Chapter Text
The gallery is small, cramped. The paintings on the walls spill over each other like scattered thoughts plastered corner to corner. Rolls stacked on top of one another in wonky pyramids. A set of incomplete stretched canvases lean against the busy sales desk. The door is propped open by a white striped rock that’s left dents in the wood and chips in the colour, letting in the drifting sounds of late afternoon tourists fawning over pintxos from the bistro across the street. The light that pours through the translucent windows is softly muted by paper, kind on the eyes and the artwork.
Nile takes her time looking at each piece in turn. She’s always had more patience for an art gallery than anywhere else. She takes in every piece, in its whole and in its parts. The flecks of white and green studded through a slain stag’s eyes. The ruby curve of a dancing couple’s hips. The faint lilac gleam of a moon over a foamy sea.
The owner, Armando, is a good-humoured old gentleman with twinkling brown eyes and a missing canine in his wide smile, who twice has made her a coffee from his back office after her visit reached the ninety minute mark. She’s never bought anything, and it’s approaching rude, she’s sure. She’s never bought a piece of art before, and even one from a tiny corner gallery down a hidden street in Barcelona feels rather momentous.
“You like this one,” Armando says after he has finished dealing with a customer who had arrived with her heart set on one painting, and left with three different prints instead. He smiles at Nile’s awkward shrug. “It is a beautiful picture,” he agrees with her silence. “The artist is from Morocco. She lives across the city, and teaches at the university.”
Nile swallows a cough and smiles again.
“I don’t always like sea paintings. This one is different,” she says. Her Spanish isn’t too shabby, half-kept from school, but she was thrown off by the difference of Catalán when she arrived in the city several weeks ago. Armando is kind though, and his occasional corrections always come with friendly encouragement.
“You don’t like the sea?” Armando asks.
Nile looks at the painting again, away from his dewy, smiling eyes. The waves in combat, the sky’s indifferent serenity. Unbidden, memories of her dreams trickle through the trappings of the brushstrokes. A woman’s screams swallowed by a prison of saltwater, her rage rattling her cracked bones.
She shakes her head.
“It is very…dangerous,” she says, which is true, and close enough to her reservations.
“Perillosa,” Armando corrects.
“Perillosa,” Nile repeats, and Armando nods with a twinkle in his eye, and a question that he does not voice as he looks back at the choppy splash of the oil and canvas in front of them. He touches her arm, just a simple pat on the elbow that requires no words of interpretation, before turning around, just as a shadow blocks the doorway.
“Welcome,” he greets jovially. “How can I help you?”
“No need, sir,” a familiar voice says. Nile whips around to see Booker in the doorway. “I am collecting my tardy friend.”
“How did you know I was here?” Nile blurts in instinctive English. Booker makes a show of rolling his eyes.
“You think I don’t know where to find you?" he asks primly. There's a playful smirk quivering at the corners of his lips, and Armando welcomes him in, taking the diverting moment to return to his desk, where he has been trying to clear a space of more than a square inch since Nile arrived.
Nile bids Armando farewell and follows Booker out into the shady street. It’s still very hot, and the city is chattering loud, even half secreted away.
“Joe told you to check out the galleries,” Nile guesses, and Booker throws his hands up in the air with a loud sigh.
“This was the fourteenth fucking shop I tried,” he admits and grins at Nile as she snickers at him. “One day, I’ll get it right the first time.”
There’s a charming sturdiness to his words. A genuine belief that one day, they will know each other well enough to guess accurately where each other gravitate to in a city. It’s not a very Booker thing to say. Nile has come to expect that sort of sentiment from Nicky, or perhaps Joe. She hooks her arm around Booker’s so they walk linked together down towards the metro. It’s heaving with tourists, even this late in the summer, and Nile keeps her chin tucked close to her chest.
"Is everything alright?" she asks, keeping her voice light as she scans the crowds of people. She's getting better at noticing things like security cameras, and phones held up to grab snaps.
It's good training, was all Andy said, when Nile asked how on earth she was supposed to avoid getting caught on camera in one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world.
Booker, who has his aviators on, and the longer strands of his hair shielding his face, hums innocently.
"Just some new intel from Copley."
