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Joe and Nicky aren’t joined at the hip by any means, but it’s still unusual enough to see Joe alone in the kitchen on a sunny morning that Nile stops dead in the doorway. Joe’s holding a mug of coffee and staring out the window, but there’s no steam rising from the mug, or the spout of the moka pot.
‘Good morning,’ Nile says, stepping carefully towards Joe. He blinks heavily, and looks up at her with an expression not unlike someone surfacing from a deep dive, like he was down somewhere heavy and dark and the air is a surprise to him.
‘Good morning, Nile,’ he says, a sleepy croak in his voice. ‘Did you sleep well?’
‘Fine, thanks.’ It’s true for once, no nightmares of centuries of torture, just garden-variety dreams. It was almost a relief to sit an exam she hadn’t studied for. ‘Are you okay?’
‘I’m fine,’ says Joe. It would probably be convincing if Nile couldn’t see the way his nails are white at the tips with his grip on his mug.
‘Sure,’ she drawls, sarcasm dripping honey thick. Joe gives her a shadow of his usual playful glare, before the odd light in his eye wins out again. ‘What’s on your mind?’
‘Nothing worth bothering you with,’ Joe says, almost firmly. He takes a sip of his coffee, and then looks down at it like it betrayed him somehow.
Except, he doesn’t, because Nile knew what that expression looked like on his face before she knew how joy looked.
The house is quiet around them. Joe puts his mug down, and starts the fussy process of cleaning and refilling the moka pot.
Nile misses K Cups, but Nicky’s one-use plastics rant isn’t something she’s willing to put herself through again. It reminds her though, watching Joe tip the used coffee grounds into the trash, and she asks before she’s even really aware she’s spoken:
‘Where’s your better half this morning?’
Joe gives a strange, humourless laugh.
‘Is he my half?’
‘It’s just a phrase,’ Nile says slowly, feeling like she’s stepped on to a mine and heard the click, but not the bang. ‘It doesn’t mean anything.’
'We've been together nine hundred years, Nile,' says Joe, distantly. 'I'd like to say I'm still the same man I was before we met, but it would be a lie. I've lived so long with him, I don't believe I could live without him. Not as I am. Who I am without him by my side, spiritually or physically, I don't know. I've never truly met that man.'
There's a long pause; a silence that stretches hungry teeth and claws into the warm morning air, turning it chilly and sharp around then, and then Joe says, so quietly Nile could almost pretend he never spoke at all:
‘I hope I never do.'
—
‘Gypsies, tramps and thieves—’ Nicky and Andy holler in unison, whipping around the roundabout with the windows wide open to let in the morning air. ‘We hear it from the people of the town, they call us—’
‘Nicky, pull over!’ Andy yells, cutting over Cher and Nicky both. Nicky looks wildly over at her, but he can’t see any danger, and they’re in the middle of a junction.
‘What is it?’ he says, struggling to look for what Andy’s yelling about and watch traffic at the same time. ‘What do you need?’
‘I need coffee, Nicolò,’ says Andy, face almost pressed to the glass. ‘You dragged me out at the asscrack of dawn, I need coffee. There’s a Costa there, look. Pull over.’
Nicky sighs, and rolls his eyes, turning his attention fully back to the road.
‘It’s not the asscrack of dawn, Andy,’ he says tiredly, hitting his indicators on in the opposite direction of the Costa. Andy glares at him, but Nicky’s busy turning into the through-lane, and he ignores her. ‘Even if it was, that would not be a good enough reason to go to a drive-through Costa. You don’t even like their coffee.’
Andromache the Scythian, once-immortal warrior of millennia does not pout, not according to her, but from the corner of his eye Nicky can see her face doing something very close to it.
‘It’s too fucking early,’ she grumbles, turning to face the door again. The radio ticks from Cher to a song Nicky doesn’t know, and he turns it down.
‘The quicker we get there, the quicker it’s over with,’ says Nicky patiently, not for the first time.
‘I don’t see why you couldn’t—’ Andy starts, again, but Nicky interrupts her.
‘Because I last trained when pulling your tooth out with a pair of pliers was the best cure to be had,’ says Nicky, also not for the first time. ‘And I know you happen to like your teeth, so we are not doing that. You are going to the dentist, and you can have coffee after.’
Andy grumbles, crossing her arms over her chest, but they’re finally in sight of the dentist’s office, and Nicky has to focus on parking. Despite what certain ill-informed members of his family might think, Nicky is not bad at parking. Other people are.
‘If you can parallel park in less than two minutes I’ll drink one of your godforsaken smoothies tomorrow,’ Andy says. Nicky can see her smirking from the corner of his eye, and he doesn’t dignify her with a response.
—
‘I’m sorry,’ Joe says, over the rush of the tap as he fills the moka pot reservoir again. ‘That was heavy, I didn’t mean to dump all that on you.’
His eyes are still distant, and Nile is reeling from trying to conceptualise just how much of Joe’s life he’s lived with someone else.
‘How… how old were you when you—?’
‘Died?’ offers Joe, kindly. ‘Thirty-three, or thereabouts. I felt older, at the time. Now I think I was a baby, stumbling on shaking legs through a world I’d barely scraped the surface of. I thought I was so worldly, so well-travelled. How much I had to learn.’
Nile is twenty-seven. But she’s also not. She’s frozen at twenty-six, and she knows the feelings Joe’s describing intimately well. But Joe, thirty-three and nine hundred fifty something, all at the same time, looking both and neither somehow, is more unknowable in this moment than Nile can imagine.
‘I lived less than four percent of my life without Nicky,’ Joe says, facing the window and giving Nile a moment to collect herself. Outside, the rowan that grows in the middle of the garden splits the sunlight into brushstrokes that scatter across Joe’s face. ‘My personality has grown in tandem with his, who are we without each other?’
There’s a long silence. On the hob, the moka pot starts to gurgle, and Joe twists the knob to turn off the gas.
‘Would we like each other, if we grew without each other, and met now?’
