in the sea that's painted black (you're a king and i'm a lionheart)
The others will come for him, Nicky knows. They always have. That’s what they do, what they’ve always done, when it seemed they could accomplish very little else: They find one another.
His head thunks hollowly against the door of the van. He misses Joe already.
“Sad we didn’t grab your boyfriend, too?” one of the soldiers asks with a derisive little chuckle.
Joe is the romantic, the one who has a way with words. Nicky swallows, looking up at where the night sky should be, and does his best.
“You can call him my boyfriend if you like, if you want to call a galaxy a single star.”
A different soldier laughs awkwardly and mutters something that probably isn’t very nice. Nicky kills them all because he can, because he wants to, because he misses Joe and they hurt him and...
And in the back of his mind he knows he saw Joe crumple, but didn’t see him rise. And he knows that any time, every time, could be the last.
Not without me, he thinks fiercely as the blood dries tacky on his skin. Not ever, not anywhere without me. Your death has always been mine.
He doesn’t fight when they take him in. Maybe he should. But in the back of his mind he is afraid to die.
No, that’s not exactly it. He’s dodged death so long it wouldn’t be an unwelcome guest.
He just desperately does not want to be alone when it comes to call.
XXXCCCXXX
“I can still feel pain, you know,” he says when the doctor lifts a scalpel.
She gives him a curious look, and then she cuts him open anyway.
The biopsies and the blood drawings—enough to leave him dizzy, in pain, tools pinning him open so the wounds never quite close—at least leave physical evidence. Nicky can turn his head and tell himself that that pain was real. It happened. Someone took a piece of him and it hurt because he is alive.
(He just has to hold to that. The others will find him soon, it can’t be that hard.)
The doctor snaps six of his ribs and times their healing and when it’s over there is nothing to mark that it happened at all. No one speaks to him; when they talk over and around him he’s lucky if he gets to be him at all instead of “it” or “the subject.” He hasn’t heard his own name since Joe screamed it on the night he was taken. He has a number now. 163. That’s all he is. A number and no scars at all, tubes of blood and petri dishes with parts of organs.
They cut off one of his fingers, not to study it, just to watch it grow back. It takes fifteen minutes. Nicky bites a hole through his own tongue three times because that heals so much faster.
Pain, though. Pain he can handle. It’s an old friend and his healing takes care of it quickly enough.
Or, it should.
They start trying to suppress it.
( Any day now, Yusuf, Nicky thinks as they click new cuffs around his wrists. Whenever you feel like getting a move on, here. I’m waiting. )
The cuffs are not to tie him to the bed. They are, as he finds out about twelve hours after they’re put on, to shock him if he drifts off to sleep.
( Please. )
They don’t feed him, either. Not for several days. Nicky loses track of everything except the pain of more samples being extracted from him. The pain of his empty stomach. The white lightning in his bones whenever he gives in to sleep. If anyone tries to talk to him, he doesn’t hear.
Screw Joe and everybody. Nicky is pretty sure he wants to die.
( Please, he whispers to the ceiling when he thinks he is alone. Please, please, please. I want it to be over. I want to see your face, but I’m so tired. )
The doctor makes six neat slashes on his bicep and watches as they gush blood. Nicky can feel his body trying to heal, as slow and sluggish as his thoughts. It takes too long. Far too long. He thinks with the right type of injury he could die for real, like this. Before his time.
(Joe is dead. Nicky knows that Joe is dead because the others wouldn’t leave him, they wouldn’t, but even if they did Joe would never. So. Logic follows that Joe is dead and Nicky is alone.)
They give him a day to rest, to eat, to stop being electrocuted. Not to stop being in pain, of course, but some of it. Then the doctor stabs him in the shoulder and tips something into the wound, and he doesn’t even care because finally, finally he can sleep. The infection wakes him up hours later, fever ripping through his body as the bloody wound struggles to heal.
It must be days later, by the progression of it, when his skin starts to rot.
“Please,” he begs, out loud this time, to the doctor. “Please, kill me, please, just let me be done. I’m done.”
