Work Text:
Nile flopped into one of the living room chairs, still staring up in awe at all the research Copley had done, at the cascading threads of cause and effect throughout history. Andy and Copley were still in Copley’s office, working out the ground rules of their new partnership, so Nile had plenty of time to admire the sheer depth of research that Copley had put into finding them. And even though his research had focused on the last 150 years, there were still some fragments from even farther back, particularly on the wall tracking Andy. She glanced across them: a historical painting from the renaissance era, fragments of poetry from the Han dynasty, a ship’s manifest from the age of exploration, an inquisitor’s log from a witch trial.
Nile froze, flashing back to the conversation in the early morning hours in Goussainville, before she had really understood the other immortals. Nicky’s words echoed in her head, impossibly weary and sad.
“Andy and Quynh, they were accused of witchcraft themselves, and they were trapped and caught.”
Nile got up out of her chair and walked over to the wall to take a closer look. It was a scanned document written in Latin, with a name circled in the same red ink that Copley had used to highlight Andromache throughout history. Beside it was a post-it with some of Copley’s notes.
Andromache and another woman (Quinn? Queen? No local names match) arrested for witchcraft after freeing over 300 women sentenced to death for consorting with the Devil during the 1500’s witch hunts in Germany.
Nile inhaled sharply, causing Nicky and Joe to get up and wander over to her. She pointed out the post-it and then the inquisitor’s log with just a single word question: “Quynh?”
Nicky and Joe both leaned in towards the board, clearly reading the Latin text with increasing fascination and grief. After a few long moments, Joe nodded sadly.
“The timeline matches, the name matches,” he said, tapping the name in the log that Copley had not been able to identify. “That might be the last record anyone has of Quynh and Andy together.”
Joe and Nicky leaned against each other sadly, still mourning their lost friend after all these years. But where the two of them saw only grief, Nile saw an opportunity that hadn’t been fully explored.
The other immortals had told her about their search for Quynh, spanning decades after her imprisonment, but they had been on the inside, excruciatingly close to the problem, trying to find answers without being noticed themselves. Just like Copley’s outside observation had revealed a pattern of positive influence spanning the centuries, perhaps that same outside view was what was needed to track down Quynh’s location. And with the technology now available to them -
Nile unpinned the document and the post-it from Copley’s wall, careful not to disturb anything else from his intricate web of research. She raced towards Copley’s office, just as Andy and Copley emerged, clearly finished with their discussion. Nile shoved the papers at Copley, and he took them, bewildered.
“This woman,” Nile said, jabbing at Quynh’s name in the inquisitor’s log, “could you find out what happened to her?”
Copley looked at Nile, confused, and then glanced over at Nicky and Joe, who had followed Nile. Their faces were a mess of emotions - dawning hope warring with weary cynicism and grief. Andy took a step forward and looked down at the paper in Copley’s hands. It took her only a second to realize the contents, and then the ache of a deep, ancient wound carved its way across her features for mere moments before she masked it again. Andy met Copley’s eye with a single raised eyebrow.
“I-I can try?” Copley wavered, clearly uncertain as to what was going on, but still aware it was important. “My research really only covered the past 150 years, but I did keep an eye out for historical mentions. I got this one from a colleague at the Ravensburg Museum in Germany - they had an exhibit about the German witch hunts several years ago.”
Andy nodded decisively. “Those jobs we talked about? Finding her will be our first.”
One Month Later
Nile glanced over the edge of the boat, peering into the ocean depths as if she would be able to see anything. In the span of a single month, Copley had managed to turn up a set of records from six different ships that had launched from the correct port at about the same time, any of which could have carried Quynh’s metal coffin out to sea. Unfortunately, he had been unable to narrow it down further, and so the team of immortals had to manually search the routes that each ship traveled.
The team was posing as a group of archeologists, searching for German shipwrecks from the 1500s. They had chartered a research boat, equipped with acoustic scanning that allowed them to create a 3D map of the ocean floor, and paid the crew a significant amount of money so that they would ignore any … odd occurrences. Nile was taking point with the acoustic mapping technology, since the team was short Booker’s usual technical expertise for the next century.
This was the fourth trip they had taken; each trip charted the seafloor along one ship’s route, and the first three routes that they had tried had turned up nothing. Nile could see what little hope Andy had draining out with every false positive. (Their search had thus far turned up an actual shipwreck and an illegal dumping site, as well as a number of large fish nurseries)
When the computer pinged again, indicating that the next section of map was complete, Nile walked away from her position and looked at the image. There was a bump of approximately the right size, so she signaled to the captain to anchor the boat while they investigated. Nile informed Nicky and Joe of the ocean floor bump, and the pair of them started setting up the remotely operated camera while Nile retrieved Andy from her spot by the bow.
