Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

My lover asks me:

“What is the difference between me and the sky?”

The difference, my love,

Is that when you laugh

I forget about the sky.

• Nizar Qabbani

On Monday, Joe gets up on his second alarm, staggers downstairs and just manages to press some fervent kisses on Nicky’s mouth before his husband leaves for his shift, eats the warm breakfast his love has left for him, racks the dishes, scoops his keys and wallet from their ‘everything bowl’ leaves for work, curses in the driveway, comes back, grabs his lunch from the fridge, goes to work, gripes with his fellow operations clerk about crappy supplier paperwork, comes home, successfully argues his grumbling husband into a risotto rather than the salad combo they had planned, watch their favourite baking show on the couch in between making out, and go to bed.

On Tuesday, Joe is up before his alarm, goes for a run, comes back to a pouting husband because he forgot to take his phone - thus, Nicky got the alarm - and spends an enjoyable twenty minutes making it up to him with all his special skills, after which they rush through a morning routine, Nicky races out the door to his carpool toast still hanging from his mouth, and Joe yelling after him about his coat, goes to work, deals with yet more late coming cargo in the warehouse, gets off late, remembers dismally that Nicky is pulling a double shift, eats the limp salad combo from yesterday with warmed over frozen chicken and falls asleep to the football game until Nicky comes home sniffling and dripping wet from the rain, disconsolately shoving limp salad and remaining cold chicken into a bit of pocket bread that Joe’s reasonably sure has been sitting in the bread box too long, before stumping his way upstairs muttering vile Italian things about head administrators while Joe makes soothing noises and makes him feel a bit better in the shower before they go to bed.

Wednesday Nicky gets to sleep in, Joe tries to get up for fajr, crawling over his husband since their bed is against the wall, misjudges where the edge is entirely, face plants on the bedroom floor, is informed by his horrible, evil, unsympathetic husband that Mecca does not lay in that direction, which leads Joe to give him a righteous kick in the shins with his one remaining leg on the bed and telling him to kindly fuck off, which leads his horrible, evil, unsympathetic husband to laugh at him - in fairness, Joe was laughing when he kicked, so he can’t a hundred percent say Nicky’s in the wrong here - does his morning rituals, leaves a breakfast for his husband whenever he gets up for the day, goes to work, finds out he forgot his lunch when Nicky shows up at reception toting it ruefully, which leads Joe to kissing him thoroughly in gratitude in the lobby - it should be noted Nicky wasn’t allowed further than the front desk after the third ‘Storage Closet Incident’ - goes back to work, comes home to a lovingly made lasagna, grocery shopping done and a very, very nice night in the bedroom thereafter.

Thursday Joe sleeps through both of his alarms, which meant he only got a brief kiss before his ultra considerate husband dashed up the stairs to get him up for work, he flew through his early morning routine in haste, hied off to work, had to deal with bad traffic, getting in late, a griping manager, his idiot co-worker storeman adding his own two cents in unasked for, the fact that he forgot his lunch, and the dismal fact that Nicky sent a message saying he was pulling another double shift and wouldn’t be home until very late, which left Joe coming home tired, hangry and irritable, unable to sit with anything and a tired and grey faced husband staggering home at an ungodly hour and passively aggressively eating the lunch Joe had been saving for tomorrow for dinner since Joe had completely forgotten to take out a ready meal for him to eat and going to bed with his only kisses pressed against the back of his tired love’s neck while Nicky’s hands squeezed his in the dark.

Friday, they both got up and went for a joint run together, the fresh hell of Thursday left behind, and treated themselves to a cheeky pain au chocolat at the bakery on the way back, warm and fresh from the oven, before hurrying back to shower and get ready for the day, which leads to kisses for Nicky as he rushes out the door, after which Joe racks last night’s dishes, adds some things to the grocery list, grabs his keys, phone and wallet out of the everything bowl, remembering his lunch before he got out the door this time, getting to work early, finally getting the cargo they’d been waiting on into the warehouse, getting through the rest of his backlog, getting half an hour free at the end of the day to look at classic car listings before cheerfully clocking off going home and being delighted by Nicky bringing home pizza with him and getting up to all sort of delicious things with him as a result.

Saturday Nicky was working again, but Joe could sleep in, and did, and then go to the farmers markets to restock their crisper and get some cuts of halal meat for the next week, some artisanal soaps that Nicky liked and maybe driving the car wildly around the abandoned lot a few times before going to pick up Nicky, who unfortunately looked tired and drained and admitted sadly that they’d lost a resident today - not unexpected in an aged care facility but Joe knew Nicky was the kind of person to take that very hard, and subsequently spent the rest of the night waiting on him hand and foot and doing his damndest to make him laugh.

Sunday was just for them, to sleep in and have lazy morning sex and stay in bed to read and talk about maybe getting a pet again, and Joe going down to his man cave in the cellar to do some hardcore Assassins Creed while Nicky went out and tended to the garden - Joe had been officially banned from everything except helping bin the trimmings because he had somehow, against all common sense and probability, managed to kill strawberries, mint, rosemary and aloe vera in the same year which Nicky had declared either a sign of a divine miracle in reverse or proof of the existence of curses but either way, the garden had a restraining order against one Yusuf al-Kaysani and Nicky had had it framed and put on the door jamb leading out to the patio - but he was allowed in there for some lazy afternoon sex since Nicky had planted some screening greenery around the walls for that purpose, which was nice.

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, all turned through the wheel of time again and again and again and again and Joe did his best to find some outlet for his growing restlessness. Wake up, kisses, breakfast, bowl, lunches, work, home.

It was all so unbearable.

Nicky. Nicky, Nicky, Nicky, Nicky. That was the only part that Joe could say he reliably liked. Because it was Nicky.

The rest of it though… Joe was coming to the disturbing realisation that he could happily set it all on fire. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. He was lucky for this life. He ought to be more grateful.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Maybe I need a hobby,” Joe muttered into the headset as he ran through the latest mission on the windswept and dusty pixelated streets. “I should take up art again.” The only drawing he did nowadays was endless sketches of Nicky, but, hey, that counted, he’d kept his hand in. 

“Yeah, that’ll buy you, like, two months. Three on the outside,” the dry French came through the headset knowingly. “You used to live a life where the game was nothing but adrenaline punches the whole time. Some amateur art class isn’t going to deliver the same buzz.”

“That wasn’t a life,” he muttered, because it hadn’t been. Being with Nicky was living. 

  “I got news for you, your adrenals don’t care. Nor do those funky little neurotransmitters in your brain. You’re not feeding them anything they want with this nine to five shit. It’s not enough,” the French was so smugly knowing that Joe attempted to shoot his avatar in vengeance. “Face it man, you’re bored.”

“I’m not bored!” Joe retorted, snapping more than he wanted to. “I have Nicky. Nicky makes me happy. Always has, always will.” Because it was true and he stood by it.

“Just because you’re happy with Nicky doesn’t mean you’re happy with life, mon ami,” was the retort. “You’re in a rut. You’re trapped. You’re kind of wired to not like that feeling, for good reason. You've got to pull yourself out of it. You’ve got to shake things up a bit.”

“Nicky’s happy with the way things are,” Joe muttered. “I’d endure a lot worse than this if he's happy.”

“You sure about that?” was the answer.

A message popped up on the screen: BookofLivre is Offline.

“You asshole,” Joe muttered, feeling nettled.

Joe doubled down on the domestic bliss for the next couple of weeks, to prove what he couldn’t say. Nicky certainly didn’t seem to mind his new friskiness at all, but there were moments in their breathless afterglow where he looked at Joe strangely with those startling incisive eyes of his, like they could see right down into Joe and his unworthy, ungrateful soul. Joe did his best to kiss and kiss and kiss that look away, his conscience rubbing raw like high grit sandpaper.

His husband was a miracle. He would always, always be enough for Joe. He didn’t need anything else. Knowing that always settled him. 

It was right about when he had just about made his peace with whatever mid-life nonsense was sparking in his understimulated brain when it all went to shit.

A Thursday rolled around, the same as any Thursday, only this time Nicky forwent the pleasure of a sleep in and drove Joe to work instead, giving him sweet kisses goodbye before telling him he’d pick him up early. He was being particularly affectionate and the warm glow of an affectionate Nicky could buoy Joe through the gloomiest of days. He spent the work day with a spring in his step and cheerfully clocked out an hour early despite his boss’ spluttering complaints. The man was never going to fire him; he was the only one who could sweet talk the trucking company to deliver on weekends at a standard rate.

Nicky was waiting for him, looking like a vision despite the cloudy day, his careworn jeans and the tired shadows under his eyes. They had been hanging around for a while, ever since management had changed over at his work. Joe was arguing with himself about whether to bring this up with him for the last few weeks; his own guilt at his restlessness had stayed his tongue.

