Chapter Text
1.
Quynh once told him a story about reincarnation. It started with a rich merchant who had a beautiful wife and a lovely daughter. He wasn’t a king but he had everything a man could desire. He was, in fact, the happiest man in the whole country, happier than the king himself. At that time, it was considered a sin for a wife not to bear her husband a son, a proper heir, but the merchant didn’t care about that. He loved his wife greatly. People whispered that all his robes were worn out at the knees because he knelt on the floor every single night to wash his wife’s feet. His daughter’s feet, they said, never even touched the ground because she was constantly carried in the arms of her father as well as by the many servants in the house. (Is that supposed to be good for her? Nicolo wondered aloud and Quynh rolled her eyes.)
But one day, both his child and wife fell ill. It was so serious that the doctor said they would die within the month. (Was it because of the lack of—No, Nicolo. Do you want to hear it or not?) The merchant, of course, was devastated. He loved them more than all his riches and even his own life. (Quynh’s fingers carded through his hair slowly.) It broke his heart into thousands of pieces already to watch them in pain. He couldn’t even imagine what he would do if they died.
So, he went to the most renowned fortuneteller and asked if there was any way to save them. The fortuneteller, when the merchant gave her the names and dates of birth of his wife and daughter, frowned and shook her head. She told the merchant that he had been a hunter in his past life. She asked if he remembered (of course, he didn’t.) killing a fawn in front of its mother. He (the hunter) must have known that he was supposed to let it go, for it was too small for game, but he knew that it would lure the mother out, so he shot it with his arrow first, and when the deer appeared, looking for its lost baby, he had killed it too. The merchant shouted with anger and accused the fortuneteller of being a useless madwoman because he could not understand what she was trying to say. It all sounded utterly irrelevant to him.
The deer and the fawn you had killed in your past life are your wife and daughter in this life.
She told him that his agony was necessary to keep the natural order of things. He needed to suffer the same pain that he had caused them. (To make things even, Quynh explained, so that everyone involved could be free from hatred once and for all.) The man finally understood and returned home. (That’s it? There was nothing he could do, Nicolo. So, he simply accepted it? He had to. Then it’s only a cycle of tragedies. In the next life, they would live happily because everyone paid their price.)
2.
It’s cold and dark underwater. Everyone could describe it like that, cold and dark. It’s unimaginative, banal, unoriginal, and overused. But it’s true. What people imagine drowning to be like is surprisingly accurate. When you drown, your brain doesn’t process it in beautiful prose, delicately woven with sophisticated words. It can barely think. When it does, it’s usually only a half-garbled word or two. So, cold and dark. And also, pain. Oh, yes, so much pain. It’s painful to drown. He’d describe it more vividly if he had the energy but he doesn’t, because when he tries to think about what he felt—which should be easy because that’s all he had been doing, drowning, for centuries—he starts to drown, again, even without the weight of the entire ocean crushing him from all sides.
3.
For a long time—Nicolo thinks it must have been long but he is not sure if it was for a year or a century. It felt long so he will say so—he missed the sun so much. Oh, how he missed his Yusuf. All creatures of land wither and die without the sun and he was no exception. There was no light, no warmth, and Nicolo thinks that it did kill some parts of him. He doesn’t have any evidence to prove that, though. His curse of immortality never allowed it. It prevented him from having even the most pitiful respite. It never permitted his mind to slip away into blissful insanity, not even for a moment, to forget what was happening to him.
He dreamed. He dreamed throughout the day and night but he could never pretend that they were anything other than what they were, dreams.
For a decade or two—it is a joke, actually, whenever he mentions a specific number for a period of time—he pretended to have gone mad. During this time, Nicolo never formed any picture or word in his mind, and only screamed and thrashed against his metal cage. He did it over and over again as if he could not comprehend the fact that it was no use. He acted like he was incapable of understanding concepts such as time, reality, or futility. It was, he realized later on, a pitiful attempt to deceive his own mind.
Anyway, Nicolo could not deny that there was a time, once, when he loved someone with his entire being. Yusuf Al-Kaysani had been his sun. Nicolo had loved him throughout countless lifetimes. Again, cliches are cliches for a reason. Nicolo loved him beyond measure and reason. The man was beautiful and had a beautiful mind, a clever tongue, and a kind heart and they were cursed with the same fate. These were good reasons to love someone but even those weren’t enough to explain the absolute devotion and adoration he felt toward the other man.
But it doesn’t matter now because Nicolo doesn’t love him anymore. No one—and Nicolo is absolutely certain about this—is capable of actively loving someone as they drown for the millionth time. He barely remembers love.
