Chapter Text
Joe collapsed under the baking sun.
He couldn’t walk any farther. What day was it? How long had he been doing this?
He was dead. He knew it. But that did not explain this endless march of thirst and heat. Fuck. Was his homophobic asshole brother right? Was this hell and he was damned? No. Even if this was his afterlife, he refused to believe his brother was right. “Fuck that guy. I regret nothing,” Joe mumbled to himself, words garbled by his dry tongue. He sprawled out in the hot sand and groaned.
He waited to die, pretty sure it wouldn’t take this time either anyway, when a shadow fell over him. Merciful darkness that somehow tricked him into feeling cooler for a moment.
When the darkness stayed, he opened his eyes. He might have startled if he hadn’t been out here for so long already. Joe was pretty sure nothing could startle him now. Not even the dark hooded figure looming over him. He stared, unable to see a face in that living shadow. A reaper?
“You are late. Very late. Is it normal to make dead men wait this long?” Joe asked.
“You were hard to find,” the reaper said, his voice nothing like Joe would have imagined. It was…beautiful. It spoke English but with a strong accent, like the words were not appreciated by his tongue. Joe ached to hear what words sounded like that were and immediately chastised himself for the thought. Hopefully reapers don’t read thoughts.
The reaper swung its backpack around to the front, unzipping it. It was all alarmingly normal. He pulled out a large water bottle and Joe sat up, mouth open and dry lips breaking. The reaper uncapped the bottle, took one drink himself, and then poured out the rest on Joe’s head. Joe didn’t have the time to complain about the waste, mouth open to swallow as much as he could and groaning in relief as the cool water spilled over his skin and soaked into his shirt.
When the bottle was empty, the man stuffed it back into the bag and then pulled out a second one. He zipped up his backpack this time and swung it back around to his back. Uncapping the bottle, he squatted down and held it out to Joe. When he came down to eye level, Joe could see into that dark hood. He stared, for a moment forgetting even the water. He was, literally, the man of his dreams. The one he had been seeing for days now. Ever since he died.
“I will explain. Drink first,” he said, nudging the bottle closer to his face.
Joe took it, still a little distracted by the reaper that was far from what a reaper should look like. And then he drank and for a moment forgot all else. He closed his eyes, drinking and drinking that sweet water until he thought his stomach might burst.
The reaper stood and let him take his time, still positioned to cast his shadow over Joe.
When he finished the water he felt better. Phenomenally better. His lips weren’t broken anymore and his skin wasn’t sunburned. He stared at the empty bottle, turning it in his hands, but it was just a normal water brand. No magic.
He heard the reaper speak and looked up. He wasn’t speaking English this time. He was on a phone, looking around at the dunes. He spoke Italian and it fit perfectly in his mouth. Joe wasn’t sure if it was the delirium of the heat, the madness of being a dead man, or just the truth, but he thought then that it was the most beautiful sound he’d ever heard.
“I found him. I know it took a while. He didn’t make it easy,” the reaper was saying on the phone. “Yes. I’ll bring him home. It’ll take a few days.” There was a pause and then a smile on the reaper’s lips. The person on the other end must have said something familiar and kind to make him smile like that. He nodded even though the person on the line could not see. “I will.” He hung up and looked down at Joe, surprised to find him staring back at him.
“Can you walk now? The car isn’t far,” the reaper asked, back to English.
Joe wasn’t sure he could but he tried, shocked when it wasn’t all that hard at all. He was still tired, yes, but a thousand times better than he had been ten minutes ago. “Who are you?”
The reaper blinked, stunned, and then looked almost embarrassed. He took a step back, head dipping to the side. “Nicolo di Genova, but Nicky will do. And your name?”
Joe almost laughed. “Why would you come out here to find me if you don’t even know my name?”
Nicky shrugged and started walking. “Names are the least important part of a person.”
Joe blinked, thinking about that, and then hurried to follow him back the direction he had come. “My name is Yusuf Al-Kaysani, but everyone calls me Joe.”
“Who is everyone?” Nicky asked.
“Um…” Joe thought about that. Everyone was just everyone he had ever known. He walked for a while longer, until he saw the truck parked on a road at the bottom of the hill, a road easily unseen if not for that car. He reached out suddenly and grabbed the man’s arm. He was honestly surprised when his fingers closed around hot fabric and pressed against the muscle of his upperarm.
Nicky stopped, turning to raise an eyebrow at the hand on his arm and then stare right at Joe, waiting with what seemed to be the infinite patience of a hunter—which is to say, patient until he pulls the trigger.
“You’re real,” Joe said.