‘What’s brought this on?’ Nile asks, a yawning pit opening in her chest at Joe’s words. In all the upheaval since she woke up that first time, hands and throat clean and smooth, the only steady point that’s proved true has been Joe and Nicky. If they’re on shaky ground, what does that mean for the rest of them?
Joe shrugs, pouring coffee for them both. Nile watches his shoulders move. She’s pretty certain his shirt is actually Nicky’s, given how it drapes just slightly too big at the shoulders and neck, but that doesn’t mean anything. Andy wore a pair of Nicky’s shorts just the day before, cinched at the waist with one of Nile’s belts.
‘Nicky had a dream,’ Joe says, as though that explains why he’s the one out of sorts. Maybe it does. Maybe after nine hundred years, they dream the same dreams too. ‘He almost died on the crossing to Jerusalem, you know.’ She didn’t. ‘He dreams sometimes that he did, and because of that he walks alone through this life. It always leaves him shaken.’
It’s not Nicky sitting in front of her, pale at the edges and clutching his coffee like a lifeline.
‘Leaves him shaken?’
Joe manages a little smile at her; a wry quirk of his lips entirely unlike his usual sunny grins.
‘My love is too practical a man to dwell on such thoughts,’ Joe says. ‘So I must do it for him.’
—
‘Welcome, Mrs. Black,’ says the smiling receptionist. The perfection of her smile is almost uncanny. Nicky blinks at how straight and white and uniform her teeth are, and as a result utterly misses the words she says.
‘Excuse me?’ Andy says, slowly. Nicky doesn’t miss that. His attention snaps to her. ‘Mrs? ’
‘Ah-’ the receptionist blinks, and then redoubles her smile. ‘Apologies, Ms. Black. We’re running just a few minutes behind this morning, so if you wouldn’t mind taking a seat and filling in this form for us, that would be fantastic.’ She says it all so quickly, and with such rigid cheer that neither of them can even begin to interject. Nicky just accepts the clipboard and pen she brandishes, and follows Andy into the waiting room without any real awareness he’s done any of it.
‘What is that?’ mutters Andy, even though the room is empty.
'A medical history,' Nicky mutters back, scanning the form.
Some of it is easy to fill out, the details of Andy's cover identity long since memorised, but they've never had to actually consider the consequences of any allergies or missed vaccinations. Or complete lack thereof. When Nile goes to appointments with Andy, she tells people Andy grew up in a cult. Nicky doesn't know precisely what natural lies would follow that one, so he doesn't feel comfortable trying it.
They leave half of it blank, and hope for the best.
'Unclench, Nicky,' says Andy, slouching in her seat and crossing her feet at the ankles. 'It's just the dentist.'
Nicky blinks at her, and she smirks at him.
'Do you want to tell me what’s wrong?' she asks, her smirk softening into a smile.
They've played this game before. Nicky knows all her answers, just as she knows all his questions. He doesn’t see the need to bother her with bad dreams, not when she’s got her own battles to fight.
'Not today, sorella.'
She squeezes his hand once, because she's the best of them, and then lets him go in favour of picking at a loose seam on her wrist strap.
‘I’m surprised Joe let you out of his sight this morning,’ she says, a little smirk playing around the corner of her lips. Nicky smiles, and bumps his shoulder gently against hers.
‘He knows I’m in good hands.’
'Andrea Black?' announces a smiling dental nurse in pristine pink scrubs. She beams at them from the doorway. 'Don't worry, Ms. Black, your partner can come with you into the exam room.'
'I'm not—'
'He's not—'
The nurse's smile doesn't shift as she turns and walks away, content that they'll follow where she leads.
Andy gives Nicky a look of such deep suffering that he bursts out laughing in the face of it.
'You'll be fine, Andy,' he says, standing up and offering her a hand. 'You'll be in and out before you know it.'
—
'What do you dream of, Joe?' Nile asks, holding her coffee close to her chest. It's so bright and lovely outside, but the warmth doesn't seem to reach them.
Joe adds cinnamon to his cup, and stirs it slowly.
'I dream of walking beside Quynh,' he says at last, eyes low and lost. 'In the snow, as we did when we found each other. She and I would walk for hours together, learning each other. Andy had words for Nicolò, and needed privacy to share them. I dream I walk beside her, and I know she's there, but I never turn to look at her.'
He toys with the jar of cinnamon, turning it around and around on the tabletop.
'I don't know if I hate that I don’t, because I want to see her face so badly, or if I'm glad I don’t, so I don't have to know I’ve remembered her wrong.'
Nile can't take it, not for a second longer. This isn't a facet of Joe she knows, but she loves Joe, and she can't bear to see him hurting. She reaches over the table and takes his hand, squeezing it gently.
'How long did you have Quynh?'
'Four hundred years, give or take,' says Joe with an insouciant shrug Nile doesn't believe for a second. 'A blink, compared to Andy.'
'How long did Andy have Quynh?'
These people are the closest thing Nile has left to family in the world (family she can claim, a little voice whispers in Nile's mind, family she can reach, if she wasn't so much of a coward (or maybe if she was)) and Nile knows so little about them.
'At least four thousand years,' Joe says, like he's commenting on the weather and not the longest relationship in history. 'Possibly more, but who's to say? Even getting that figure out of Quynh was difficult.'
'Who would Andy be without her?' Nile asks, awed at the scale of them, lost in Joe's wonderings.
Joe looks at her patiently, evenly, until she remembers, and her cheeks burn with the realisation.
'I'm sorry,' she says, squeezing his hand again. 'I didn't mean that.'
'I know,' Joe says, squeezing back. 'But that's where we are. I'm not as strong as Andy, and I know it. I wish I could say he is, but I don't know if Nicky is either. We are ourselves, and I don't know how we can be anything else.'
He smiles, a little wry, a little melancholy.
'It's a blessing and a curse to love forever, Nile.'
In dark moments, alone in strange beds, miles and mountains away from all the things she's ever known, Nile has found herself wishing she could have done the same as Nicky and Joe. Could have entered into this with someone else to lean on, a ready-made companion in the loneliness.
Looking at Joe now, hollow in a way she never wants to understand, Nile takes those wishes back.
