Chapter Text
Andy woke in an empty bed, the sheets beside her still warm to the touch. The house was quiet. The morning sun streamed in through the window and left a bright parallelogram of light that bent over a rumpled pillow and onto the mattress. Andy pressed her face to the pillow and breathed deep, enveloped herself in the warmth of the morning and the echoes of Quynh. Quynh slept beside her in this bed, woke with the sunlight on her face, the light warming her dark hair.
It had been nearly a year since Andy woke alone in a different bed, to the sound of her family screaming. It had been nearly a year since that night on the beach in Plymouth and it still didn’t feel real. They’d lived so many lives, but so few of them were quiet, so few felt like they moved at a normal human pace.
It was the longest Andy had gone without dying in five hundred years.
She grew reckless after she lost Quynh to the sea. She saw that now. When she lost Quynh, she lost herself, her reason and her purpose. She pushed on. She tried to ignore it, tried to keep to the mission, and for so long she succeeded. Booker helped. Nile helped. It still wasn’t enough.
This might not be enough either. She had Quynh, but she’d lost all the rest to mortality. She’d been a warrior, a valkyrie, a god. She spent thousands of years working to right the wrongs of humanity, and now she was out of the game. She would spend the rest of her life--as long as that turned out to be--here on this island, here in this cottage, here with her love by the sea.
Sometimes it made her panic and she shot up in bed and rushed to her feet. Sometimes it was Quynh who woke in a panic instead, convinced her lungs were filling with water, convinced of iron above her head.
There was no panic now and Andy was reluctant as she slipped from the bed and shouldered on her robe. She took her time in the bathroom and then she padded down the hallway--there was Quynh and it all fell back into place. Quynh in their small kitchen, a bowl and a cloth still set on the table beside her, the water red with her blood. Andy leaned down to kiss her, and her fingers curled around Quynh’s hand, opening it, examining. The skin of her palm was smooth and unmarred.
“No change,” Quynh said. Andy wished she would stop checking.
“There’s time,” Andy said, though she didn’t think time would make a difference. She would grow old. Quynh would stay the same, and each day Quynh woke, and each day she checked her humanity and hoped for its return. And Andy would still grow old. Quynh would still stay the same. Andy wasn’t sure of many things, but she was sure of that. “We have so much time.”
There was a noise at the door and Andy turned to see the dogs shaking their butts, tails frantically swinging, desperate for entry.
“Bak,” Andy groaned as she watched him smear his wet nose across the glass, leaving a new wet streak over several dry stains at the exact same height. She opened the door and he and Cam rushed in and began to circle Andy’s feet. They were Icelandic sheepdogs, siblings, and there was never a day when Quynh didn’t delight in their presence. Even now she leaned down in her seat to hug Cam around her neck, to press her nose into the dog’s fur.
“You smell like snow.”
Not true. They smelled like dogs, but Andy was smiling as she turned to the counter to pour her coffee.
When this was over, Quynh would rejoin their fold. She’d return to Joe and Nicky and Booker and Nile and they would welcome her. What else could they do? What else could she do? She couldn’t stay there forever. She couldn’t sit by Andromache’s grave for eternity. They burned Lykon on a pyre and carried his ashes for centuries before letting him go over the land he’d called home. When Andy’s time was finished, Quynh would move on, just as Andy had tried to move on from Quynh.
Anyway, it wasn’t time for that yet. Andy’s time wasn’t over.
“I would grow old at your side,” Quynh whispered to Andy on cold northern nights, the wind howling outside their windows and their dogs curled up in front of the stove.
“We have so much time,” Andy returned.
**
They watched the sun rise on that beach outside of Plymouth, their blood in the surf, mixing in with the rain and sinking into the sand.
“What will I do?” Quynh asked. She spoke the words into the skin of Andy’s shoulder and Andy shivered at the rain and the cold and the touch of Quynh’s lips. Their clothes were soaked and torn. They had a stolen car and a bag of weaponry. She hadn’t thought this moment through, not entirely. She was hardly equipped to answer questions about their future.