“Hello, my love,” Joe plied him with kisses, then looked around the little employee carpark. “Where’s the car?”

Nicky gave him a bright smile. “I parked around the corner. Come, come,” he seized his bemused husband’s hand and tugged on it with child-like enthusiasm.

Joe would follow him anywhere, although he was a bit confused as to why Nicky wouldn’t bring their frankly boring silver sedan right up to the front entrance like he could and had in the past. Eh, any excuse to hold his love’s hand, he supposed.

They hurried up the street. Nicky was very clearly bursting with news; good news, judging by the glow in his eyes. Joe smiled to see it.

Suddenly, he stopped. There, parked on the road, an absolutely magnificent specimen of a classic car caught his eyes. He couldn’t help slowing to admire it; classic cars were kind of his guilty pleasure hobby. Nicky knew him so well, because he slowed too with a knowing grin, letting Joe take a good long look.

“Do you know what this is?” Joe gushed. “This is a 1967 De Tomaso Mangusta. They’re so rare, you know? Only about four hundred were ever made. Look at those lines, Nicky. I wonder who owns it?” he mused crouching down to get a better look at the chassis. Joe’s importing house was in a warehouse district, not really the place you’d see a car like this. Granted, it looked a little bit careworn - not fully restored, it would need a little work to get back to its former glory, but it was a magnificent thing even battered as it was. 

There was a jangle from the vicinity of Nicky. “Funny you should ask that.” He sounded full to the brim with satisfaction.

Joe looked over. His jaw dropped open.

Nicky was idly spinning some pretty old fashioned looking keys of his fingers, beaming.

“No!” Joe breathed, scarcely daring to believe it. “Bullshit. Bull. Shit. There’s no way…” he floundered, scarcely daring to think past the sheer glee. “We could never afford it!”

Nicky shrug was pure smug. “I freely admit, I won the lottery with the listing I found,” he admitted. “Frankly, it’s probably a drug car that some criminal shed in a hurry. But! It most certainly is all ours - or all yours. I took extra shifts for months for the cash and sold off the sedan for whatever it was worth. It was a scrape, but it was enough.”

He pressed the keys into Joe’s limp hands and planted a soft kiss on his husband’s open mouth. “Happy Birthday, tesoro.”

For second, Joe is fully bluescreened. He has nothing. But then it all caught up with him and he seized his husband up in his arms and swinging him around like he weighed as much as a loaf of bread, which he most assuredly did not, babbling “Ohmygod, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you!” It a horrendously mashmashed pidgin of languages not even he can keep track of. 

Nicky suffered this with aplomb, laughing as he was spun around. “I thought you might like it,” was his cheerful and modest undervaluation as the centre of Joe’s entire universe.

Joe kisses him feverishly, hotly, pressing his body up against the body of his new car, his whole being feeling like an exposed, sparking livewire. If they had been somewhere just a shade less public - just a shade - Joe would have given into the urge to do something a lot filthier than the already filthy kisses. He bit and sucked his way down his husband’s elegant and pale next fervently.

“Not that I’m complaining, exactly,” Nicky said breathlessly as he squirmed against Joe in the rightest wrong ways. “But are we actually going to take her for a ride at some point.”

“Oh, we’re taking her for a ride, alright,” Joe smirked against his husband’s neck and shoulder joint, then scraped his teeth along a nerve cluster that never failed to make him whimper. “Her first, then you.”

“It supposed to be your birthday, you know,” Nicky was probably aiming that to sound like a complaint, and did not succeed in the slightest. He looked up ruefully, gorgeously flushed, as Joe drew back a little and frowned thoughtfully. “You forgot again, didn’t you?” he said dryly. 

Joe gave him a beaming smile. “But, as my moon, you are indeed the keeper of time, habibi.” He gave Nicky another long, sweet kiss just because. He never needed a reason.

So the afternoon devolved into Joe gleefully spinning his new car around an abandoned lot in an abandoned housing complex with Nicky shrieking and laughing with delight in the passenger seat. Joe found out the Mangusta was every bit as good as he’d dreamed it would be, with one fatal flaw.

“Why can’t they make these things for tall people,” Joe grunted as he twisted himself into a pretzel to try to get around the gear lever and kiss Nicky some more.

“Damn Italians,” Nicky grinned at him through kiss swollen lips. “So very impractical.”

Joe snorted and then kissed him again. 

Alas, his fantasy of fucking Nicky in his dream car were for naught without more preparation and maybe re-taking up yoga. Joe only had the consolatory satisfaction of making him come on his hand, and then a far sweeter follow up of Nicky sucking him dry while he sat in the driver’s seat with the seat all the way back, although poor Nicky had his legs dangling out of the passenger door into the rain to manage it. 

They got back on the road dishevelled and laughing at their own ridiculousness, Nicky plucking at his wet jean cuffs with a wrinkled nose.

“We’ll be home soon, my love, where I will make sure you’re nice and warm and dry,” Joe offered gallantly. “For a little while at least,” he added with saucy wink.

Nicky blew a raspberry. “First things first, Kaysanova,” he reached over and tapped the fuel gauge.

“Ah, yes,” Joe looked at the dismal needle angle and scanned for the nearest station. “I fear we should not have done that last lap.” There, he thought, seeing a neon beacon approach through the windshield wipers.

“This car is a lot thirstier than I thought,” Nicky mused as they pulled up.

“I’ll have to pop the hood, but I’m pretty sure it’s been supercharged.”

Nicky’s brow wrinkled. “Wasn’t it already supercharged?”

His husband’s stunning and complete ignorance on the subject of classic cars was so unspeakably adorable that Joe just had to pat him on the head and coo.

“Ah, off!” Nicky shooed him away. “Go, fill your mistress to her heart’s content, I’ll go pay.”

“She’s not my mistress,” Joe retorted, laughingly scandalised. “There is none in my heart by you, yar amar. I assure you we are merely… very, very good friends,” he waggled his eyebrows because he knew it made him look ridiculous and Nicky laugh.

Joe went through the motions of finding the tank filler, working the cap open - it was a little stiff, but that wasn’t too bad, he could probably improve that at home. He wanted Nicky to be able to enjoy this car as much as he did. 

Then it was just standing there with his mind idling away as he filled the car up. It was an easy and heady thing to do to just look at it and admire it, even under the harsh lights of the petrol station. It was a beautiful thing. Joe couldn’t believe Nicky had actually managed to pull this off, and he was even more amazed that he’d put in so much work and time into getting something that he, himself, was perfectly indifferent to. He did so out of only the deepest and most abiding love for his husband. Joe had been a fool to think Nicky hadn’t noticed his growing restlessness and discontent with their staid routine. He knew this was his husband’s way of trying to help him, to give him something to get excited over, a project to engage him with the wider world again.

Sometimes Joe loved him so much he felt like he would burst with it.

He wasn’t so absorbed in gushing love for his husband that his situational awareness was diminished. He was immediately aware of another car pulling up to the pumps; then again, it would have been very hard to miss this particular car. It was one of those ultra flashy Range Rovers that the very wealthy gravitated towards, and this one had all the chrome trimmings and shiny paintwork to boot. It sat in the drab environment of the industrial estate petrol station like a ghost pepper chilli in a bowl of porridge. 

And even if it hadn’t been packed to its roof in bling and monster tyres, there was certainly nothing missing from its sound system. It was blasting out some high octane tunes, the kind that all seem to sound the same after a while.  

Joe side eyed it, and the cadre of young and youngish men getting out of it, only because he pegged at least three of them as armed - one quite visibly, which was pure dumb youngblood swagger and two very emphatically conceal carrying. Joe had left his old life behind a long time ago, but certain instincts you just never lost, and one was his olfactory powers of trouble detection.

He turned away from his side eye before his gaze even registered with the interlopers and disengaged the pump, shoved the nozzle back into its holster on the pump and rescrewing the filler cap, feeling a certain amount of calm sweep over him. It was fine, he thought. It would be the easiest thing in the world to not engage. 

“Holy shit,” one guy said, looking over the car in admiration. “What is that, some kind of porsche?

Joe looked over the kid - and it was kind of a kid. He was younger than Joe, maybe early to mid twenties, with the facial expression discipline of some about ten years younger than that. His eyes gleamed with a proprietary covetousness looking at the car that he did not trouble himself to try and hide. White as milksop, Joe thought, with all the privilege that implies. “De Tomaso Mangusta,” he shrugged as if it were no big deal at all. There was no harm in admitting it; the guy was already looking it up on his phone.

“Whoa,” the kid’s teeth flashed in a way that could almost be called charming. “They’re pretty fucking rare, my man.” His accent was English, very upper class Public School type. He’d probably had an actual elocution teacher. “How much?”

