Nicky
Nicky’s torn between staying beside Joe and running after Andy, but in the end he races after her. She’s leaning up against a tree and Nicky carefully picks his way across the ground wrought with overgrown roots before stepping up to her side.
Her face is tilted up to face the moon, and the light’s enough to catch the faint sheen of tears in her eyes.
Nicky cannot imagine what she’s feeling. 900 years on this earth and he’s still confronted with unfamiliar waters. He gives her the silence she came out here for even as he sees how much she struggles to keep her tears at bay. A frustrated sound escapes her and he can’t help but flinch as she brings down her fist on the bark of the tree behind her.
Her knuckles bleed and the reminder of her newfound mortality still feels like like the ground beneath his feet’s shifted.
Her first words to break the silence are hardly wavering but he hasn’t known this woman for near millennia to be fooled so easily.
“I shouldn’t have stopped looking for her,” Andy says.
“It was an impossible mission Andy,” he replies softly.
“If it had been Joe,” she starts.
“You’ve asked this of me before,” he interjects firmly.
And he’d never given her an answer, not once. In his world, room for questions like those did not exist. From the very first time he’d laid eyes on Yusuf, as they’d struck against each other on the bloodied sands of Jerusalem, he’d known their fates were entwined. Their love had come after but that bond.
It was as sure as the beat of his heart.
There was simply no world that could exist where Joe was locked away at the bottom of the ocean, drowning endlessly, while Nicky continued to walk this earth.
“She’ll blame us,” Andy says. Her tone implies that she believes she deserves it.
But it had been him. Only him. He’d been the first to suggest that they take some time after he’d nearly lost Joe and Andy to the ocean. Joe never would have suggested a break but that was Joe, filled with that inextinguishable fire that shielded everyone he loved, and burned everyone that lost his trust.
Joe would have spent the rest of his immortal life diving into oceans, regardless of the impossible odds. Nicky had once asked him how he could find the strength to do so, many years after Quynh, and he’d said,
Look at where we started and where we are now ya hayati. Does that not seem impossible? Did it not happen anyway?
In fact it was Andy that finally accepted the impossibility of their mission, long before Joe had. They still tracked leads when they could, but as leads dwindled, so did their hopes of ever finding her.
Until he finally suggested they stop, claiming that if they couldn’t save their friend, they could help others.
He and Joe had gotten into one of the worst arguments they’d ever had that day as Andy drifted into a near comatose state. It had taken nearly a century to help her through that grief, to help her find purpose again.
All that time and more ran through Nicky’s mind as he stood by Andy in silence.
“I failed her Nicky,” she finally says. She’s never sounded older to him than she did then.
“We did Andy,” he admits. He reaches out to turn her towards him, keeping a hand wrapped around her bruised knuckles.
“But we can still make this right. We can bring her home,” he says firmly.
“500 years,” Andy whispers. A single tear finally slides down her cheek.
“Fate would not bring her back to us like this if we couldn’t help her Andy,” he states.
At times even he feels foolish for how much he believes in fate and destiny. But it was destiny that brought him Joe, brought him Andy, Booker and now Nile. It’s fate that’s allowed him to help so many in this world.
It would be fate that allowed him to help Quynh as well and make things right.