She tried anyway and said: “The same thing we’ve always done. You’re one of us. You’re still one of us and you always will be. You stay and we’ll work through it together.”
Quynh considered this quietly and eventually she said: “And what, Andromache? Fight for the people who did this to us?”
Andy shook her head. It was never for them. “Fight for the rest of them.”
“They’re all the same.”
Andy squinted up into the rain, felt the water hit her forehead. “I thought so too, not that long ago.” She would show Quynh Copley’s work. She’d show Quynh the difference that they could make, the difference they had made. It’d never been possible to see the scope of it all before, to really understand their reach. It was difficult to see that it made any difference at all, but it had, and they had, and Copley had the proof of that. Quynh would see it and she’d understand.
Quynh pushed herself up on her elbow to look down at Andy with narrowed eyes. “You’ll be dead in a year.”
She seemed more balanced now. Quieter. Andy could no longer see the desire for destruction thrumming beneath her skin. It would return, no doubt. It’d return, and Andy would quell it, and it would return, and they’d do this again. She’d fight it back until it was gone and forgotten.
She shifted beside Quynh, brought a hand to her cheek, fingers catching in Quynh’s dark hair. “You don’t know that.”
“Don’t I? There was a time when I knew you better than anyone could possibly know another person. I think I still do. So tell me, how many times did you die in the last year?”
The answer was five, but that didn’t include the damage done that didn’t end in death. It didn’t count the wounds that healed before they had time to kill her.
Andy shook her head. Quynh was probably right. It didn’t matter; it was only one option. There were others.
“Okay, just you and me then,” Andy offered. Quynh turned to look up the beach and Andy set a hand on her arm to draw her back. “Look at me. Maybe you’re right. I’m out of the game, too fragile. We can leave, the two of us.”
“Just you and me,” Quynh repeated.
“Until the end,” Andy agreed.
“Until your end,” Quynh corrected. “And then?”
And then Quynh could do whatever she wanted. There was plenty of time to convince Quynh she wanted to live in the world instead of tearing it down.
“I’ll get to watch you grow old,” Quynh said with a hint of wonder in her voice.
“Great,” Andy laughed. “I get to watch you not grow old.”
In all of this, in all that had happened since they found Nile, since Andy lost her immortality--she never actually considered the possibility that she would live long enough to grow old. She’d sort of thought she’d go out in a blaze of righteous glory, a hailstorm of bullets, Quynh’s knife plunged mercifully through her heart. Never once did she consider that she might just live a normal life beside the woman she’d always loved.
“Andromache?” Quynh asked, after a long moment of silence. “How are we getting back?”
A man had appeared, walking a dog far off at the other end of the beach. He was a long way away, moving slowly, but the dog was loping ahead and would catch sight or smell of them soon enough.
“We’ll take the car,” Andy murmured, reluctant to leave this moment behind, the real peace of having Quynh back and whole in her arms.
“And clothes? Are we to walk naked through the streets of Plymouth?” Quynh was smiling. “I tried it just a few months back in Saint Malo. Times have changed, but not that much. A naked woman in the streets still causes quite the stir.”
“Might be fun.”
In the end they found a pile of folded blankets in the trunk of the stolen car.
Back in the city, they paused, blanket-wrapped outside of the house. “They might attack,” Andy said. “I’ll do what I can to keep them off you.”
Quynh shrugged. “Let them. Then we’ll be even.”
**
Andy picked Nile up from the airport in Reykjavik. Nile was bundled in the biggest sweater Andy had ever seen, most of her face obscured beneath a hat and scarf, and Andy had to hug her pretty damn tight to feel the hard muscle Nile had hidden away under all of that soft.
Nile took one look at Andy, thermal fleece, no hat and no gloves. “I overdressed.”
Andy laughed. “You’re just right.”
Nile stared out across the parking lot at the low rise of the hills beyond. “I don’t know why I expected snow.”
“It’ll be here soon enough.”
