Afterword

She enters the room Joe disappeared through, heavily favoring her right leg as she peers around the corner. She spots Quynh, and has all of a second to reel from the shock of seeing her in the flesh after feeling her drown for so long. There’s nothing but mania in her light brown eyes, nothing salvageable.

500 years drowning in an ocean. Nile doesn’t know why she expected any different.

She lowers her gaze and that’s when she sees Joe on the ground, lying in a pool of his own blood. Every time he heals and manages to push himself up, Quynh puts another bullet through his head. Joe barely seems to feel it. Nicky’s screaming though, loud jarring screams that she doesn’t think she’ll ever forget as long as she lives. It speaks of pain she hopes she’ll never feel. Quynh’s looking at him as she kills Joe over and over again and the sheer cruelty of it flips her stomach.

Even Booker’s struggling against his restraints, shouting at Quynh but when he spots Nile, he goes still.

She can’t see Andy from her position but she does when she swings out from behind the door and shoots Quynh in the leg. It’s enough to bring her to her knees, her gun clattering to the floor. Joe heals enough to rise up to his feet and points his gun at her heart.

But his fingers are shaking over the trigger, eyes full of tears.

“How could you? She loved you, more than anything,” he says raggedly.

Then he makes a loud keening noise, sobs wracking his entire body violently enough that Nicky lurches against his restraints hard enough to break his wrist. His eyes are shifting rapidly between Joe and Andy.

Andy.

That’s when Nile finally really catches sight of Andy and the entire situation registers in her head. She can’t hold back her scream then, a mere echo of Joe’s. Andy’s slumped down against the wall and her lifeless eyes seem to burn through Nile’s very soul. She drops to her knees beside the woman, raising two fingers to the side of her neck.

She knows what to expect but it still breaks her heart when she feels no pulse, no signs of life. Her tears are quick to follow as she remembers all Andy was in the admittedly short time they’d known each other. Andy, who’d come for her when she’d been lost and alone.

Andy who’d given her this beautiful family. Andy who’d trained her, who’d patted her hair sometimes in a way that reminded her of her mother, who’d still laughed and loved after losing so much.

“Nile. Nile.”

The calls are anxious enough to catch her attention. She breaks through Nicky’s and Booker’s cuffs in somewhat of a haze before returning to Andy’s side. Booker pulls Andy into his arms, openly sobbing into her hair.

Nicky’s shaking from where he’s crouched beside Andy, holding her limp hand in his. He still looks like he’s waiting for her to wake, eyes glued to her face with unwavering intensity.

Nile stands up to join Joe’s side, who still has a quivering gun pointed at Quynh. She looks like a wounded animal on the other end of the gun, though Joe looks nothing like a hunter for the grief that ravages his features. Nile can see the near millennia he’s lived through then, and the agony he’s carried through a large part of it.

The agony for this woman, this mad woman that had just killed him almost a dozen times in the last minute alone.

“She should have come for me. You should have come for me. I spent 500 years drowning and you gave up,” Quynh lashes out.

Joe reels from each word like their physical blows and Nile braces him as best as she can.

“We tried. Quynh we tried,” Joe pleads.

Quynh’s head snaps away from him, like she’ll succumb if she stares into the raw grief in his eyes for too long. She turns away to look at Andy again, and her brow furrows.

“Why isn’t she healing,” she asks.

Open alarm crosses her features as she rounds on Joe with wide eyes. Joe’s clammed up, sunken in on himself and Nile answers for him. She doesn’t know this woman and although she felt her pain, her madness, she cannot excuse Andy’s death.

Andy was the center of this new, small world that Nile carved out for herself and she was gone. Just like that. Andromache the Scythian taken down by a single bullet through the head.

The very idea had her blood boiling in her veins.

“She was mortal,” Nile states, tripping over the word was.

“She’s not mortal,” Quynh exclaims, rapidly shaking her head. She picks up a gun off the floor and points it at them with shaky hands, like it’d protect her from the truth.

“It was her time Quynh,” Nicky says. His blue eyes are vacant, empty. The description Nile would use was completely and utterly shell shocked, like the very truths that formed the base of Nicky’s world had completed shattered.

