Title Here
Joe loses track of Nicky during the battle. He finds himself crouched behind a rock in the woods, exchanging gunfire with two of their enemies. They’re only mortal, but slippery, and if they kill him it’ll be precious seconds before he’s back in the fray. He ducks behind cover, scanning briefly for Nicky through the trees. None of the immortals are within sight, but he can hear Andy’s war cry ringing through the trees. With a soft, frustrated noise, he takes another shot, and one of the terrorists goes down. There’s still the other one to deal with, though.
Of course, that’s when Joe’s gun jams.
“Dammit,” he hisses, drawing his sword as he vaults over the stone.
He dodges the first spray of bullets, save for one that grazes his arm. The wound heals within seconds, anyway, and by then Joe is knocking the gun from the terrorist’s hand.
His opponent draws a knife, a tiny, pitiful thing next to the broadsword, but deadly sharp and easy to get under Joe’s guard if he isn’t careful. The clang of metal on metal rings through the air, strange in this century but still deeply familiar. After a moment, Joe catches the man’s wrist and twists until the knife drops to the ground.
He has one brief second to revel in his victory before someone kicks out his knee from behind and pistol-whips him for good measure. It was the right move, of course, because it buys the terrorists a precious few seconds until Joe’s vision clears. He barely notices his sword being wrenched from his grasp—that is, until one of the men shoves him back against the nearest tree and the other one runs him through with it.
Awesome.
Then the guy lets go of the sword. It doesn’t move. He smirks.
“Fuck,” Joe breathes as they both take off back toward the battle. “Fuck, fuck, no-“
His skin, his insides are already knitting themselves back together, a sweet sort of pain. Then the healing skin curls around the blade and slices open again. Joe has to hold himself up, standing straight. As soon as he starts to slump the sword cleaves through more of his body. He should stay still, minimize the damage.
He’s already shuddering, shaking with the pain. There’s so much blood. His body will endlessly make more and he will never die, not like this.
The others will find him. They’ll get him out.
Unless the enemy finds him first.
If they killed him now, would he regenerate? Would it be worse if he did, just to die and come back to this?
Only a few minutes. That’s all he needs. The fighting will end soon and Nicky will find him and get him out.
Carefully Joe eases forward. The ground is uneven, and he has to go on his toes to follow the blade. He feels behind him for where the metal juts out of his back, dripping with blood, and then where it sinks deep into the tree. After several tries that only succeed in slicing his hands to ribbons, he gives up and starts to move back.
His foot slips in blood-smeared leaves and he screams as the sword cuts through him, rips him all apart as he struggles back up. Every tiny movement flays him wider open.
Maybe he can pull the sword out from the front.
His fingers—still healing, slow with his body preoccupied—are slippery with blood on the hilt. It takes a second to get a good grip.
Once he slices into his own spleen from wriggling, he gives up. It’s bleeding heavily now, but he is still healing. It’ll be a long time before he bleeds to death like this, if he ever does.
Fuck, but it hurts. Joe stops struggling and thunks his head back against the tree, staring at the sky through emerald leaves. He can’t stop shivering, flinching away from each touch of the blade even though he knows he’s only making it worse.
He can still hear the fighting going on.
“Nicky,” he whispers. “Come on.”
Nicky doesn’t.
XXXCCCXXX
Nicky loses track of Joe during the battle. They were fighting back to back among the trees, and then they had to roll away from a grenade, and then they were separated. Now, he paces through the forest in the aftermath, calling out.
“Joe! Where are you? Joe!”
He would know if he was dead.
Really dead.
He would know.
Right?
But Joe doesn’t answer him and the minutes tick by. He wasted precious time regenerating some truly vicious burns from a bomb thrown by a desperate terrorist. If Joe is hurt badly, if he’s lost, if they’re taking him, Nicky is wasting time. He has no idea how long they’ve been separated.
Don’t panic.
He checks his watch, the face cracked and smudged with blood, but still dutifully informing him that twelve minutes have passed since he started looking. He’s far from the original scene of the fighting now. There’s no way Joe is out here.
Unless someone took him.
“Joe!” Nicky shouts again, stopping in the middle of the woods. “ Yusuf! ”
A pair of birds takes to the sky in a panicked flutter of wings, but otherwise the forest is still. Nicky’s harsh breathing is the loudest sound there is.
And then he hears it, so faint it could be birdsong or the whisper of leaves, if not for the way it winds around Nicky’s heart and squeezes. A soft, pained groan.
“I’m coming!” he shouts, and starts pelting through the forest toward the sound.
It’s a macabre game of call-and-response. Nicky pauses every few seconds to shout Joe’s name, and after an agonizing silence he gets another noise like a dying animal and follows. It doesn’t stop. Regeneration, even for something big, shouldn’t take this long. He risks a glance at his watch as he pauses again near a huge boulder. Eighteen minutes since the fighting ended.