Andy tossed Nile’s bag into the back of her jeep and then opened the front door for Nile, ushered her inside. Nile talked non-stop for the start of the drive, about travels, and a new friend that Andy knew could not last. It was difficult to make connections when you knew you couldn’t stay.
“Damn,” Nile said, reaching up to push back Andy’s hair. “You’re turning grey?”
“Shh,” Andy said. She knocked Nile’s hand away.
“How old were you when you died anyway?” Nile asked.
Andy wasn’t actually sure. She might have known once. It lost importance over the years. Her fake IDs provided a range of ages between thirty-five and forty-five, so she split the difference and said, “I don’t know. Forty, maybe?”
“Course you don’t know,” Nile said.
Nile came with baklava from their travels, with a promise to relay Andy’s guesses as soon as she tried it.
“How are they?” Andy asked. She didn’t mean the sweets.
“They’re good,” Nile said. “Everybody’s good.”
“Booker?”
Nile nodded, and when she continued her voice was a little slower, a little less sure. “Yeah. Booker’s good.”
Andy laughed. She wasn’t fooled. Nile punched her shoulder. “Who told you?”
“Booker told me! I’ve been waiting months for you to spill and you’re over here talking about some new friend.”
Nile shrugged. “It’s still new, but you know, it’s good. You know that’s not why I’m here. I want to hear about you.”
Andy smiled, big and wide.
Nile sucked at her lips, attempted to repress her own smile. “That good, huh?”
Andy gripped the steering wheel tight as she leaned forward, then pushed back in her seat. She grinned over at Nile. “It’s so good. So good.”
**
They were mostly silent as Andy announced their plans. They’d move somewhere quiet. Andy would remove herself from danger. Most of the danger. All of the danger except for Quynh.
Joe nodded. His eyes look wet. Nicky looked at the floor. Nile was the hardest to convince. She stood before Andy with her arms folded over her chest and her eyes narrowed in Quynh’s direction.
“And if she tries to kill you?” Nile asked.
“She won’t,” Andy said.
Quynh stayed quiet, and after a moment she left the room, leaving Nile to discuss her freely. Nile relaxed, just a fraction. Her shoulders slumped and she moved forward to sit down beside Andy.
“She nearly did,” Nile countered. Some of the heat had drained from her body, but it was still there in her face. Andy set a hand on Nile’s knee and sighed.
“We’re learning,” Andy admitted. “None of us are used to being breakable, but she’s learning. Death means something different now.”
Nile chewed on this for a long moment. She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. “I don’t like it.”
“You don’t have to like it,” Andy said. “You just have to trust me.”
**
That night they were quiet, coupling in silence, in rushed breathing and swallowed gasps. They’d done this so many times, sliding silently together while the others slept, slipping away just far enough to feel alone. The quarters weren’t so tight here. Nile was set up in the other room on the couch. Their door was shut, but they spoke in hushed whispers, touched in soft sighs.
“She looks at me different now,” Quynh said the next morning. “She’s settled into my presence.”
“I would hope so,” Andy snorted. “It’s been a year.”
“A year is nothing.”
“For you. It’s still something for Nile.” A year was something for Andy now too.
Sometimes Quynh smiled, and Andy’s life flashed before her eyes. Two thousand years of that same smile, a laugh that transformed an entire face. There were people who got sick of looking at each other in five years, ten, fifteen. They didn’t understand. They couldn’t understand what it was like to never ever tire of seeing one face.
Quynh turned that face toward the ceiling and Andy studied the sharp lines of her profile. Every night Quynh wished to wake mortal. Every night she whispered promises into Andy’s ear. “We’ll bend like trees in the wind. Old and happy.”
And each day Quynh sliced the skin of her hand, each day she watched it heal before her eyes. At first glance, she was Quynh at rest, but Andy knew where to look and she found the slight bouncing of Quynh’s knee beneath the table.
“Where’s Nile?”
“She took the dogs out for a run,” Quynh said, frowning, still disappointed by the absence of change. “They’re down on the beach.”