Joe turned his eyes from the guy who was taking it upon himself to circle around the car and inspect it and positioned himself in such a way as he could see the conceal-carriers in the car mirrors. 

“Hey,” the guy called his attention, annoyed. “I asked you a question.”

Joe gave his slowest and most annoying blink. “I don’t know,” he answered in a deliberate and mild voice. There was a paperclip in his pocket, settled there amongst the lint. It had been there for months, he never remembered to take it out on laundry day no matter how many times he told himself to remember. He began twirling it in his fingers like a small fidget toy, to keep himself aware of what his hands were doing. “It was a gift,” he added when the silence got too awkward. “I’m not in the habit of checking gifts for price tags. My mother taught me good manners.”

The sally had an effect, of a sort. Milksop guy burst out into raucous laughter. “No, no, no,” he chuckled. “Not what I meant at all, my good fellow. I meant, how much to buy it. From you,” he added condescending.

“Ah,” Joe made a show of letting realisation settle over his face. “I see. I’m sorry, it’s not for sale.”

Milksop guy frowned. “Why not? I assure you, money is no object. It’s a beautiful thing. It deserves someone with the resources to restore it to its former glory. Plus, it’s rare,” he smirked. “And I do like rare things.”

Joe gave him a thin, polite smile. “Alas, my friend, I treasure it because I treasure the man who gave it to me. No amount of money would induce me to part with it. Once cannot buy a memory, can one?” He flashed his teeth. “It is not for sale.”

Milksop guy’s eyes narrowed. “What if I told you it would be in your best interests?”

Joe shrugged. “My interests are my own,” he said. He was mentally tracking how the posse was fanning out. A couple had gone inside, oblivious, but the conceal carry muscle guys certainly weren’t taking their eyes off Milksop. “Some things you cannot buy, my friend.”

Milksop guy scowled, his ears turning red. The door into the service area chimed and out came Nicky, who may not be aware of the context, but could read atmospheres like a goddamn savant. His face wrinkled with concern as he headed their way.

Milksop had noticed where his eyes darted. “Who is that, your boyfriend?” he sneered, and turned to his muscle guys. “Hey, grab the guy’s little bitch so this bitch learns when to quit.” He said to his boys in laughing Russian.

Joe stepped right into his space, and laid a hand on the juncture of his neck and shoulder before the idiot could blink. Milksop’s eyes bulged out of their sockets as he felt the metal point of the unfolded paperclip pressing deep and hard against his carotid. 

In the right place, all you had to do was puncture deep enough. Blood would still spray.

Joe gave him a friendly smile. “ You're a child. An infant,” he said through his flashing teeth, calm as a sea, and in perfect Russian. “Your mocking is thus infantile. He's not my boyfriend. This man is more to me than you can dream. He's the moon when I'm lost in darkness and warmth when I shiver in cold. And his kiss still thrills me, even years after we had our first. His heart overflows with the kindness of which this world is not worthy of. I love this man beyond measure and reason. He's not my boyfriend. He's all and he's more. And there is no man I would not kill, no law I would not break, no villainy I would not sink to and no horror I would not endure to keep him safe. So I suggest,” he smiled wider. “You leave us to our lives and keep your own.” Joe smiled wider. “Bitch.”

Milksop backpedalled like Joe had just punched him and very nearly tripped over the raised platform of the pumps and landed on his ass. As it was, he was forced into an ungainly flail as he grabbed at the water station to keep himself upright, eyes still all but popping out of his skull.

“Sorry about that,” Joe continued mildly. “Watch your step.”

The muscle men both lurched forward, to do what, no one ever found out, because Joe sent a look at Milksop that turned him about as white as his sobriquet. Something fell away from Joe in that moment, like a layer of velvet peeled off steel. Without moving at all, the set of his shoulders, the turn of his foot, the tilt of his head all suddenly turned into something… predatory. Like something in the pitch dark night opening its glowing eyes in the hard light of the petrol station.

Milksop had what Joe could only imagine was a very erratic ability to read people and their boundaries, but whatever he saw in that moment burned through all the posturing arrogance and hit the animal part of his brain that wanted to survive. “Yes. No. Yes, that’s fine,” he got out, righting himself awkwardly. “That’s… fine. No harm done.”

“Tesoro,” Nicky’s voice was a soft siren call.

The predator went quiet. “It’s alright, habibi,” he said. “Just a little misunderstanding.”

The rest of Milksop’s posse was coming back out, loaded with junk food and whatever else had caught their eye. There was a general, raucous reunion, where all the tension drained out. Milsop was still looking at him darkly, and the muscle didn’t seem overly pleased either, but Joe shepherded Nicky into the Mangusta and drew away from the station without any trouble.

“Joe,” Nicky said. “Are you alright?” His eyes were searching Joe’s face.

Joe shamefully didn’t take his eyes on the road. He never wanted Nicky to see the monster that was inside him. He couldn’t stand the thought of frightening him away. “I’m fine. Just some young, stupid queerphobes.” He didn’t know that for a fact, but the sneer had been pretty telling, so Joe felt reasonably sure that wasn’t an exaggeration. “You know me when I lose my temper.” And instantly regretted that, because that felt like a lie Nicky didn’t deserve to have to swallow. His husband had once been in the running to be a priest. He was damn perceptive. Joe made it a point never to lie to him, not outright, not when he deserved the best that Joe could give him.

Nicky would see right through it. Joe knew he would. His fingers tightened on the steering wheel.  

Nicky, as always, lived to surprise him. He felt the brush of lips against his cheek, which startled him enough to look over. His husband was looking at him, his face so soft and sweet that Joe might die from love, looking at it. “My incurable romantic, defending my honour.”

Joe felt a great wave of relief hit him so hard he nearly felt dizzy with it. “Of course my love. When would I not defend you from all comers.” Then his brow knitted. “How did you know I was defending you?” His heart did not speak Russian. Not a word.

“Oh amore mio,” Nicky sent him a look of patient tolerance. “Do you think I do not know what you sound like, defending me? I would know that in any language.”

Joe beamed.

“Also,” Nicky added. “Apropos of nothing, I didn’t know you spoke Russian.”

Joe blinked. “Yes you do. You must,” he frowned as he tried to remember. “I must have spoken it to you before.” He must have, in the decade he had known Nicky. 

Nicky shook his head. “I have heard Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Basque, Greek,” he counted them off on his clever fingers. “And swear words which I suspect were Vietnamese. No Russian. I don’t know why I'm surprised,” he added ruefully. “There seems to be no language you do not know.”

“The hazards of being the son of professional translators and moving around a lot,” Joe took his hand and squeezed it. “I will mend the gaping hole in my list of endearments to you post haste душа моя.”

Nicky laughed delightly, which dispersed the last lingering sour taste of the encounter from the air.

Chapter Text

Joe angled his body and firmed his grip on Nicky’s hips as he thrust his cock inside deeper and deeper. “So beautiful,” he ground out, trying to master the building fire in his loins so as not to let it end too quickly, even now after such a slow, sweet build up. “So hot and tight for me. Such a good, sweet creature, you are, opening yourself up like this, all wanton and passionate, my love.”

 Nicky all but jackknifed against the headboard as it beat the wall in a steady percussion, his face slack and revelatory with pleasure. His eloquence had long since dissolved to wordless moans and half formed pleas. “Oh… oh… Joe… Yusuf.. Per fav-ooooh!” his voice went up into a half scream as Joe found a new angle and a new sweet spot to relentlessly hammer.

God he loved Nicky like this. All open and wanton and passionate like this, with the flush hectic on his beautiful pale skin and all his tightly held reserve unwound and spread out before Joe like a gift. There weren’t a lot of people Nicky was willing to let down his walls so completely for, and Joe never took the privilege he had been given for granted.

He knew, without being told, some of Nicky’s reserve had been etched into him with the scars on his body. It had taken a long time for him to be vulnerable, to let go, to leave doors unlocked. Joe had never found out who made those scars. He’d never found out who Nicky was running from when he had first met him. He and Nicky had both known the other had a Past, and they had both agreed to leave it behind, together. For each other.

Joe never stopped being grateful that Nicky felt safe around him. That he had taken the brave step of trusting him, again and again, until it wasn’t a conscious choice anymore. It was a grace that Joe felt he hardly deserved.

But he revelled in it, nonetheless.

He hauled Nicky up into his arms, his beautiful husband damn near bent in half, and pressed fervent, hot bruising kisses to his mouth, biting and sucking savagely at his neck. He became a primal thing with Nicky in his arms; some part of him loved to mark him, brand him, show the world Nicky was his, his, his. Judging by the reciprocity, Nicky hardly minded. He kissed back with equal fervour, tilting his head up to expose his elegant neck to Joe ministrations while running his blunt fingernails down his back.

