Chapter Text
The room was silent.
The blood was everywhere.
This was on Andy. She should have known that they’d wake up in the hotel, that they’d find Andy gone, that they’d know exactly where to check. Sometimes she thought she knew Joe and Nicky and Booker better than she knew herself. She didn’t know Nile as well--it just wasn’t possible to compare, not yet--but she understood Nile and she knew her better every day. Andy should have known that this was how it would go. She should have pulled Quynh out of the flat, brought her somewhere safe, somewhere where the others wouldn’t find them for a while, somewhere where they’d have the time to go through this without four other people contributing to the mess of it.
And if she was honest, of course she had known. She was just too blinded by her want for Quyhn to care. This, like many things, was Andy’s doing.
Quynh had been thorough; she’d done a lot of damage even after they went down. Quynh knew exactly how long it took to come back, knew how to prolong the moment, to buy herself more time. She had to slow the recovery enough to make it last longer than a second or two. She had to slow it down enough that even when they came back, the healing would take time, ten minutes maybe, fifteen, twenty.
Nicky’s hand twitched and Andy pushed back his hair. He’d drag himself up first. He’d go to Joe. Joe would take longer, his torso a bright bloody hole. Booker--Booker’s time would match Joe’s. And Nile--
Andy shifted Nile’s arm closer to her shoulder, something small to ease the process. She leaned over Nile, tapped her cheek.
“Come on, baby. Come on, wake up.”
There was no question that Nile was going to be okay. She was still so fucking new. But Andy had to check, had to know. She had to see them all stir before she could rush after Quynh.
Joe groaned. Andy found her discarded clothes on the stairs and finished getting dressed. Her labrys was missing. She grabbed a duffel bag, some extra clothes. Booker let out a pained laugh. Nicky’s head lolled. And then Nile gasped.
Andy couched over Nile, wrapped a hand around the back of her head.
“You’re okay,” Andy said. “It’s okay.”
She pressed a kiss to Nile’s forehead and then Andy was gone, out the door and into the street.
They would still follow. Even considering the damage, it wouldn’t be that long.
She paused in the center of Beatrice Avenue and closed her eyes, felt the breeze tickle the hair at the back of her neck. It was going to rain.
Where would Quynh go? What would Quynh do next?
Andy knew exactly where to start.
**
Andy found her just as the rain began to come down. Quynh stood at the edge of a residential neighborhood, of streets lined with tidy terrace houses, with well-tended gardens. Quyhn’s clothes were stained with blood, visible in the light from the street lamps. Her hands hung at her sides. Her left arm looked deceptively limp, and in her right hand she held Andy’s labrys, her fingers gripped tight.
Quynh wasn’t hiding herself, her weapon or the blood. It was early still, dark, but the lights would start switching on soon enough. It was dangerous, careless, and Andy was glad she thought to bring the bag.
Andy made sure to make noise as she approached. She stepped down harder than she might have otherwise, rustled the bag on her shoulder. She made noise that made it obvious who she was, noise that made her unmistakable. And then, just in case, she said: “I should have known they’d come looking. I’m sorry for that.”
“I knew,” Quynh said. She didn’t turn. “I knew as soon as you arrived alone. I was ready.”
Andy unzipped the bag she’d brought--it was large enough to stow the labrys--and pulled out a long jacket. She held it out to Quynh. Quynh reached past it, her fingers sliding over Andy’s skin to circle around her wrist. She held her like that for a moment, her grip reminiscent of those old shackles, those old restraints transformed by love. Quynh’s fingers were sticky with blood. Joe’s? Nile’s?
“You did a number on them,” Andy said. When Quynh didn’t respond, she wondered if it was the first time she’d heard the expression. She clarified: “You were very thorough.”
Quynh pressed her lips into a tight line and tilted her head up toward the sky. She closed her eyes against the rain and her hair slipped off her shoulders and fell down her back in a tangled cascade. “I needed time.”
“Can I?” Andy asked. She reached her free hand toward the labrys, fingertips light and careful against Quynh’s damp arm. Quynh tightened her grip and then relaxed and passed the weapon to Andy. She released Andy’s other wrist and accepted the jacket, sliding her arms through the sleeves and shrugging into it while Andy slipped the bloody axe into the bag and out of sight.
“You left them like that?” Quynh asked.
“I waited to make sure,” Andy said. It had lifetimes since they crouched over Lykon and sometimes it felt like yesterday. They never knew whether he’d just learned the truth at that moment, or if he’d known it for some time and had intentionally kept it from them. She hadn’t understood why he would do that then. She understood it all too well now.