Nicky raised the other eyebrow too and then his whole expression softened, he turned toward Joe rather than away, still not brushing his hand off his arm. “Yes. And so are you. And so is the car down there with air conditioning and a cooler in the backseat. I have been looking for you for three days. You have seen him in your dreams, yes? Me and the others,” he added the last quickly, as if it just being him alone was too intimate.
“Yes,” Joe agreed. “How?”
“You died, didn’t you?”
Joe stared at him. His free hand reached up idly and touched the back of his head, blood crusted in his curls and long since dried into the back of his shirt. He had awoken in the desert and stared at his own blood and brain and bone in the sand, a halo around where his head had landed when he fell. When he died.
“How many times did you die?” Nicky asked when he didn't answer.
“I don’t know. Do I need to keep track?” Did he only get so many?
Nicky laughed, the sound surprising and beautiful. “No. No. Just curious. I lost count long ago.”
“How long ago?”
Nicky glanced at him, thinking and then shrugged. “I stopped counting after the war. Now I just keep track of the interesting ones.”
“Which war?” Interesting ones?
“Crusades.”
Joe sat on that for a while, staring at the man as they walked up to the car. “Is this a joke?” he finally asked.
Nicky sighed. He opened the backseat door of the car and tossed his bag in before closing it. On his way back toward Joe, he pulled a knife from his belt. Joe immediately tensed, hands forward to defend himself.
Nicky shook his head and stopped just out of arms reach. He held his left arm forward, pushing the sleeve up to his elbow and then before Joe could move, dragged the blade across his own skin. Joe rushed forward. He snatched the knife from Nicky’s right hand and then took hold of his left wrist, blood spilling off his skin and onto the sand. He swore but before he could toss the knife out of reach and try to stop the bleeding—it stopped on its own. He watched the cut heal and then gently thumbed away the blood on perfect skin. “No,” he whispered, shocked.
“We heal fast and we come back when we die,” Nicky said simply, not trying to pull his arm from Joe’s hold but letting him study it. “If you don’t believe me you can kill me and see.”
Joe stared at him, expecting a smile to signal it as a joke but Nicky just waited, glancing once at the knife still in Joe’s hand. Joe let go of his wrist and took a step back, shaking his head. “No.”
Nicky shrugged once and then pushed his sleeve back down, turning for the car. “Keep the knife. Get in the car.”
Joe used his shirt to clean the knife of Nicky’s blood before flicking it shut and sliding it into his pocket.
The engine on, the air conditioning kicked in. Joe groaned in relief to sit in the seat, close the door, and feel the heat being drained away.
“There’s more water in the back and food. Oh, and some clothes. I figured you might be a mess.” Nicky said, matter-o-factly as he started driving, soon speeding down that endless road.
Joe thanked him and twisted around in his seat. He found a shirt, pulled his own off and put on the clean one before digging another bottle of water out of the cooler on the backseat and a plastic wrapped sandwich. He sat forward again and for a moment just absorbed the surrealness of his situation. It couldn’t be real. But he had spent the last few days dealing with the fact that he was dead, so this felt like a blessing. Anything that wasn’t endlessly walking and dying in the desert was welcomed.
He uncapped the water. “How many of us are there? I mean, how many like us?”
“Not many. We’re only five now, with you, but we belong together. I think it is why we have the dreams, so that we will find each other.”
“And you’re taking me to the others?”
Nicky nodded. “We try to do good. Like overly skilled mercenaries with morals that don’t get paid nearly enough.”
Joe laughed and drank more water. He wasn’t sure about any of this except for Nicky. Nicky, he felt sure about.
“So what were you doing out here?” Nicky asked.
“Dying,” Joe laughed and then shrugged. “I was working freelance for a company defending transports. The transport we were defending turned out to be human traffickers.” He sighed, losing steam for the first time since Nicky found him. He had been a surprisingly easy newbie so far. He had been bracing himself for another Booker—god help them. Nicky glanced at Joe. He had his head leaned back and eyelids heavy now that he’d eaten the sandwich and settled into his seat. He stared at the road ahead. “I killed the traffickers and let the people get away.” He paused, smile gone when he shrugged. “My team shot me and left me in the desert.”
Nicky squeezed the steering wheel but nodded tightly. There was a long pause before Nicky asked, “You want to find them?”
“Why?”
“To kill them.”
Joe looked at him, a half smile on his lips before he pressed it back and shook his head. “No.” He shifted in his seat, turning sideways to face Nicky.