Too long.
His gaze catches on something behind his watch, on the rock: A smudge of red.
Joe was here. Nicky can feel it the way he felt him during the Crusades, chasing his enemy, his ghost, his heart. He’s so close.
The forest is so quiet.
“Come on, Yusuf!” he shouts, his voice hoarse from screaming and breathless from running and fear. “I’m here!”
The answer is so quiet he almost misses it under the thunder of blood in his ears.
“Nicolo.”
Nicky follows, scrambling up a hill—there’s a knife on the ground, small, bloody, and he tries not to look at it—and catching himself on a tree, scanning the area.
“Nicolo, per favore.”
A few more steps, following his lover’s strained whisper and the splashes of blood on the ground and-
Oh, no.
Oh, God.
“Yusuf,” Nicky whispers, rushing to him, hands fluttering everywhere and nowhere, wanting to help and wanting to wilt. There’s so much blood.
Joe’s foot slips and his body slumps a terrible inch or two, wringing a tremulous cry out of the ruin of his intestines. He straightens again as Nicky fumbles for his hand, grips his fingers slippery with red, useless. Their eyes meet.
“I died once already,” Joe whispers, like the blackest of secrets. “Coming back was worse.”
“I’m getting you out,” Nicky whispers back. “I’ve got you, just hang on.”
Joe nods and nods and nods and releases his hand. Nicky moves to grip the hilt of the sword, trying not to stare at where the blade disappears into Joe’s body.
“Andy! Nile!” he shouts. Screams, really. His voice doesn’t sound like his. “I found him!”
Twin shouts answer, scrambling in the woods. Nicky braces and yanks on the sword, as hard as he can. It moves, but not the right way, and Joe makes a sound like an airless scream as it jerks sideways. Blood spurts.
“Sorry, fuck, I’m trying-“
“It’s fine, Nicolo,” Joe says, his head lolling on his shoulders. “Just, just…”
He trails off, his chest heaving. Nicky thinks he can see his diaphragm. He swallows hard and plants his foot on the tree, adjusting his grip on the sword.
“I’m gonna go again, okay?”
Joe nods, a loose and uncontrolled movement. Fuck. How long has he been like this?
“What the fuck? ” Andy shouts just as Nicky yanks on the sword. Joe screams. Nile screams.
Nicky falls backwards of his own momentum, Joe’s blade thudding across his chest, slick with his blood.
Half a second later Joe’s body thuds to the earth. Nicky tosses the sword aside and scrambles through leaf litter to turn him on his back. He pulls Joe’s head into his lap, running his hands over every uninjured part of him he can reach. Joe reaches clumsily back for him, gripping hands and wrists and elbows as his insides knit themselves back together.
“You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay,” Nicky tells him, bending low enough to press their foreheads together. “It’s over. Everything is over.”
Joe leans up, pressing their heads together harder. “That was awful and I never want to experience it again,” he says seriously.
“I’m going to handcuff you to me in our next battle,” Nicky promises.
“That might—mmph, shit—make mobility difficult, but I’m not entirely opposed.”
Joe writhes as the healing goes on, but he’s alive and coherent enough to joke, and that’s more than enough for Nicky. He kisses him just because he can, laughs into Joe’s mouth when he realizes, not for the first time, that kissing upside down isn’t exactly what Spiderman makes it out to be. It’s okay.
It’s good.
“Are you two done?” Andy asks, but there’s a tremor of relief in her voice as she crouches to look at them. “Some of us would like to get out of the woods.”
“Some of us still have our intestines hanging out,” Joe replies.
“Oh, God, don’t say that,” Nile says as she comes up the hill, wiping her mouth. “I already can’t get the image out of my head.”
Andy makes a sympathetic noise and rubs her calf. Nile touches her shoulder and moves to Nicky’s other side.
“You okay?” she asks Joe, resting her fingertips on his arm.
“Peachy. Just fine. My organs are all whole again, which is nice. Give me another thirty seconds and I’ll be fine.” Joe gives her a reassuring smile and covers her knee with his hand.
“As always,” Nile murmurs, watching his wound close up.
As promised, Joe is good to go in another minute. Nicky gently shifts out from under him and stands, holding out his hand. Joe smiles and grabs his arm, groaning theatrically as he’s hauled to his feet. It’s ridiculous, but Nicky can’t stop himself giving him a once-over, just in case.
“I’m fine, Nicolo,” he murmurs, amused, and kisses him. “That’s our magic.”
“Mm. You were stuck to a tree for twenty minutes. Forgive me for worrying.”
Joe smiles fondly, and for once he seems to have no words, because he only kisses him again.
