Work Text:
After the helicopters have faded, after the tendons in her ankles have stitched themselves back together and she can heave herself, panting, off the ground, Andy goes back into the bunker.
It's for Quỳnh, at first. It's to shred the edge of her shirt and wrap it tightly around the wound, slowing the blood loss, and to apologise as she lifts her into her arms, half for the pain now, half for the pain of the last five hundred years.
But all the doors are open, now. With Discord gone, the compound has unlocked entirely. Andy will have to secure it before she leaves, to stop civilians from getting in and killing themselves. It's just another tactic to slow her down.
But -
"Booker died," she tells Quỳnh. "I have to - his body. I want to get his body, and bury him. Mourn him, like we did Lykon."
"I don't care what you do," Quỳnh says, and Andy knows it's a lie. But Quỳnh's hands are cold and clammy where they are holding on to Andy's neck, weak and terribly mortal, and Andy doesn't know what to do with any of it, and at the same time Booker died for her, and she hadn't wanted him to.
"If I'd been faster," she says, half a sentence, half to herself.
Quỳnh laughs, a cruel sound against the side of Andy's neck. "If you'd been faster," she agrees, and she means now, and she means five hundred years ago when men were locking her into an iron cage.
Andy swallows, and she heads back towards the corridor where Booker died.
His body is terrible to look at, when she sees it. She's seen him dead a hundred thousand times before, and half of her expects him to stitch himself back together and stand up smirking, like he has a hundred thousand times before, but he does not. He will not.
"I'll find some way to carry you both," Andy says, just to say something. She doesn't get a response, but she wasn't expecting one. Quỳnh doesn't, however, protest when Andy moves her to her back, clinging on with her arms wrapped around Andy's neck and her knees on her hips.
"I could kill you like this," Quỳnh says, her voice as thin and familiar as the air itself.
Andy nods. She gives Quỳnh a moment, just in case she does want to try, but Quỳnh's arms remain a firm but non-lethal grip, so Andy bends down to move Booker into a position where she can carry him.
There's a sound when she moves the body, something pained.
"He's breathing," Quỳnh says. "Andromache, he is breathing."
Andy's own breathing stops, then. Heart racing, she grabs for Booker's wrist, and finds a pulse, thin and fluttery.
"You idiot," she says, cursing herself more than him.
Booker's eyes flutter open. If anything, he looks as surprised as she feels.
"Dying's normally faster than this," he complains. "Hey, Andy, come to give me a mercy killing?"
Andy hates him, for a moment, with a burning fury. "Fuck you," she says.
Booker laughs.
Quỳnh slips off Andy's back, stumbling to a seated position on the floor. Andy's glad for it, glad that Quỳnh still seems to be able to read her mind. It makes it easier to shred what's left of her shirt, turning it into thin strips that she can shove in the worst of Booker's gunshot wounds, and the knife wounds in his side. The blood congealing under him is the wrong colour; they've hit some vital organ.
"Fuck you," she says again. "Live with the consequences of your actions, you idiot."
"Always knew you cared," Booker slurs. "You don't need to save everyone, Andy."
Andy takes one breath in, then lets it out. She doesn't dignify Booker with a response. She picks him up instead, one arm beneath his shoulders and the other beneath his knees, avoiding his injuries as much as possible.
Quỳnh struggles to her feet, then takes a step forward.
"You'll hurt yourself more, walking," Andy tells her.
That's how she ends up carrying them both out, both breathing. She finds their truck, Copley missing, like she'd expected. It's just them, now. Discord has the rest.
It's just Andy, and two injured ex-immortals.
Their truck has first-aid supplies, like all their vehicles have ever since Andy lost her immortality, ever since Copley joined the team. She patches them up as best she can, bandages tight to stop as much bleeding as possible, but she's no doctor. She's always been better at creating wounds than healing them.
It's a few minutes work, to lock the gates again. She loathes every minute of it. Back in the truck, there are two people she cares about, dying, and she has to do this instead of looking after them.
After, she drives them back to Tuah's hideaway, carries them one by one down into the cave. They'll have the most advanced warning, there, if Discord comes back for them.
There's nothing more that she can do.
Quỳnh is the better off. She's more lucid than Andy had expected - Nile clearly hadn't aimed to kill her, not like the men going for Booker had.
When they are both settled as comfortably as is possible, Andy pauses. She points at Booker, who blinks blearily at her. "Don't you dare die," she orders, and then can't bear to watch his reaction.
She turns to Quỳnh instead. "I have no right to ask anything of you," she tells her.
Quỳnh looks at her, steady, and doesn't disagree.
Andy takes a breath in. She's desperate, in a way that she so rarely is. She feels like a wounded prey animal, despite being the only uninjured person here.