“Oh, Joe,” Nicky’s head rolled back. “Harder, Joe, please, I’m so close!”

“Beautiful,” Joe murmured as he thrust even deeper as commanded. “So beautiful. That’s it, my love, that’s it, come on my cock, my sweet one.”

Nicky gasped out his name as his entire body went taunt, arcing, clenched around Joe hard. Wet heat painted their stomachs with Nicky’s seed.

There was nothing Joe could do with such a sight as that, but follow in a groan as his own release whited out his mind.

They came down together, sharing panted breaths in the same space and riding the aftershocks with sweaty, glorious kisses. Joe withdrew, wet and messy and made to roll off but Nicky gripped him tight and let Joe’s weight press him into the mattress which Joe, honestly, had zero problems with.

“Wow,” Nicky said as his breathing started to slow and his sweaty face relaxed into sweet rapture in the candlelight. “You must really love that car.”

Joe kissed him punishingly for that little cheeky jab. “I love you,” he corrected as if that was actually in doubt. “I have an abiding fondness for the car,” he admitted, nipping playfully at Nicky’s jaw and throat while Nicky giggled.

Joe rolled away and took Nicky with him so they could settle on their sides, tangled together. Joe loved Nicky like this, soft and pleasured, revelling in the press of their naked bodies and the adoration in those indescribably pretty eyes. God, Joe thought, had been particularly inspired the day He poured His moulds and shaped His clays to make Nicky. Proof indeed that God was an artist.

The side of Nicky’s mouth hooked up in a soft smile, like he could see what Joe was thinking behind his eyes. He probably could; no one in the world knew Joe better than Nicky. “We were supposed to have dinner, you know? A proper birthday dinner. I had it all prepped and ready to put in the oven.”

“Oh, habibi,” Joe caressed his face and rang fingers through his silk-fine hair. “You are a delectable food fit to satisfy every sense I have; what more sustenance could a man need but to gaze upon you and be fulfilled in every way.” His stomach chose that moment to let out an audible growl. Joe continued without missing a beat. “Although, now that you mention it, a sandwich might not go amiss.”

Nicky shook with silent laughter, infectious and happy. “So much for the nourishing properties of romance.” 

He detangled himself from Joe’s embrace despite Joe’s half hearted best efforts to keep him captured, released only after a considerable bail of kisses had been paid. He went into their en suite to grab a damp hand towel and wipe away the aftermath of their passions, with Joe narrating his every move with melodramatic and flowery poetry until Nicky laughingly chucked the washcloth at his head and told him he was engaging in haram by being such an utter ham and then shimmied into a pair of boxers - Joe’s, as if he didn’t know what that sight did to Joe - and headed downstairs despite Joe’s protestations of despair.

Joe lazily cleaned himself up and then threw the washcloth to land on the floor somewhere. What the hell, it was his birthday, fastidiousness could be a virtue for tomorrow. Then he sank back into their rumpled sheets in a lazy sprawl, post-sex glow dripping over him like warm honey.

What the hell was wrong with him, he asked himself in wonderment. All that restlessness seemed like a weird hallucination in moments like these. What man in his right mind, he thought, would want to give up something like this? What man in his wrong mind, even? He had a job he could coast by at, a wonderful home and a beautiful husband to come home to. Laying here bathed in candlelight and the assurance of his soulmate’s passionate affections, Joe couldn’t imagine any other place he’d want to be for the rest of his life.

Booker can go fuck himself, Joe thought, grinning. He didn’t know shit about Joe’s neurotransmitters. The only thing he would or could be addicted to was Nicky.

Joe must have slipped into a doze, because he came awake to the sound of distant banging in the kitchen almost at the same moment as his phone started to buzz loudly and angrily. Who the hell would be texting at this midnight hour? Whatever the reason, his state of golden haze was gone.

Joe mournfully levered himself out of bed and fumbled for a clean pair of sweatpants. Maybe he could go down and cuddle Nicky while he got something to eat. Creep up and wind his half naked body around Nicky’s half naked body and sway with him in the dim light of the hood light…

His phone buzzed again.

And again.

And again.

There were more noises downstairs.

Joe frowned, suddenly wide awake, and dug for his phone on the pocket of his discarded work pants on the floor. The screen was lit up.

NOIR, NOIR, NOIR!!!!! was all that was in the text field.

There was the sound of someone coming quietly along the passageway

And it sure as fuck wasn’t Nicky.

Something cold and steely surfaced in Joe’s mind. He went to the en suite, turned on the light and the tap, plugged the drain in the sink and then left the door ajar with the light spilling through. Then he ghosted up to the bedroom door then secreted himself beside it, so that when the door opened it blocked him from the view of whomever was coming through.

The barrel of an assault rifle came first, it’s light shining into the room, followed by it’s holder.

Black gear, body armour, full tactical setup. He was heel-toeing in heavy combat gear like someone trained in stealth infils.

The light swung towards the almost closed en suite door with it’s running tap.

Joe waited. Patient.

When the assailant was all the way through and had proven he had come up alone, Joe moved like a snake. He struck the intruder from behind, one arm going across the neck in a choke hold and the other fisting in the guy’s hair. The shrill sound of surprise he got would have been hilarious, but Joe was too busy kicking a knee out from under the guy and sending them other into an ungainly stagger towards the bathroom as the guy tried to twist and wrench his way from Joe’s grip.

They hit the door, went through, and slammed so hard into the bathroom mirror that it shattered. That stunned him enough for Joe to haul his head back and slammed it forwards, disintegrating the cabinet beneath the mirror, toiletries flying left and right. The interloper went slack, stunned and disorientated, and Joe hauled him back and then plunged him face first into the sink, now overflowing with water.

You only needed to cover the nose and the mouth to drown someone. Six centimetres, at a minimum, was all that was required..

The sink was deep. 

The interloper kicked and struggled, twisting and trying to get leverage, but Joe grip was iron and his will was steel. The guy slumped, unconscious, and Joe left him there, his head still in the sink. 

There was another bang from downstairs, the sound of grunting and swearing.

Nicky.

All other considerations fell away. Joe took off down the corridor and headed for the stairs, his thoughts a panicked mess. There was a sentry, or someone, there waiting for the sink guy at the top of the stairs. Had Joe been thinking clearly, he would have dropped into stealth mode, taken the guy out quietly and kept anyone from below from knowing what was happening, but the rational centres of his mind had fallen away. He had to get to Nicky.

God only knew what he looked like to the sentry, barrelling out of the darkness like a freight train, every inch of him wild and furious in the light of the barrel torch that swung towards him. The sentry didn’t even have time to pull the trigger as Joe slalomed into his at full speed and took them both into a death roll down the stairs. Joe found the wherewithal to force the man’s chin up as they rolled and used the leverage to turn the spin the right way. The guy landed on his head wrong. Joe felt the snap of his neck breaking right before they landed at the bottom, the body slack dead weight.

Don’t stop moving, Joe told himself. He rolled upwards before the shock of their landing could register with the men on the ground floor. He was on his feet and before them, striking viper-fast. His palm went into one’s face - crunch - and the intruder was down with a broken nose at the very least. Awfully hard to function with a broken nose; Joe disregarded him.

Besides, the others were swarming. There were way too many people here, and they were far too well equipped, for this to be a mere home robbery.

He’d been out of this game, away from the violence, for nearly a decade now. The muscles had not forgotten, but he made the fatal mistake of splitting his focus. He wanted to get to Nicky and take out these fuckers. That left him with blind spots.

He hoved into the grouping he’d landed in. He was disgustingly unarmed, and these guys weren’t going to give up their fancy guns any time soon. On Joe’s side was only the advantage of surprise; they weren’t expecting a homebody suburbanite to put up such a fierce fight, or such a well planned one. They went down to eye gouges and arm twists, wrestling flips. He slammed them into walls, threw them across living room furniture where they had to struggle to get to their feet. This was his home, he knew precisely where all the tripping corners were in the dark. He took some blows in the struggle, but while they were better equipped, he was a better and more precise fighter. He could also move like a pit viper.

None of them had shot him yet, maybe out of sheer bafflement. That streak ended when he got one of the intruders in a choke hold, Joe’s bare chest pressed to his back, and tried to get his hand on the safety strap to the backup pistol on the guys belt. One gun, that was all he’d need.

Unfortunately these guys weren’t particularly inclined to let him arm himself. They raised their weapons, forcing Joe to grab his victim with both arms and essentially ram him into the firing line like a body armour wearing meat shield. His body jerked as friendly fire wasn’t, and he was thrown into the line of his colleagues to send them all scattering like skittles.