Nile nods, tilting her head around closer towards Booker as they pass a couple taking a selfie. Intel from Copley could mean any number of things, but seeing as how Booker is steering them towards the metro and not shoving her into a car and smashing his way out of the city GTA style, it's probably not that one of Merrick Inc's bounty hunters has discovered them and are on their way to try re-abduct their golden geese.
It's a one line route back to the house, and Booker must be feeling safe indeed because he doesn't even take any deviations on the way. They just get onto the first L3 and ride North all the way to Mundet. Tourists pour in and out of every stop, and Mundet is no different - Nile is getting used to crowd cover, to following the throng of foot traffic to get through stations and streets, and it's almost fun by now, the way Booker gives her a nod as if to say Good luck, before they split up to take their separate routes home, to the other side of the park on the metro station's doorstep.
Nile finds herself shielded by the shadow of two young women who are bickering over whether to eat or go straight to the Parc del Laberint d'Horta. They're both British, outraged yet laughing at each others' messed up priorities, and Nile follows them maybe a little longer than strictly necessary, just to hear more about their lives, and whether Caitlyn really is going to text that boy from the bar in Madrid. Caitlyn seems to think getting ghosted would spoil the romance of her one night torrid affair with a mysterious Spaniard, and that she'd be better off keeping the dream of further dalliance alive - Nile, honestly, is inclined to agree with her. Her friend, who name is either Rogue, Brogue, Drogue, it's not quite clear, is utterly scandalised by her friend's cowardice.
It's only once they reach the path up to the Parc entrance, where Caitlyn and maybe-Brogue stall to squabble about overpriced tapas, that Nile breaks off from her route and takes the ambling road to the East out towards the house, where the security cameras are few and far between.
Tucked between a series of allotments and a by-road that seems to be exclusively used by motorcyclists with death wishes, the safehouse is welcoming enough from the outside, dark umber walls and a little veranda, netted curtains over the windows and an upstairs patio that overlooks the south view, sunbleached from dawn to dusk every day.
The trick, with houses like this, Nicky had explained to her, is that places shouldn't look too abandoned or it will invite squatters, but not be so nice looking it will appeal to burglars either.
How long do you keep the same safehouses for? she had asked, and Nicky had wrinkled his nose thoughtfully, as if counting the years there and then.
Oh, some we have had for a century or more, he explained, bringing to mind instantly the closed off mine in France where she had gone with Andy and Booker after the attack at Goussainville. Others, we won't use more than twice, for a few years at most. If we leave things behind in those places, we have to accept there is a chance what is there won't survive our absence, so we must always be careful.
Nicky has proved a good teacher of the everyday realities of their life. He doesn't go out of his way to make everything sound quite as downright miserable as Booker, or dig out tenuous silver linings like Joe is sometimes prone to. He's not half as intense about it as Andy, either.
When asked if they would be leaving anything behind this time, Nicky shrugged one shoulder and said, Perhaps, this has proved a useful place, and I imagine we will return soon enough.
There is no sign of Booker as she walks down the short path to the front door. Either he took the closest shortcut as she expected him to, or -
"What kept you?" a voice grumbles behind her, and she whips around to see Booker following her.
"Nosiness," she replies cheerfully. She doesn't ask what kept Booker - he's swinging a blue plastic bag by his side, which is clinking with glass bottles. She pulls out her keys, knocks thrice on the door in warning, and lets them both into the house. "Guys-" she begins, fully intending to know what the others think about British Caitlyn's European romance, but she's silenced by the sound of the loud voices coming from somewhere in the house.
She glances over her shoulder at Booker and they share a frown.
"Shit," he murmurs, and hurries them both inside.
The words are incomprehensible, she can't even tell what language it is, but the voices are distinct and clear as they get closer.
It's Andy and Joe, and they're bellowing at each other.
Nile races the last few steps down the hallway, glancing into the front room automatically as she passes it, all the way to the back kitchen, where she freezes in the doorway to take in the scene.
Joe and Andy are both gesticulating wildly, standing on opposing sides of the room and yelling over each other - Arabic, maybe, though Nile can't be sure. Joe makes a sweeping motion with his hand, catching sight of Nile but it doesn't break his flow, only seems to bolster him because he actually points at her then as he speaks, which makes Andy laugh for some reason. She's sharp and furious, and she clenches both fists in front of her like she's grabbing Joe's shirt to shake him from several feet away.