—
'Hello Mrs. Black!' trills the cheerful dentist as he enters the room at their backs. Andy pauses in the act of handing Nicky her jacket, and turns to stare at him.
'Ms.,' hisses the dental nurse, handing the dentist a disposable mask.
'My mistake,' he says jovially, unapologetically. 'Hop up in the saddle there for me, we'll get you sorted out in no time.'
Andy and Nicky blink at him in unison.
'Who the fuck is this clown,' asks Andy in Ligurian.
'I have no idea,' answers Nicky, in Greek.
The dentist's eyes widen, and he gets the posture every Englishman of a certain social class gets when confronted with evidence other languages exist, but Nicky cuts him off before he can carry on with whatever effort he's about to make.
'Will this be a long procedure, doctor?' he asks, reaching for Andy's hand and squeezing her knuckles until they loosen from the tight fist she's been holding.
The picture of relief, the dentist shakes his head.
'Not at all,' he says, patting the reclining chair in the centre of the room. 'Hop on, we'll be done in no time.'
'I'm going to get you back for this, Nicky.' Andy promises in Tamazight, sitting on the chair awkwardly.
'Threaten me when you can eat without pain,' Nicky sighs, answering in Vietnamese and taking the seat the dental nurse offers him in the corner.
It’s a game he and Andy play, and have played since she took responsibility for his language acquisition upon herself after seeing how lax Yusuf could be if he thought it was funnier not to correct Nicolò. She asks in one, he answers in another. When he was young, it frustrated him to no end, clumsy as he was stumbling over languages like cobbles in an uneven road.
Now, when Nicky’s long since mastered more languages than he even knew existed as a young man, it’s as comforting as a cup of tea on a cold evening.
'What are we looking at today then?' asks the dentist, peering at Andy's mouth. Her lips are pressed together, and she's staring at Nicky with eyes that have struck fear in entire armies for millennia. Nicky stares patiently back.
Last night, at dinner, Andy bit down on a piece of bread and hissed through her teeth. Andy, who in the almost nine hundred years Nicky’s known her has never flinched, touched her hand to her jaw and scowled at the ache. Nicky will hold her down in that seat if he has to, if it means she won’t be in pain any longer.
He waits her out, until she sighs and finally replies to the dentist.
‘I have a cracked tooth,’ she says, mulish, still staring balefully at Nicky. ‘It hurts.’
‘Alrighty,’ says the dentist, leaning over to reach for an instrument on his tray. ‘Lay back and say “ah” for me.’
‘Ah.’
The dentist gives an awkward little chuckle, and glances at Nicky. Nicky stares back, wondering exactly what he expects to gain here from looking away from Andromache’s mouth.
‘Open nice and wide for me please,’ he says on a sigh. Whatever he wanted from Nicky, he didn't get it. Instead he turns and leans over to peer into Andy’s barely open mouth. He shines a little penlight in, and then reaches up to adjust the bigger light above their heads. ‘I see it, yes, fracture in lower left seven, can you get the x-ray ready please Nancy?’
Nurse Nancy clicks through several screens on her computer before she steps away towards a large box on the wall. Andy looks at Nicky with wide and worried eyes over the dentist’s arm, and he tries to look as calmly as possible back at her, even as his heart starts to pound in his chest.
Nancy hands the dentist a strange little object, a wide plastic circle on one end of a metal rod, and a little plastic lip and square on the other, and the dentist squints at it for a second before he lifts it to Andy’s mouth.
‘I just need you to bite down on this for a moment so we can really see what we’re dealing with, and then we can get on with fixing that tooth of yours.’
Nancy slips out of the room as the dentist speaks, and Nicky watches her go with no small amount of alarm.
The last time he was involved with x-rays, it was the touring tuberculosis x-rays in the 1950s. He’d worn a lead-lined apron, and hidden inside a lead-lined booth to operate the machinery. The trucks had been huge, and the x-ray had been hot even through all the protective layers. He had wondered then, and moreso in the days since, if he had been mortal, would he have come out of the experience unscathed? It was worth it, of course it was, for every case they caught early enough to cure, but still. The danger was significant.
On the chair, Andy bites down on the plastic grip of the x-ray apparatus like she’s picturing tearing into the dentist’s flesh. Like he knows what she’s imagining, the dentist springs from Andy’s side almost as soon as her teeth close on the plastic.
‘Ten seconds and a popping noise, and it’ll all be over,’ he says as he pulls a bulky, cream-coloured plastic arm from the box on the wall, and angles the end of it at the circle that protrudes from Andy’s mouth. From the other end, he picks up a little black box on a long twisted wire, and then he follows Nancy out the door.
Nicky knows that x-rays have markedly improved since the 1950s. He knows that Andy is in no danger in this little yellow room in a little dentist office in Dumfriesshire. He knows this, in his head, but his heart and his guts don’t quite seem to have got the message.
‘Andy—’ says Nicky, getting to his feet and reaching for her, but almost as soon as he moves there’s the promised popping noise, and the dentist and Nancy are sweeping back into the room.
‘All done!’ he trills cheerfully, handing the remote control to Nancy. She takes over tucking away the awkward bulk of the x-ray as the dentist reaches for Andy once more. He lifts the device from her mouth carefully, keeping his fingers well clear of her bared teeth. ‘Ten minutes till it develops, and then we’ll know where we stand. Your husband can take you back into the waiting room.’
‘He’s not—’
‘I’m not—’
‘Right this way,’ says Nancy, swinging open the door for them. ‘You can leave your coats in here.’
—
‘You have to understand, Nile,’ says Joe gently, taking both of her hands in his. ‘This life can be wonderful, if you let it. You will have so long to experience all the things you could ever wish for. But without others to lean on and love, it can be unbearable.’
‘What would you know about that?’ snaps Nile, more vicious than she means to be. In his usual way, Joe just looks softly back at her, not a hint of hurt in his face. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says anyway, in the face of his quiet kindness. ‘I didn’t mean that.’