Andy pressed her hand to Quynh’s shoulder and stared out the glass door toward the figures frolicking in the black sand.
**
There were repeats of the night on the beach in Plymouth, just twice more over the course of a year, and then once the night after Nile left. She wrapped Quynh in a hug so tight that when Quynh laughed, it sounded like Nile was squeezing the air out of her, like the stretch of a balloon, high and long. Quynh stayed behind while Andy drove Nile back to the airport.
“We miss you,” Nile admitted as they got close. She’d said it a dozen times since she’d arrived. “It isn’t the same.”
“What you’re doing is important,” Andy said. “I can’t be part of that now. I’d just hold you back.”
“And Quynh,” Nile said.
“And Quynh,” Andy agreed. She wasn’t ready, but she would be. Andy would grow old and Andy would leave and Quynh would be ready for them.
“I like her,” Nile admitted. “I see her now. I see how you are with each other.” It was nice to hear, nice of Nile to say, and then Nile punched her shoulder and said, “Joe was right though. You two really do need to learn the meaning of quiet.” She mimicked a low breathy moan. “You’d think in a country this cold, the walls would be thicker.”
“He did not say that. We’ve always been very discreet.”
Nile snorted and stared out at the hills.
They hugged long and hard at the airport. Andy gave as good as she got. And then she returned to the cottage and found Quynh already standing in the ocean.
“It’s cold!” she shouted from the edge of the beach.
“It’s always cold,” Quynh shouted back, but she understood. She understood the smell of snow on the air. She understood that Andy should not expose herself to the surf for too long. She moved back onto the sand and she pressed her knife into Andy’s hand.
**
Nearly two years, and a morning like any other. Quynh at the table with her bowl and her cloth. The dogs pressed eager noses against Andy’s thigh, hoping for a scrap of breakfast. A long walk in the afternoon, a cup of tea while Andy watched Quynh paint, thick layers on canvas, blotches of blue on Quynh’s arms and Quynh’s cheek. And then in the evening, Andy misjudged a distance--that still happened, even after thousands of years--and her glass of wine hit the edge of the table wrong. It shattered in her hand and sliced the skin of her thumb.
Quynh rushed to Andy’s side and fell to her knees, heedless of the shards of glass scattered over the floor. “Let me see it.”
“It’s nothing,” Andy said, with a shrug. “It’s just a slice.”
“Let me see.”
Andy opened her hand, turned it to show Quynh her thumb. “It just needs a small bandage. It’ll be fine.”
Quynh frowned and wiped the blood away with her fingers.
“There’s nothing.”
“I know, I told you it was--” Andy stilled. She closed her eyes. “Don’t.”
“Look, Andromache. You know me. You know I wouldn’t lie about a thing like this.”
Andy did know Quynh and Quynh would not lie about a thing like that. Andy felt Quynh’s fingertip slide over her skin. There was no pain. Quynh’s finger didn’t catch on a wound, didn’t spark Andy’s nerves. Andy opened her eyes and looked.
Nothing. Andy rubbed her fingers against her thumb. Nothing. Not even blood now that Quynh had wiped it away. There had been blood, though. Andy could see the smear of it on Quynh’s skin. But the cut itself, sealed. Gone as if it never happened.
“No,” Andy said. She felt dizzy and folded down to her knees. Quynh was waiting there to catch her, to wrap her in strong arms. “No. No, no.” It couldn’t be right. It couldn’t be real. She stood and went to the counter. She found Quynh’s knife. She didn’t bother with the bowl or the cloth.
“Andromache,” Quynh said gently, from her place on the floor. She didn’t rush after Andy or try to pull the knife from Andy’s hand. She already understood the truth of it.
“No.”
“Andy.”
Andy ignored her and pressed the blade into the palm of her hand. She hissed as it sliced through skin. By the time Quynh pulled herself up from the floor, the wound had closed. Andy dropped the knife on the counter, listened to it bounce once before settling within its small splatter of blood.
