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Joe and Nicky never know what their first Marks look like.
They can make a general guess at the location of them: even centuries later, Joe can recall a faint tingling against his chest where a hand had pressed just before Nicolò’s sword was thrust up through his heart, and Nicky swears he felt the same across his bicep as they collapsed against each other. But it wasn’t until their third or four death at each other’s hands that either of them noticed, and far longer before they cared.
The color and shape of those first designs against their skin are lost to history. It is, to both of them, one of the greatest regrets of their very long lives.
In Joe’s memory, there are three moments from London that sit like jagged scars that will never fully heal:
The sharp and bitter sting of betrayal and grief as Andy tells them both of Booker’s choices (they’ll recover from this eventually, with enough time and space, but it will never be the same and Joe mourns the loss of that brotherhood);
An instant of abject horror as he looks across Kozak’s lab, eyes locking onto the open cuts in Nicky’s neck that haven’t yet started to heal, and realizes that this could be the rest of their eternity: not the torture or the repeated deaths, but the understanding that the man he loves will always be just out of reach, and that he will never see his colors against Nicky’s skin again;
And this: him bent over Nicky’s too-still form, fingers brushing against a cheek that stays pale and blank under his touch, keening with a pain and terror he’s never felt before, until Nicky gasps awake beneath him.
(Their Marks are matching, this time and for a while after: sharp splotches of color on their forearms where they braced against each other, reveling for just a moment in their relief.)
The first time Nile sees it, they’re in Brazil. It’s their first job since London, eight months later, and it should be an easy retrieval job. Instead, they end up stuck in the middle of the jungle between two warring drug cartels. Nile dies three times, and that’s mild compared to Joe and Nicky.
They take separate trucks back to their safehouse of the week — Nile and Nicky in one, Joe and Andy in the other — and none of them breathe easy until the doors are locked and bolted behind them.
It’s in the lull that it happens: Joe and Nicky find each other’s eyes from across the room, and in the next breath they’re next to each other. Joe cups a hand around the back of Nicky’s neck and tugs him in to press their foreheads together; Nicky curls his fingers loosely around Joe’s wrist and closes his eyes.
Nile watches, wide-eyed, as color stains their skin. Joe’s grip leaves a watercolor of gold and pink across Nicky’s neck. Under Nicky’s fingers, Joe’s wrist has blossomed into a swirl of green and blue.
“They disappear when we die,” she says to Andy, later, after Joe and Nicky have retreated to the only bedroom for a nap before dinner. She’s staring down at her hands, but what she’s looking at is really the expression on her mother’s face, years ago, when the color abruptly faded from the skin on the back of her hand.
“Yeah,” Andy says. When Nile finally faces her, she finds Andy twisting her pendant back and forth, looking just as far away. “They do.”
Andy doesn’t remember her first Mark, but she does remember being inconsolable the day she realized she could no longer recall if it was red or black or purple. It’s been a few centuries; she’s learned to live with that.
She hasn’t figured out how to live with the memory of her last one: a hand cupping her cheek, thumb brushing against the corner of her eye. Tender in ways she hasn’t felt in half a millennium.
She’ll never know what color it was. It faded long before she got a chance to find out.
(“It was red,” Quynh tells her, so much later, when they’re healed and whole again. She sets her hand against Andy’s cheek as if to recreate it, even though she’d already let her colors bleed onto the skin of Andy’s hip the night before. “Just like your first.”)
When Booker is stressed, or anxious, or a little too deep in his bottle or thoughts, he rubs his left wrist. Habitual, a tic developed over two centuries of missing something no longer there. The others don’t mention it, out of respect, or simply an unwillingness to hurt him further.
Nile asks him only once, after he comes home, when she catches him worrying that same patch of skin.
“What color was it?”
She watches the way his eyes go glossy, the lump in his throat that he swallows back. When he finally answers, his voice is hoarse and weak.
“Blue,” he says. “It was blue.”
When Nile tugs at him, he comes easily, burying his face against her shoulder, breath hitching when she wraps her arms around him and holds tight.
“So, have you ever had one in a place that’s, like… really embarrassing?” Nile asks early on, still charmingly fascinated by their stories.
Joe meets Nicky’s eyes. A mischievous grin spreads across his face. Nicky drops his head onto the table; the tips of his ears start to flush.
Andy, standing at the sink washing their dinner dishes, smirks. She’s heard this one before.