‘You did,’ Joe replies, gently, and keeps a warm grip on her hands. ‘And that’s alright. You should always feel free to question me, Nile, to question any of us. We are not your gaolers, we are your family, if you want us to be.’
Close to tears, but unsure why, Nile nods shakily, and keeps her eyes fixed just beyond Joe’s shoulder.
‘What I know of entering this life with no one to lean on,’ Joe says quietly, all his attention fixed on her, ‘is that for the first few years of our acquaintance, I can’t even say for sure how long, I hated my Nicolò with every fibre of my being.’
Nile’s breath goes cold in her lungs, and she looks sharply at Joe’s eyes. More expressive than almost anyone she’s ever known, Nile can always read how Joe feels in the shine and crinkle of his eyes.
Now, they burn warmly at her, and the lines around them are relaxed. His face is completely at odds with his words.
‘You have to remember Nile, Nicolò was an invader in my lands, and he was so full of fear and anger and hate,’ Joe’s voice is melodic and sweet. He recites poetry sometimes, in the evenings after dinner. It's impossible to reconcile the voice that murmurs dirty poems to make Nicky blush, and the voice across the table from her baldly stating some of the reasons why he hated his beloved.
‘So how—?’
‘How did we get from there to here?’ Joe prompts, when Nile’s voice fails her. She nods, and he hums, leaning back in his chair and looking up at where the dappled light spills over the ceiling now. ‘Time. And patience, with ourselves and with each other. He took my hand at Jerusalem, and for so long that’s all the connection we shared. He had a lot to unlearn, and so did I, and we met somewhere in the middle, eventually. But for a long time, for both of us, we felt alone even in company. We had no answers, and strange dreams, and we spoke Greek but not the same way, so even in a common language we couldn’t understand each other.’
He takes a sip of his coffee, and holds the edge of the mug against his lip for a moment after.
‘You came into our lives in a strange and painful time, Nile. And your suffering is great, please don’t think for a moment I deny that, or make any comparison to it. Suffering is personal, and there is no scale.’
Joe looks at her, no hint of his usual good humour in his face. He looks older than she’s ever seen him.
‘But although we did it poorly—I know this—we were still here to explain what was happening to you, as best we could, in a language you can understand. Nicky and I stumbled through the world in blind horror and fear for so long. Andy walked alone for a thousand years at least. Quynh… Quynh was alone for three hundred years, I think. She never said for sure, but it took so long for Andy to find her that she’d given up hope almost entirely. Even Sebastien—’
Joe chokes, slightly, and has to swallow heavily before he continues.
‘—Sebastien came into this life alone, in agony and in misery until he could escape, and then in confusion and fear until we could reach him. Ten years can seem so long when all you have is dreams you can’t explain and a secret that burns you from the inside out.’
Joe takes Nile’s hands again, holding them tight where they shake and tremble. He’s so gentle, but even under his soft touch Nile feels a breath away from splintering apart.
‘I know you feel alone, and I will not do you the discourtesy of arguing with you, but we are here to listen should you wish to speak, and we are here to hold you should you wish to be held. We love you, Nile.’
It’s not until Joe’s hand cups her cheek and his thumb brushes softly under her eye that Nile even realises she’s crying.
—
‘I’m going to bite him,’ Andy promises, and Nicky, because he doesn’t doubt her for a second, clamps his hand on her thigh to hold her in place.
‘You have survived worse tortures than this, Andromache. You can survive this too.’
'I can,' says Andy, glaring at the waiting room door as though she expects him to burst through. 'Can he?'
Andy’s leg is tense under his hand, but Nicky keeps it where it is. If Andy doesn’t want to be touched, she’ll soon let him know.
‘You’re frightening the poor man,’ Nicky says, fighting to keep from smiling.
‘Good,’ says Andy, and Nicky loses his fight.
Nancy appears in the doorway, smiling brightly at them. Before she can speak, Nicky hops to his feet and yanks Andy up along with him.
'We're coming,' he says, tugging Andy along, resolutely ignoring the murderous expression on her face.
'Ms. Black!' The dentist is no less cheerful when they get back into the exam room. Nicky fears for his safety. 'Good news and bad I'm afraid, take a seat, best seat in the house!'
Nicky hopes his shove to Andy's shoulder is convincing as fond to everyone else in the room, and not as forceful as it actually is. Between his lack of desire to actually ever force Andy into anything, and Andy's complete inability to be forced into anything, it's more for effect than anything. She takes her seat though, which is all that matters.
'Now,' begins the dentist, sitting close to her and clasping his hands paternally. 'The x-ray has shown that in addition to the crack in the crown, you have an infection in the root. Am I right in thinking you've been avoiding me, Ms. Black?' his tone is playfully scolding, and Nicky is somewhat impressed at how severely he’s misreading Andy’s expression.
When Andy just stares back in silence, the dentist gives an uncomfortable little cough, and looks to Nicky for help. Nicky stares back evenly, unblinking, until he looks away again. His jovial tone is strained, but he carries on with it nonetheless.
'That's alright, visiting the dentist can be scary, I know.'
Andy's face freezes, as does Nicky's, both of them paralysed with the need to laugh at the idea of Andromache the Scythian being afraid of anything, let alone a balding middle-aged Englishman in cheerful pink scrubs.
'But it's alright, we'll give you a jag and you'll not feel a thing.'
'I don't need it.' Andy's voice is absolute.
'Now, Ms. Black, it's not a pleasant experience I'm afraid. We need to numb your jaw. I'll have to go quite deep in the tooth, and it’s not something you want to experience without a little help.'
'I refuse.'
'Andy,' Nicky tries, because she said no to dessert the night before and it almost broke his heart. He can’t stand to see her in pain.
Andy’s face softens minutely, and then:
'Listen to your husband, Ms. Black,' says the dentist, in a surprising attempt at public suicide. Nicky closes his eyes and prays.
'Do not involve him,' Andy hisses in the low and dangerous tone Nicky's only ever heard her use when addressing rival generals. 'He is not my husband. He is nothing to this situation. You deal with me or not at all. I do not need an injection, I refuse to accept it. If you try to make me, I will feed it to you. Do I make myself clear?'