She smiles. “You’re not done until we say you are.”
She cuts him open and takes a sample of his liver. She makes little cuts all along his abdomen that bleed and bleed and bleed. Then she leaves him alone.
XXXCCCXXX
It takes two false leads, four ruined facilities, countless bodies, and three endless weeks to track down which lab they have Nicky in. Joe knows, standing outside of it, that he looks a mess. He hasn’t changed clothes in days, and he’s covered in blood and ashes. He can’t really bring himself to care. No one else brings it up.
“I’m taking point,” he says, unnecessarily, and he goes in.
The team is really sort of redundant, at this point. Andy is the warrior god, but Joe has a millennium of experience himself, and he feels sort of godlike as he tears through one level of the facility after another. Unstoppable.
(Most of his experience comes from fighting Nicky.)
His love has always been an ocean, a night sky, a warm summer breeze. Beautiful and powerful and bounded by nothing.
He molds it into rage and uses it to kill, and in his wake leaves only blood.
Finally, they reach the lab where Nicky is being held. The doctor crumpling to the floor, a hole between her eyes, is an afterthought. Joe has eyes only for the pale, thin figure on the bed next to her.
He’s so pale. He’s so thin.
He’s so very, very still.
He’s bleeding.
Joe brushes some of the hair out of his face, feeling a ghost of breath on his fingertips as he does.
“Oh, my Nicky,” he whispers. “Amore mio. What have they done to you?”
Nicky’s eyelids flutter like butterfly wings and his eyes crack open. It takes a moment for his gray-green gaze to focus.
“Yusuf,” he whispers, barely a breath. “I’ve been waiting.”
Joe cradles his head, so, so gently. “I know, my love. I’m so sorry, I came as fast as I could-“
Nicky’s face screws up with pain. “I thought maybe it would hurt less,” he murmurs. “Being dead.”
Joe’s blood and bones and heart freeze solid. “What?”
It’s then that he looks closely at the papery sheet covering most of Nicky’s body, including a small part lying over his left shoulder. At the rows and rows of blood vials and little bits of organs on the counters. He gingerly pulls the sheet back to Nicky’s waist and suddenly he wants the doctor alive again so he can kill her slowly. So many healing wounds. So many scabs and scars from ones not all the way there yet. He hopes and prays that Nicky hasn’t lost his immortality. Not now. Not here. Not like this.
“Hang on, Nicolo,” he murmurs, smoothing his hair out of his face and pressing a kiss to his temple. He’s soaked in sweat. “Hang on. I’ve got you. You’re not dying yet.”
Nicky’s eyes are already closed, but he mumbles, “Promise?”
“Swear on my life.”
Nicky smiles as sleep takes him. Andy comes closer and gingerly lifts the sheet covering Nicky’s shoulder. Immediately she puts it back down. “I know why he’s not healing.”
Joe moves to see, but her hand on his shoulder stops him. “You don’t want to see this.”
“I’ve already seen everything, Andy.”
“Trust me. Not this time.”
Joe shrugs her off and looks anyway, because it’s Nicky. After, when he’s done trying not to throw up, he stalks through the rest of the lab and kills everyone else he finds. It’s not enough. Most of them are dead already or managed to run.
Every time he blinks he sees angry black and red skin, yellow infection, a sight that belongs on rotting meat and not his lover’s body. As it turns out, he doesn’t need a gun to kill these men.
“Joe,” Andy says quietly when he comes back in. “ Yusuf .”
His answering “ What ” is loud, sharp, harsh.
Andromache the Scythian, of course, doesn’t flinch. “Stop it. Nicky needs you. Here.”
“Merrick is gone.”
She raises an eyebrow. “And?”
“ And I need him.” Joe’s fists clench and unclench at his sides, aching for violence.
“Do you need him? Or is it just that you need Nicky to be whole and you’re willing to take a broken Merrick as a shitty substitute?”
He looks away.
“Come here.”
With nothing else to do, he goes. Andy picks up Nicky’s uninjured arm, threading his limp fingers with hers for a moment, then offering his hand to Joe.