There was a scream. Nicky’s voice was high and filled with pain, the cry right from the bottom of his chest.

“Nicky!” A red haze descended on Joe and he frantically turned towards the sound, and that’s where his blind spot awareness fell away.

The guy with the broken nose rose up and clubbed him hard, on the back of the head with the butt of of his weapon. Joe went down, vision dimming but not going black. His bell had been rung but good, and he valiantly tried to sort through his scattered thoughts.

The only thing he could hang onto was to get to Nicky.

Hands grabbed at him and dragged him. He tried to regain some footing and got a sharp kick to his kidneys for his troubles. He shook his head fiercely to clear the lingering fogginess, using the anger to focus.

He’d been dragged into the liminal space between their living area and their kitchen. There were a bunch of similarly armoured thugs all milling around, all masked up and armed.

There was also Nicky. He was curled on the ground in pain. His hands were cable tied in front of him, and there was some asshole straightening up from where he’s been grabbing one arm and twisting his viciously.

To make him cry. To make him scream.

“Nicky!” Joe’s yell was loud, and his struggles became more vicious.

“See?” A voice said. “I told you. Make the bitch scream and the doggy comes a-running!” 

Joe blinked for a moment. It gave his handler the opportunity to truss his hands with cable ties too - behind his back, not in front. They at least recognised him as a legitimate threat although… Joe tested them - there weren’t exactly the reinforced kind of cuffs. There were those cheap versions people bought in hardware stores for actual cables.

Nicky was worrying silent, his bare sides heaving in the dim light of the single stove light in the kitchen and whatever these joker’s torches deigned to show. “Nicolo, destati,” he pleaded. “Destati.”

“Ah, excuuuuse me,” the voice from before said, oozing insult. “You you mind speaking fucking English?”

Joe, forced onto his knees, ignored him. “Ya amar, destati,” he repeated.

“Sono qui,” Nicky grunted out. He shifted slowly, his eyes opening. “Sono qui.”

“Can someone make these assholes speak English?” the voice demanded, querulous.

The guy standing over Nicky roughly yanked him up and slammed back against the wall of the breakfast bar. He groaned.

Joe lurched against his captors grips, dragging them farther than they liked. “Don’t you fucking touch him!” he snarled.

“Right. There we go,” the voice said. “Finally. Some intelligible conversation.”

Nicky met Joe’s eyes. He gave a silent nod. He was fine. Trussed up, near naked, but fine. 

Joe felt the relief hit him in a wave.

“Well, well, well,” the voice finally deigned to emerge from the wall of protection that had surrounded him, insouciantly taking a seat on the one breakfast bar stool still standing. “Here we all are then.” He beamed.

He wasn’t wearing a face mask like the others. He looked awfully familiar.

Nicky’s brow knitted as he craned his beautiful head up to look at him. “You’re that idiot from the petrol station.”

There was a flash of anger in those eyes at the insult, before it smoothed over into faux amiable lines. “Well, I mean, yes, we’ve met before but there’s no need to be rude!”

“I shouldn’t think anyone accosting people in their own home in the dead of night with a pack of thugs has any right to invoke the social contract that is politeness,” Nicky replied with cold deliberation. His hands were clenched together in front of him, white knuckled, but his tone was steady and unwavering.

He could be faultlessly brave, his Nicky. Joe loved him so very much.

If Milksop - his name ever after as far as Joe was concerned - was taken aback by this cold contempt, he hardly showed it. He chuckled a little, aggravatingly. “Yes, well, maybe this isn’t the most civilised way to go about things, true, but, in my defence I did try the civilised route! I mean, I made a genuine offer and everything!” Milksop’s face was a picture of injured innocence. He turned to Joe dark glare, shaking his head sadly. “I mean, you could have just said yes when I offered to buy the fucking car.”

“What?” Nicky’s brow wrinkled. “This is about the Mangusta?” He turned to Joe. “What is he talking about?”

Before Joe could answer him Milksop burst into a great bray of laughter. “Oh, you don’t know? Didn’t he tell you?” he smirked like a man with a particularly good punchline in the offing. “Didn’t he tell you? I offered to buy that car for every cent it was worth, and then some. You could have been rolling in money, more than this little shithole is worth four times over,” he knocked his knuckled against the formica top of the breakfast bar. “I mean, this could all have been prevented if he’s just. Said. Yes. He clearly cares about the car more than he cares about anything else in his life,” he smirked down at Nicky, implications clear.

Joe willed himself to not surge up and throttle Milksop. How dare he?

He did use the flex of angry movement to cover the fact that his shoulders strained a bit more than usual, and he moved his hands beneath the ties to the right position.

The next part was going to suck balls, and not in a good way. 

“Don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs,” was Nicky’s flat response to this.

Milksop blinked. “Beg pardon?”

Nicky’s look of pure disdain. “Perhaps that does not translate. I mean, I am not going to be lectured about love by a spoiled child who has never loved,” green eyes flashed. “Or been loved. No amount of gaudy swagger is going to get the attention of your father. You want the car? Keys are in the bowl. Go for it. But when you take your shiny new toy and tell him ‘look what I’ve got’ he will do the same thing he has done every other time you had done that; and that is, ignore you entirely.”

Milksop looked taken aback. And discomfited, so Nicky was clearly right on the money.

Joe didn’t know whether to grin or to groan. His angel was so devastating smart. He had, once, been in the seminary - he knew how to read people.

However, not everyone takes their choice of protective shell being cut away with a scalpel very well. It was probably not wise to do it to the guy holding a multitude of guns on you.

“Yes. Well,” Milksop flailed for a response in the face of Nicky’s quite unnerving stare. “Maybe this has nothing to do with my father, did you ever think of that?” he asked waspishly. “Maybe I just want it. I want it, you have it,” he smirked. “There’s a kind of symmetry there. A sort of balance.” He reached down and ruffled Nicky’s hair, grinning wider as Nicky jerked his head away. “And in any case, what’s a little no one like you going to do about it? What are you even good for generally, sucking dick?” he laughed a little. “Why, is that on offer, sir?”

Joe jerked upwards, to his feet, much to the surprise of the guys trying to hold him down. “Don’t you fucking touch him!”

Hands grabbed him by the biceps either side. Milksop wandered over, insouciant and easy. “Or you’ll what, Rambo? File a complaint with the strata council?” he sniggered right in his face.

Milksop then went flying backward onto the breakfast bar, courtesy of Joe’s head slamming into his face. He let out a shriek of pain, clutching his nose and face even as a laughing Joe was kicked back to the ground. “There’s your balance, asshole,” he spat. “There’s your symmetry.”

Nicky let out a choked off laugh even as the thugs scrambled to drag him back down and to his knees.

“You mother FUCKER,” Milksop shrieked as he got back upright, a vivid red mark where Joe’s skull had connected. “You absolute, fucking…” he appeared to struggle for words, face flushed a dull red. He looked at Joe in a towering rage that didn’t quite hide the fact that he was too intimidated to get close to him again. It didn’t help that a couple of his crew were visibly holding in snickers.

Unfortunately, there was a softer target. Milsop’s cruel eyes lighted Nicky, who was still grinning faintly at Joe and the sight of it apparently set Milsop off.

“Don’t touch him!” Milksop’s booted foot hit Nicky’s side, hard. He went over. “I’ll touch!” kick. “Whatever!” kick. “I fucking FEEL LIKE!” kick, kicky kick.

One landed on the side of Nicky’s face and groaned, curling up.

“Nicky!” Joe’s voice was full of anguish, before it turned on Milksop’s sweating, smirking face in a tempest of rage. “I would know your name,” he hissed out through bared teeth.

“Oh?” Milksop taunted. “And why’s that?”

“Because I am going to kill you.”

Milksop burst out laughing. The rest of his crew all snickered, echoing his amusement like good cronies. He really was quite amused. “Oh, the terribly wrath of a trading clerk!” he guffawed. “What are you going to do? Stab me with a cheap ballpoint? Make sure my packages arrive late? What? Who are you? Yusuf al’Kaysani, barely passed university in a dead end job a brain dead monkey could do, thirty something and fully nothing,” he sneered. “But sure, Mister Great Office Worker, I guess one of us should be polite. I am Steven Merrick. And you? You’re fucking no one. What, are you going to call the authorities on me? You think the police are going to touch me? You think there’s going to be a day in court for you faggot little suburbanites in your faggot little lovenest with your little TV and your little photos and you little, insignificant lives.” His speech was punctuated by Nicky’s coughing. “Please. I own your. Entire. Fucking. Little. Lives. I can buy and sell you as easily as a box of cheap pens. I own the police. I own everything I want. And if I don’t own it,” he scooped up the keys of the Magusta from the everything bowl and shook them jauntily. “Then I just take it. That’s what it's like being me. I have power that little people like you can’t even dream of. You, kill me?” he overflowed with laughter again. “Who the fuck are you?”