Once the four were gathered together, Nicky sent the remote camera over the edge of the boat, and Joe began piloting it down to the seabed. The camera transmitted its feed up to the boat, where the four watched it on the monitor. For several long minutes, the feed was nothing but open ocean, as Joe sent the camera racing downwards.
Then, finally, the seafloor appeared on the screen, and Joe swung the camera out in a wide radius. They had approximate location data that corresponded to the 3D map made by the acoustic scanner, but even as slowly as the boat had been moving, it still took time and distance to stop, meaning that the camera had to traverse quite a bit of area.
The camera traced back and forth across the seabed, carefully covering all the ground where the bump could be. In each sweep, it looked like the typical seafloor, stretches of uninhabited sand broken by the occasional rocks and greenery, around which various fishes swarmed. And then, on one of the sweeps, Andy suddenly pointed at a dark rock in the corner of the screen.
“There,” she barked, tracking it with her finger as the camera went past it.
Joe maneuvered the camera around to face the rock, and Nile quickly spotted what Andy had noticed. All the other rocks and outcroppings had sealife built up around them, but this one was totally bare. Without any prompting, Joe abandoned the methodical sweep, and sent the camera racing for the rock. As it got closer, all four noticed that the rock seemed to be shaking, rocking back and forth in the sand on the ocean floor, although the shaking stopped well before the camera reached it.
And then Joe arched the camera up and over the rock, pointing it down to get a better view. Andy sat down hard, shaking, as the camera showed a clear picture of a lead chamber, with the head fashioned into an awful grimace. Nicky, Joe, and Nile all looked at her for verification, and she simply nodded her head, stunned.
With that, the team burst into a flurry of activity. Nick and Joe rushed to get geared up in dive suits; they were the best suited to retrieve Quynh, as she would likely recognize them, but they would not die if something went wrong during the retrieval. Andy set up an area on the bow where they could safely place Quynh, if she was in a poor state after retrieval, and Nile went to make sure that the boat’s captain would not interfere with the retrieval.
When Nile returned, Andy was sitting back down by the camera feed, eyes fixed on the screen. The lead coffin was shaking again, and Nile looked away, biting at her lip. She was still trying to come to terms with the idea that she would live for centuries; trying to imagine drowning and reviving, over and over again, for that same period made her heart ache with a fierce grief, and she did not even know Quynh.
By the time Nicky and Joe entered the water, the coffin had started shaking and then fallen still almost 6 times. And while this was good, in the sense that it was nigh-on irrefutable proof that Quynh was in there, Nile could only imagine how difficult it must be for Andy, to have to watch her oldest friend suffer, and know that that suffering had been occurring for years. Nile couldn’t keep from doing the morbid calculations in her own head; if Quynh drowned again about every 5 minutes, that meant that she had died more than 50 million times over the past five centuries.
With that terrible number in her mind, it seemed to Nile that it took Nicky and Joe forever to reach the coffin, although it really only took about 12 minutes. Nile watched the camera feed as the two set about removing the chains from the coffin, waiting until the shaking stopped once more to remove the last chain and throw the coffin open. When Joe lifted Quynh out of the coffin, Andy let out a sharp breath; if Nile hadn’t known better she would have said that it was almost a sob. And then Nicky carefully injected Quynh with a knockout drug to keep her from waking up during the retrieval, and the pair carefully brought her back up towards the boat. Nile followed them back up with the remote camera, and Andy kept her eyes riveted on Quynh the whole way.
As Nicky and Joe surfaced, holding Quynh, Andy and Nile were waiting at the edge of the boat to help hoist Quynh aboard. They carried her to the triage area they had set up on the bow and laid her down. Andy collapsed down beside Quynh, clearly ready to hold vigil until Quynh awoke. Nile slipped off to go recover the remote camera and get the captain to return to shore, while Nicky and Joe removed their SCUBA suits.
Almost 30 minutes later, the team of immortals was all sitting around Quynh as she awoke. Her awakening was not a gradual, peaceful event; Quynh flailed into awareness, gasping and shaking. It took several long moments before Nile realized that Quynh was repeated the same actions that had caused the coffin to shake every time she revived - gasping for air, and struggling futilely against her confines, even though the coffin was no longer present. After almost two minutes with no end in sight, Andy reached out to hold onto Quynh. This caused the writhing to subside for a moment, but then Quynh was gasping and fighting harder than before. Eventually, when it was clear that nothing they were saying or doing was getting through to Quynh, Andy sedated her once more.
