The world begins again when Quynh walks into a diner on 44th Street.
Sure, the world was probably still spinning before she entered this dingy little place with its dirty yellow walls and cloying coffee-egg-hot oil combination smell. But it doesn’t begin before this second comes to pass. It doesn’t begin until her and Andromache, after all this time.
She pauses in the entranceway and takes stock. Record scratch and whirr, the music starts to play again — she missed the record heyday, you know? It’s rather sad, but just another thing to mourn. All said, music is one of the better things she's discovered about the 21st century in her scant half a year walking the earth again.
Not all music. Rock music is totally out. Anything with a beat that sounds too much like fists on iron, anything with a voice that strains like five hundred years of screaming through asphyxiation — anything like that is inherently shitty music, in her opinion (she likes the modern swear words, they roll so smoothly off the tongue).
What she likes is classical. Chamber music especially. Mozart is good, Tchaikovsky is not. Strings and piano are fine, but she hates big brass and percussion. Apparently, she’s picky.
Those odd times she’s allowed herself to rest, in the six months since she took her first breath in half a century, she’s enjoyed music more than most anything else. In the past few months she’s even built enough connections to get a hold of a reliable stream of income – killing people is very lucrative, in these times. So she’s spent a lot of the money on going to concert halls. She recommends the Chicago Symphony Orchestra but is also partial to the Rotterdam Philharmonic.
And if she vacates her seat to lock herself in the bathroom with her hands over her ears for the duration of any piece more abrasive than Beethoven, then…well. She just knows what she likes, alright.
The music currently playing in this New York diner is something she hasn't heard before — she hasn't heard of most things, she's not used to living in a world she hasn't witnessed growing up, inch by incremental inch. But the song is loud and crooning and clashing so she unplugs the jukebox with a fierce kick to the electricity cord as she walks by.
And there’s Andromache. Her hair is different than Quynh remembers, but Sebastian found her a picture from the early 20th century and she looks the same as she does in that photo. Imagine that, the same haircut for over a hundred years. Quynh’s done her own hair up in a loose, contemporary style. She wants to look different, feel different, nothing like herself from hundreds of years ago. Did you know, drowning 8,9001,542 times is hell on your hair?
She’s not quite sure why she’s so caught up on the hair thing but she is, she stands just inside the diner and stares at the side of Andromache’s head – she’s looking at her breakfast, hasn’t seen Quynh yet – and her hair is different. Is that the only thing that’s different? Except it suits her, the short cut. It’s so Andromache that it actually hurts, but it hurts as a pang in her chest and for the briefest moment she confuses it with the burn of water in her lungs.
She breathes in, deeply, breathes out. Breathing is the best thing about being alive again, she thinks. There’s nothing so underrated as a long, cleansing, painless breath. Almost makes her feel human.
This calms her. So she takes the leap: she strides across the diner and slides into the seat across from Andromache in the booth.
“You started without me,” Quynh chides, as Andromache starts to choke on her pancakes. “I will have to order quickly.” She waves to catch the attention of a waiter, knows she is being too casual, too flippant – because this is Andromache, in the flesh, after all these years this is Andromache and she is Quynh and they are in the same space, breathing the same painless air – but a part of her hopes that her coldness will hurt Andromache too.
"Quynh," Andromache breathes, and, sure, Quynh's heart stops and clenches in place to hear it. But she pretends it doesn't. She brushes Andromache’s hand aside like she doesn't care to feel her skin against her cheek.
Because she doesn't. When her knuckles knock against Andromache’s palm, it doesn’t give her a lightning-shock. She doesn't care for these things, she's lived for 508 years without them. (Died for 508 years? Same difference.)
“Eggs and bacon,” she tells the waiter, whose gaze is flicking concernedly between Quynh and the still half-choking Andromache. “Scrambled, please.” He confirms her order and leaves, and she says to Andromache, “I like the way they do eggs in this century.”
“Quynh,” Andromache says again, like it’s the only word she knows.
“Andromache.” Quynh reaches for Andromache’s glass and takes a gulp of orange juice. She makes a face. “I don’t like the way they do juice in this century. All that added sugar.”
Andromache drops her fork, her hands fall to the table, curling in and out of fists. You wouldn’t know it when she’s clutching a sword or an axe or any other weapon, but Andromache has never quite known what to do with her hands. Quynh tries not to smile. That would be telling.