“Joe,” Nicky groans. “Don’t—”
“My dick!” Joe declares with childish glee. “The whole thing, root to tip! He didn’t even wait a full minute after I’d come back!”
Nile bursts out laughing. “Seriously?”
“In my defense,” Nicky says into the wooden varnish, the entire back of his neck a vibrant red now, “he was already naked at the time.”
“That’s going to be hard to explain,” Booker comments one morning, glancing up from his breakfast to watch Andy and Quynh stumble off the sofa bed. Nile follows his attention and snorts.
“Y’all aren’t even trying to be subtle anymore,” she complains.
Andy shrugs, rolling her neck and shoulders as if to loosen them. It only serves to make the perfect imprint of Quynh’s teeth on her jugular stand out more. The mix of black and purple would look like a bruise if not for how bright it looks against her skin.
“You should see Quynh’s,” is all she says.
They both glance to Quynh, who stands with her arms stretched over her head, arching her spine. She’s wearing nothing but a pair of low-riding panties, and there’s no trace of rusty orange-red-brown anywhere that they can see.
“I can’t believe there was a time when I thought Joe and Nicky were the bad ones,” Nile says, while Booker just sighs.
At some point, they die again. In the aftermath, Andy looks at Joe and Nicky and groans.
“They’re going to be unbearable,” she warns Nile, for just a moment looking every bit like the exhausted eldest sister that she is.
She’s right.
Their return to life this time around had been graceless, characterized by Nicky briefly slamming into Joe’s chest, the two of them tumbling to the ground in a tangled pile, before they managed to right themselves and return to the fray. The resulting Marks are expansive, full-body imprints that stretch from neck to thigh in vibrant gradients.
Joe adores them. For weeks after, he wears sleeveless shirts and shorts to show off as much skin as possible, preening at the attention it garners even walking down the street. Occasionally people will ask, and he delights in telling increasingly unrealistic tales about how the Mark came to be.
Nicky is more subdued about it, and certainly more modest in his sartorial choices, but he also does nothing to hide the yellow streak that creeps up his neck and pools across the left side of his jaw where Joe’s cheek had briefly rested. Occasionally, Nile or Andy or Quynh will catch him staring down at the stains across his palms and tease him for the besotted look on his face.
Joe fills up three sketchbooks with chalk pastel and watercolor renditions in the nine months they manage to keep the Marks preserved. Decades later, he still occasionally pulls them out to smile fondly at the memory of Nicky’s colors covering so much of him.
For Nile’s fiftieth birthday, they rent out a sprawling house along the east coast of Florida with the biggest pool she’s seen in a residential space and throw her an authentic American-style barbecue. Joe and Nicky squabble over the grill and Nicky nearly takes Joe’s hand off when he tries to stick his finger into the barbecue sauce and steal a taste. Quynh naps on a pool float, soaking up the sun like a cat. Andy sits on a lounge chair, a beer dangling from her fingers, and shamelessly ogles the sight of her wife in a tiny bikini.
Nile and Booker sit side-by-side at the edge of the pool, idly trailing their bare feet in the water as they trade quips and barbs in French.
Nile throws her head back and laughs at something Booker says, shoving at his shoulder. Her laughter cuts off abruptly. Booker looks down at the hand print in purple and yellow on his shoulder and marvels at the way it doesn’t hurt.
“I don’t think that’s how it’s supposed to work,” she says, her voice sounding far away to her own ears.
Booker smiles at her, soft like it always is whenever he thinks about her these days. She’s his best friend; he loves her more than he has words for. “Since when has that ever stopped any of us?”
He offers her his hand: an invitation. He won’t be upset if she doesn’t take it.
Nile looks at it, his shoulder, his eyes. Everything happens for a reason, she hears her mother’s voice reciting.
She takes his hand and sees color on her skin for the first time in her life.
“You all have such beautiful Marks!” Their waitress coos, and she isn’t wrong.
They’re at a cafe, sitting at an outside table, their first time together as a group in almost six months. Andy has a tan and a red-purple pair of lips on her cheek; Quynh’s crop top shows off fingerprints on her waist. Joe’s palm has Nicky’s green and blue wrapped around it, and Nicky has a gold splotch across his jaw where Joe held him steady for a kiss. Booker’s Mark curls around his shoulders like the hug they came from, and Nile has a matching set around her back.
There’s a story to go with each of them.
They place their order. Andy waits for the waitress to scurry away before she leans forward and sets her elbows on the table.
“So,” she says, “who wants to go first?”