The first time Nicolo saw him again—oh, the first time, and Nicolo felt like drowning in something other than water, he couldn’t breathe, he cried, he screamed as he watched Yusuf smile at him. He tried to wrap his arms around Yusuf but he couldn’t move. No, he could move but his body didn’t move the way he wanted it to. He sat down on the ground and it felt so solid. He inhaled deeply but unhurriedly. His head turned and—
There they were, Andromache, Quynh, and Yusuf.
His family.
They acted as if Nicolo had never been gone for a moment and Nicolo felt confused. They looked so calm while he was weeping. It was when they called him ‘Sebastien’ that he realized that it wasn’t him they were talking to. Another immortal. Nicolo realized that they’d found another one.
And this sudden bloom of acute pain stabbed his heart, not once, not twice but over and over again as he continued to watch and tremble. He could almost taste the bread that they were sharing. His skin, almost, felt the warmth of the fire. The air. The smiles. The laughter.
Oh, how Nicolo envied them as he drowned, again.
4.
The first thing Nicolo consciously did when he got out—he was no longer underwater but it was impossible but he was but it was impossible—was to call Sebastien. He’d memorized the number. It felt strange to touch an actual phone but he knew how to use it when it was handed to him. He’d watched Sebastien call or text someone a thousand times. He also watched when Sebastien answered the former CIA agent’s call only a few days before. They were discussing something he had thought impossible before, something he had been craving for so long. He slowly started to press each number on the screen.
“Hello?”
Sebastien answered in English. Nicolo closed his eyes and swallowed. The voice in his ear was familiar and strange at the same time.
“Hello, Sebastien.”
5.
Nicolo really had to thank Sebastien for a lot of things. The man had been Nicolo’s teacher for almost three hundred years without knowing. Nicolo didn’t know how often the other man dreamed of him but he knew for certain that it could not compare to how often he dreamed of Sebastien. After all, he had so much time in the water, constantly trapped in the strange place between life and death, never fully asleep or awake.
“How can I be sure that you haven’t gone mad?”
Sebastien’s voice was deep and rough but in a nice way. Nicolo liked it. He held the phone closer to his ear and closed his eyes.
“You know I am not. You know me as well as I know you. When we sleep, we don’t only see through each other’s eyes, we become each other. There is no one in the world who can understand your grief and pain better than me. I’ve lived them as you have lived mine.”
“Was it a nightmare to you, too?”
Suddenly, Sebastien asked in a derisive voice,
“My life?”
“Oh, Sebastien.”
He thought, if he could still love anyone, he would’ve probably loved Sebastien. It would have been very difficult not to love someone after you had seen the brightest and darkest corners of their mind. Nicolo stayed silent, looking up at the dark blue sky and the faint dots of light on it. Everything on the earth might have changed in the past five hundred years but above it, nothing much seemed to have changed, only a bit hazier. He felt like that, too, an ancient, unchangeable thing that still existed after too many centuries, a bit faded and worn at the edges.
“Was it a sweet dream, then?”
Sebastien let out a harsh laugh. It reverberated through the empty room that Nicolo was sitting in.
“Must have been better than constant drowning.”
Nicolo understood the root of his anger and resentment, too.
“I won’t lie. It was much better than that. Sometimes, it was the only thing I held onto. You were my only light in the darkness, quite literally.”
He laughed a little and continued,
“But you cannot compare your pain to mine. I won’t, either, and I will never judge any part of what you’ve done. It was life, Sebastien.”
Nicolo whispered,
“And I know how tired you are, how much you wish everything would just end, once and for all. You barely remember the faces of your beloved children anymore and although the pain has dulled, it kills you to know that you’ve started to forget. You’ve never wanted to forget, no matter how much it hurts, I know. But time takes away everything, doesn’t it? Nothing lasts and that is perhaps how it is supposed to be. But you still stand, confused, in the ruins of everything that you once were. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“I—”
There was a wounded sound.
“I can’t— I can’t do this anymore.”
“I know, Sebastien.”
“But I don’t want to hurt them, either.”
Sebastien’s voice, wet with tears and pain, trembled.
“You won’t hurt them. This is for them, too. Nothing that lives lasts forever, little brother. Didn’t Andromache tell you that?”
6.
Sebastien came but they spoke through the thin door of his rented house between them.
“Is this really necessary?”
When his voice reached Nicolo’s ears, Nicolo realized that Sebastien must be taller than him. The sound was coming from slightly above his head, near the top of the door.
“You won’t even show me your face?”
“This way we can keep dreaming about each other.”
“So, this is your measure against betrayal?”
“Only for a few weeks more.”