“How…” Andromache chokes again, but on words, this time, instead of her breakfast. “How are you…when did you…Quynh…”
It’s the first time Quynh’s rendered her speechless. Andromache is a woman of few words but she almost always knows what to say, even if it usually comes out brief and sharp.
In any case, the story of how and when and what is not why she is here. She imagines telling Andromache everything, spilling her guts on this unwashed café table. Waxing on about every second she spent living and dying and living and dying again, every second that passed in agony, describing in detail every pint of water that ravaged down her throat and killed her like it meant it. Water is just a thing, she knows this. Water is thoughtless but, still, she swears that every separate time it drowned her the water really meant it.
There’s a story in myth about the man who stole fire. Quynh knows it intimately – she knows it as intimately as anyone can know it, she knows it like death. After the hundred thousandth death at the water’s hand, she started telling herself stories as she choked. Stories she’d been told, stories she’d read, stories from places she can’t even remember but she still knew the shape of them enough to tell them back to herself. It didn’t dull the pain, but it gave the pain some meaning. It gave the deaths some purpose.
In this particular story, Prometheus stole fire, or metalworking, or spirit, or he created humanity, or all of those things – accounts differ, but it all comes to the same end. Prometheus stole something from the gods and gave it to the mortals. Not out of sympathy, or charity, but he did it out of pity and maybe that was the real crime.
The gods were angry, so the tale goes, and punished Prometheus. Chained him to a rock, weak and exposed and naked as the humans he so loved, and the eagle came each day to peck out his liver. A mortifying kind of hurt. Each day, Prometheus would heal over a number of agonising hours, cursed as he was with immortality. And each day, the eagle would return to do it all over again, with the same result. People call that insanity. Quynh calls it natural justice.
She took comfort in the myth. Not as a predictor of her own future – she doubted Hercules would ever come to rescue her – but simply as a form of meaning. It gave some structure to her endless, endless hours – breathe, choke, die, wake, breathe, choke and die, die, die. Dying got boring, like a house you’ve lived in your whole life. The story a fresh coat of paint on the walls.
It was the Prometheus story that she told herself most often. It pleases her to be something of a myth. A god. Like Andromache always was.
She wonders, sometimes, what it was that she stole. Eternal life is the easy answer, though she never asked for it much less took it in violation of any natural laws.
She thinks maybe the crime was learning, over time, to want it. Learning to love it after it was forced upon her. Immortality, that is. Maybe the first second she was grateful for it was the second she technically stole it, like: damn you, woman, it was meant to be a curse. Her crime was waking up each morning and reviving herself after every death and smiling to see the sun in the sky, rejoicing to feel her heart pump in her chest, and softening to see Andromache – always, always Andromache – awaken right there with her.
But she’s not here to tell Andromache that story. So, she asks, taking another sip of the orange juice that offends her with its sweetness, “Why did we never lie together?"
Andromache stares, her hands clenched in white fists atop the table.
"Mm,” Quynh nods indulgently. “Apologies, Andromache, how would they say it today? Why did we never fuck. It would have been nice to have something good to think about when I was dying for the eight millionth time.”
“Quynh, I – “ Andromache’s eyes are piercing; steel traps in their beholding. Quynh will not shrink, she will not shrink – “I don’t know what to say. I feel like I’m dreaming.”
The waiter comes by with her bacon and eggs. Quynh smiles at him, thanks him soundly, and digs in. Food, like music, is another of those simple pleasures she can’t get enough of now, and she groans at the heavy fatty warmth of the first bite on her tongue. That keeps happening, it’s almost embarrassing. Funny how dying so much makes you not give a shit.
“We should get out of here,” Andromache says while Quynh eats. “I have so much to tell you. You have so much to – if you want to, I mean. I don’t…what do you want to do? We can do anything you like. I have a place a couple blocks from here. It’s safe, off the grid.”
Quynh ignores this, especially ignores the fragile ache of we can do anything you like. She points at Andromache’s plate with a fork. “That is getting cold.”
“Quynh?”
“Andromache,” she says lightly. “I have waited five hundred years to see you again. Please eat breakfast with me.”
Andromache actually smiles at that, and Quynh wants to kill her for it. Damn her for that, after all this time, that smile still makes her chest flutter instead of burst with pain. “Sure,” Andromache says. “Sure. If that’s what you want.” She picks up her fork and starts again on her pancakes, still smiling a little through bites.