The room is so still that if an angel were to dance on the head of a pin in the room next door, Nicky believes they'd be able to hear its steps.
The dentist sits up, out of his patronising slump and into the straight-backed and pale-faced posture Nicky recognises of everyone on whom Andy has used that tone.
'Ms. Black,' he begins, before he swallows and tries again. 'I can see from your otherwise pristine teeth that this is an unusual situation for you. This is going to hurt, and I have a duty of care. If you're refusing local anaesthetic, I can give you a light general anaesthetic, but the effects are much longer lasting and you’ll have some cognitive impairment for a while after. But I can't perform a root treatment in good conscience on a patient with no pain relief at all.'
Andy looks at Nicky. He knows, somewhere in the recesses of his mind that he doesn't particularly like to visit, that Andy doesn't like needles. In the grand scheme of tortures there are far worse things she's suffered, but needles remain. Given the choice between needles and no needles, even with consequences, Nicky knows what Andy wants.
What she needs, however, is to be assured that she will be safe.
Nicky can promise that.
He nods, once and deeply, clear as he can be.
'The general,' Andy says immediately, her tone brooking no arguments.
'Alright,' sighs the dentist, gesturing tiredly at Nancy, who nods and opens a cupboard on the wall. 'No allergies, I trust? And your hu-friend will be driving you home?'
'Yes.'
Once again, Nicky closes his eyes and prays that this won't be the moment they discover Andy is allergic to anaesthetic.
He can protect her from any threat in this room or out of it, and would gladly do so no matter how much harm it may bring him, but he can’t stand between her and an allergic reaction.
'You'll feel a slight tingling sensation,' explains the dentist as he hooks a tiny mask over the end of Andy's nose, 'and some strange emotions, possibly, but you'll be alright. You might doze off, but it won’t knock you out completely the way a full general anaesthetic does. You’ll still be aware, it just won’t hurt.’
The mask trails off in a long hose, and Nicky slips his phone from his pocket as discreetly as he can. Andy looks like a furious elephant, and he knows several people who simply will not believe him without evidence.
‘There’s going to be a lot of buzzing and noise, and you’ll feel some pressure Ms. Black, but if at any point you want a rest or if anything hurts, just raise your hand for me and we’ll stop, alright?’ asks the dentist, one hand on the dial for the anaesthetic.
Andy nods, eyes fixed firmly on Nicky, and opens her mouth.
—
When Nile stops crying, there’s a wet spot on the shoulder of Joe’s shirt that reaches from the collar to the hem at the end of its short sleeve. Joe pays it absolutely no mind, just strokes his hand down her hair one more time, and then helps her sit up again.
‘I’m sorry,’ Nile says, and then keeps talking over Joe as he tries to interrupt. ‘Not for crying. You were upset, and I made it about me.’
‘You didn’t,’ Joe says firmly, squeezing her shoulder. ‘Our situations are not the same, but our burden is shared. Taking and giving comfort go hand in hand.’
It’s shaken her more than she ever could have expected, trying to imagine a world where she had to flounder alone in her first days of immortality. If she had got on that helicopter at Camp Leatherneck, if she hadn’t had Andy infuriating and terrifying her by turns. If she hadn’t had Nicky making her dinner that night, and Joe smiling at her, and Booker laying out the reality of her new existence.
If she’d been alone on a table somewhere, at the mercy of the military, and a thousand faceless people who could only see the profit in her skin, who would she be now? Or even if she’d avoided that somehow, if she hadn’t been discovered, who would she be, muddling through on her own?
It’s a kind of terror she can’t look directly at.
‘It’s not all bad, Nile,’ Joe says, low and warm and serious, ducking his head to meet her eyes. ‘There really is so much joy to be found.’
‘Like what.’ Her voice is wet, and thick, and petulant, and Joe's looking at her with so much open fondness she can hardly stand it.
‘Like world enough and time,’ replies Joe, intent. ‘World enough and time for it all, everything you’ve ever wanted to see, everything you’ve ever wanted to learn. You will see such wonders, Nile. And you will experience such loves, and such delights. Nicky is my comfort and my joy, but do you think we could exist as we are if we can only find happiness in each other? If the world around us was a pit of misery, could we smile just at the sight of each other’s eyes?’
‘I mean, yeah? Probably? You say that all the time, Joe,’ Nile says, spreading her hands incredulously. The ridiculousness of Joe’s statement knocks the last of her tears from her, and Joe tips his head back and laughs.
‘I do say that, yes,’ he says, chuckling. ‘But you should know by now Nile, my great vice and my great passion is hyperbole. As much as I like to claim I need only my Nicolò’s smile for sustenance, I still need to eat and drink. As much as I claim he is all I need in the world, I still need the world too. My world is just brighter for his existence. Happier. I find joy in him, as I find joy in you, and in Andy. Just differently, of course.’
‘Of course,’ laughs Nile, and then she laughs harder still when Joe makes a show of looking her up and down and shrugging with a comically-overblown expression of apologetic confusion on his face.
‘You are a beautiful young woman Nile,’ says Joe over Nile’s laughter, ‘and were I unwed I… well I would likely not take you in a manly fashion, because my tastes do still reside elsewhere, but—’
‘I got it Joe, thanks,’ interrupts Nile, rolling her eyes fondly at him. ‘World enough and time?’
‘World enough and time,’ Joe says, nodding. ‘You’ll find your joy Nile, and one day you’ll understand. You just have to give yourself time. Are you hungry?’
Nile nods, both in answer and in thought, and Joe steps away from the table to fuss in the fridge. She’s never yet made it through a long conversation with Nicky or Joe without being offered food, and she wonders now who brought that trait to the relationship, or is it one they developed simultaneously? Some shared feature that wouldn’t be there at all if they hadn’t been together.
—
‘Suction please, Nancy,’ mutters the dentist. With his mask and protective glasses on, he looks much more professional. Nicky watches his every move like a hawk. ‘You’re doing great, Ms. Black. Not long now.’