Quynh stared at a group of houses to her right, eyes hard, unmoving. Andy wanted to reach out and take her hand but she wasn’t sure it would be welcomed. She shoved her fingers into the pockets of her jeans instead. Rainwater dripped from the tip of her nose and sniffed, twitched her face to ease the itch of it.
“I’ve come here so many times,” Andy said. It wasn’t even that long ago that she’d come. She’d stood in that very spot with Nile, realized that there was nothing left there for Quynh to recognize. There was a time, five hundred years ago, when a jail stood in this location. There was a time when Andromache and Quynh were restrained in a cell for weeks, their wrists raw and their mouths bruised. The only thing that made it bearable was the fact that the chains were set close enough that they could still find comfort in the physical presence of each other, Quynh pressed to Andy’s side, the pressure of Quynh’s forehead against her own. Over there, down at the end of the street, near the white terrace house with the pretty front garden, was the edge of the old field, the spot where they were hanged and hanged and hanged.
“They tore it all down and built this,” Quynh said. “How do these people live and love here? The ground must remember.”
But that was the truth all over this world. They didn’t tear down the jail and build houses the next day. There had been any number of buildings and lives lived on this patch of earth before it became what they saw before them. There was five hundred years of history buried beneath these homes and thousands of years before that, before Andy and Quynh ever set foot in this place. Quynh knew that, had seen it countless times before, but this spot had seemed unchangeable, significant. Sleeping soundly beneath these roofs felt unfathomable.
Quynh’s fingers worked at the cuffs of the jacket. It was Andy’s jacket, and they were nearly the same size, but it seemed far too big for Quynh somehow, the shoulders just a little too broad, the cut of it wrong for her shape.
“What happened to you after they took me?” Quynh asked.
Andy shook her head. “Not now. We should go somewhere safe. We should--”
Quynh turned and caught Andy’s arm. “Andromache. I have to know and I need to hear it here, in this spot..”
Andy closed her eyes. She nodded, convinced by the sure pressure of Quynh’s hand on her arm. “It’s hard for me to remember exactly how it happened. I wasn’t myself. I--I pulled against those chains until my wrists broke and even then I still couldn’t get myself out. I don’t know how long it took, but eventually I managed to shatter my hands against the iron rings and slide them free. I took down the next man to open the cell. I took his weapons and I fought my way free. I rushed to the docks, but the boat was gone, not even visible on the horizon. I failed and I’ve never forgiven myself. If I’d broken free of the chains sooner, I could have stopped it from happening. I could have stopped them.” Her voice caught and she shook her head, swallowed. When she spoke again her voice was no more than a whisper. “I searched for centuries. Nicky and Joe and I, we spent lifetimes.”
“It wasn’t enough,” Quynh said. Her hand fell away from Andy as she folded her arms across her chest. She held herself tight. “I thought I’d be satisfied in your bed, but I’m not. In fact, it’s worse. Nothing else will fill me and I--what has this endless life done to us? What has time done to us, Andromache? What kind of monsters are we?”
Andy let out a puff of breath, the start of a small tired laugh. “It’s turned us into Joe and Nicky, the early years?”
“I won’t laugh at that,” Quynh said, but at least she smiled. It was brief, it was slight, but it was there.
“I would give it to you,” Andy promised. “If nothing had changed, I would give you as many lives as you needed.” Quynh was right. This endless life had done something to them. Kill me, bathe in my blood, and kiss me alive again with everything forgiven. Who was she that this thought felt reasonable to her, who were they that this seemed within reach? It was in reach once, but no longer. There was no hope of kissing Andy alive again. There was no time to get back on equal footing.
“All this time and it still takes so much,” Quynh sighed. “I want to tear down this world. And who could blame me?”
“We’ll stop you,” Andy said, because it had to be said. She was sure that Quynh knew, but the words needed to be said aloud, the truth of them made clear, a promise and a safety net. “We’ll always be here to stop you.”
Quynh studied Andy’s face, her eyes shadowed. “The others, but what about you?”
“Me too,” Andy confirmed. “I’ll stop you.” She’d do whatever it took to do right by Quynh. The hard part was already over, the drowning, the boats, the endless search. The rest of this was easy. At least, it was an easy lie to tell.
“You’ll be killed,” Quynh said.
Andy shrugged. “Might as well finish me off now then.”