Most confusing of all, perhaps, is that Nicky is right there, standing with his back to the room as he chops vegetables and drops them in a large bowl near his elbow. He's acting as if he can't even hear the cacophony going on behind him.
"Woah, guys, guys, the hell is going on?" Nile tries to shout over the din, but Joe and Andy are too deep into the flow of their argument.
"Stay out of this, Nile," Andy barely interjects in Catalan before returning to Joe, who is no longer shouting but he's still speaking rapidly with his teeth bared.
Nile narrows her eyes, feeling hot at the throat and angry herself now.
"Don't speak to me like I'm a child," she snarls, and receives nothing but Booker’s hand on her shoulder as he sides into the room past her.
"I wouldn't bother," he mumbles into her ear, which is kind of the problem, Nile thinks but doesn't say, scowling at his back as he walks brazenly between the two howling lions and straight to Nicky, whose loose shoulders only square up when Booker leans in towards him to speak as he yanks open the fridge, shoving beer bottles in at random and making extra loud clinking sounds as he does.
"Nicolò, tell her-" Nile hears Joe demand. This at least she understands, as well as Andy shouting over him "Nico, shut up!" Despite the fact Nicky hasn't actually said anything yet.
Nile feels her heart thumping faster and faster, the ricocheting upset and frustration isn't volleying back and forth between Andy and Joe alone, it's bouncing through the entire room. She notices, for the first time, a laptop open on the counter behind Andy; however long it's been there, it's long enough for the screen to have gone completely black.
"Ai, peace, will you?" Booker says, cracking open a bottle and taking a long sip.
He holds it out to Nicky, who actually takes it wordlessly and drinks before handing it back. This, Nile decides, is the final straw.
"Will somebody fucking explain to me what is going on?" she shouts.
Andy fully turns around, bracing herself against the worktop like she might Hulk out and rip it off. Joe, meanwhile, has pressed his prayerful hands together against his lips to silence himself, his eyes solemn, then closed. In their stubborn pause, as Nile feels herself go bug-eyed on the brink of shrieking, Booker presses his cold beer bottle to Nicky's shoulder, which prompts him to finally put down the knife and look at the Frenchman. What passes between them is silent, and so fleeting Nile almost thinks she made it up.
Then Nicky takes the beer from Booker’s hand, holding it to his lips and says: "Booker and I will go."
"Nicolò-"
"Absolutely-"
"Go where?" Booker snorts, as Nicky takes a gulp of his beer and hands it back.
For a moment it seems Joe and Andy are going to lock horns again before anybody can get a straight answer, but cutting cleanly through their blustering, Nicky says: "There has been a series of disappearances in Stockholm, and a new Merrick facility opened three years ago that has had some suspicious activity. Copley believes the two are connected."
"What does that have to do with us?" Nile asks.
The look on Nicky's face when he turns to stare at her, aghast and disappointed, feels like a knife in her gut. What a wretched thing to say, she thinks, and swallows uncomfortably.
"Obviously we should help," she backtracks, and she hopes he knows she means it. "I just meant - you guys were pretty insistent about the need to lie low for a while unless something forced our hands first."
You guys is probably a bit of a stretch. Andy was the one actually saying it, but she has this way of speaking that always makes it sound like it's a group thing, like she's some sort of voice for the collective thought. Probably what makes her a good leader, Nile thinks.
Nicky's expression softens a touch, but his eyes are still a bit narrow, and Nile has to hold her ground to keep from trying to mollify him further.
"It's out of the question," Joe interjects. "Nicolò, be reasonable-"
Nicky's retort is in Italian, and completely lost on Nile. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Andy's posture has almost completely transformed. She's gone from hostile to positively relaxed in a heartbeat, leaning one elbow on the counter and making a grabbing gesture at Booker, blatantly requesting a beer of her own. She knows she's won, somehow, and by the slump of Joe's shoulders, he does, too. His conversation with Nicky is less argument and more a token, animated discussion, now.