"Be here when I get back?" she asks, soft, pleading.
Quỳnh doesn't say anything. Andy has no choice but to leave, running as quickly as she can, up the stairs and out into the market, buttoning her jacket so that it's not so obvious her shirt is half-missing and blood-soaked.
Time is ticking, and she knows it. Time has been ticking ever since Booker knocked her labrys down from the door and charged directly into live fire.
There is a doctor here, somewhere. There has to be.
There's a clinic, down the street. The green cross is fading, but it's there, and Andy has no choice.
Inside, a young woman is putting a bandaid on the knee of a little boy. She freezes when she sees Andy.
Andy does not know what her own face is doing, but she has scared enough people to know the response.
"Go," the young woman says, but it's not to Andy. Instead, she pushed the young boy, and he scrambles past Andy, out onto the sunlit street.
"You're a doctor?" Andy asks.
"A student," the young woman says. "If you're looking for drugs, we don't have anything here."
Andy snorts. "Don't need drugs," she says. "I need a doctor."
"The senior doctor will be back any minute," the woman says. "If you'll wait -"
"I don't have time," Andy tells her. "You'll do."
There's a pause, then the woman sets her shoulders. "What do you need a doctor for?"
"I have two friends with knife wounds and gunshot wounds," Andy tells her, succinctly. "Gather what you need, and hurry."
Her eyes are wide, but she does what she's asked, and that's to her credit. Andy hasn't interacted much with doctors, but she remembers the kindness of the pharmacist who helped her when she first lost her own immortality, and she knows that some doctors do still take the Hippocratic oath.
That will have to do. Andy has no choice but to trust her.
"I can keep my mouth shut," the doctor says, once she finishes pulling things out of boxes and plastic drawers.
Andy smiles at her, or, rather, makes the best approximation of a smile that she can. "I won't tell you my name, and you won't tell me yours, and we'll call it even," she says. "Now, doctor: can you run?"
They don't run, but they do move at a steady pace. The doctor watches with wide eyes as Andy lets her into the underground complex, but, true to her word, she keeps her mouth shut.
"Him first," Andy says, pointing at Booker.
There's not much to say, after that. The doctor does her work calmly, with her mouth pressed into a thin line. "He should have surgery for this," she says. "I'm not qualified. I can patch him up, but I can't guarantee that he'll heal correctly. The chance of infection alone -"
"Will he die, without surgery?" Andy cuts in.
There's a pause. "I can't guarantee he'll live," the doctor says. "But - he's not guaranteed to die."
"No surgery," Booker rasps, blinking his eyes open. He looks surprisingly aware, if pained. Andy is shocked to see him awake, but she supposes that they, of all people, are used enough to dying and to pain. Andy supposes it's a good thing, that the blood loss was not so great that he is still unconscious.
She nods in agreement with him anyway, sharply. Surgery is a whole other thing, and she's not sure she'd be able to organise it without making them all vulnerable. They'll have to take their chances.
"I'll stitch it, then," the doctor says, and she does, needle moving in and out of Booker's flesh, weaving him back together like scraps of cloth. Booker doesn't make a sound. Andy thinks one of the ointments the doctor used must have been a numbing agent; if it was not, Booker bears the pain with nothing but acceptance.
"If it gets infected," the doctor says, "come find me again. I'll prescribe some antibiotics, and do what I can."
Andy almost laughs, at that. "What do I do to prevent infection?" she asks, and is shown how to change a dressing, how to make saline, how to tell if a wound is becoming infected.
"We used to call that bad blood," Quỳnh says. Andy startles at the reminder. "Science has come far."
It has. It has, and Andy was there to see it, and Quỳnh was not.
"This cream should help prevent it," the doctor says, handing a tube to Andy, "once it's stopped actively bleeding. Keep any wounds clean - that's the most important thing."
Andy nods. Booker is, mercifully, silent.
"I can give you something for the pain," the doctor says.
Andy remembers poppy milk, and soldiers screaming, and the wrecks it left them, afterwards, the way it turned out in China. Andy remembers how easily Booker falls into drinking, how he is no longer immortal, how his vices can now kill him. How, too, that if Discord comes for them, she needs him lucid and fighting, to give them their best chance.
"Nothing addictive," she says. Booker rolls his eyes, but he's not stupid enough to contradict her. "And nothing that will make him sleep."
"You can get that at any pharmacy," the doctor says, startled. "It won't do much for the pain, though."
"It will have to be enough," Andy says, grimly. "If there is infection - I will not tell you. Leave something out, somewhere I can find it, and if I need it, I will come and take it."
The doctor hesitates. "There's no medicine that will cure every type of infection," she warned. "I'd need to see it - maybe do some tests - "
"No," Andy says. "You will make your best guess, and we will do with it what we can. You cannot save everyone."