Andy mumbles something, but it’s garbled and wet through the various things in her mouth. The nurse pokes about in her mouth with a short rigid hose that makes a somewhat stomach churning noise, and then the dentist lifts his hands free, looking at Andy carefully.
‘What did you say?’ he asks, waiting as she smacks her lips and clears her throat.
‘Nicolò,’ Andy slurs, raising her head slightly to look at Nicky with bleary eyes. ‘Nicolò, tell them—tell them, I’m, I’m the greatest. Greatest warrior in history.’
Nicky presses his lips tightly together, and breathes carefully through his nose.
‘Tell them, Nicky,’ Andy whines, drawing out the last vowel of Nicky’s name in a long trailing noise.
‘I’m sure they know, Andy,’ Nicky says.
‘Tell them,’ Andy whines again. Nancy puts her hand on Andy’s shoulder and presses her gently back down onto the seat.
‘That’s certainly something,’ she says patiently. ‘But we need you to open your mouth again please, you’re almost done.’
Docile in a way Nicky’s never seen her, Andy opens her mouth and looks up at the nurse with big sad, wet eyes.
‘What’s wrong?’ Nicky asks, half rising in alarm at the sadness on Andy’s face.
‘It’s alright sir,’ Nancy says, picking up her suction tool again as the dentist leans back over Andy. ‘“Laughing gas” is a misnomer. People experience all sorts of emotions while under the influence. Crying isn’t unusual at all. She’s not in pain, she’s just feeling the effects.’
‘Are you sure?’
Andy has always smiled easily, even if her smile is tired at the edges, but she doesn’t cry. Seeing her like this is strange, and somewhat horrible.
Nancy looks over at him, her hands firm on her work, and says, gently, ‘if you bring your chair here beside me, you can hold her hand.’
Between Nancy and Nicky there’s a little sink and mirror contraption attached to the suction tool she’s using. Nicky slides his little roller-stool over beside it, and sits down again, Andy’s hand held firmly in his.
It’s entirely for his own comfort, he knows, but rarely all their years together has Andy ever refused to provide comfort to her family. She won’t begrudge him this.
As he expected, as she always has done, Andy rubs her thumb across his knuckles almost instantly. Her movements are clumsy and slow, but it’s Andy’s hand and Andy’s movements, and that’s enough.
‘Can you make up some B1 composite please, Nancy?’ asks the dentist, digging in Andy’s mouth with what Nicky knows is not a fishhook, but definitely looks like a fishhook.
Nancy steps away, and the dentist takes his tools out of Andy’s mouth, putting them down in favour of fussing with identical-looking tools on his little tray.
‘Nicolò,’ Andy slurs. ‘Look at me, Nicolò.’
‘I’m looking Andy, I’m right here,’ Nicky says, squeezing her hand gently. Andy looks at him, blinking heavily. She smiles, and one side of her mouth raises higher than the other.
‘If you hadn’t had Yusuf,’ says Andy, slowly, thickly, ‘I would’ve beaten sense into you. So don’t worry.’
Nicky blinks, and the dentist and Nancy both pause in what they’re doing to look at her too.
‘You couldn’t stay an idiot in the face of that,’ says Andy, slurring heavily. ‘I wouldn’t let you. No more dreams, Nicolò. Tell your dreams to fuck off.’
Nicky laughs, more than a little incredulous, and Nancy and the dentist go back to their work. In all the years Nicky’s dreamed his terrible dream, and in all the years Andy’s talked about it with him, she’s never been quite so pragmatic. Strangely, it makes him feel better than anything else she’s ever said.
‘How did you know?’ he asks, shaking his head at her.
‘I always know,’ says Andy, affronted. He can hear the you idiot she left unsaid ringing in the air around them. ‘You’ve got that dumb look on your face.’
He blinks at her again.
‘That one,’ she says, nodding at him like he’s said something profound. ‘Can’t let someone I love stay so fucking stupid. I would have fixed you. Didn’t need to but.’
Nicky has to look away from Andy’s face before he embarrasses himself in a dental office. When he looks up, Nancy is looking at him curiously.
‘I made some poor choices in my youth,’ he explains quietly to her, unsure why he feels the need, and Andy snorts an unflattering laugh.
‘I’m telling Yusuf you said that,’ she says, and then laughs at her own joke.
—
Joe doesn’t make French toast the way Nile knows it. It’s savoury, when Joe makes it. He mixes salt and pepper into the eggs before he dips the bread, and he fries the slices until they’re crispy around the edges and the crust crunches beneath her teeth. The first time she saw him dip a bite in ketchup before he ate it, she thought he was pranking her, but now she loves it.
He puts a plate with three slices piled high in front of her, and kisses the top of her head before he sits down to his own meal.
Joe doesn’t say grace, for fairly obvious reasons. Neither does Andy. Nicky will join in sometimes, but mostly the three of them just wait quietly while Nile dips her head and has a second to herself. They’ve never begrudged her it, and Joe doesn’t start now. It’s one of the things Nile appreciates most about this new family she’s found. The care they take with the things that matter to her. Even Andy gives Nile the space she needs for her belief, even after all her comments about God.
Joe’s smile when Nile raises her head again is sweet.
‘So,’ Nile starts, dragging out the sound as she cuts a bite out of her toast, ‘everything’s okay? Between you and Nicky, I mean.’
Joe grins at her. He has French toast in his mouth, and ketchup on his lower lip. It’s objectively disgusting, but it’s so ridiculously Joe that Nile can’t help but grin back.
‘Nicky and I are great, Nile,’ he says, pushing his food into his cheek like some demented hamster. ‘He is the very sun that lights my days.’
She rolls her eyes affectionately at him, and tries not to grin too widely when he winks back at her.
They eat together in companionable silence, nothing but the chorus of their clinking cutlery and the quiet clatter of their mugs disturbing the air for long moments. The air is warmer around them, but something heavy still lingers in the set of Joe’s shoulders. Nile can feel the pressure of it on her own skin, something in the room with them that hasn’t been addressed.
It’s not until Nile’s plate is clear, and Joe’s standing up to make tea for them, that he speaks again.