Nile stares at Andy, as Booker makes his way over with three fresh beers. Andy takes hers with a nod; when Booker holds one out to her, Nile almost wants to swat it away just to prove she's as capable of being an unreasonable asshole as the rest of them, but the very idea makes her feel petty and stupid. So she simply takes her beer, and sips it, while Joe and Nicky's voices turn hushed and soft as Nicky returns to cooking.
"Don't be smug," Booker grumbles. "It'll give you wrinkles."
Andy's mouth twitches, and she elbows him in the side.
"You'll go?" she asks.
Booker's expression is flat as he leans back beside her, eyes darting to Nile, and then to the two men across the room, and finally to Andy, at which point he ducks his head like he's walking under a ladder.
"I don't see what is so urgent, but sure, I'll go."
Nile swallows a mouthful of beer, and leans against the door frame as Joe lets out a long, bullish sigh through his nose, staring up at the ceiling with his hands on his hips. Nicky is speaking in low, rapid Italian, and he says something that makes Joe snort a reluctant laugh and shake his head. Nicky smiles triumphantly and cups Joe's jaw very briefly - as his hand slides away, Joe grabs it tight, and puts it back.
It feels suddenly too intimate a moment to watch, no matter that it's taking place in a full kitchen. Nile looks back at Andy instead.
"Why can't we all just go to Stockholm?" she asks.
Andy's expression is positively withering, it's so dry.
"You're not ready," she says without even looking up from her bottle as she thumbs at the corner of the label. Beside her, Booker traitorously says nothing.
"The hell I am," Nile scoffs.
"We aren't ready," Andy corrects before she can explain exactly how ready she really is. She tilts her head, daring a rebuttal, and takes a gulp of beer.
Across the room, Joe has finally released Nicky's hand and is turning back around with a cool, clear face and bright eyes, almost smiling. He scans the room, then zeroes in on Nile with a laser focus.
"So, Nile. Were you at a galería as I suspected?"
For a moment, Nile is flooded with indignation at the idea Joe thinks she's such an easily distracted toddler he can just breeze past that entire scene and she'll have forgotten about it in an instant. However, as Joe crosses the room and reaches out a hand, his rings catching the light and his eyes firmly fixed only on her without even glancing at Andy or Booker, she realises it might actually be Joe who is looking for an out here, instead.
Clutching her bottle tight, Nile turns, letting Joe place a hand on the middle of her back to guide her through the house towards the front sitting room.
"I was, well guessed," she replies indulgently.
Joe's hand is warm through the cotton of her t-shirt, fingers spread wide, and there is undeniably real enthusiasm as he asks her if she's found a favourite in the city, ushering her to sit on a feathery old sofa and joining her side. As she puts her beer bottle down on the floor, he crosses his legs, hands clasped around one knee, and down the hallway, there are voices drifting down the hall - Italian, maybe. Something deliberately not in her repertoire yet, rudely.
"I have," she replies. "In Poble Sec. It's this tiny, cramped little thing and the owner is the loveliest man called Armando."
"Oh, Armando," Joe says with an r that rolls for days as he bats his eyelashes cheesily at her.
"Shut up," she chuckles, slapping him with the back of her hand. "Oh, oh, I heard a good one today."
"Oh, oh?" Joe responds in perfect imitation of her, and Nile shakes her head, but lets it go in favour of explaining British Caitlyn's dilemma and asking what he would have advised.
Joe listens with the same attentiveness he always affords her, and when she asks what he thinks, he looks entirely affronted.
"She should call him!" he announces. "Why hesitate?"
"Because some things are better left as a good memory before it gets spoiled?" Nile scoffs - she had known, of course, what Joe's answer would be. But she likes talking to him about her eavesdropped conversations nonetheless. Like now, when he makes a psshhh sound through pursed lips and tosses his hands in the air.
"He could be the love of her life! Her soulmate! And if he isn't, a good memory cannot be spoiled by a disappointing present or a lost future."
Nile wonders if that is true. It is hard to believe sometimes - when she sees the grief in Booker’s eyes, or when she thinks of Dizzy, and all her brightest, fondest memories are blurred by the image of her frown as she stared across the camp with distrustful eyes. She smiles, and raises her eyebrows.
"Sometimes we want to preserve our image of something, so it can go on being perfect forever," Nile suggests.