The door rattled as Sebastien leaned against it.
“You, I thought about this after our first phone call, you know, you always sound far too calm for a man who had been tortured for hundreds of years, Nicolo. It’s a little bit unsettling.”
“We are immune to insanity, Sebastien.”
“Are we?”
“Apparently.”
“Or maybe we are all insane.”
Nicolo laughed, touching the door with his fingertips.
“Maybe.”
There was silence for a few seconds before Sebastien asked,
“You will tell them eventually? About our plan?”
“Are you afraid, brother?”
“I know I cannot convince them right now, so I won’t even try. They dread capture much more than permanent death and I think some of it has to do with what happened to you, so maybe, maybe if you talked to them, they could understand. And— and it could really help a lot of people, like Copley said, right? And it will help us.”
“Yes.”
“No, no.”
The door rattled again, its hinges creaking almost dangerously.
“If we’re doing this, at least show me your face. I can’t trust you. I barely know you.”
Nicolo stared at the door in front of his face and replied in a soft voice.
“You do know me, Sebastien.”
“No, I don’t. I only ever watched you drown over and over again, had a few phone calls and that’s it. The others don’t even let me mention your name. And most importantly, you don’t trust me enough to even show me your goddamn face. You want to keep monitoring me through these strange dreams that I am sick and tired of, so that I won’t tell the others about you. How can I possibly trust you like this?”
“But why would I betray you? and how? I have no one to turn to. I only have you, Sebastien. Copley was your contact and you and I both know Merrick’s ambitions mean nothing to me. I am not demanding anything from you, Sebastien. I am, have been, at your mercy. We can open the door now if you want to. I only asked for this because this way, you won’t have to go too far trying to contact us if things don’t go according to our plan.”
The doorknob moved slightly, sagging from the weight of Sebastien’s hand on it. Nicolo waited for his decision.
“Yes, I’m—I’m afraid.”
When he finally spoke, his voice small and uncertain, Nicolo closed his eyes. He put both his hands on the door which remained closed. He could almost feel the warmth of Sebastien’s body through it.
“Is this the right choice?”
“You know it is.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Is letting innocent people die the right choice? Is letting ourselves go on and on until we cannot recognize ourselves the right choice? Why? Because it’s natural? Then why have you been fighting wars that weren’t yours? Why choose sides? Why kill? Why save?”
Sebastien didn’t answer. Nicolo slowly turned the doorknob.
“If you still want to see me, you can. I trust you, Sebastien, even if you don’t trust me.”
A brief flash of a hand stopped the door.
“No, it’s okay.”
Nicolo’s eyes traced the sliver of space that appeared between the door and the doorframe.
“Can I see your hand?”
“What?”
“Your hand. I want to see it.”
Nicolo could picture the confusion on the other man’s face.
“My hand? Why?”
“You like to read, so I often saw your hands holding open a book, flipping a page, or jotting down notes on the margins. I want to know if they look the same.”
It wasn’t a proper answer, he knew.
“All right, uh, just don’t chop it off or something.”
It was strange to carefully hold the door open but only slightly, and study the rough and large hand that belonged to the man standing on the other side. Nicolo, indeed, had watched it getting chopped off once in a battle somewhere. Those pictures in his mind had been blurry, though. Now, he could see it clearly. Nicolo felt his eyes burn.
“Can I touch it?”
Sebastien choked out a laugh and it shook the door again.
“Yeah, sure.”
It was also strange to touch what he had seen countless times before. Sebastien’s hand was warm and dry. His vision began to blur. Nicolo had to blink a few times. He found himself slightly disappointed that it didn’t feel quite right. The shape of it, the length of the fingers, the weight. He was not sure what he expected. He finally let it go.
“Thank you.”
7.
James Copley was not a bad man. But who was? Nicolo knew that even those men who put him in the iron coffin were not necessarily evil. People were neither good nor evil. People were people and that was the problem. When people cared too little, they could be endlessly cruel, but even when they cared too much—like when they loved their god so much that they started to kill anyone who didn’t—it always brought terrible things. He knew about this better than anyone.
“This is impressive, Mr. Copley.”
Nicolo studied the pictures and clippings on the wall. He knew he appeared calm and relaxed to any outsider but his heart was starting to beat faster. Most of the pictures were from a long time ago and even some recent ones were not clear, obviously taken from a surveillance camera, but Nicolo could still see them, see him.
“But I heard you were having trouble getting the support you need,”
He waved his hand at the wall.
“For this project.”
“Merrick is still doubtful, about all of this. I showed him everything I could, but he insists that videos and pictures can be doctored.”