“Sebastian tells me you go by Andy now.”
“You saw Booker?”
“Of course. I had to track you down somehow, didn't I? You made quite a mess in London, but after that...Anyway, he also told me you exiled him.”
“Ah. Yes.”
“Long story?”
“Well, yes.”
“Tell me it one day,” Quynh says around a mouthful, then swallows. She mouths the syllables, but doesn’t speak it: Andy. “You know, I don’t like it. I won’t be using it, I hope that doesn’t bother you.”
Andromache laughs again, gravelly. “As much as I love to hear my name from you, we are keeping a low profile these days – so maybe in public you could just – “
“No, Andromache,” Quynh hisses. “You misunderstand me. I won’t be using it, this is me telling you.” She sets down her knife and fork, levels her gaze. “You should never forget. You are Andromache of Scythia. You are inevitable.”
Quynh can’t hold the stare for long. Andromache’s eyes are – her face is – well. So she looks down and concentrates on her eggs.
For a minute there’s only the clinking of cutlery and working of jaws. It was always Quynh who did most of the talking, way back when. Figures that’s something that wouldn’t change.
“Do you know what I’m doing now?” she asks her plate.
Andromache answers, “Aside from abandoning all your table manners with those eggs? I don’t know. What are you doing?”
“I am levelling the scores.”
“What do you mean?”
Quynh tilts her head, stretching her neck out as she chews. “Well, I died eight million, nine hundred and one thousand, five hundred and forty two times. Not an exact calculation, mind you, but what’s a few thousand deaths between friends?” She scrapes up the last of her eggs and continues talking through the last bite. “I am an outlier, you see? I’m messing up the averages. I have been killed almost nine million times. There are many, many people out there who deserve to die much more than I ever did, but how many times has anyone killed them?”
Quynh looks briefly up at Andromache, just a flick of the eyes, she can’t help it. Andromache is studying her, no longer smiling. That little line between her eyebrows spells worry. Quynh stabs a piece of bacon. “The answer, Andromache, is none.”
“Quynh…” Andromache starts, her pancakes forgotten. “I don’t know where you’re going with this, and I know you’re hurt – I can’t ever understand that, I know – but I don’t like what you’re saying.”
“Oh, you don’t like it? How many people have you killed?”
“Come on. This isn’t how we work. You remember? We saved people, helped people. We’re still doing that today. Sometimes we need to kill in order to do it, but that’s not the point. That can never be the point.”
She’s so earnest. So forgiving. It makes Quynh’s chest ache.
“No,” Quynh says. Andromache may have lived longer than her but Quynh has died longer, so who is the wiser? Quynh, of course. Life is foolish where death is wise. She knows she’s got it right. “That is the point. That is what I came here to tell you. You always wondered why we were given immortality? It’s not for any of that – saving humanity? No. Immortality is cheating death, and cheaters rule. We are death, Andromache. We bring it with us instead of succumbing to it. We deal it out as we see fit, that is who we are, that is why we are still here. Something out there wants this for us. And I am giving it to them.”
“No,” Andromache shakes her head. “No. I don’t care what you’ve done since you got out of – since you came back. That doesn’t matter. You’re here now, and I can help you. I will help you, I promise.”
Quynh smiles. It’s a different smile than her old one, even she can feel it. It’s thinner, keener. It’s a smile that says, not I’m happy or I love you, as her old smile did. It’s much more complicated, so many more depths, a smile of many different uses. Right now, it says, I don’t want you to help me. It says, I am who I am and I am this, behold it, bear witness, suffer it always.
It surprises her, how much she wants Andromache to suffer. Not to suffer in general, but to suffer her. Specifically. Personally. The intimacy of agony, pas de deux, et cetera.
Andromache, it seems, reads her smile and gets the message. Loud and clear, apparently, because she stands abruptly. The table rattles. Just as quickly – drowning for five hundred years didn’t weaken her reflexes, that’s what they call a small mercy – Quynh pulls the gun from the waistband of her jeans. Flicks off the safety with a click loud enough for both of them to hear above the low hum of conversation and the cranking of the coffee machine.
Andromache freezes. Quynh smiles wider and pokes the butt of the gun into Andromache’s thigh.
“Sit down,” she says lowly, “you don’t want to make a scene. It would be so annoying to die in this diner, wouldn’t it? Lots of awkward questions, like, why didn’t you leave a tip, and how did you get up and walk away five minutes after getting your skull blown up? We wouldn’t want that.”