"Oh, but that won't do at all," Joe says, wrinkling his nose. "Everything is more beautiful in its entirety, and not only its perfect parts."
"He says that now," a voice says from the doorway, and Nile turns her head to see Nicky leaning against the door jamb, arms across his chest with his hands tucked around his ribs, smiling fondly. "But I recall a certain taverna at the port of Paros that served the most perfect whitebait, where we spent two very perfect months, and when I suggested we return a decade or two later, Yusuf said he would rather never see the Aegean again than find out that taverna wasn't there anymore."
"Hypocrite!" Nile teases with a grin, while Joe looks outraged.
"Amore mio!" he cries. "I don't know what you are talking about." He turns his nose up at the laughter, mouth twitching. "And you know full well it was Samos, not Paros."
Nicky walks over to brush a hand over Joe's hair, and leans down to kiss him, just once.
"My mistake," he replies with a sly grin, thumb on the apple of Joe's cheek for a moment before standing tall again to look at them both. "Food will be an hour at least. I'm going to call Copley. Speak to her."
"I'm not apologising for-"
"Did I say apologise?" Nicky asks archly, one brow raised. "Just speak. Before we leave."
Joe grumbles something Nile doesn't understand, but the tone, and the way he flaps his hand, and the way Nicky's shoulders relax, are more than enough to get the gist. Nicky looks at Nile.
"Remind him for me, please?" he asks. "I have a feeling he'll forget as soon as I've left the room."
Joe splutters, and Nile can't quite laugh at the joke.
"Sure," she says.
With that, Nicky leaves the room, shouting something in French as he goes. He always switches to French to get Booker's attention, Nile has noticed. Joe and Andy don't speak it half as much as Nicky and Booker, and she doesn't know what that means. If there's some hidden meaning in Nicky speaking Booker's mother tongue when the others don't, or if it is just that Andy and Joe don't like speaking French.
There's a lot about these people she doesn't know yet. And maybe not knowing why they choose one language over another is not very vital to completing a mission. Maybe knowing why Nicky was ignoring Joe and Andy's argument but was roped in just by Booker pressing a cold beer to his arm isn't going to prove useful for knowing their manoeuvres or weapons or ways of moving in the dark.
But there is so much, she keeps realising over and over again, she doesn't know about any of them.
Andy's right, Nile thinks. She's not ready, really, to trust this group of people wholly and unerringly.
Beside her, Joe leans back on the sofa and scrubs his face with both palms. He mumbles something into his hands, muffled and certainly not English or Spanish. When Nile lightly kicks his calf with her toe, he pulls back up, looking expectant.
"Talk to Andy," she says in a deadpan reminder, and he kicks her back with a flashpan smile.
"I will, drill sergeant," he retorts, and tucks his feet up underneath him instead.
Nile sighs, flopping around to the side to lean her elbow on the back of the sofa, her own legs curled up as well to mirror him. There's a small strip of dark blue sofa between their knees.
Joe worries at a loose thread in the cushion, twirling it around and around his finger and tugging lightly.
"Joe," Nile says after a moment, careful not to sound too grave but he knows anyway, must do, because he pulls in a deep long breath through his nose, exhaling even more slowly and pulling the blue thread tighter into the joint of his finger.
"Hmm?" he asks, eyes on his thread.
Nile swallows, and steadies herself.
"What exactly were you fighting with Andy about?" she asks. She doesn't know everything about any of them, but she knows all four people she shares this house with appreciate a certain level of candour. "Do you…" she falters, wondering if she should ask. "Do you think we can't trust Copley's intel?"
Joe's eyes flash up at her, dark and surprised, and his mouth gapes like a fish for a moment.
"Oh, no," he replies, shaking his head then looking back at the blue line cutting into his finger. "No. Nothing like that. I am sure if he thinks there is a connection between the missing people and the hospital, there is one."
"Then…" Nile prompts, when he doesn't elaborate. He's rarely cagey. She resists the urge to shuffle forwards until their knees are touching, and is struck by the realisation that's what she'd do if she was sitting with Noah, back home in Chicago.
She feels a distracting pang in her chest.
Joe looks up at her, properly. Resignation in his face.
"Andy likes to be in control of things," he says, first.