Quỳnh snorts. She doesn't need to say it out loud for Andy to know what she's thinking. She doesn't look, but she knows Quỳnh and Booker are exchanging glances.
The doctor sighs, but she doesn't argue. It's a smart decision. Andy is not in the mood to entertain a civilian's misguided attempt at heroism.
"That's all I can do for him, then," she says. "You next?"
Quỳnh shakes her head. "Mine are not so bad," she says. "I can tend them."
It's a lie. It has to be a lie. Andy saw the injuries, helped bind them with the dirty rags they are still wrapped in. There is no way, even having watched the doctor tend Booker, that Quỳnh can manage them herself.
"Quỳnh," she says.
Quỳnh glares at her. "It's my choice," she says, and Andy looks away.
"They're not bleeding anymore," Quỳnh adds, after a moment, softly. It's a concession. Andy will take it.
"Thank you," she says to the doctor. "I'll show you out.
The doctor glances between them. "I can -"
"It's her choice," Andy says. "I'll show you out. I can't pay you, but -"
The doctor nods, miming at zipping her mouth shut. For a single moment, Andy is reminded blisteringly of Nile, of her mannerisms, of her youth. It aches.
"Just don't kill me, and we're good," the doctor says, lightly. It's a farce - Andy can see how her hands have started shaking now that she has no patient to focus on.
Booker snorts. "It's not us you need to worry about."
That does remind Andy. "There may be people looking for us," she says. She is hoping that even though Discord knows where Tuah's place is, she will not think to look here first. It is the most obvious place for Andy to have gone, if she had injured people with her. That makes it the least likely place for her to have gone, and thus, she is here.
She doesn't even know if Discord knows that Booker and Quỳnh are alive.
"I don't even know your names," the doctor says. "I can't tell anyone anything. There are a dozen gangs in the big cities, I'm sure, with guns and knives. You could be involved in any one of them. I'll keep my mouth shut."
She doesn't believe it about the gangs; Andy can see it in her eyes. But she's not stupid. She'll believe it enough that it will keep her safe.
"Good," Andy says, and shows her out, changing the passcode after the doctor has disappeared back into the heaving shape of the markets, just in case.
When she gets back, Booker's voice dies off.
Andy eyes him suspiciously. "What?" she says.
"Did your shoulder heal?" he asks, as gentle as a firing squad. "Or do you need care, too?"
"It healed," Andy snaps, rolling her shoulders as she says it, feeling the loose give of them, the lack of pain. The reminder stings. "Fuck you."
"What?" Quỳnh says. "Your shoulder? Andromache, what -"
"Wasn't it you?" Booker cuts in. "She went to meet you, and came back hurt. I was sure I'd connected those dots."
"Enough," Andy says, but her voice is more fear than anger, and while she's not sure Booker hears it, Quỳnh certainly does.
"Lost my immortality," Andy says, to the wall. It doesn't make it much easier, but at least she doesn't have to look Quỳnh in the eyes. "Some months ago. Got it back yesterday, when Booker decided he had a death wish. Fuck you very much for that, Book."
Booker laughs shortly, cut off by his own gasp of pain.
"You were mortal," Quỳnh realises. "I could have -"
Andy looks at her, then. She's helpless not to. "Does it matter?" she asks. It's only slightly easier to say than what she means, which is: if you had been trying to kill me, I would have let you.
"Yes!" Quỳnh says, and then winces, her hand going to her side. She's slumped over more, Andy realises, in her seat.
"When you said it had stopped bleeding," Andy accuses, "you were lying."
Quỳnh huffs, which means Andy is correct.
"Let me see it," Andy says, and Quỳnh does, so Andy can gently undo the rough field bandages that held just long enough, and sponge away the blood, and see the wound for what it is.
Quỳnh's side shudders when Andy runs her finger next to the wound, but it's not from pain. She's always been sensitive there.
Andy shakes her head, to clear it. "Clean dressing," she says. "And - food."
It shouldn't feel strange, that Quỳnh lets her do it, lets her tend the hole in her side, lets her offer her a new shirt, lets her make a thin stew, lets her check that she hasn't bled through the dressing. It does, though. It is strange, in this century, that Quỳnh accepts her touch as safe.
"Wow," Booker says, drawing the word out.
Andy smooths down Quỳnh's shirt, and turns to glare at him.
"What?" he says. On one hand, she's glad to see he's feeling better. On the other hand, she hates this entire situation. "I'm just saying, this is an unusual situation, no? I finally meet the Quỳnh, and, well - I've never known you to be tender, Andy."
"Shut up," Andy says. She doesn't feel tender. She feels angry, and helpless, and desperate.
"What are you going to do?" Booker says, softly. "Kill me? Exile me for one hundred years?"