“This,” she tells him, “is your job. Until he’s better.”
“And after?”
Her eyes flash, dark and cold and cruel. “We’ll hunt Merrick down and you can do whatever you want to him.”
It’s a good deal. Joe nods and takes Nicky’s hand. Andy starts wrapping his shoulder while he focuses on Nicky’s face. As if a bandage will help anything now.
(It makes them all feel better, he supposes, which is help enough.)
“Booker, Nile,” Andy says a few minutes later. They come in from guarding the door. “We’re moving out. Book, can you-“
“Can I?” Joe asks, small.
Andy gives him a long look and nods. “I’ll take point, clear the way. You two guard Nicky and Joe. We, um, we don’t know-“
“I know,” Nile and Booker say together, before she has to admit that Nicky might be...that he might not...
Joe shakes the traitorous thoughts away and gently lifts Nicky in a bridal carry. They’ve done this before, a hundred times over.
He’s so light. Joe’s muscles tremble with the effort of holding them both so carefully together. Andy gives them an unreadable look and starts destroying everything that was taken out of Nicky.
The sound of breaking glass is cathartic.
Nicky groans, whisper-soft, and turns his head into Joe’s chest. His eyes open again and train on him.
“Ciao,” he says quietly.
“Ciao, Nicolo,” Joe murmurs back. Sometimes they use their native tongues for privacy, intimacy, subterfuge. Sometimes they use them because English is a much newer language, slippery. Hard to hold on to when...
Well, when this. Joe switches fluidly into Italian with a brief glance at the others, who are politely looking away even though they all learned each other’s languages centuries ago. “We’re taking you home, love.”
Nicky smiles again. “Good. It will be good to die with my family.”
“No,” Joe says. “Not today, not for a long time. You promised me another millennium at our last wedding, didn’t you?”
Nicky closes his eyes briefly, rocking with the motion of Joe’s steps. When he speaks again, it’s in English, picking carefully around the words. “Mm. But I am so tired, love.”
He sounds exhausted. Wrecked. Joe exchanges a worried glance with Nile and picks up the pace. The two of them slide into the backseat of the car outside, Nicky laid gently across them, while Andy and Booker throw themselves into the front seat. Nicky makes small, hurt noises whenever he’s jostled, which is almost constantly, but he isn’t keeping conversation anymore. Joe half thinks he’s fallen unconscious again as Andy guides them into traffic.
“Nearest hospital is about ten minutes, if we’re lucky,” she reports.
Nicky jerks, his good arm flailing to grab Joe’s shirt while he scrambles upright. “No,” he says, the loudest he’s spoken since they found him, looking straight at Andy.
She watches him back in the rearview mirror. “Nicky, your shoulder-“
“No hospital.” His grip twists in Joe’s shirt, trembling ever so slightly. “No doctors.”
“We’ll make up a story, Booker can hack into their records after, we won’t get caught.”
“No doctors,” Nicky repeats, shaking his head.
“But-“
“He said no, Andy,” Joe snaps, pulling Nicky against him. “We’ll figure it out. We always do.”
There’s a long, tense moment where Andy drums her fingers on the steering wheel and glares at the road.
“Fine,” she grits out at last. “Fine, fucking fine, die if you want to. No hospital.”
Nicky sags, boneless, pressing his face into Joe’s neck. Joe doesn’t so much hear as feel the words he whispers.
Grazie. Grazie. Grazie.
Thank you.
Joe thinks of the sterile white laboratory, the scalpels in neat rows beside Nicky’s bed, the soft beeping of machines, the doctor. He pulls one hand away as it forms a fist without his consent. He can’t get it to stop, so he rests it on his thigh and eases Nicky back down, so he’s lying flat out again.
“You’ll be okay, Nicolo,” he murmurs.
“If you say so,” Nicky replies into his stomach.
From anyone else it would be dubious, even snarky. But the thing is that Nicky means it. If Joe says he’ll be okay, it must be so.