“Can they?”
“These days, anything is possible.”
Nicolo nodded.
“That’s a problem I can solve for you.”
He turned around to face the man.
“How many of us do you need?”
“The more subjects we have, the better. It’ll help the research progress more efficiently, and possibly, more quickly.”
“So, all of us.”
“If it can be managed.”
“Yes, actually, if you leave any of them out, it will be too much of a risk.”
Because they would always come back for each other, that is, unless one of them gets thrown to the bottom of the ocean.
Nicolo sat down on one of the chairs and looked around the room once more.
Or maybe they would not have given up if it were someone else.
This man owned a very nice house, Nicolo thought.
Or maybe they never even tried in the first place.
Even the chair he was sitting on was plush and soft.
But all of this doesn’t matter now anymore, does it?
Every surface in the house gleamed meticulously. Still, the house smelled of mourning and grief and its owner was far too young to hide it as well as Sebastien.
“I’m sorry about your wife.”
Nicolo told him sincerely. Copley’s eyes turned downward instantly—a poor attempt at hiding his emotions, again—and he shook his head curtly.
“Thank you, I—”
Before he could say anymore, Nicolo interrupted him.
“I can provide the company, or Mr. Merrick himself, whatever proof they want, but there are a few things I want to make sure of. I want to know everyone who is involved in this research, and who is in charge of it. Not Mr. Merrick, I want to know whom you considered actually capable of understanding and recreating our condition, and decide for myself if this project is really worth my, well, our time.”
“It is. I promise.”
Nicolo smiled at his eagerness.
“And I trust your judgment, Mr. Copley, otherwise I wouldn’t have come here at all. I only want to know what I need to know as a participant. This can’t fall into the wrong hands, you must understand.”
“Of course.”
8.
He has real dreams now. One night, Nicolo fell asleep and dreamed about someone kissing him. It felt so soft and warm that it was almost ridiculous. When he gasped awake, shaking all over, he had to clutch at his heart. It hurt. His lips felt cold and numb. For a moment, he felt terribly confused. He could not tell where he was, or when it was. He had forgotten what it felt like to dream, a meaningless, useless, absurd—real—dream. Or was it a memory? If it was, then it must have been from a millennium ago, which made it as meaningless, useless, and absurd as any other illusion of the mind.
Nicolo looked around the barren room, searching for the ghost from his dream, but there was no one. He was alone. He was in one of the many safehouses that belonged to them. Sebastien had given him the addresses of some and Nicolo decided to stay in one. This one was close to— at this point, he decided to stop his thoughts.
He watched as the phone blinked awake, too, with a message from Sebastien. He was glad that, at least, Sebastien could not dream—what a strange thought—his dreams.
9.
If they were, like any other human being on the earth, given one—just one—lifetime, then it would have been bearable. If life were a jug and tragedy wine, even if it gets filled to the brim, it’s not something it’s not made to bear. One lifetime of tragedies, Nicolo can bear. The most tragic story that has ever been written, even that, let it be his life, and he won’t resist. If it’s for once, and only for once, then he thinks he was prepared to bear anything. He’d die with a smile. He’d love and forgive his enemies. Even in abandonment and misery, he would have loved, loved until his last breath.
But someone has poured an entire ocean into him.
10.
In South Sudan, Nicolo made a mistake. He lost himself in the multiple screens that captured every movement of the four immortals in the room, or maybe he had really turned stupid and useless now, out of time, out of touch with reality, he wasn’t sure.
It was not the first time he saw Sebastien’s face. The point of view sometimes shifts in the dreams. He sometimes becomes an anonymous observer in the background. But it was the first time seeing it in real life.
Andromache and Quynh looked the same. It was almost eerie. Nicolo suddenly felt like he had traveled back in time, or perhaps that he’d had a very long, very terrifying dream and that it hadn’t, in fact, been hundreds of years since he last saw them.
It would have been much easier if the team captured them there and then but Nicolo forgot about everything at the moment and watched as they came back to life. It was a glorious scene, the way they mercilessly slaughtered the heavily armed mercenaries. They moved together seamlessly and Nicolo was reminded of how he used to fill Sebastien’s place, there, beside them. They used to call him, brother, and Yusuf—
My love.
Nicolo flinched back from the screens. His hands shot up to cover his ears. He was suddenly terrified of a voice that did not exist.
Yusuf turned to stare at the camera and Nicolo froze. Not taking his eyes off the lens, Yusuf spat out a bullet to the floor.
This man is not him.
Nicolo knew this but still, he couldn’t turn away until Andromache threw her labrys at the camera and the screen went static.
That was another lifetime.