Nile nearly laughs in his face, but instead she schools her expression into one of dramatic shock.
"Oh, really?" she gasps. "I hadn't noticed."
Joe rolls his eyes, and reaches across the chasm of that strip of sofa to swat her knee with his hand.
"Hush," he chides teasingly. "I merely wanted Andy to admit this was the sort of job Nicky and I would usually manage alone. It escalated."
So, it's not he doesn't want to do the job at all, which had been Nile's first assumption, quickly dispelled by Nicky's look of indignation at the suggestion this wasn't their concern. She remembers the way Joe pointed at her when she arrived - or was it Booker? She's suddenly not entirely sure.
Andy had laughed, and the way they both reacted to Nicky saying he and Booker would go…
"She doesn't want you both on the job?" she guesses.
Joe's eyes twinkle at her, his expression twisting just a little and it makes him seem - sadder? Lighter? Something. She doesn't know.
"Too soon," he reminds her.
Nile is struck then by a memory from the week following the breakout of Merrick's building. Holed up in a tiny cottage in Wales, tucked far out of sight of the world. She remembers sitting in one of the bedrooms with Nicky, letting him distract her from the self-pity she'd been wallowing in with stories of colourful, entertaining adventures, back when crossing from one country to the next took weeks, and sometimes relied on very irate horses that preferred to shit on the baggage if it was left unattended.
You're lying, she'd scoffed as she laughed, and Nicky, grinning, had insisted he was not.
It's true! He cried, hands as talkative as his mouth, much brighter and livelier than he'd been in days. He waited until the bag was open and everything. I didn't - Yusuf! Yusuf, come here and explain to Nile-
Within moments the door had crashed open as Joe came hurtling through, looking haggard and frightened, yelling Nicolò? Nicolò! Are you alright I heard you-
His panic, hearing simply Nicky shouting his name between rooms, had been dreadful, and even with proof of their smiling peace before him Joe's hands shook as he folded himself around Nicky and kissed his crown and gulped back a tremor in his voice.
It's alright, we're alright, tesoro, sono qui, Nicky had promised, over and over, until his heart and ears believed it.
So when Joe repeats Andy's "Too soon" in that wry tone, barely three months later…
"Joe," she says, very gently. "It's only been a couple of months. Maybe she has a point."
For some reason, this provokes a genuinely mirthful laugh.
"Oh, it's not that she thinks we aren't up to the task," he assures her, and goes back to pulling his blue thread. "She just doesn't trust us to come back when the job is done."
A startled, bewildered scoff escapes Nile before she can rein it in.
"What, she thinks you'll run off somewhere?" she jokes. Joe, watching his pinky furl and unfurl the thread, shrugs complacently. "I mean," Nile backtracks, feeling thrown. "You wouldn't, would you?"
Joe pulls an expression that's more apologetic than anything else.
"Not intentionally," he says.
"Not...intentionally?" Nile repeats slowly, trying to make sense of that. She can feel her frown digging into her forehead, her eyes blinking too fast. She tries to chuckle, but it comes out wrong. "Joe, you can't accidentally run away."
"So dramatic," Joe huffs, but when he sees Nile's face, he pulls up short, tucking his knees closer to his chest and clasping his hands together.
He looks, if anything, even more apologetic, which is less than reassuring. Nile is almost embarrassed by the trembling of her chest as she tries to breathe slowly.
"Nile," Joe says, so tenderly she'd rather he leave it there. Let it remain perfect and nothing more than her name, spoken lovingly. But he doesn't. He keeps going. "You should understand, your sense of time - it's going to change. When you've lived for a few hundred years, time starts to be a lot more…" Searching for the word, he runs his thumb over the ring on his forefinger and says, with smiling irony, "Insubstantial, I suppose."
He closes the gap between their knees, and Nile feels ten years old, sitting opposite her brother, trading secrets in the fort made between their beds.
If Joe can tell, he has the grace not to ask. He explains, simply, confusingly.
"You set off saying you'll be back in three days, and a month later when you return you say oh, sorry I'm a bit late, without thinking anything of it."
Nile thinks about that day in Wales, about the way Joe gripped Nicky's hair so tight he winced, but said nothing.