Joe had ignored Merrick throughout this little speech, and looked at Nicky, who cracked open one eye and gave him a reassuring blink, like a cat. 

Joe loved him so much.

Joe was going to lose him because of this.

But they’d have to turn him into a fine red spray against the walls before he’d lose Nicky because Nicky was dead.

So this was it. All the masks away, Joe thought bleakly, and looked away from Nicky’s gaze.

He focused on Milksop Merrick - all swagger and noise, signifying nothing - and let the shell of Joe fall away. He let the quiet domesticity of the civilised world peel from his skin, like a cracked lacquer being scraped off steel.

“I was not always just Joe al-Kaysani,” Joe met his enemy’s gaze with such cool and predatory deliberation that it even punctured Merrick’s unassailable ego. “I went by another name. Al-Tayyib.”

He heard at least one guy suck in a breath.

Merrick seemed unaffected. His brow knotted in confusion. “Al-whatsit now?”

Then one of his thugs said. “I’m out.” And started handing off his gear to the nearest other thug.

Merrick blinked. “What?”

“I’m out,” the guy repeated. “I quit. I’m gone. Whatever.”

He shoved his assault rifle into the nearest guys bewildered hands, dropped his sidearm. He jabbed a finger at another guy, who seemed kind of young. “You too. Come on. We’re leaving. Drop your shit, let’s go.”

The young guy looked so baffled that he actually obeyed, stripping off his gear while the rest of the crew all stared at him.

Merrick exchanged a wild look with his main lieutenant. “Wait, hang on. Hang on!” he blustered. “You can’t quit! I hired you!”

The first merc whipped around like a snake, so fast that Merrick actually faltered. “You don’t pay me enough to fucking deal with al-Tayyib!” he yelled at the very top of his lungs, making the rest of the crew jump. “You want to throw your shitty fucking life away, rich boy, that’s your business! I intend to survive to retirement age! You!” he turned to the other one. “Get moving!” He turned and accidentally caught Joe’s calm gaze. He clearly hesitated before saying. “You have a good evening, sir.”

Merrick blinked.

Joe nodded solemnly.

Then the pair turned marched away, out the front door, without a word.

There was a short, astonished, silence. Nicky was staring where they’d gone. He turned back to Joe, forehead creased with questions.

Joe didn’t dare meet his eyes. It was selfish and stupid, he couldn’t hide it forever.

He just wanted to keep it from his husband as long as he could.

Merrick was blinking after where the deserting pair had gone. “Okay. That was… weird.”

His lieutenant, or main muscle, or whomever he was, spoke up. “We should go, sir, before we attract attention.”

“Sure, sure, whatever, Keane,” Merrick sounded sulky about it. “No one’s ever any fun anymore. Now let’s see. I’ll be taking this,” he scooped the car keys out of their everything bowl. “Oh. What’s this?” Something dangled in his hands; Nicky’s rosary, that he carried like a talisman even though his observance of his faith had long since lapsed save the occasional holiday mass. “Oh, this is very nice. A gift?” he waved it tauntingly in Nicky’s face.

“None of your business,” Nicky muttered through a rapidly swelling face. One of his eyes was swelling shut.

“Oh, well,” Merrick said haughtily. “Just for that, I’m keeping it. You really should learn something about English hospitality, you know. You’d probably make more friends.”

“Fuck right off with your hospitality, asshole,” Joe snarled at him.

Merrick turned his gaze to Joe and gave a bright smile. “You know, I was going to try to be kind about this. Headshot, you know, quick and clean for both of you.” He turned and laughed uproariously as Nicky gasped in shock. “What, you didn’t actually think you were getting out of this alive, did you? Having people running around knowing my face, it’s bad for business. I’m sure you understand.” 

“As I was saying,” he turned back to Joe. “I was going to be kind about it, but you’ve been such an utter bitch,” he deployed the jab with relish. “That you and he can think about what you did while you fucking burn to death. Okay? I want you,” he leaned forward, then clearly thought the better of getting into Joe’s space again. “That is, while you watch him,” he pointed to a pale Nicky. “Writhe in utter agony, I want you to remember that you could have prevented this, Al Tybalt or whatever you call yourself. You could have stopped this from happening. If only you’d been just a little more reasonable and a little less rude. This one is one you, okay?” he smiled with a flash of teeth. “Pleasure doing business with you. Come on boys, I’m hungry!” He dismissed them from his concerns. “Let’s go get something to eat. The rest of you come join us once you know…” he wriggled his fingers. “Fire.”

Then he turned, patted a shocked Nicky on the head, and walked out towards the door, swirling his new keys on his finger. He dropped them at the front entrance, cursing, which did spoil the smoothness of his exit. A handful of his muscle dutifully followed him out.

The rest of them scattered, muttering back and forth amongst themselves. A couple of them went and got some stuff they’d set aside.

Canisters. For fuel.

Chapter Text

Nicky watched them being set down with wide eyes. His broad shoulders bunched up with tension. He was breathing hard. The thugs were ignoring them the same way an abattoir worker would ignore an animal going to the killing floor.

“Habibi,” Joe took a gamble that these assholes wouldn’t know Arabic. “My moon. Look at me. Look at me.”

Nicky’s eyes turned to him, whites showing.

“It’s going to be alright,” Joe held his gaze even though he hated the thought of Nicky seeing what was behind his eyes. “I promise. It’s going to be okay.” His thumb joints were nearly back in place. He kept his hands folded at the small of his back, quiescent and docile and patient. This crew of idiots hadn’t noticed.

Complacency was a killer.

Joe forced himself to continue. Nothing mattered right now except making sure Nicky got out of this alive. “When it starts…” Joe faltered but rallied. “When it starts, get into the kitchen area and keep flat to the floor. Stay down, no matter what you hear. Understand?”

Nicky’s bright eyes searched his face. He nodded slowly, his whole face a portrait of worried questions. He would do it. His Nicky was, on top of every other wonderful thing, quite practical. He had nerves of pure steel. He could keep his head in a crisis. 

And he trusted Joe. He trusted him with everything.

For now at least. 

“Hey,” one guy, he didn’t know which one, nudged Joe in the side with a steel capped boot. “Speak English, or shut the fuck up.”

Joe didn’t take his eyes off Nicky, trying to etch every bit of his face into his memory. “Why?” he said, deadly and soft. “It’s hardly going to matter within the next few minutes. For any of us.”

Nicky’s eyes blew wide. God only knew what he saw, leaping up from the depths of Joe’s eyes.

It didn’t matter. Joe was rising like a spectre of death. His hands were free.

He’d grabbed the knife from the speaking idiot’s boot holster.

He moved like a dancer. Blood sprayed across the canvas. The guy was down before he even realised that down was a thing he could be.

Joe had his hands on the guy’s pistol before the bleeding out body had even dropped. He was already turned around before it hit the floor and the first yelling started.

Then bullets were flying. Blood splatter was painted in the light of muzzle flashes. 

Everyone in his old world Joe had met had had a thing when it came to situations like this. 

Andy used to say that she switched off and her labrys took over, like it had a will of it’s own. She became a prophet, seeing what the future held before it arrived, where she would swing there and there and there and she just knew it was the right place and the right angle and the people on the other end would inevitably find themselves on the wrong end of it, like they were pulled in by fate.

Quynh said it was all numbers to her; six feet, six seconds, six degrees of angle here, there, against there to bounce off here. It was all addition, sunstraction, division, angles and vectors, the numbers dancing and streaming around her as she moved, as she aimed. Chaos might upset them, but her numbers were never wrong.

Booker - well, Booker preferred to stay out of direct conflict. His gigs were usually premeditated and explosive in nature. He was at his best with research and prep time. In a fight, he was precise, methodical, and a mirror. He copied what the guy in front of him did, exactly, perfectly, until whomever it was thought they had a handle on him, and that’s when he then spun the funhouse on its head and warped it into something else when they were least expecting it. Surprise and precision were both his weapons of choice. Booker relied on striking in ways that were the least suspected.

Joe though, Joe was an artist. He didn’t flow or count or copy. He painted a canvas, often with blood, directed by nothing but his sense of the perfection and shape and colour in the exact moment he was in. Booker had once said he had a demonic eye for detail, part Dupain, part Holmes, part da Vinci - he saw everything and therefore anything was his paintbrush when he was doing one of his masterpieces.

One guy at the back went down; Joe knew he was close friends to another in the mid-range - he had seen it, he saw everything - so he knew that guy would turn and watch the other one fall, so he couldn’t back up the one in front that was coming for him on a bad leg (corns and a knee injury), slightly unbalanced. Joe was spinning him around and using him as a shield, and annexing his assault rifle as his own, using it to take out another four guys; two short, one long range who was quick and itchy on his trigger, and the guy in the mid who’d gotten distracted - fatally as it turned out.