He's smiling that way he does, infuriatingly amused with himself. "I told you, Andy. I wanted my expiration date."
Andy gets up, and stalks over to him. Each of her footsteps feels too heavy, too loud. "I said, shut up," she snaps. "Save your strength for healing."
She dumps the rest of the stew in his bowl, and leaves.
Except - there isn't anywhere to go, here. It's just a library, small, with circular rows of benches and so many books, and absolutely no leads to follow, and nowhere to hide. She pauses in front of Tuah's desk.
"It's one of those books that made him realise Nile could take immortality," Booker says. "And that it could be transferred. It was just a theory, but, well - theory proven, I suppose."
Andy sets her jaw, and gets to work. She skims through a full stack of books before finding anything that seems to mention immortality at all, and it's in a language so old that she feels the weight of the ages just remembering how to read it.
"Discord has the others," she says. She'd forgotten that they didn't know. "She's - mortal, I think. She said she would try to force them to give their immortality to her."
The two shocked sounds that gets her are proof that they really did not know, neither of them.
"I'm staying here," Andy says. "You two are healing, and I'll plan, and then - I'll go after them. I have to find them."
"I'll help," Booker says, immediately. Quỳnh doesn't say anything. It hurts, more than Andy thought it was, but she's trying to come to peace with it. Quỳnh doesn't owe her anything. Andy is the one who is the traitor.
Quỳnh and Booker sleep fitfully, from what Andy can tell. She's not sleeping herself, taking advantage of her renewed immortality to go beyond what would normally be capable of a human.
Andy knows that they are an odd set. Quỳnh, who Andy betrayed. Booker, who betrayed Andy, and who did it again to save her life. She doesn't know what to do with it. She doesn't even know how she feels about it. It's too much, whirling around inside her, and all she can really feel is fear.
She does have to sleep eventually, though, and ends up taking her rest right by the door, gripping her labrys in one hand, the other arm folded under her as a pillow. She doesn't have a blanket, but she hardly needs one to sleep.
The discomfort, though, means she is woken easily.
"You said she spoke of me," Quỳnh is saying, distinct.
"Sure," Booker says. "Don't ask me for specifics, though. I wasn't exactly taking notes. Even though we were looking for you, I didn't really ever expect to meet you."
"You looked?" Quỳnh asks.
Andy shuts her eyes. It hurts that Quỳnh sounds surprised. It hurts to know that she really does not recognise Andy.
There's a pause, enough that Andy can picture Booker making one of his sarcastically surprised faces. "Of course I looked," he says. "We all did, between other missions. You know Andy - she can't give up. Eventually, though, we all decided you just couldn't be found. We'd tried everything, looked everywhere, and we hadn't found you."
"I was still there," Quỳnh says. "Drowning. For five hundred years."
Andy hides her face in the crook of her arm, glad for the darkness, and weeps.
The days fall into a pattern. Andy wakes, and checks that nothing has changed over night. She makes food, going as infrequently to the market as she can manage, and helps Booker and Quỳnh tend their wounds. Then, she reads, and lets Quỳnh watch her, and reads some more, and does not look at Booker, and then she has lunch and reads more again, then dinner, then she reads yet more.
Quỳnh has taken to wearing her necklace. Andy doesn't comment on it, because while she's not scared of pain, she's also not willing to walk head-first into a fight she knows will leave her aching. Booker, though, has no such wariness.
"You're wearing Andy's necklace," he says, one day, having just managed the incredible feat of easing himself into a sitting position without having to pause to recover.
"My necklace," Quỳnh says, shortly.
Booker hums. "You two really have history, don't you."
"Not in the last five hundred years," Quỳnh replies, and -
That hurts, because it's not true. It's not true. The last five hundred years -
If someone had written a book about Andy's last five hundred years, Quỳnh's name would appear on every page.
There's nothing she can do, though. She did give up. She did betray Quỳnh, breaking the promise they made. There's nothing else to it. It is not a clean wound. It is something festering, and there is no cure for it. There is only Quỳnh and Andy, sitting in this one room, not quite looking at each other.
Andy goes to sleep on the step above Quỳnh, one night. She can't really help herself. She always wants to be close, even though she knows it's not welcome.
She wakes up, some time later, to Quỳnh moving the blanket to lie over the two of them. She doesn't know what to do about it. She doesn't know what to do about it, so she just lies there, just lets Quỳnh do this, and accepts the soft warmth of the covering. Her chest aches. Her chest aches, and the blanket is warm, because it had been wrapped around the living warmth of Quỳnh's body.
She doesn't know what to do about it.
"She's not going to forgive me, I don't think," Booker says to Quỳnh. He means Andy, and he's clearly given up on pretending he doesn't know she's listening in, because he's looking straight at her.