If Nile notices him scrubbing a hand over one eye, she says nothing. Twenty minutes later, he carries Nicky into the next safe house, which isn’t that safe at all; they’ll have to move again in a few days. A week, at best.
Nicky will be fine within a week.
Joe carries him inside and lays him on a wooden dining table none of them will ever eat off of again, and he holds his hand. That’s his job. Booker begins tending to the smaller wounds. He cleans all of them, making Nicky hiss and writhe and grip Joe’s hand hard enough that his bones creak. He stitches up the ones that are still sluggishly bleeding and bandages the smaller ones. He even puts band-aids over the scars. It doesn’t help, except that it does.
While he works, Andy takes over the infected shoulder wound, thankfully shielding it from everyone else’s view. Nile runs for painkillers, since that’s not something they tend to keep on hand. After, she gets blankets and a pillow and a damp washcloth to try and bring the fever down. Water, soup, tea.
Joe traces Nicky’s skin with delicate fingers and whispers poetry into their entwined hands.
And then? They wait.
The others sleep in shifts, their work as complete as it can be, but Joe’s job isn’t done until Nicky is better, so he stays awake. Through the first day, the second, the third. By the third evening Nicky is looking better, especially around his shoulder. His fever’s broken and he can hold coherent conversations, when he can stay awake for them. When they aren’t about what happened.
Late on the third night, or maybe very early in the fourth morning, Andy leans on the table next to Joe. Nicky is asleep, as he so often is.
“It’s long past time for you to get some sleep,” she tells him.
“He’s not better yet.”
“And you’re no help running on fumes. Besides, as soon as he’s stable we both know you’ll want to find Merrick as soon as possible, and you can’t do that on three days of no sleep, either.”
“But-“
“Part of the experimentation involved sleep deprivation,” Andy says in a dark voice. “Do you think Nicky will be happy to find out you’ve been torturing yourself like this? You hide it well enough for now, but he’s no idiot.”
Joe bites his lip. “What if something happens?”
“One of us will always be watching. If anything changes, you’ll be the first to know.”
XXXCCCXXX
“Hey. Joe. Hey, wake up.”
Joe jerks awake, tangled in blankets, to Booker’s face inches from his own. It’s bright in the room, full of sunlight, but it could have been any length of time since Andy told him to sleep.
She said they’d wake him if anything changed.
“Nicky,” he gasps, grabbing Booker’s sleeve. “Nicky, is, is he-“
“See for yourself,” Booker says, tugging him up and into the small dining room.
For a millisecond nothing seems to have changed. Nicky still lies prone and bloody on the table, blankets drawn over him and a makeshift hospital crowding in on all sides.
Then Nicky sits up on one elbow, smiles a smile to rival the sun in her brilliance and the moon in her beauty. He says, “Hi, Joe. Surprise.”
The blanket on his chest falls away, revealing...nothing. No stitched-together holes, no cuts, no needle marks, not even a bruise or a scar. He taps the white bandage on his shoulder. “This one’s getting there. Give me another ten minutes and I’ll be good as new.”
“You...your immortality?”
Nicky grins, lopsided, and shakes his head. “Totally fine. Just had its hands full for a minute.”
Nicky is fine. Nicky is more than fine. Nicky is immortal, still.
Joe, for once, can’t think of a single thing to say, so he hauls Nicky in for a bruising kiss. He tenses for a moment before melting into it, cupping Joe’s face in his hands. He’s warm and real and alive and it is quite possibly one of their top ten kisses.
(Hey, they’ve been together for a thousand years. Nothing will ever quite beat that time in Malta.)
“You,” he whispers into Nicky’s mouth, “scared the shit out of me.”
“It was no picnic for me, either,” he murmurs. He kisses each of Joe’s eyes in turn, for no reason at all.
One of Joe’s hands slots neatly into place over his heart, feeling it thud steadily against his skin.
“You two better separate or get a fucking room,” Andy tells them, throwing a pillow at Joe.