Quynh turns the gun on him and Joe’s darting forward in a second.

“Quynh don’t,” he starts. His grip on his gun has suddenly steadied and pointed directly at her head. She doesn’t even seem to notice.

“You’re lying. You’re lying,” Quynh says. She repeats it, over and over as she backs into the corner of the room. Her eyes remain fixed on Andy’s still form, and slowly the truth seems to sink into her.

And then she races across the room faster than Nile can register and drops to the ground beside Andy. Her sobs aren’t human, not in the slightest. She all but snatches Andy out of Booker’s hold and Nile feels a wave of nausea rolling through her as she sees Andy’s head lol to the side like a rag doll.

And Nile can’t help but think that for all Andy was in life, her death was the most pitiful thing she’d ever seen.

“Andromache. Wake up. Wake up. I’ve just found you. We have time now. You need to wake up.”

The words are feral, uttered in a mix of languages that Nile can hardly comprehend. But the grief breaks through all language barriers and it’s finally Joe that kneels beside Quynh and slowly pulls her into his arms. Nile doesn’t know where he finds the heart to do that but she sure as hell can’t share in it. Quynh sobs into his shoulder, muttering apologies in Arabic, because she knows it’s him.

And Nile knows that under all the anger, the madness, Quynh still cares.

Joe grips her tighter, his other hand clenched around Andy’s still one.

Nile’s still staring at that pale hand when it twitches, just barely. She thinks she’s imagining it when the fingers move again and Joe startles. Nicky’s beside him in an instant, muttering prayers under his breath. Even Quynh’s grief-stricken babbling ceases as they watch Andy.

She coughs once, twice before her eyes fly open. She lifts herself up with a loud gasp, that’s immediately covered by Quynh’s scream as she throws herself into Andy’s arms. Joe’s half screaming, half sobbing into Nicky’s shoulder. Nicky holds him steady as tears drip down his cheeks. With his free hand, he pulls her towards him and she finds herself enveloped into a bone crushing hug between Nicky and Joe. Nile peaks over Joe’s shoulder to find Booker staring at all of them with barely concealed longing on his face.

She extends a hand to him and he latches on to it. Joe stiffens, just barely as Booker’s arms wrap around him and Nicky, with her trapped in the middle.

“I shouldn’t have done what I did,” Booker admits.

And the stiff expression on Nicky’s face melts just a little as he slowly wraps his own arm around Booker. Joe’s less accepting but he allows Booker’s arm. A temporary truce. A step in the right direction.

With time, together, Nile’s sure these relationships will fix themselves. And that’s one thing that they have. Time.

Beside them, Andy finally frees herself long enough from Quynh to hug them all.

“I told you it wouldn’t be your time yet,” Nicky says as she draws back.

“You’ve always had more faith than me,” Andy replies, reaching out an arm to pull Quynh to her side.

“Even now,” he asks, looking at the two women and the joy that exists between them like a tangible, living being.

Andy just smiles. Quynh’s joy fades ever so slightly as she catches sight of all the bullet holes riddling Joe’s shirt, the blood coating his face.

“What I did,” she starts without direction.

“Is done now,” Joe finishes. Then he looks at Nicky with a smile that finally reaches his eyes, laugh lines making their appearance.

“Besides, Nicky and I have done far worse to each other and he is still the love of my life,” he says.

It’s a terrible joke but it’s still enough to assuage some of Quynh’s guilt from what Nile can tell.

Nicky grimaces a little at the mention of Joe’s death. Now that Andy’s awake and well, his entire attention is devoted to Joe, and more specifically the numerous holes through his shirt. Joe notices the staring and presses a chaste kiss to his lips, murmuring something that’s just for the two of them. They draw back and a silence descends over them all, for once heavy with contentment rather than grief or pain.

There are still things to be fixed, like the way none of them still completely meet Booker’s gaze, like the way Nicky puts himself between Quynh and Joe, like the mania that’s no doubt still hidden behind the temporary joy that Quynh’s found at Andy’s resurrection. Nile’s not even sure the last one can be fixed.

Not to mention the fact that Copley was still nowhere to be found.

They were all incredibly broken but this family could survive anything. Nile was sure of few things in her life at this point, but this, this she would bet on.