There--almost a laugh from Quynh. She turned away from Andy and was quiet for a long time. Andy knew this move. She’d seen it countless times in battle. Her mighty Quynh, turned away from an enemy, back exposed. Quynh waited just long enough for her opponent to relax, for them to forget that she was a threat, and then she swung back and hit them when they least expected. They never saw it coming, fell hard, hit the ground with an ungraceful bloody thump.
Andy waited there in the rain. She willed herself to relax; she knew that Quynh would feel the precise moment when she did.
She took a deep breath, shut her eyes, and felt the air move through her hair, felt water against the back of her neck.
And then Quynh was back, Quynh was there with her hands on either side of Andy’s face as she pulled Andy in for a searing kiss. Andy could smell the blood on their skin, sweet and sickening and so familiar that it still felt a little like home. Quynh bit at Andy’s lips, followed the sharp pinch of her teeth with the soothing press of tongue, and Andy melted beneath her hands, surrendered, defeated. Quynh pressed kisses to Andy’s jaw, up toward her ear, down to the spot where neck met shoulder. Once there, she wrapped her arms around Andy, their first real hug in five hundred years. Only then did Andy move, only then did she hold Quynh back.
When Quynh spoke, she formed her words against Andy’s skin, and they tickled and shivered down Andy’s spine.
“I understand how it happened and why it happened, and I still don’t know how to forgive you. I can’t stay, Andromache, but I don’t think I can stay away from you either.”
Andy turned her face in toward Quynh, pressed her lips to Quynh’s hair, breathed deep. “Don’t forgive me. I don’t forgive myself. But I ask you to stay with me, just for this short time that’s left. Stay and we’ll figure it out together.”
Quynh shifted against her, pulled back just far enough to slip a hand into her clothes, to come back with a knife. The blade gleamed beneath the streetlights. For one brief moment, Andy thought that might be it, the short time she had left. And then Quynh pressed the knife into Andy’s palm, wrapped Andy’s fingers around it and pulled Andy’s knuckles to her lips, to her teeth.
“If it can’t be you, then perhaps it should be me. You know what to do. I know you do.”
Andy remembered Quynh’s words from hours before, from before the bed and before the blood: I long to shove my knife into your gut, to listen to your heart stop, to swallow that moment when it starts again. I want to hold you beneath the waves and watch you drown so that I can suck the sea from your lips. And you stand there and say please when you know that I can’t. So what are we to do?
It couldn’t be Andy; it had to be Quynh.
“No,” Andy said, but her chest was tight with anticipation. It curled in her gut and raced through her veins, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to say no, that she didn’t want to, not really, and not for long. Five hundred years, she’d imagined that moment, on her knees on the deck of a ship, Quynh in her arms, Quynh gasping that first breath between Andy’s lips, down Andy’s throat, filling her with it. She felt drunk on the thought, and when Quynh pulled back, Andy stumbled, unprepared to stand on her own two feet.
“Andromache--”
Andy swallowed, nodded. Time had stopped. The waves crashed in her ears, and when she spoke, it was like she was hearing a stranger’s voice, sound from a stranger’s lungs and a stranger’s throat.
“It can’t be here. Not here."
She pocketed Quynh’s knife as she scanned the street for the oldest car she could find, one on its last legs, one she could still hotwire. She pulled her phone from her pocket. She’d switched it to silent when she left the hotel, and now she saw a screen full of messages. Twenty from Nile, twelve from Joe, eight Nicky, five from a number she didn’t recognize, which meant it must be Booker. It was Copley’s number she was after. Needed car. she texted. More info to follow. She couldn’t give him more than that, not until they were finished. She smashed the phone and tossed it into a hedge, then she reached for Quynh’s hand.
“Let’s go.”
**
The sun was coloring the horizon by the time Andy pulled the car onto the beach. There was no one on the private road and they saw no one in the field leading to the tiny parking lot. It was still raining, coming down hard enough to discourage even those morning walkers who would venture out in a drizzling mist, intent on walking the beach in the early hours, on letting their dogs loose to roam.
Quynh followed her onto the stand.
“We don’t have to, if--”
Quynh paused for only a moment, her eyes hard on the sea. Her fingers found Andy. She squeezed Andy’s hand in hers, and then her hand fell away and she stepped away, toward the water. At its edge, Quynh turned and beckoned to Andy as she backed into the surf. Andy followed, drawn by the longing on Quynh’s face, by the wind in her hair and the push of the waves against her calves.
They stood in the water, the waves hitting their thighs, each swell pushing their bodies into each other.
Quynh kissed her, the rain and the saltwater mixed on her lips.