“Woods, active crime scene, immortals, any of this ringing alarm bells?” Andy asks lazily. “Bloody clothes we would all like to get out of, actual beds, showers, et cetera, et cetera.”
“Yes, Mom,” Nicky says.
Andy chucks a stick at his head. Laughing, Nicky tangles his fingers with Joe’s and follows her out of the woods, back to the safe house.
XXXCCCXXX
“I can feel you staring at me,” Joe says, not looking up from his sword. The blood is stubborn once it’s dried. He hasn’t even touched the hilt yet, and doesn’t want to think about cleaning every little crack in the engravings. And Nicky’s eyes have been boring into the back of his head for several minutes, since he finished cleaning his own sword.
“I’m not,” Nicky says, but when Joe glances over his shoulder he doesn’t even try to look away.
“Did you know,” he goes on, “that those twenty minutes or so where I couldn’t find you, and all I could hear was you in pain, when it should never have taken that long to heal, they were the longest twenty minutes of my entire life?”
Joe huffs a laugh, rubbing at a particularly stubborn bit of gore. “You’ve been alive for a millennium, Nicky. This is a blip.”
“It feels that way right now, though.”
“Humans are very present-oriented creatures,” Joe muses. “Even trauma is the result of the brain deciding that something terrible that happened in the past is still happening in the present.”
“Is that what’s happening?”
Joe snorts. “It was twenty minutes. At the very least the whole Merrick debacle ranks above that. I’m fine.”
“You didn’t see what you looked like. I never…I mean, we’ve done the lab rat bit. That, I understand. But I’ve never really thought about it. Being unable to heal and unable to die, not because of some science in a lab, just…because. No method, no strategy, no reason. Just blood. Just because someone wanted to hurt you. They didn’t even wait around to watch.”
“Nope.”
“They’re dead, now. All of them are dead, so.”
Joe sets his sword aside. He’ll finish cleaning the hilt later. When he turns, Nicky is sitting cross-legged on the bed, staring into the middle distance and not at him anymore. Joe joins him, settling on the mattress and taking his hands.
“They’re dead,” he says. “What’s bothering you so much about this, Nicolo?”
“Nothing. I don’t know.” He shrugs, sighs. “I hate when you get hurt? I wish they weren’t dead.”
Joe frowns. “Why?”
“So I could do it again. Make it hurt more. Like they deserved.” Nicky scrubs a hand over his face. There’s still blood under his fingernails. “They used your sword. I killed you with your sword once, do you remember?”
“I do,” Joe says quietly. “It was very quick. Clean.”
“Even when I hated you I was better than them.”
“I know.”
“The cruelty is the point. They didn’t care.”
“I know.”
“Do you ever think maybe they’re not worth it? People.”
“That’s dramatic,” Joe murmurs. “I’m fine, Nicky.”
“If you were anyone else, you would’ve been about three people, I think. For that much blood. And they knew you wouldn’t die, or that you would, but you’d come back. They just wanted you to suffer because they could. On your own sword.”
“Lots of people have wanted us to suffer just because they could make it happen,” Joe says.
“Yeah,” Nicky sighs. “I know. I’m overthinking. In a couple of days it’ll be nothing.”
Joe shifts until he’s propped up on the pillows. “Lie down with me.”
Nicky looks away, at his sword in the corner. Joe pats the bed. “Nicolo. Lie down.”
Reluctantly Nicky does. Joe lies on his back and Nicky rolls onto his side. He wastes no time in pushing Joe’s shirt up, high enough to trace slow swirls on his stomach, right where there ought to be scars. Realistically he should be more scar than skin at this point.
“Nothing happened,” Joe whispers, covering Nicky’s hand with his own and pulling it to his heart. “I’m here.”
“It did happen,” Nicky replies. “Just because it didn’t leave a mark doesn’t mean it wasn’t real.”
“That doesn’t mean you have to let it own you. Come on. Sleep with me.”
“It’s like, three in the afternoon.”
“And I died twice today. I’m tired. If you have something better to do…” Joe started to turn over.
“No! No, I don’t.” Nicky lays down with him, and his hand moves for the unmarred skin of his stomach.
Gently Joe pulls it away and nudges him until he’s on his side, so they can spoon like usual. If he holds Nicky a little tighter than usual and shudders at the memory of his own sword inside him, of wriggling like a fish on a hook? Well. No one else has to know. They’ll be alright. It was one bad day. They’ve got dozens for every new decade. People have always been just as awful as they are kind.
“I’m okay,” he murmurs. “You’re okay. Those terrorists are dead. Sleep, Nicolo.”
He presses a kiss to the back of Nicky’s neck and doesn’t move away until his breathing evens out. A bare moment later, his own fatigue pulls him into oblivion.