Then it was just a game of how fast he could go through the rest of them. Joe moved in almost a dreamlike state, the loudness of the guns and the screams distant and watery. His mind was running so fast, observations made and such dizzying speeds, that he was already planning what to go about the enemy two bodies ahead, letting his body paint the brushstrokes of death on the one in front of him on automatic. 

It was surrealism, mixed with Pollack, ending on a still life. This house had been the skin Joe had worn for nearly a decade, he knew exactly how many steps he had to move to get here, get there, duck behind here not trip here. One guy went flying through the glass French doors out into the garden, still firing in a death squeeze while Joe used his companion as a meat shield. A bullet drew a line of burning reds and blacks over the top of his shoulder, which made him stagger sideways and miss the connection to get his meat shield’s knife into a good angle to hit one of the last thug’s neck, and get in under his throat guard. The knife carved a spray of red down his chest and arm as he shrieked in pain, but Joe was forced to abandon that corner of his canvas because his meat shield goon had flailed a hand around a fuel canister and was trying to do what with it Joe wasn’t particularly keen to find out. Petrol was spilling everywhere. 

Joe kicked the guy's knees to destabilise him and then grabbed his side arms and fired up through his chin before he could drag Joe to the nearest wall to try to scrape him off. He dropped, blood coming down like a tiny red rainstorm of Joe’s hair and face.

The one his knife had missed, the last one out of this gaggle of hired mercs who hadn’t been expecting or trained for this level of resistance, was still fucking standing. He had a lit cigarette lighter in his hand, the one that wasn’t limp and dangling. “Fucking DIE you-”

A shape hit him from behind. Joe’s heart tried to crawl out of his throat. No, his heart was fighting for his life in front of him.

But Nicky hadn’t just tackled the thug empty handed. His love had come prepared. The paring knife he’d armed himself with came down and hit a critical juncture in the neck and shoulder.

Nicky was a nurse, and before that a paramedic. He damn well knew where to find the carotid.

A spray of blood, not one of Joe’s brushstrokes, hit the canvas. They both went down in a fighting tangle, the thug was reaching for his gun even as he bled out…

Joe surged forward at a speed his former movements seem like a toddlers crawl. He was clawing back the gun hand in a rage so black he’d already slipped his finger over the thug’s trigger as he wrenched the gun around in a bone snapping move so the barrel was pointing at the assailant’s head.

Boom. A white flash of light, a red fan of death.

And Nicky, his Nicky, still in Joe’s underwear and bruised, covered in a fine red mist.

Holy shit, Joe thought faintly, looking into Nicky’s wide, shocked eyes. What had he just done?

But Nicky, even though clearly shaken to his bones, continued to surprise him. He wriggled out from where he’d been half pinned under the now dead weight. He was breathing hard and thin as he tried to push himself up and crawl over to Joe, who was on his knees and frozen from where he’d just murdered someone practically in his husband’s face.

“Joe,” he rasped out, reaching for him frantically. “Joe, are you okay? Are you alright?” he was running his big hands over Joe’s care chest and neck, the contact feeling like a brand. “Oh my god, you’ve been shot, you’ve been shot, Joe!” Nicky’s voice was thin and hysterical, he was breathing too hard and too fast.

He sounded like he was going to cry.

Joe woke up from his paralysis and seized his husband, dragging his warm alive body into his arm and crushing him tight, heedless of the burning sting in his shoulder and various other aches that were making themselves known. It would have taken the hand of God himself to get him to let go of Nicky in this moment as his husband trembled and shook in his arms. “I’m alright,” he choked out into Nicky’s sweaty hair and head. “I’m alright, habibi, I’m alright, I’m alright, I’m alright.”

You’re alive, you’re alive, you’re alive, was on repeat in his head. In this moment he cared about nothing else.

Nicky buried his head deep in Joe’s shoulder and said reverently “Thank God,” before he began to shake with sobs that sounded far more like relief than pain.

Joe couldn’t stand it. He held on tighter, making sure Nicky’s face stayed pressed into him, so that he didn’t have to see anything else.

Even a few minutes in this paradise before the horror hit… was a miracle that Joe didn’t deserve.

Chapter Text

Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack.

The sledgehammer bit into the concrete mercilessly. Great chunks of it came loose, while little chips went flying. There was so much dust, Joe could feel it sticking to the sweat on his face, beard and curls. 

His shoulder stung. The bandage Nicky had wrapped around his wound pulled as his shoulder took on the work. He was trying not to think of anything, including all the poetic and bitter metaphors for the breaking down of things by cruel hammers, be they physical or of fate.

It wasn’t working.

Nicky was… Nicky was upstairs. Once they’d been patched and iced and done whatever the extensive paramedics bag Nicky still kept could possibly do for them, Joe had told his husband that they had to go, they had to leave, that Merrick wasn’t the kind of man who let witnesses to his crimes walk away alive. This wasn’t because he knew Merrick - he knew fuckall about Merrick and what criminal shit he was likely up to - but he knew the type. Privileged, arrogant, a king without a crown. Above the law, or so he likely assumed. 

Nicky hadn’t argued. He’d just said he’d pack their bags.

Joe was clinging to that their like a man hanging off a cliff. Nicky had said their, like his and Joe’s, like they were still a unit. Nicky had seen what he’d done. What he was. He hadn’t asked for an explanation, not when he’d stopped crying, not when they’d patched each other up, not when Joe had given his ultimatum. He hadn’t even asked why Joe had, in this moment of crisis, fucked off to the basement of the house with a sledgehammer, new and pristine, that Nicky had always wondered why Joe kept it the hall closet and not out in the shed with the rest of the tools.

Just like he’d wondered why Joe had spent a day when they’d moved in concreting the basement floor when the basement had hardly needed it. But he’d let Joe get away with some explanation about setting up a mancave. He’d laughed about it at the time.

He’d never seen any of the things Joe had buried here. Joe had never intended digging them up.

But you kept the fucking hammer, didn’t you, a snide voice reminded him. Some part of you wanted to be able to go back.

Crack. Crack. CRACK.

The smaller metal lockbox was all but loose. Joe left it where it was; it could wait. The longer hard case was still half trapped, but chunks of concrete were falling away to reveal more and more of it.

Joe was fighting the urge, second to second, to go up and check on his husband. Underneath all the tightly held, highly trained emotional self-discipline, some corner in his mind was screaming in terror. What if Nicky just left? What if he, alone up there and surrounded by Joe’s awful masterpiece, decided that he had to run? From Joe?

What the actual fuck was he supposed to say to make Nicky stay? How could he convince his beautiful soulmate that this life they’d built hadn’t been a lie when all the ugly truths were right there in the light for him to see? How could Nicky ever look at him with tenderness ever again, knowing what he now knew?

What if he’d already gone? What would Joe do? How could he live without him?

Joe’s hands went white knuckled around the hammer.

Movement above him made Joe freeze for half a heartbeat before his subconscious said Nicky and his shoulders loosened. It was indeed his husband padding quietly down the stairs. He was fully dressed now, and shadows of bruises were spreading nicely across what skin did show. Oh, how Joe wanted to kiss them and hold him and tell him it was all going to be alright.

He choked on the words. Nicky had been lied to enough.

Nicky held up Joe’s phone. “It keeps buzzing,” he explained.

Joe blinked. That was so domestic that it wrong footed him. Nicky kept his gaze on Joe; he wasn’t avoiding his face or his eyes. 

What did it mean?

The phone started buzzing furiously again. Joe climbed out of the crater he was digging and took it from Nicky’s hand, the brush of their fingers like a white hot brand on Joe’s senses. What would he do if he never got to hold those hands again? Joe trembled in the face of the thought, and frantically jumped on the distraction of the phone instead.

He was greeted with a furious deluge of French. “It’s me,” Joe grunted out past the tightness in his chest. 

“What the actual fuck, asshole, can you not pick up your fucking phone?!” Booker yelled back at the top of his lungs.

“I was a bit busy, Book,” Joe said, watching Nicky settle on the stairs, hands clasped around his knees, eyes still on Joe. “What the fuck is going on? What do you know?” Booker must know something, he wouldn’t have tried to warn Joe if he didn’t.

“I’m not sure how the fuck you managed it,” Booker said. “But you’ve pissed off Stanford Merrick's grandson.”

“Who the fuck is that?” Joe asked, feeling waspish. It might have something to do with the fact that Nicky was still there and apparently had no intention of leaving him to talk in private. Joe could feel himself hurtling towards the conversation, the Last Conversation, the one he’d always feared would come one day. His gut churned from the thought of it in a way an army of privately hired thugs could never manage. 