"You think if you took a day or two off with Nicky, you'd disappear for a month?" No matter how hard she tries to inject humour into the question, the weight of it sits heavily in her chest, and she's embarrassed by how abandoned the idea makes her feel.
Wasn't she just thinking how little she knows them, how far she has to go before they are anything close to the family she's left behind?
The family she's abandoned, a dark, secret voice reminds her, and she pulls back instinctively. Their knees are no longer touching, and she misses the square inch of touch but doesn't fix it. Joe fixes her with a curious look, less sorry, but surer.
"I don't know what would happen," he tells her, and she thinks she believes him. She wonders what Nicky would say in his stead. "But I do know Andy has suffered the consequences of our tardiness once beyond measure, and I can't fault her for trying to prevent it again now."
Nile frowns again, and tries to parse the look in Joe's eyes. The window behind them is full of sunshine, split by the netted curtains and covering them in lacy shadow.
The look is familiar, the tone of his voice. Nobody has mentioned her since that night - Nile hasn't dared, even after waking up soaked to the bone and gasping.
"You mean...Quynh?"
She forces herself not to whisper, not to turn the woman into a ghost story, but it's difficult. She wakes up sometimes with her throat hoarse from screams that never broke the surface.
Joe turns his face towards the sun - away from Nile.
"Two months late," he says, eyes open and full of filtered light. "Some of it our fault, some of it bad tides and misfortune. If we'd been on time, we'd have been there long before they were even captured."
Nile didn't know what to say the first time around, and three months later is no different, the sun warm on her skin and Joe's words cold in her gut.
"It was nothing," he says, with a small huff of disbelief, as if four hundred years later he still can't quite believe it. "Two months," he repeats and shakes his head, thumb rubbing a half moon of his ring. "Andy and Quynh were once three years late meeting us, and when they finally showed up, Nicolò and I were beside ourselves while they just rolled their eyes and told us to stop being such mothers about it."
It's difficult to tell if he's simply offering her context or trying to convince her. The crumple in his brow, a far off look in his eyes. "After Quynh was lost we - we all tried to be more careful. But it happens, sometimes. Time slips through the hourglass and the days become years in a heartbeat."
Nile thinks again on Andy's furious expression as she shouted at Joe, louder than Nile has maybe ever heard her before - telling a completely silent Nicky to shut up, laughing amidst her boiling emotions, Too soon, she thinks. Too soon to let them out of her sight for long, too soon to risk them vanishing to-
Oh, she thinks, and feels like an idiot. Andy's so good at tricking them into thinking she's not utterly terrified, sometimes.
"Andy's mortal now," she says, slowly.
Joe looks physically pained as he nods. He swallows loudly, and rubs his jaw.
"Yes," he replies. "Yes, she is."
"Time isn't going to mean the same anymore."
"Yes."
Does she think they'll forget? Three months might not be long, but she doesn't think Nicky and Joe seem that inconsiderate, or cruel. If anything, Nicky has been driving Andy to distraction trying to force her to eat more balanced diets and stop scoffing every sugary delicacy in sight.
Nile doubts either of them are forgetting any time soon.
"So she's what, gonna hold you hostage to make sure Nicky comes back quickly?" she asks. She must be losing her touch, because this doesn't land half as lightly as she means it to, either.
Especially when Joe tilts his head to the side and shrugs.
"Yes," he says at first, but then sighs, and shakes his head. "That's an exaggeration. But it is a foolproof plan."
"I mean, can she physically stop you just going after him?" Nile asks.
Joe chuckles.
"I'm sure she could," he admits. "I'm sure she would. But I wouldn't go behind her back. That's not our way. We fight, we disagree, we debate. But when a decision is made, we abide by it. We don't stray from the path we've chosen, certainly not out of spite, or selfishness."
It feels close to an instruction, the way he says it. A warning maybe, for whenever Nile next disagrees with something they decide, that the answer should not be running rogue anyway.
"Are you…" Her mouth runs away from her before she can trap the words between her teeth.
"What?" Joe asks. When she hesitates, he rolls himself around until he's sitting cross-legged on the sofa, shoulders loose, his attention undivided. "Speak freely, Nile," he instructs. "That is what it means to be family."