‘What do you dream of, Nile?’
He’s facing the sink, so Nile can’t see his face, and she’s not sure if it's her expression he’s avoiding, or his own.
‘You still dream of her, don’t you?’ he asks, quietly, but it shatters the fragile warmth around her like a stone dropped in a frozen pond.
Nile doesn’t answer, and Joe doesn’t turn around.
‘I would take it from you, if I could,’ he says, his attention seemingly focused on the kettle. ‘But I cannot.’
He pours boiling water into two fresh mugs, flooding the kitchen with the bright smell of peppermint.
‘We thought she passed, when Sebastien ceased to mention dreaming of her.’ Nile flinches at the reminder of that first night, the naked grief on Andy, Nicky and Joe’s faces. ‘It was a blessing, as much as it pained us. Learning the truth of her, and of Sebastien’s pain was agony.’ Joe grips his mug tighter, his knuckles white around the soft green ceramic. ‘But it is always better to know the truth, even when it hurts.’
‘I’ll tell you,’ Nile promises, forcing the words out past the lump in her throat.
Joe sighs, and turns around again, leaning his back against the sink. The light he’d found is gone from his face again, and he looks old, and tired.
‘Thank you.’
—
‘That’s you all done, Ms. Black,’ says the dentist at last, leaning back and pulling off his protective glasses. ‘Do you need to rinse your mouth?’
‘I’ll rinse your mouth,’ grumbles Andy, wobbling where she tries to sit up faster than the chair is moving. Nicky reaches out to steady her elbows, and she swats clumsily at him.
‘No? I’m just going to put these cotton buds in your mouth then,’ says the dentist, taking his life in his hand as he pops two rolls of cotton between Andy’s cheek and her tooth. Andy watches him with wide eyes, her mouth hanging open like she’s forgotten how to close it.
‘Will you be staying with her, or is someone waiting for her at home?’ Nancy asks Nicky, distracting him from the incredulous look on Andy’s face.
‘Both,’ replies Nicky, unthinking, more concerned with catching Andy’s flailing hands as she reaches for her own face.
‘She’ll be tired,’ says the dentist, taking off his mask. Andy gasps and stops dead to stare at him. ‘When this wears off I mean, and she’ll be sore, but she can have paracetamol and ibuprofen for the pain. It shouldn’t last more than a day or so, but if she has any unusual pain or anything else gives you cause for concern, just pop back in. It’ll take the filling a little while to settle, so no food she has to bite or chew until at least tomorrow. She likely won’t want it anyway, but just in case.’
‘What can she eat?’ asks Nicky, helping Andy cautiously to her feet. She wobbles, but then holds her hands up in triumph when she doesn’t fall.
‘Soup, ice cream, anything she fancies that doesn’t need to go between her teeth,’ says the dentist with an easy shrug. Faced with him now, Nicky can’t help but wonder if it was nerves that made him so silly before. ‘Try and avoid extremes of temperature though, at least for a little while. The tooth will be a little sensitive.’
‘I’ll eat what I want,’ slurs Andy. ‘I want ant egg soup.’
‘Sure you do,’ laughs the dentist, nodding agreeably. ‘You can have it as soon as you can swallow without choking, okay?’ To Nicky, he murmurs, ‘never heard that one before. Well travelled, is she?’
‘You have no idea,’ says Nicky, before he steps away to assist Nancy in wrestling Andy back into her coat.
‘I was a god,’ Andy is informing Nancy. ‘You never would have treated me like this. I would-I would have—Nicky I want—’
‘I know, Andy,’ he says soothingly, easing her arm into her coat. ‘We’re going home right now.’
‘Simone at reception will finish up with you, okay?’ says Nancy, stepping away once she’s confident Nicky has a grip on Andy.
‘Thank you.'
'All good then?' asks the smiling receptionist as they spill out into the main room together. Andy's hand is fisted tightly in the back of Nicky's jacket, and she's blinking slowly at everything around her.
'Yes, thank you,' Nicky says, trying to coax Andy into walking beside him, instead of behind him.
'You're a bit more than usual today due to the general anaesthetic,' says Simone, still smiling. 'That'll be £52.50 all in, unless she's entitled to any discounts or financial support?'
'I am the oldest woman alive,' says Andy, leaning heavily on Nicky's shoulder to level a shaky glare at Simone. 'That's my discount.'
'And you look great,' Simone says, nodding cheerfully at Andy as she accepts the handful of cash Nicky passes to her. 'You don't look a day over five thousand.'
Andy turns and tries her hardest to whisper in Nicky's ear. Given she's two inches away and not in full control of her existence, she doesn't quite manage it.
'She knows too much Nicky!' Andy whisper-shouts. 'We have to go!'
'We're going, Andy,' Nicky sighs, accepting his change back from Simone. She’s looking at Andy the way Joe looks at kittens. 'Let's just get to the car.'
—
'How did you find your joy again?' Nile asks when she can't bear the silence anymore. 'In the early days, I mean. Did you find it in Nicky?'
Joe purses his lips and looks at the ceiling as though he expects to see the answer written across it.
'Yes and no,' he says, rolling his mug slowly between his hands. 'We were a kind of friends before we were anything more, but it was fraught for a while. Both of us were on edge, not sure the other could be trusted. When we started to laugh together, that’s when things started to change. When Nicolò reckoned with his choices, and when I stopped seeing a monster in the flesh of a man. We started finding joy in other people, and that helped us find it in ourselves.’
He laughs, sweet and quiet, and when he looks back at Nile he looks young again, a boy smiling through all the years.
‘We first laughed together when we were helping a family bring in their harvest. They had this donkey, you’ve never seen an animal so obstinate—except Andy, of course,’ he says with a wink, ‘and it stole Nico’s hat straight out of his hand as he was wiping his brow.’
Joe’s laughing as he speaks, and Nile finds herself laughing too, amazed that the shine still remains on a joke almost a thousand years old.
‘The family had a son, a tiny scrap of a thing, he clung to my leg like a burr, and when he saw the donkey run away from Nico with his hat in its mouth, he laughed and laughed like you’ve never heard. We couldn’t do anything but laugh along with him.’