Andy looks away, because -
She doesn't know. She doesn't know what she's going to do, and she's afraid that they won't have the time to work it out.
Quỳnh just shrugs. "And I will likely not forgive her."
"What do you want her to do?" Booker asks, and he's asking Quỳnh about Andy, but he's also asking Andy about himself.
Andy doesn't have an answer. Neither does Quỳnh, it seems like.
"Walk on her knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting?" Booker asks, the lilt of his words like that of a poem. It's almost familiar. "Live a hundred years without seeking you out? That's what she asked me to do, the last time I betrayed her."
"I'd be dead by the time that was finished," Quỳnh says, surprise colouring her tone. Andy doesn't know what to do with that, with the fact that Quỳnh perhaps does not want to die before seeing Andy again.
"Yes," Booker says, thoughtfully. "That, I believe, was rather the point."
He's not wrong. It had been the point. But Andy had seen him again, and had forgiven him for that hurt, and now he's gone and betrayed her anew, and she doesn't know what to do with it. If she says the same thing this time, it'll be him who's dead by the end of it. If she says the same thing, she will wake up one day and he will be dead. It could be from infection, or it could be Discord, or it could be too many bottles of liquor in a small Parisian apartment and they wouldn't find out for months.
Andy doesn't know what she wants, but she knows it's not that.
Andy burns dinner, one day. She has to spend half an hour, cursing every person that ever laid hand on the pot in its making, scrubbing the blackened rice from the bottom, before she can start again.
"You're still bad at that," Quỳnh says.
Andy doesn't flinch, but it's a near thing. "Yes," she says, because she hasn't changed, not really. Not much. Not in any way that should count, and yet, to Quỳnh -
Quỳnh doesn't recognise Andy. She'd made that much clear.
"Five hundred years," Quỳnh says.
Andy has to turn away, or else her face will betray her. She thinks it already has. There is no way that Quỳnh does not know how Andy is hurting. That almost makes it worse, to know that Quỳnh is just going to watch, and twist the knife a little more. This is not a clean wound.
Quỳnh's healed enough to start moving again, soon enough. She takes one of Andy's knives and goes up and down the library with it, sparring with an imaginary partner.
Andy doesn't need to ask who she's imagining. She's fought fights like this before, many times, across centuries. She can almost hear her own footsteps, the sound of Quỳnh's knife against her labrys, the reverberation of the joining down her arms.
Booker's healed enough that he's started complaining. He's certainly not yet well enough to do any kind of physical training, and Andy had told him so, in no uncertain terms. He's watching Quỳnh sullenly, something near envy on his face. Andy doesn't know what it is, really, or why. She thinks he should be asking her to go find painkillers, but he hasn't, and she is too angry to go and buy them unasked. It's petty, but she has never been a saint.
Andy doesn't offer to spar with Quỳnh. She couldn't do it. Knowing that Quỳnh is mortal - she doesn't think she could bare to lift a hand against her, knowing any damage she does could be permanent. She's never had much practice, sparring with mortals. She doesn't want to have to start now. It would make this feel much too real.
"So, Discord wants her immortality again," Booker remarks, out of nowhere.
Andy's pretty sure he wants to start a fight, but she doesn't know how he can, with this.
"Yes," she says, carefully. "And she has Nile, and Joe and Nicky, and Tuah, and Copley."
"How does she think that's going to work?" Booker asks. "None of them are huge fans of her, and Copley's just a random guy."
Andy's pretty sure she's falling for it, but she hates these types of games anyway, so she says, "Well, she told me she was going to torture them."
"They're immortal," Quỳnh says, pausing her imaginary slaughter. "They can withstand endless deaths."
Andy knows she's talking about what she survived herself. It's blunt, and an accusation itself. Quỳnh had been tortured for five hundred years, and Andy hadn't been able to do anything about it.
"You're right," Booker says. "But, say, what do you think Joe will do, if they put Nicky in that iron maiden they pulled you out of, and dropped him into the ocean?"
There's a ringing in Andy's ears that's entirely unrelated to the way Quỳnh just dropped the knife, sending it clanging noisily off the stone. The blade will be damaged, Andy thinks distantly, as if through a fog. She's not breathing properly, she doesn't think.
"Or vice versa," Booker says, somewhere far away. "Just a thought."
"He'd do anything," Andy says. She doesn't mean to say it, but she does. It's true, after all. She'd been in that position.
If someone had told her that, to get Quỳnh out, all she needed to do was give up her immortality -
She wouldn't have even thought about it.
"I need some air," she says, too quickly. She's sure they can both see that's she's shaking as she leaves.
A few hours later, she finds herself by the marketplace as the sun rises, washing the area in gorgeous colours at odds with the sounds and the stink of a city market.