Andromache sits down, precise and coiled. “What do you want?”
“What I’ve always wanted,” Quynh says. “I want you to know me.”
“This is fucked up, Quynh.”
“Ah. You like the modern swear words, too.”
With the hand that isn’t wrapped around the pistol beneath the table, Quynh stacks Andromache’s plate – still half a pancake left, how unfortunate, wasted food is a pet peeve of hers these days – on top of her own, which she’s practically licked clean.
“Did you think about me?” she asks.
Andromache takes a moment to answer. When she does, it’s with a deep sigh. “Of course, I thought about you. Every day. I never stopped.”
Quynh feels something in her face twitch. Stop that. “That’s nice to hear. I didn't think about you,” she lies. “I thought about other things. Higher things. I’ve had over five hundred years to think about nothing but life and death and the tiny space between. It’s so delicate, have you noticed that? I did. I made a study of it, I cultivated it. I let it grow in me.”
And didn’t it just grow? Every three minutes, like clockwork. Like it loved her and she loved it. Don’t psychoanalyse her, she knows what Stockholm syndrome is and she doesn’t care.
“I’m sorry,” Andromache says.
Quynh jabs the gun against Andromache’s stomach. “You kissed me once. Do you remember? It was in Paris. Sixteenth century. Île de la Cité, on the bank of the Seine. A summer evening, the sky was a sort of dark pink and we’d had a lot of very expensive wine. I remember it like yesterday.”
“That was a mistake.”
Quynh feels her eyes flash wide, the crunching of her jaw. She almost pulls the trigger, then and there. She settles for pointing a shaking finger at Andromache – shit, she really is shaking, this wasn’t supposed to be so telling. “Don’t say that. Don’t you say that to me.”
Andromache meets her gaze. Quynh wishes she would look away. She licks the dryness from her lips and readjusts her grip around the gun.
“Maybe I should kill you now,” she murmurs, considering. “Maybe I should kill you nine million times in nine million different ways, and then you’ll know what it was like.” And then maybe we’ll be the same, again.
Andromache must see in her eyes that she means it – none of this is a joke, except for the part where Quynh died every three minutes for five hundred years, that bit is funny – because she stiffens, clutches at the table. Quynh watches her and anticipates the feeling of killing her. She might feel horrible about it, in fact she probably will, but that’s just something she’ll have to get over. Death, she’s learned – a hard, half-milennium-long lesson taught in burning lungs and fading out and futility – death is just something to get over.
But –
Andromache is scared.
This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. This isn’t how she imagined this for the last hundred years in the iron maiden, everything else up until now has gone according to script but not this. Not the tightening of skin around Andromache’s eyes, not the hard press of her lips, not the glaring white of her knuckles around the lip of the table. Guarded, yes. But scared.
Why would she be so scared? Unless –
Quynh lets the gun fall. Clicks the safety back on.
It’s her turn to be speechless. Fair’s fair. “You’re not – you’ve – “
Andromache smiles weakly. “Maybe I’m not quite so inevitable."
And what are five hundred years of drowning to this? The final nail in the coffin, death by a thousand cuts, the brothers Grimm and the diamond mountain and the bird that sharpens its beak on the peak of it. Whatever story Quynh might tell herself to understand this, it doesn’t matter. The world stops, record scratch.
Quynh says, “Oh.”
Andromache catches her hand under the table with two of her own. Those hands are rough, calloused, warm. Everything about her is just as Quynh remembers and isn’t that just the most horrible thing she has ever heard since the last breath of air gurgled out of her lungs five hundred years ago.
The gun is pried from her hands, and Andromache sticks the weapon in the back of her own trousers but doesn’t let go of Quynh’s hand. Thumb tracks over knuckles and the feel of it is enough to induce nausea – it’s tender, loving, or some similarly awful thing. Quynh meets Andromache’s eyes and almost throws up.
“Hey,” Andromache says, using the hand that’s not holding Quynh’s to brush her hair out of her eyes. Maybe that hair really is the only thing that’s changed. Quynh waits for more but – that’s all, that’s all she says.
Someone’s plugged the jukebox back in and it starts blaring drumbeat and guitar, making her shiver. Andromache must see something of it and she clutches Quynh’s hand tighter. Her knuckles grate together. It hurts.
Record scratch. If the world starts turning again, then, she doesn’t notice.