“Will do, boss,” Joe replies, sweeping Nicky into his arms again despite his protests, carrying him back to the master bedroom Joe claimed four days ago, tossing him gently onto the double bed.
“You know, I’m practically all healed up, I don’t need to be carried around.”
“Maybe so. But it makes me feel better,” Joe says, straddling his thighs. He taps the bandage of Nicky’s shoulder. “Can I see?”
Nicky obliges, peeling it off. For a minute they both watch his skin steadily knitting itself back together. The wound is clean, all signs of infection long gone. Joe gently covers the wound again, leaning back. He watches Nicky watching him, memorizing his face, his eyes, his hair. Details already burned permanently into his memory, but made more fragile by how easily they were almost lost.
“You want to say something,” Nicky says, resting a hand on his knee.
“No I don’t.”
“Yeah, you do.”
Joe looks down, threading their fingers together. “I want to tell you you’re beautiful.”
“That’s not what you wanted to say.”
“I always want to say that.”
“Even when I’m half-dead with my skin rotting off me?”
Joe sucks in a breath. “Yeah. Even then.”
“You do want to talk about the half-dead part, though.”
“No.” It isn’t, technically, a lie.
Nicky tucks his good hand behind his head, staring Joe down. “Then what? I’ve known you for a millenium. I know when you’re chewing on something you don’t want to tell me.”
Joe sighs. “How much do you remember from when we rescued you at the lab?”
Nicky’s expression clears. “Ah. That.”
“You acted like you were ready to die. And the way you were bleeding, I really...I really thought you’d lost it.”
“Well, to be fair, I sort of thought you were dead, which didn’t help the whole ’will to live’ thing.”
Joe sits up straighter. “You thought I was dead?”
“It took you a long time to find me. I figured that, uh, you would never just not come find me. So. You had to be dead.”
“I’m so sorry.” Joe smooths his hair out of his face, not that Nicky needs him to anymore. “They had you well-hidden, but I swear, we never stopped looking. I never stopped.”
“I know,” Nicky says softly, cupping his cheek. “I know you didn’t. C’mere, I’ve been laying down for days and I’m about to go stir-crazy and run away.”
“Don’t you dare,” Joe says.
“Come cuddle, then, and I’ll have an excuse to hang around.”
Joe collapses into bed, nudging Nicky onto his right side and slotting up behind him, an arm slung gently around his waist and their legs tangled together.
“You didn’t sleep much while I was missing, did you,” Nicky murmurs.
“I slept enough.”
“You’re such a liar. At least you’re cute.” Nicky twists to kiss him on the nose. “Go to sleep. I’m okay. You’re okay. It’s over.”
(It isn’t over, not until Merrick is bloody and screaming and then dead, but it is enough.)
Joe settles his palm over Nicky’s strong heart and buries his face in his shoulder, and he sleeps.
XXXCCCXXX
When Nicky wakes up, his back is cold. No one is shouting and the air doesn’t smell like burning or blood, so he waits. Maybe Joe went to make tea. Maybe he’s talking to the others. Maybe...lots of things.
(He’s nervous. He hates waking up alone at the best of times, which this is decidedly not.)
A few minutes crawl by before Nicky flings the covers off and pads into the main room. It’s just Andy there alone, and instinctively he knows they’re the only ones in the house.
“What’s going on?” he demands. “Where’s Joe?”
“Out. Pack your stuff, once he gets back we’re moving to a better safe house. This one was only temporary while we fixed you up.”
“He took Nile and Booker along.” Andy doesn’t answer. “It’s not a job, if it was a job you would be with them and he would’ve told me. And you don’t need three immortals for a milk run. Not at midnight.”
Andy stares at the wall. The truth settles like a stone in Nicky’s gut.
“He’s hunting him. Merrick. He’s going after him, fuck, why would you let him do that?”
Finally Andy looks at him, sharp and reproachful. “He kidnapped and tortured you, Nicky, what did you expect us to do? I only stayed so you wouldn’t be alone. Otherwise I’d like a piece of the bastard myself.”