“Do it,” she said. “I’m ready.”
Andy took the knife in her hand. She reached for Quynh, pulled her in. Quynh took her hand and guided it to a spot between her breasts. Andy had been so sure she could do this, but here and now, the knife in her hand, her heart felt heavy in her chest. It hammered so fast. She felt close to some edge, some point of no return. If it didn’t go the way they hoped, if it didn’t fix this ache, scratch that unscratchable itch, what then? What else was left after this?
“You can,” Quynh said, reaching the doubt on Andy’s face. Her voice was firm. A voice that Andy remembered from countless battles with Quynh strong and resilient by her side. “You must.”
Andy stared down at the knife, at the length of the blade. “Lykon--Quynh, first it was Lykon and now me. You might not come back.”
“I will come back,” Quynh said, with an adamant shake of her head. Strands of hair clung to her face and Andy brushed them from her cheek. “I can feel it. I’ve died so many times, so many more times than any of you. It isn’t over yet, not for me. I feel it in my veins. Do you know how many times I’ve died? Have you counted?”
“Yes,” Andy said. She'd done the math, knew the impossibility of the numbers. Resolve strengthened, she pulled back, and then she thrust the knife forward into her heart, into her purpose and reason, her past and her future.
The knife went into Quynh the same way it did anyone else, as though she was ordinary, human.
“Again,” Quynh gasped, and Andy followed these orders, the same she would have given had the tables been turned. She pulled out the knife, refused to close her eyes at the sound of Quynh’s cry. She stabbed her again, and realized that this time the cry came from her own throat. Fuck, she’d done this so many times, but for some reason she thought--there was no reason for Quynh to feel any different. There was no reason to think it wouldn’t go exactly the same way. It went exactly the same way, Quynh’s eyes wide, her mouth slack, and when she coughed, a splash of red blood on her lower lip.
“Let go,” Quynh said and she sounded like she was drowning. Andy let go and Quynh fell into the waves.
Andy caught her with one arm to keep her from turning, from being pushed away by the waves. She wiped the rain from her face, stood over Quynh until she saw it happen, until she saw Quynh’s body still, saw her eyes go dark. There was enough light now to see the blood in the water, the dark cloud where the knife was lodged in her chest. And then Andy collapsed to her knees. She ignored the sharp press of stones; she ignored the water that came up to her chest and the waves that tried to push them back toward the shore. Andy gathered Quynh’s floating body in her arms. She cradled Quynh’s face with her hands, kissed her still and bleeding mouth.
She swallowed her screams and the rain on her face hid her tears. She reminded herself that this was for Quynh, she’d do it for Quynh as many times as it needed to be done, and she’d ignore the ache that said it should be her. It should be Andromache lying in the surf, Quynh’s knife in her chest. It should be Andromache bleeding them back to life.
Quynh jerked in her arms, and when she gasped, when she sucked air into her repaired lungs, Andy was there with her lips on Quynh’s face, on her cheeks and her nose and her mouth. Andy was there and Quynh grabbed her with force, kissed her with an intensity that Andy hadn’t felt in centuries, that she'd longed for like a missing limb. Quynh’s mouth tasted like blood and salt. She tasted reborn, brand new, but when Quynh found her voice, it was soaked through with desperation and she said:
“Again. I’m ready. I need it again.”
No knife this time, just Andy’s hands holding Quynh beneath the waves, while Quynh tried to accept it, tried to stop her thrashing limbs. Andy climbed on top of her, held her down, and when Quynh went still, she yanked Quynh from the water and sobbed against her shoulder, loud keening cries that were swallowed by the wind and the rain, anguished screams that fell on dead ears.
Quynh clung to her, shaking, her fingers grasping at Andy’s arms, nails sharp and scratching.
“I’m here,” Andy said, mouth against the shell of Quynh's ear. “I’m here, I’ve got you. I’m not ever going to leave.”
And Quynh pressed sucking kisses to her throat, to her shoulder, and then she said: “Again.”
Again and again, countless deaths there in the dawn, in the surf, their mouths raw with the salt of their kisses, Andy’s lungs full of Qunyh’s breath, and when it was over, when Quynh was satiated and when Andy felt that she could not possibly go on, it was Quynh that stood and lifted Andy in her arms. It was Quynh that helped Andy back to the shore, Quynh that eased her down onto a wet bed of discarded clothes. Quynh brought Andy back to life with her hands, with her fingers and her mouth, and the next time that Andromache cried out, it was with a different sort of anguish, a different sort of release.