She buys mangosteen, just to make her loitering less suspicious. She doesn't know why; she hates the things, and it's not like she can give them to Quỳnh, not now.
"Are you alright?" asks the auntie selling the fruit. "You don't look well."
Andy hesitates. There's no point in staying. There's no point in being honest. "Fine," she says, but she doesn't leave.
The auntie hums, skeptically.
"My -" Andy starts, but she doesn't know what to call Quỳnh. She doesn't try again. "She's unwell. And she's not talking to me. They're her favourites."
"Well!" says the auntie. She's talking in English to Andy, though Andy knows exactly what she's saying when she turns to shout at the stallholder beside her in Malay, asking for free flowers. "You give those to her, then talk to her , if she's not talking to you!"
The doctor is also in the crowd. She catches Andy's eye, and moves as if to come closer, which isn't safe for either of them.
"Thank you," Andy says, but she doesn't wait for the flowers, and that is how she ends up back outside the library, her forehead pressed to the wall above the keypad, hands overflowing with mangosteen and absolutely no idea what to say.
A sharp crack sounds behind her, and she startles, almost dropping a mangosteen as she reaches for a weapon.
"It's just me," Quỳnh says. She looks down at the fruit in Andy's arms, at the purple gleam of them. "Why do you have mangosteen?"
Andy shrugs, helplessly. "I ended up at the market," she says, and doesn't ask if Quỳnh was waiting for her, looking for her, or hoping to leave while Andy wasn't there. "I didn't mean to, but I saw them, and - and I was thinking of you."
She's been told to talk to Quỳnh. This, it turns out, is the best she can do.
"Hmm," Quỳnh says, but she plucks one from Andy's hands and slits it open neatly with Andy's knife, using the tip to pick up a chunk and put it on her mouth.
She chews, slowly, eyes closing.
"Good?" Andy asks, when she can bear the silence no more.
"Yes," Quỳnh says. "Not the same as before. Different, but good."
Andy could read into that. For the sake of her sanity, she doesn't.
"The sunlight is nice," Quỳnh says, and it's with a rush of guilt that Andy realises she's been keeping Quỳnh in a dark box, again.
"I'm sorry," she says, much too late.
"I know," Quỳnh says, simply.
Andy watches her eat the fruit. It has been… a very long time. More than five hundred years.
"Much less messy than your favourites," Quỳnh says with satisfaction, when she finishes.
Andy has to blink away the memories of Quỳnh's mouth stained red with pomegranate juice, of her fingers dripping with honey, of the taste of them.
Quỳnh takes another mangosteen. "Booker is getting anxious," she says, splitting it open. "Go, Andromache. I will be down soon."
Andy hesitates. She's still furious at Booker, still shaking at what he made her think, but this has settled her a little, watching Quỳnh alive in the sun. "You don't have the passcode," she says, a weak protest.
Quỳnh laughs, an inelegant shock of sound. "Andromache, you were not subtle. It is the last year we saw each other, no?"
It is, Andy realises with a start. Not in the modern calendar, but in a far older one, the code she'd unthinkingly picked was the year she lost Quỳnh.
"Discord will not find me from five minutes in the sun," Quỳnh says. "She left me for dead. She is not looking for me. Go."
Andy doesn't talk to Booker when she goes back inside. She doesn't know what to say. He keeps poking at the most tender parts of her soul, she thinks furiously, but he can't force her away. She's not going to give up on him, even if he wants her to.
In hindsight, it's easier to see that that's what he was trying to do. The fool.
By the time Quỳnh returns, they still haven't spoken.
Quỳnh sighs, looking between them. Her mouth is plush; Andy knows by heart what it tastes like, mangosteen and all. It feels like, now she is less afraid, she has room for the wanting, and it is that, now, which will crush her.
"Booker is almost healed," Quỳnh says. "And when he is, we will go after Discord. You cannot be fighting."
The word we rings in Andy's ears. She's always been fond of Quỳnh's flair for the dramatic, but this -
"Andromache, stop blaming yourself," Quỳnh says, because she knows Andy too well. Booker startles physically. "For him losing his immortality, and for his near-death. You blame yourself, though it was never your fault, not like my case was."
"How could it not have been?" Andy asks. "Of course it was my fault. If I'd been faster -"
"I didn't give you a choice," Booker says.
"I wish you had!" Andy shouts. There's a moment of dead silence.
"I wish you had," she says, softly. "I wish you'd just talked to me, Booker. There were so many other ways that could have gone, and none of them involved you dying."
Booker shrugs. "It's what I wanted," he says, and Andy has to breathe through that.
She's wanted it to stop, sometimes, but she's never wanted death. Booker, it seems, has.