There was no reason to it. No pattern. It wasn’t one full year, nor was it two. There was nothing special about the day Andy died. Nothing special about the day she knew she was able to die again. There was nothing significant about now, this moment, when she knew she was immortal once more. It might not even have happened today. This could have happened days ago, but without wounding herself, how could she have known? It could end again tomorrow, and how would she know?
No. No, it was nonsensical. It was wrong.
She rushed from the house, the dogs following at her feet. She rushed out onto the black sand of the beach. She lost herself in the roar of the waves, and she screamed, and she screamed. She stayed out there all night, and Quynh--Quynh knew her well enough to wait, joining her in the sand sometime during the early hours of the morning, the world still dark, the ocean still endless black.
“Well? What do you think?”
“I need to finish what we started in Plymouth,” Andy said. “I need it done right. Kill me. Make me yours again.” Kill me, bathe in my blood, and kiss me alive again with everything forgiven. This endless life really had done a number on them. Two years of mortality couldn’t change that.
Quynh leaned her head against Andy’s shoulder, the warmth of the house still caught in her hair. “Shh. You’re mine. You’ve always been mine.”
“You know it won’t be real until I feel it,” Andy said. The life extinguished then ignited again. She had to feel it to know for sure. “You know if you won’t do it, I’ll just do it myself. I’d rather it be you.”
“You might not come back,” Quynh warned. “If you don’t come back, I don’t know what I’ll do.”
She’d tear the world apart, but it wouldn’t come to that. “I’ll come back,” Andy promised. “I can feel it.”
Quynh shook her head. “We don’t know. This is all so new.”
Quynh was right, of course. Andy did not feel the change when it happened the first time. She did not feel it when it happened again. “I can feel it,” she insisted anyway, an echo of Quynh that first night.
Andy had a lot of time out there on the beach. She had a lot of time in the surf and the wind. She thought, perhaps, this was how it went. She thought that if Lykon had realized, if they’d moved him to safety and they’d waited it out, he would have passed through it too. “I need it done. I want to feel your mouth on mine, kissing me back to life.”
They were Quynh’s words, always more romantic than Andy. She felt Quynh soften against her and knew that she’d won.
“I’ll get the knife,” Quynh said, finally. She moved to stand, but Andy caught her arms.
“Not the knife.” There was no other way. “I have to drown.”
Quynh was quiet for what seemed a very long time. Her head settled back on Andy’s shoulder and she stared out at the ocean. Eventually she stood. She walked to the edge of the sand, and then out into the surf. Once there, she turned back to look at Andy.
It was time.
I want to hold you beneath the waves and watch you drown so that I can suck the sea from your lips.
The water felt ice cold against her ankles, even worse against her shins. The dogs were shut in the house and if Andy stood still long enough, listened hard enough, she could almost imagine the sound of their barking, their agitated pacing at the door. She continued into the waves, away from the warmth of their home, into the cold Atlantic Ocean, into the arms of her Quynh.
How many times had she done this before? How many times in the last five hundred years, imagining Quynh was there to hold her down. Instead it was Joe and Nicky on the ship, Andy far below. Instead it was the fights when they inevitably pulled up the chain too soon, unable to bear for a day what Quynh bore for centuries. Andy was good at drowning, but Quynh was the expert.
She knew exactly how long it would take, how long to hold. The water rushed into Andy’s lungs. Andy fought, but Quynh knew how Andy fought, knew exactly how to fight back.
And the world went black.
**
Life rushed in, a burst of adrenaline, heart beating too fast, body twitching awake. She was still in the water. She could feel Quynh’s hands tight on her arms. She opened her eyes and at first saw nothing but black. And then Quyhn moved into her field of visit, her eyes dark and her mouth set in a line.
The waves rocked against them, tried to dislodge Quynh’s feet, but she held fast, leaned in, pressed a hard kiss to Andy’s lips.
“Welcome back, my love.”
And then she pushed Andy under again.