“He’s too close to this, he’ll take unnecessary risks, he’ll get angry...you don’t even know what you sent them into, what if they get taken instead, what are we going to-“
“Nicky, please shut up. Joe is fine. Four days ago, yes, I would’ve worried. But he’s not going to do anything that might mean he doesn’t come home to you. They’re taking Merrick from a party, not infiltrating a lab. I gave Joe 24 hours off the grid before he has to check in, three days at the most before he has to come back.
“Why would he need three days to kill—” Nicky swallows. “Oh. Okay.”
Andy tosses him something—a burner phone. “That’s what he’ll call. Figured you should have it.
“Thanks,” Nicky mutters. “Do you, uh, want some tea?”
They have tea. They sit. They wait. Andy goes to bed around sunrise, but Nicky is too restless. She cooks for them both, as much as sandwiches count as cooking, and they sit and wait again.
“Should be soon. He left around nine,” Andy nods at the clock. 8:50.
8:52. 8:55. 8:59. 9:00.
The phone stays dead and silent in Nicky’s hand.
“Give him a minute,” Andy murmurs, but her shoulders are tense.
9:04. 9:12. 9:18.
“Something’s wrong,” Nicky says. “He should’ve called by now.”
Andy, like usual, has no answer.
At 9:24, the phone rings. Nicky jumps and presses it to his ear, already breathless as if he’s been running.
“Hello, Joe,” he says.
“Nicky? Nicky, put Andy on the phone, it’s-“
“I know you went after Merrick. What, you couldn’t trust me to know that? You couldn’t even say goodbye? What are you doing to him?”
Until this moment Nicky hadn’t realized he was angry.
“I’m just giving him a taste of his own medicine,” Joe says. In the background, a man screams.
“That doesn’t make it okay.”
“Ask me if I care.”
It hurts, this cruel side of Joe. It hurts more because Nicky knows he wouldn’t be any better. And he’s scared.
“Please come home,” he says, switching tactics. “I woke up and you were just gone and now you’re out torturing a man in my name-“
“I’ll come home when it’s over, Nicky.”
“I don’t want you to be this person.”
“He deserves it. You know that he does.”
“That doesn’t mean I want you to play judge, jury, and executioner about it!” Nicky pinches the bridge of his nose, hissing out a breath. “Please. I don’t want you to, to stoop to his level. To occupy the same space as him. He doesn’t deserve that. You don’t deserve that.”
“To, what, be tainted by him?” Joe asks, faintly amused, still gripping the leash of his anger.
“ Yes, that,” Nicky says. “Please come home.”
“Andy gave me three days.”
“I miss you. Do you know how, how scared I was when I woke up and you were gone?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t want to wake you.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“I didn’t want you to try to stop me,” Joe admits. Something thuds or snaps or clangs in the background, and a man—Merrick, has to be—screams again. “Look, I have to go-“
“Back to torturing a man?”
“I’m doing this for you, Nicolo. ”
Nicky sighs. “No, you’re not. I didn’t ask you to. You’re doing this for you.”
“Nicky-“
“Come home.”
“Give me some more time.”
Nicky glances at Andy, who looks steadily back, offering up nothing. “You have six hours,” he says roughly. “And even that is too much.”
“Put Andy on the phone.”
Wordlessly Nicky hands it over. Andy looks at the phone, then at his face, and tells Joe, “What he said. No, Joe, I’m serious. Listen to your boyfriend, husband, eternal life partner, whatever the hell you two call yourselves these days.”
( Everything, Nicky thinks to himself, even though it’s hardly the time for it. We’re everything. )
“Okay. Okay. Six hours, Joe, don’t forget. Do I need to get Booker and Nile on the phone and tell them, too? Okay. Fine. No. Talk to him when you get home. Yes, Yusuf, now go, you’re wasting your time. Mhm. Bye.”
She hangs up and tosses the phone to Nicky again. “Okay?”
Nicky shrugs. “I guess so. I wish he wouldn’t have...but I guess I’m a hypocrite, because I would have a hard time not doing the exact same thing. But it, it’s Joe.”