"Do you now?" Quỳnh asks, curious, unfamiliar enough with Booker that she's able to ask the question Andy never could have forced herself to say.
Booker's quiet for a long time. Andy watches his face, and watches the flame of a candle, and watches her own hands shake.
"No," he says, eventually, and the relief it brings is so strong that Andy thinks she could forgive him, one day. Not now, but one day, as long as he stays alive and tells her if he doesn't want to be, so that they can try and fix it.
"You can't fix everything, Andy," Booker says, like he's reading her mind.
Andy doesn't know what to do with her hands. In a fight, she always knows what to do with her hands, but here - there's nothing to do. "I want to try," she says. "Just talk to me. I'll always want to try."
"Alright," Booker says, and it feels like the moment a siege breaks. Andy forgives him. She can't say it, can't tell him, but she forgives him. "Alright."
He's clearly desperate to change the conversation, because he looks at Quỳnh. "Did you say you'd be coming with us?"
Quỳnh is silent for a moment, which isn't the response Andy so desperately wants to hear.
"Discord told me that the way we were and you are interacting with mortals was hurting both them and us," she says, eventually. "I wanted to believe that, then. I had been hurt enough to believe it easily. But now - all these books say otherwise. And I do not believe Andromache would be so foolish as to continue if it was not working as planned. So: tell me what you have done, while I have been gone. Tell me what makes it worth it. And yes, I will come."
Andy takes a breath in. "Where do you want me to start?" she says. She's not the best of storytellers, but she can try. She knows her own story well enough, and has seen the shape of it sketched out on Copley's walls.
"The beginning," Quỳnh offers, then shakes her head. "No, I was there for that. Start there."
Andy doesn't need that to be clarified. She starts with the first mission she'd intentionally run, after she'd lost Quỳnh. There's a year missing, but Quỳnh doesn't ask about it. Andy wouldn't know what to say, anyway. It's the year in which she screamed and cried and drowned herself in the ocean, diving for Quỳnh. There's nothing much to say about that.
Eventually, she works her way to when they found Booker, and the first fight he'd joined them in. She pauses, after describing it, aware that her prose is plain and lacks the poetic nature he so favours.
"And then we spent six months dredging the ocean," he says, instead of embellishing the story she's already told. "And absolutely nobody would tell me why, because I was the new kid."
Andy sighs, and starts with the next story. There was a war; there are many stories to tell. Booker is more comfortable now, chipping in his own notes about how events progressed, about how Andy and her old guard had found themselves facing the worst of humanity, over and over again, to give the world a chance to turn a new leaf.
"Then, when the war was basically over, we searched what felt like half the ocean again," Booker adds, cheerfully. "This time, I wasn't so much of the new kid, and I found out that Andy doesn't shut up about you when she's drunk."
Andy swears in a language she couldn't name. "Shut it."
"I'm just telling the story!" Booker protests. "You made me dive off boats in the middle of nowhere so many times, it did stick in my memory."
Andy sighs. "If you wanted me to list every time I searched for Quỳnh, we'd still be back before you were born. Shut it."
Booker tips back his head and laughs. Andy doesn't dare look at Quỳnh.
She goes back to telling stories. Eventually, though, she gets to the ones she wants to tell.
"After I realised I'd lost my immortality," she says, slowly, "I didn't want to tell anyone. I ended up in a pharmacy, completely lost. I didn't know how to patch myself up at all. There was a woman there. I don't know what she thought had happened to me, but she knew I was hurt, and she helped me patch it up, and she gave me advice, which would have been very helpful if I was who she thought I was. I wasn't, but it still helped. She would have done it for anyone who walked in that door bleeding. The doctor today, too; she wasn't just glad to get out of it alive. She was worried about you both. I saw her at the market. She would have come to me, despite the danger, if I hadn't left."
Andy's not quite sure what she's trying to say.
"In the end, we're not like them, but we're not unlike them," she says, eventually. It's not quite right, but it's not wrong, either. "We help them. We help each other. They help us, like they help each other. We see so many of the bad people, because we seek them out, and put ourselves in their way. But - if you walked down the street bleeding, someone would help you. I've done it. I know. The woman at the pharmacy, she told me one day maybe I could patch someone else up.
"That's how I think of it, now. Someone helps me, with the skills they have, and I help others, with the skills I have, and they help other people. And sometimes that's with reinventing medicine, or saving a city, and sometimes it's just patching up one lonely woman in a pharmacy. I forgot that, for a while. I remember it, now."
"A big cycle," Booker says, once Andy's run out of words. "Almost cosmic. Like karma."
"I don't believe in karma," Andy says, "or anything like that. I believe in my axe, and in my team. That's all I need."
"The men who drowned me, were they also doing good?" Quỳnh hisses.