Nicky smiled a little curiously. It wasn’t like he could do the same while driving and he definitely wasn’t used to someone looking at him as much or as intensely as Joe did. It was probably because he was still trying to figure out this whole immortal thing—maybe expecting horns to sprout from his head or something.
“You’re really a thousand years old?”
Nicky snorted. “Not quite a thousand yet…”
“Do you know any great secrets of the universe?”
“Such as?”
“Is there a God? Which one? What is the meaning of life? Like sort of thing.”
“No. Definitely not,” Nicky answered easily, catching the smile on Joe’s face from the corner of his eye. “We just try to make the world less horrible, I guess.”
“Does it work?”
“So far? Not so much.” He laughed and then shrugged. “We do what we can.”
Joe nodded, eyes closing for another second before opening again.
“You can sleep if you want. It’s a long drive.”
“Seems like a waste. How often does a person get to talk to an immortal? I should ask questions.”
Nicky laughed again, surprising himself. He liked Joe. “I’m not going anywhere. You can ask questions later.”
Joe hummed for a second and Nicky was sure he would fall asleep, but then he started in on the questions. They ranged from various wars to historical figures and whether Nicky had been there or seen them, to Nicky’s best and worst deaths. It had become a strange sort of game. The man would ask if he had died in some absurd way and, surprisingly, the answer was usually yes and followed by a story.
With every story, he was sure Joe would fall asleep. How could he not? He had probably died in that desert every day since first getting shot in the head. He had to be exhausted. He was exhausted! Nicky could see it. But he never dozed off when Nicky was talking and always followed up with another questions.
By the time they reached the city, to his shame, Nicky had learned very little about Joe’s life while Joe seemed to be cataloguing Nicky’s.
“Are you a historian or a mercenary?” Nicky finally asked when he found a spot in a narrow alley to park the car. It was already dark out.
“Can’t I be both?” Joe asked, sitting up to look around. “Where?”
Nicky got out, opened the back door and put everything he needed into the backpacks. There were two. He passed one to Joe who took it without question. “I’m going to get us someplace to sleep. Tomorrow we’re catching a train.”
Joe nodded, slung the bag over his shoulder and followed him around the building and up the street. He didn’t ask why they were staying in a dive motel on this side of town or where their end destination was. Nicky was starting to worry that Joe was all around too trusting. He was going to have to keep an eye on him.
He surprised himself with that thought. Not sure if he really thought he needed to keep an eye on Joe for Joe’s sake, or if he just wanted to. There was something about him, something so easy to be with and so calming. He filled some long hollow silence inside Nicky’s chest.
He was monetarily surprised when they spoke to the owner of the building and Joe knew Farsi. He even gave Nicky a cocky smirk and a wink when he negotiated the already abysmally low cost of a room. The man insisted there was only one room available in the building and they took it.
Nicky paid and led the way upstairs. He walked into the tiny room first, frowning at the one narrow bed and short table. Not even a chair. He dropped his bag in the corner and turned, closing the door when Joe walked in, piling his things close Nicky’s. Surprisingly, he hadn’t complained yet, not even a disgruntled groan.
“Take the bed,” Nicky told him. He could sleep sitting with his back to the wall. He’d slept in worse places.
Joe raised an eyebrow, those eyes tracking Nicky. He felt them even before he turned and met them. “There’s room,” he insisted and turned away long enough to settle himself on his side on the bed, his back to the wall and that small piece of mattress left like an invitation.
Nicky stared. He wasn’t sure what exactly about this was the most alarming to him—that this beautiful stranger was inviting him so casually into his bed, or that he trusted Nicky so much. Why? All he had done was come out and collect him from the desert. He told himself it would have been exactly the same if Nile had come instead of himself.
Joe smirked sleepily at Nicky’s hesitation. “If I get handsy with you, you could kill me, right?”
Nicky laughed before he could stop himself and took those two steps to the bed. He turned and laid down on his side, back to Joe so that he could see the door. His heart beat faster in his chest, faster than he’d felt it beat in centuries.
“Seriously, just elbow me if I get in your space,” Joe said, no longer a joke but laced with a yawn.
Nicky turned out the light on the little bedside table. There wasn’t enough room on the bed to have any real division of space other than where they physically aligned. At one point in the night Nicky started to tip forward from the edge, waking just as he was about to fall off the bed. Only he didn’t fall. An arm had hooked around his waist and pulled him back, pressing his back to Joe’s chest.
Nicky’s mind raced, still between awake and asleep.
“Okay?” Joe asked in a grumbly, tired voice of his own, his palm warm where it pressed to Nicky’s stomach.
“Yeah,” Nicky agreed and they both fell back asleep.