have the right clothes. They’d retrieved his backpack from the ruins of the church, so he had the cargo pants and flannels Kasper had packed for him, which just made him look like a woodsy lesbian. He could have borrowed clothes from the others, but the only ones with any style were Nile and Quỳnh, which he suspected would only compound the problem.
In another life, he had trans friends to commiserate with, an understanding husband to affirm his masculinity, and the well-trod paths of his transition to revisit when he needed to settle back into himself. If all else failed, he had his art, and he could work out his fears and frustrations in a geometric language that was only legible to him. Now, the familiar comforts of that life were beyond his reach, replaced by a bare-walled farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, filled with strangers who had no point of reference for any of it.
Nicky, at least, was trying to understand, waiting patiently for him to get to the fucking point. Joe shook his head. “I just need... I don’t know. I need something.”
“Something you can control,” Nicky said. “A reminder that you are a man.”
Joe let out a breath he must have been holding since yesterday.“Yes. Exactly.”
Nicky nodded and looked away for a moment, thinking. “There is a certain thing that will help? Something that will not be in a shop?”
“Um, no.” Joe could just imagine a supermarket display of little rubbery phalluses, in between the lube and tampons, with harnesses and packing underwear stocked next to the adult diapers. “There are some shops that have them, but the internet is better.”
Nodding again, Nicky’s frown eased into a small smile. “We will find a way. It may take time, but it is possible.”
Time, Joe thought, was something they had in abundance. He could wait a few days for Copley to work whatever magic it took to let him shop online without bringing an army down on them or letting everyone in the house know that what he needed was a dick.
“I don’t know the...” Nicky started, but he paused and furrowed his brow for a moment before he tried again. “There is no single way to be a man. You know this. But... I believe that a real man, a good man, is true to himself, honest in his dealings, and guided by kindness and compassion in all that he does. By that measure...” He looked down at his own hands, broad and rough where they sat on his knees, dangerous even at rest, before he looked back up at Joe. “By that measure, you are more of a man than any I have ever known.”
Joe stared at Nicky, stunned. There was no possible response to that. He wasn’t even sure how to feel in the face of such a statement.
Nicky seemed to realize he had said more than he meant to, and he turned away again, face flushed bright red. In English, he said, “It makes no difference, I know, but it’s the truth.”
“It does,” Joe said quickly. “Of course it does. I... Thank you. Really, Nicky, thank you.”
The flush on Nicky’s face deepened. After nine hundred and fifty years, Joe was surprised anything could make Nicky blush, but apparently his weakness was paying compliments. Shaking his head, Nicky reached to open the car door. “I should find Nile. I will be close, if you need me. Anything.”
“Oh. Okay. Sure,” Joe said, but the door was already closing.
The cold sickness that had gripped him the night before didn’t disappear, but it was beginning to ease enough that he could breathe. Now, watching Nicky walk quickly away in the rearview mirror, Joe thought how much worse this could have been. If he had to live his immortal life surrounded by people who hadn’t allowed themselves to be changed by the passing centuries, if his new family had remained mired in the mores of their own first lives. He couldn’t imagine the kind of man Nicky had been, the man that Nicky said was dead and gone and good riddance, but Joe was sure that conversation would have done much differently with a Medieval Crusader.
He needed to get his head on straight, figure out the new rules of his changed and unchanging body. Then he needed to figure out how to actually live his new life and work on being a real part of this fucked up little family.