Andy laughs, despite herself. "I wouldn't know," she says. "Probably, before. I'm sure they held a hand out to a neighbour. But Tuah burned the place to the ground, and I killed anyone who survived. You know me, Quỳnh. I'm a blunt instrument. If someone is causing harm, and they aren't being stopped, then I'll stop them the best way I know how. Maybe, one day, the world won't need anyone to do that. For now, I do what I can."
"The Salem witch trials," Booker says, but nothing more.
"What?" Andy prompts.
Booker shrugs. "Thirty people in one part of colonial America were found guilty of witchcraft on little to no evidence. Most of them were killed. It was the worst of a series of murders masquerading as trials, and the most famous, but far from the only one."
"It wasn't just because we were us," Quỳnh suggests, slowly. "Other people died."
"It's generally accepted to be due to a human need to blame someone for an event," Booker says. "Like a harvest failing. Even at the time, they were found to be less than lawful. Mankind has committed many atrocities."
"And it will commit many more," Andromache says. "But - if we can, where we can, should we not make a difference?"
"I do not want to be like Discord," Quỳnh says, "who sees the terrible world and decries it, and makes it worse."
"You'll come with us?" Andy asks, barely daring to say it.
"Didn't I say it'd be you and I until the end?" Quỳnh says. She's looking right at Andy, and she's smiling, a gentle half-turn of the lips, as familiar and as warm as the rising sun.
It's forgiveness, and Andy could weep. To her horror, she realises that she is, that her cheeks are wet, all of the pain and the stress and the fear of the last weeks welling up until they pour down her face. She's not even that upset, or overwhelmed, not now. But it has been so much .
"Oh, shit," Booker says. Andy doesn't think he's ever seen her like this.
Quỳnh has. Quỳnh holds her steady, arms wrapped tightly around her so she won't break apart, steady hands against the back of her neck, in her hair.
"Even when I thought I could never forgive you," Quỳnh whispers, in a language too old for Booker to know, "I still loved you."
"Do I get my necklace back," Andy says, aiming for something close to lighthearted and falling nowhere near.
Quỳnh gives it back anyway, sliding it off her own neck and around Andy's. It's a surprising comfort, the weight of it. Andy hadn't noticed how much she was missing it, but she supposes that living with something for five hundred years would do that.
"I want something else in return," Quỳnh says. "I hear matching rings are in fashion?"
Andy's tears have stopped. Quỳnh kisses her on the cheek, despite how she must taste like salty ocean water. "I'll get you a ring," Andy tells her.
"You're getting married?" Booker demands, his voice rising. "Five minutes ago -"
"Did that time in Rome not count?" Quỳnh asks.
"It did," Andy says, and she can feel herself start smiling.
"Egypt?"
The smile is a grin, now. "Absolutely counted."
Andy can feel Quỳnh's smile in the way their bodies lean together. "See?" Quỳnh says to Booker. "We're not getting married."
"Oh my God," Booker says. Andy can't tell if he's faking the horror, or if he's genuinely surprised. "Are - are you two going to be worse than Nicky and Joe?"
"No," Andy denies, but she's not actually sure. She lost Quỳnh for five hundred years. She feels that if she is not constantly looking at her now, holding her, now that she is allowed, she might lose her all over again.
"You have not been married for longer than I've been alive," Booker says, disbelieving. "There's -"
"Depends on the definition of marriage," Quỳnh tells him, but doesn't elaborate. She doesn't need to, for Andy. Andy knows exactly what she means.
"There are no tax benefits," Quỳnh adds for Booker, after a moment. Andy snorts. "No bride price. Just - us"
"It's been five hundred years," Andy says. "Let us get used to it again. Then we'll be more subtle."
Quỳnh smirks. "My Andromache would not know subtle if it bit her," she says, and Andy falls knowingly for the bait at the endearment. Kissing her feels like coming home for the first time in five hundred years.
"I can't believe I've signed up to third-wheel you two on a trip around the world to save our friends," Booker grumbles, but that's fond, from him, and he did sign up.
"We'll leave in a week," Andy decides. "Sooner if you can run without hurting, Book."
"At least I'll have Nile to commiserate with," Booker says, but he looks immensely satisfied with the future he's picturing. Andy is, too.
She kisses Quỳnh again, seeking out the taste of mangosteen. She's happy, she realises, though there is still an undercurrent of worry. She is ready to go and make their group whole again. She is no longer so afraid.
"I always go first," she says, just to learn anew how Quỳnh will react.
"No," Quỳnh says, turning to her again. "I always go first."
"That's where you got that from?" Booker says, incredulous, but Andy could care less at being so vulnerable, so revealed. Quỳnh kisses her again, and Andy feels the sunlight down to her bones.