**
Another life lost, another life started with Quynh’s mouth sucking salt from her skin. Andy turned to cough water back into the sea. It tore at her throat, burned in her nose.
“How does it feel?” Quynh asked in her ear. She must be screaming to be heard over the crash of the waves. It felt like a whisper against Andy’s skin.
It didn’t feel right. It felt far too kind.
Andy caught Quynh’s jaw in her hand, made sure Quynh saw the set of her eyes. It hurt to talk, but it wouldn’t last long. Her voice came out a ragged rasp. “Hold me down and keep me there for as long as you can.”
Quynh started to shake her head. She stopped. She nodded.
Quynh wanted this too.
**
Andy tried to scream, but had no air. She tried to breathe, but her lungs were full. She felt Quynh on her, Quynh’s fingers digging into her skin, Quynh’s knees digging into her hips. She thrashed twice. She died. She died again and again and again.
She lost count. She lost time. She lost it all except for the water, except for Quynh, and then finally, she opened her eyes and she wasn’t in the ocean. She wasn’t on the sand. She was in the warmth of their home. She was in their bed, and Quynh was there, her fingers light on Andy’s arms, her knee pressed in between Andy’s thighs.
Andy pulled her in. She came back to life.
**
“What will you do now?” Quynh asked, looking down at Andy, her head propped in her hand. It had been three days since the beach.
“What kind of question is that?” Andy asked, without a second of hesitation. “I’ll stay with you, if you’ll have me. Until the end, remember?”
“I remember,” Quynh said. She studied the lines of Andy’s face, the grey strands of hair at her temple. She leaned in to kiss the hairline there, and then, still close to Andy’s ear, she said: “You’re already restless, thinking of them.”
“I’m not.”
Quynh laughed and pushed Andy’s shoulder. “You think you can lie? To me? I see through each and every one of your lies, Andromache. You’ve been restless for two years. It’s a fact.”
“I’m restless,” Andy admitted. “This isn’t like--we’ve taken breaks from each other before. You know that. We go our separate ways, a long holiday. One year, five. But they’re out there, doing what we do without us. They’re out there doing the work that we set in motion: you and me and Lykon. Of course, I’m restless.”
Quynh kissed her, familiar lazy kisses. Kisses perfected over millennia, exquisite kisses, tailored precisely for their mouths. When they surfaced again, some time later, Quynh said, “If we went back to them, would they have me?”
“Yes,” Andy said, without a single doubt. “Of course.” What was one moment? What was one month in relationships that lasted centuries? “Can you do it, though? Can you go back to them, go back to the work after everything?”
“I can do it for you,” Quynh said. “And if I do it for you, I’ll understand it again and it’ll be for me too.”
They took their time thinking it over. They took months. Months of long calls, logistics to discuss and relationships to consider. There was Bak and there was Cam and the house. The house could be sold. The dogs would move with them. Copley would arrange it all. And in the morning Andy said, “Are you ready?” And in the afternoon Quynh returned, “Not yet.”
This went on.
Sometimes they didn’t think about it at all for a week. They went about their lives as though nothing had changed. Quynh checked her palm less frequently after Andy, but she still checked, a drop of blood into water before the wound was healed. She checked Andy’s too, and their blood danced together, mingled in the bowl.
No change.
And then finally, three months after Andy drowned, Quynh came in from the snow, the dogs trailing behind her. She paused to kiss Andy with icy lips. She pressed her thumb into Andy’s palm and said, “Promise you won’t go into battle without checking this first.”
Andy looked up. “It could happen anytime.”
“It could,” Quynh agreed. “But if circumstances allow, beforehand we check, like it was in the years after Lykon.”
Andy nodded. Of course, they’d made this promise before. Nothing changed, and with time the little rituals were forgotten, and then they were lost to the sea. Now they would start again.
Quynh kissed her a second time and then released Andy’s hand and disappeared into their bedroom. A moment later Quynh returned. In one hand she held her bow. In the other, Andy’s axe.
“All right,” Quynh said. “Let’s go to work.”