It's not the first time he's said it. The first time, when the very word had choked her line strangling comes around a bud of hope, and she said she wasn't sure if that's what they really were, his response had been simple, and kind, and ultimately true.
I know, but the more we practise, the easier it becomes.
Nile steels herself, and practises speaking freely, as if she was family.
"Are you worried about Nicky going alone with Booker?"
If Joe is surprised by her question, he conceals it expertly. Rolling his shoulders out, he wrinkles his nose in thought.
"The fear has touched my heart," he admits, then smiles. "But it's hollow. Either I accept Booker's remorse as genuine or I don't. If we are safe with him here in Barcelona, Nicky is safe with him in Stockholm."
Nile isn't sure if that's quite how it works. Fear is not easily reasoned with - certainly not the kind of fear that has a man tearing through a house with tears in his eyes just hearing his name called out in laughter. Joe sounds like he is stating facts in the hope of making them true by sheer force of will, and Nile thinks it's probably not her place to try kicking a crutch out from underneath his arm, even if it's already full of cracks.
Before she can reply, he grins at her slyly, in a surprising imitation of Nicky when he said my mistake teasingly.
"And in any case, Nicolò is more than capable of putting him down if he misbehaves."
While undoubtedly true, Nile can tell Joe isn't saying everything on his mind. She understands, but the sting of impatience is real, for the day that is no longer too soon, when she understands silences as easily as every other language they speak. She wonders if Joe volunteered to go with Booker at some point in their argument, if Andy had said no.
If Nile were Andy, she wouldn't trust Joe not to push Booker off a building given half the chance alone with him. He was easily the most furious in the immediate aftermath of Merrick, the only one who outright said he wanted Booker gone.
More than once she's walked into a room where Joe and Booker are alone, and found the atmosphere so frigid and fraught she's wanted to march back out again. Whenever they finally have it out between them, and acknowledge the quivering thread of fury connecting them, Nile rather hopes she isn't there to see it.
Outside, there's the loud rattling snarl of a motorbike howling down the lane. She turns to look through folds of the netting, but it's long gone. She reaches up to twitch the lace, watches the pattern of shadows twist over them, and the back of the sofa.
"I could go," she says, still watching the shadows.
Joe laughs, not unkindly, but not gently either.
"Nile," he says firmly. "I do not mean to insult you when I say no, you could not."
His face is all compassion, and Nile is mostly joking when she replies: "And yet, I am insulted."
Joe sighs loudly and bats her knee with the back of his hand.
"You are extremely capable, and learning very fast," he promises her. "But you don't speak any language that would be helpful to you other than English, you haven't trained with any of us long enough to know all of our signals and codes in such a way that we wouldn't be distracted worrying about you."
She knows that, of course. It's not like he's wrong.
But Nile hasn't quite shaken the sharp look Nicky had given her when her disregard slipped out in a throwaway line she hadn't really meant, and she wants Joe to know she would go, if she was needed. She doesn't want them to think she's unfeeling, or cowardly. She'd rather Joe think she was naive than that.
She's surprised by Joe's hand - not swatting her this time, but gripping hold of her leg, just below her bare skinned knee. His hand is warm, and callused. His eyes sincere, wide open, as he waits for her to really look at him before adding:
"And you should make sure you feel safe with us, too. It's not just about us trusting you, Nile. It's about you trusting us, too."
Nile smiles, and places her hand over his. She can feel his rings under her palm. She hasn't asked where they came from yet, any of them. An eternity of history to learn, she could be swallowed up with despair by it easily. But not when Joe is right here, with a promise in his eyes and his hand upturning to squeeze hers encouragingly.
"And you can't tell me you're bored of Barcelona already," he says.
"Very true," she admits.
"And Armando," he adds.
"Damn, Joe," Nile scoffs. "He's like eighty years old!"
Joe clasps his hands to his chest.
"Gah, so young," he sighs, and Nile shoves him even as he starts getting up off the sofa. He staggers off, still chuckles, and pulls her up too. "Fine, fine," he concedes. "Come. Enough moping. Tell me which painting has caught your eye then. You don't have a favourite galería just for a lovely owner, anyway."
Nile smiles, and lets herself be ushered through towards the kitchen for a fresh beer, while she tells Joe about Armando's gallery.
*