Joe smiles, fond and bright, the years falling away from him completely.
‘It was the first time I truly heard Nico laugh, and the first time I saw how truly good Nico could be—he loves children, you know,’ he says in an aside to Nile, as though it’s news to her. ‘And from there things got… easier, I suppose. Not easy. Far from that. But that was the start. It was easier to find my joy in life once more, when I could share laughter again.’
One thing their little family has in great supply is laughter. Nile remembers the night before, howling into her wine as Nicky described a persistent sailor determined to win Andy’s hand via a drinking game. Andy, Joe and Nicky are forever trying to one up each other in their stories, or play fighting, or just telling each other terrible jokes. Nile had thought they were doing it for her benefit, but now, maybe she understands a little more than she did.
‘So that’s your answer?’ Nile asks, smiling at Joe. ‘Laugh my way through the next however-many millennia?’
‘Do you have a better answer?’
—
‘Andy, please,’ begs Nicky, struggling to keep Andy’s hands away from him as he drives.
‘It’s—Nicolò it’s not right, fix it—’ Andy fumbles at the radio, and then tugs at his wrist, and Nicky makes the decision that driving before he fixes whatever’s upsetting her isn’t going to end well for either of them.
Pulling in to the first parking space he sees, Nicky cuts the engine and turns to face Andy completely.
‘What is it, Andy? What do you need?’
She looks at him with big sad eyes, her cheek swollen and puffy with cotton buds, and says, plaintively: ‘It’s the wrong song.’
‘What?’
Andy fumbles for the radio again, and this time Nicky lets her. She clumsily twists the dial, scrolling between channels with barely enough of a break between each to hear even a bar of any music that might be playing.
‘It’s not-I want the song, Nicky,’ she says thickly, ‘the song, you know- da da da da—’ she sings tunelessly, still turning the dial.
Nicky shakes his head, takes a quick picture of Andy’s rosy face to send to Joe, and starts the car again.
‘Nile will help you find the song when we get home,’ he says placatingly, easing carefully back into the light morning traffic.
Andy nods, but continues playing with the radio.
‘I’m so hungry, Nicky,’ she says after a long moment of quiet broken only by her radio adventures. ‘I need—I need peanut brittle. I need to crunch.’
‘That is very literally the last thing you need, Andy,’ Nicky says firmly. A car cuts them off, passing close enough to them that Nicky can see the angry expression on the driver’s face, and it’s only eight hundred years of practising patience that keeps him from laying on the horn. ‘What you need is to get home and get some sleep. Then we can talk about food.’
‘Peanut brittle,’ stresses Andy, pulling at his sleeve. Nicky catches her hand gently and pats it as he places it back on her lap. ‘I don’t like—my face feels weird, is it real?’
‘It’s real, I promise.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Very.’
Andy sniffs, loudly, and tugs weakly at her seatbelt.
‘I don’t think Yusuf would agree.’
‘We’ll soon find out what Yusuf thinks,’ Nicky says, easing them onto the motorway. ‘But I believe he will agree with me that your face is indeed real, sorella.’
‘What about Nile?’
‘Nile will too.’
—
‘What if my joy isn’t in fighting?’ Nile asks, finally voicing the question that’s been burning in her chest since they turned their backs on Booker in London. ‘What if it’s in something else. Anything else.’
Joe shrugs, easy and loose.
‘Then we would be glad to help you figure it out, if you want us to.’
‘Really?’ Nile raises an eyebrow at him. Joe raises one right back.
‘Really,’ he says, amusement rich in his tone. ‘We fight for what we think is right, Nile, but that doesn’t mean that’s all we do. We’ve had years of peace. Decades spent living softer lives.’
‘So you don’t like fighting?’ The armoury they carry around with them makes her more than a little doubtful.
‘I didn’t say that,’ Joe says evenly, topping up his tea. Nile shakes her head when he brandishes the kettle her way. ‘We’re all different, but I personally believe fighting is sometimes the cleanest way to end a problem. I don’t relish killing, or find enjoyment in it, don’t mistake me. But I see the benefits of a decisive end.’
‘What if I don’t?’
‘Then you have world enough and time to philosophise on the matter, and come to your own conclusions. I would love to hear them.'
‘Is that your answer to everything?’ Nile knows she sounds petulant, but she can’t help it. ‘Time?’
‘It’s the best cure I know.’
Joe’s phone buzzes across the room, drawing his and Nile’s attention, and reminding her sharply that she came into the kitchen with very different questions than she ended up actually asking. Joe stands to fetch it, and Nile glances out the kitchen window, half expecting to see the rest of their family out in the yard.
‘Where are Andy and Nicky, anyway?’
Joe snorts a loud and ugly laugh and instead of answering Nile directly, brandishes his phone in her direction. On the screen, glaring out at them like she’s imagining someone’s death, is Andy.
Andy, with bright red cheeks, a swollen jaw, and pupils the size of silver dollars.
‘Is she okay?’ Nile demands, looking up at Joe in shock. His eyes are wet with his laughter, and his grin is so wide Nile can see his dimples through his beard.
‘She didn’t kill the dentist,’ Joe says. ‘And Nicky says she wants you to help her find a song, so I’m guessing she’s absolutely fine.’
‘The dentist?’
‘Nicky finally convinced her to get that cracked tooth fixed after you went to bed last night.’ Joe stretches, huge and expansive, arms wide above his head, and then shakes his shoulders out. ‘We need some groceries before she gets back. Ice cream, things for soup. Soft things, Nicky said. Would you like to come with me?’
‘Seriously?’ Nile asks incredulously, blinking at Joe. She feels like she missed a step somewhere. ‘After all that, all those heavy conversations, now you just want to go to the grocery store?’
Joe shrugs again.
‘I might not have any answers Nile, but I can make soup, and I know what ice cream Andy likes best. It's the best thing I can do right now.'
And that’s… that’s fair, thinks Nile. That’s absolutely fair.
‘Yeah,’ she says at last. ‘Yeah, I want to come too.’