Over the next month, Quynh slowly regained her senses. The team had holed up in an abandoned factory in the German countryside, where they could lay low and help Quynh recover. The first few days were the roughest; Quynh would wake up totally unaware of her surroundings, gaping on air as if she was still underwater until someone sedated her again. Four or five days in, though, her autonomous reactions slowed, and she stopped panicking as badly when she awoke. She slowly regained the ability to track what was going on around her and began to speak in a few, desperate sentences when she was awake.
Unfortunately, it seemed like any glimpse of Andy, Nicky, or Joe set her recovery back immensely. Quynh was most alert when only Nile was in the room; by the end of the month, she and Nile could hold full conversations without Quynh sinking back into panic. If Nicky or Joe tried to talk with her, however, she seemed to become unmoored in time, losing track of the century and rehashing conversations and scenarios from before her capture. And when Andy so much as entered the room, she returned to gasping for air. As far as Nile could tell, Quynh had spent a large amount of her time underwater hallucinating that Andy was there with her, or that the team had come to save her, and so their presence made her unable to tell what was real.
Nile could tell that it was hurting Andy, to have finally saved Quynh and yet be unable to be close to her. And so one evening, after Quynh had fallen asleep, Nile went to talk to Andy.
“She is getting better,” Nile said softly, trying to catch a hint of emotion behind Andy’s stoic mask. “But I’m not sure staying with us is the best option for her.”
Andy snorted. “And leaving her somewhere she can have a panic attack without us and be captured again, that’ll help,” she muttered sarcastically.
“I think she does better with me because she didn’t know me … before.” Nile bit her lip. “But the problem is that you, or Joe, or Nicky are always right around the corner. She needs someone who understands her immortality, but who she didn’t know before she was captured. I’m not experienced enough to help her yet but -”
Andy interrupted her with a snarl. “What you think we should just drop her off with Copley, trust him to not make another bad decision like he did with Merrick?”
Nile shook her head. “Booker”
“ Booker is not allowed to contact us for another century!”
“But no one ever said we couldn’t contact him ,” Nile sat down, and gestured emphatically. “Don’t you see, that’s what makes him perfect. She’s never met him before, but he’s heard her story from the three of you, and he’s been immortal for 200 years, he’s at least got more experience than me. And if he can’t contact us for another century, well, that’s plenty of buffer space to help Quynh heal! ”
Andy swallowed, and then slowly nodded.
Four Months Later
Booker entered his flat, and immediately knew that something was up. The door to the kitchen was ajar, and the lights were on. He pulled a gun out of his waistband, and crept towards the kitchen, triple-checking his surroundings for threats. There was always the possibility that Merrick wasn’t the only one who knew about the immortals, and if Booker was captured, there would be no rescue coming for him, at least not for another century.
He crept into the kitchen, gun out, cursing in French. The only thing he saw was a woman, standing at his kitchen sink. She turned around, and he recognized her, instantly. How could he not, when she had haunted his dreams for the past two centuries?
“Booker,” Quynh smiled, “It’s nice to finally meet you.”
100 years later (give or take six months)
Booker and Quynh stood on the edge of the river, waiting for their family to arrive. It had taken decades for Quynh to recover from her time trapped at the bottom of the ocean, and there was still the occasional night where she awoke, silently gasping for air. She knew that the team would have welcomed her back at any time, that only Booker had to spend the full century away, but by the time she felt well enough to not be a liability, seven decades had already passed. It would have taken her time, possibly decades, to track down the team, and after Booker had told her of Andromache’s mortality there didn’t seem to be any point.
And so when Nile walked out of the alleyway towards the riverbank, Quynh greeted her with a smile. Moments later, Yusuf and Nicolo emerged, arm-in-arm, and Quynh was relieved to note that their presence did not fill her with dread - she still knew exactly when and where she was. And then, impossibly, a figure emerged from the alleyway behind Nicolo and Yusuf. Andromache loped out of the shadows, and it was plain to see she hadn’t aged a day. Quynh glanced at Booker, but he seemed just as shocked as she was.
Quynh raced towards Andromache, enfolding her in a hug. “How?” she whispered, breathing in the scent of her oldest friend.
“It wasn’t my time,” Andromache smiled.