That doesn’t make sense, except that it does.
(Here’s what they didn’t talk about, because Nicky wants to pretend he doesn’t remember. But the image of Joe covered head to toe in other people’s blood is seared into his memory.)
Andy nods, like she gets it. Probably she does. Their Joe, Nicky’s Joe, his night sky, his ocean, his clash of steel, his death and his love and his life. They’re all killers, all bloody deep down, but Joe is less than the rest of them. It isn’t him, doing this to Merrick.
Six hours.
Nicky doesn’t do anything. He makes tea only to let it get cold, barely touched. Andy makes him a sandwich that he picks at. The phone sits on the counter, silent.
When Joe finally shoulders his way through the door, Nicky jumps at the shattered quiet.
He pauses just inside the door. Nile and Booker slip around him like river water around a rock.
“Hey,” he says.
His clothes are clean. He could have been anywhere, doing anything, save for a streak of blood on his neck. Nicky zeroes in on it.
“Hey,” he says back.
Joe takes a step forward, hesitation written all over his face. And Nicky can’t stand any more waiting. He closes the distance, crushing him into a hug. Joe freezes, all wariness, and then hugs Nicky back just as hard. They are fingers digging into ribs and heads pressed together and twin hearts beating in time.
Finally Nicky pulls away. “You missed a spot,” he says quietly, touching his own neck where the tiny slash of red-brown cuts across Joe’s skin.
“Oh. Sorry.” He rubs it away and Nicky nods once, stiffly. “Are you mad?”
“Not really. Maybe a while ago I was. I’m tired of it now.”
They’ve been together too long to stay angry. Usually the lesson is that life’s too short, but, well...it’s them. Nicky’s found that life is too long. Five hundred years ago he might’ve dredged up sixty year old slights to win an argument, but that’s hardly fair. It’s also really hard to be mad at Joe for one day when they’ve had hundreds of thousands of them.
It’s really hard to be mad at Joe in general, actually, especially when Nicky has to look at his warm brown eyes, when they’re still close enough to touch.
“Is Merrick dead?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
“Good. Now come to bed, I’m exhausted. I’ve been waiting for you since I woke up.”
“You didn’t have to-“
“Joe.”
He subsides. They’re bad at sleeping when they’re apart.
“Besides, as Merrick helpfully figured out, sleep deprivation is not good for the immortality, and I did promise you another millennium a few years back, so.” He takes Joe’s hand and tugs him back to the bedroom.
Joe climbs in first, turning to face him as he slides under the covers. Nicky pokes his hip.
“Turn over.”
“But I always-“
“Yes, but turn around.”
Joe smiles softly, mystified, but humors him. To be fair, Nicky doesn’t really know why he’s doing this either. They always sleep the other way around. But tonight he feels like he needs to hold on rather than be held. He hooks his chin over Joe’s shoulder, pressing a kiss just under his ear.
“Are you okay?” he whispers.
“You’re the one who was recently tortured.”
“And you’re the one who had to watch. I’m fine, by the way. Totally healed up. I’ve dealt with worse people who just want to take me apart to see how I tick. I’ll live.”
Joe turns until he can look at him, his dark eyes shining in the light. “I hope you’ll do better than that,” he says softly.
“You’re dodging the question.”
“I’m fine.”
“Mhm. Try again.”
“I am. I’m not the one who almost...almost...”
“I didn’t.”
“But you could’ve. If we were a little slower in getting to you, if the doctor was just a little bit rougher...”
“But I didn’t. ” Nicky hugs Joe a little tighter. “I’m right here. I’m always gonna be here.”
“Not always.”
“As long as you’re here, I’m here.”
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”
Nicky smiles into his shoulder. “I won’t.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
Merrick is dead. There will be more like him, more threats, more blood. Someday, their immortality will fail them for real, and that will be the end. But for tonight, Nicky holds Joe in his arms and tastes blood behind his teeth as he swears to the unforgiving universe that when they go, they’ll do it like this. The way they do everything that matters.
Together.