“You wouldn’t know them,” Booker replied. “They’re not one of the dynasties; at least, not directly. Merrick’s the up-and-comer legitimate arm for some of the big cartels. Runs a pharma company; covers a lot of the illicit buying and selling and cooking all the drug empires use these days. They’re big business, even in the daylight, but Merrick’s itching to dig his fingers deep into the night world, become another legacy lord. You know what new money looks like, always looking for ways to play with the old boys.”

Fuck, was that all this was? Some uppity little laundering operation that had it’s eyes on something bigger and older than it could possibly comprehend? Fucking hell, no wonder the grandson was such an entitled little asshole that he pulled shit like this, if that was the size and shape of their ambitions. “The kid and I had a random encounter. He’s an asshole with boundary issues. How’d you know they were coming?”

He could hear the gallic shrug that followed. “The usual chatter. Thugs talk, especially about well paying jobs in the middle of ass end nowhere in Canterbury. They’re not so clever about covering their tracks when they post job listings on the internet either. Once I knew the area I put out some feelers, figured there might be opportunities for information on some up and coming caper. You could have knocked me over with a feather when I finally got the target address.” There was what could only be described as a significant pause before Booker said tentatively. “Are you alright?”

“I’m fucking peachy keen, asshole. What did you think?” Joe snapped, still reeling from the fact that his whole world had just been smashed to pieces by one unlucky meeting.

“Joe… is Nicolo…?”

Joe blinked. Then it occurred to him that Booker might be worried, not without some justification, that Nicky had died in the crossfire and that Joe was therefore teetering on the very edges of his sanity. He tried to rein in his temper. His eyes flicked to Nicky, and he quickly looked away from those piercing eyes. “He’s here. With me.”

Fuck, fuck, fuck, he thought internally, the Last Conversation looming ahead like a train station in the dark. 

He focused on practicalities. Whatever the Last Conversation held, however badly it shattered him, he still had to get Nicky to safety, so tie off loose ends, to deal with the mess.

“I need to call in a crew,” he said, letting all his panic and pain sink into a deep place inside and the ruthless self-control of al-Tayyib take over. “Book a reservation for me. Dinner for eight.”

“Nine.”

Joe nearly jumped out of his skin. He spun around to stare at Nicky, who was still sitting on the basement steps, hugging his knees.

“If that is about… the bodies,” Nicky said slowly. “Then there are nine. Including the one in the en suite.”

Joe felt his heart plummet in his chest. He’d forgotten about the one in the bathroom. He’d sent Nicky up there to get away from the carnage downstairs and Nicky would have had to walk in on that. 

Fuck.

The assassin took over. “Dinner for nine,” he croaked out, arrested by his husband's stare. 

There was a silence on the other end. “Alright, I’ll send them your way. Joe,” Booker hesitated again; the Frenchman might make a good show of being a cynical asshole, but there was a softness under all that prickly nihilism and booze and it was in moments like this that it showed. “Get to Paris. Come to Le Grande Continentale. I’ll have papers ready. For you and for Nicky.”

What could Joe say to that? “Thanks,” he said. “We’ll be there as soon as we can.” Then he hung up without salutation, because he was still trapped in his husband’s soul-flaying gaze. 

Silence descended between them.

This was it. Joe couldn’t hide in the basement from it. It was just him and Nicky, and the secret looming between them. He’d have to tell Nicky everything he’d hidden for the last ten years.

The Last Conversation. Nothing would ever be the same after it.

He felt naked, with nothing he could hide behind. No misdirections, no lies, no convenient explanations. It was just Joe, everything he was, all the ugly, dragged out into the light of day.

What’s worse, he couldn’t lean on al-Tayyib to survive this.

Well, he could. But he’d eat a bullet gladly before he ever turned that kind of force on Nicky, before he even let the thought form in his head.

Nicky was the one thing al-Tayyib never touched, and never would.

Nicky broke the stalemate, a far braver man than Joe in this moment. “The bags are packed,” he said softly. He surveyed the wreck of the basement floor that Joe had made, and the buried treasures emerging from it. “Is this… are we taking any of this?”

Joe blinked. Then he blinked again. That was absolutely a hundred percent not the question that he’d been bracing for. 

He had no idea what the fuck was happening. He waited for a beat, two beats, three beats, for the rest of the demands, the accusations, the angry recriminations to bubble up like a foul oil slick, but Nicky just sat there, arms still braced at his knees, eyebrows slowly climbing as Joe continued to stare at him mutely, like he’d asked something as innocuous as what they were having for dinner tonight. “Joe, are you alright?” he asked finally, sounding actually worried.

No, Joe wasn’t alright. “What… me?” He tried to find some equilibrium in the face of this new blow. Was Nicky disassociating? Was he still deep in mid-crisis mode and doing some sort of weird triage on the different layers of his reality? Was he drawing this out? “You’re not asking,” Joe blurted out. The whole time, for the moment the thugs were all dead, Joe had been waiting for the sword to drop. For the moment to finally hit. And this was it, this was the moment, and it was less like falling off a cliff than tripping over his own shoelaces. “Why aren’t you asking?”

Nicky blinked back at him. “I promised I wouldn’t.”

Joe felt his jaw drop open. He what? “You what?!”

Nicky’s eyes were softening now. “When we first met,” he said softly. “When we came together. We promised… we promised each other we wouldn’t ask. That we would never ask who and what we were before. We could tell each other, but we could not ask. We promised.”

Joe looked around the ruin of the basement and it's clearly illicit secrets, and the blood on his skin and the bruises on his knuckles and thought of all the bodies upstairs and felt something very much like hysteria well up inside of him, bubbling up through the cracks. “Even now?” he asked, voice thin and high.

Nicky frowned slightly. “Yes. Even now. Especially now.”

Joe stared at him.

“Keeping a promise only when it’s easy to keep is barely a promise at all,” Nicky continued, his voice still devastatingly soft. “I promised. I will keep my word.”

Joe continued to stare at him.

Nicky sighed ruefully, looking at his poleaxed face, much like he did when Joe had managed to kill the mint, like Joe was being an adorably obtuse disaster and Nicky loved him for it anyway. “I’m not saying I don’t have some…” he looked at the stuff Joe had buried briefly. “Theories, at this point. I’m not ignoring the implications. I just…. it doesn’t matter. Al-Tayyib means the kind. You’re going to have to work very hard, Yusuf al-Kaysani, to convince me you’ve ever willingly taken the life of an innocent, a bystander, a child. Just because there are things I do not know about you, doesn’t mean I don’t know who you are,” he asserted firmly. “I promised that I would not ask until you were ready to tell me. Until such time as you are ready to tell me - not through circumstances, not because you are forced, but when you are ready - then I will not ask. Because no matter what, Joe,” he reached out and gripped either side of Joe’s face with his big hands. “I trust you. I trust you to keep me safe.”

Joe can’t breathe. “Nicky…” he choked out, throat too tight for speech. His eyes felt wet and hot.

Nicky saw him, he saw all of him and he wasn’t flinching. He wasn’t turning away. 

This wasn’t a miracle. This was a miracle, wrapped in another miracle, wrapped in a hundred winning lottery tickets, hand delivered by an actual angel in khakis, crocs and a Hawaiian shirt. It was impossible, and it was happening. “What?” he choked out as the hammer finally slipped free of his nerveless fingers to clatter, ignored onto the floor. He reached up to fold his hands, white knuckled, over his husband’s, feeling like he just had to make sure the Nicky in front of him was really real.

“Amore mio,” Nicky breathed. “Tesoro. How I love you so.”

Something hit Joe in the centre mass and shattered him. The next thing he knew he had Nicky  pressed into the risers of the basement, kissing everything in his reach with bruising force, getting out a jumbled, incoherent series of “I love you’s” and “I’m sorry’s” in every language he spoke in between kisses and gut wrenching sobs. As al-Tayyib, he could survive any amount of pain but relief, oh, that was something no one could brace for.

Chapter Text

Eventually the storm ended, and Joe coaxed them both onto the basement couch which he’d pushed up against the wall. Joe was very aware he probably looked like a hot mess right now, bruised and covered in dust and tear tracks. Joe gratefully let Nicky find a tissue box and gently scrub his face down. How Joe loved him so.

“It’s a… it’s a family thing,” he started, the words starting clumsy. “A family trade, of sorts.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” Nicky said quietly. 

“No, no,” Joe gripped both of Nicky’s hands in his. “I want to.”

Nicky squeezed his hands back.

Joe took a cleansing breath. “So, um, yeah. It’s kind of a family thing. Family business. The al-Kaysani’s were assassins…” he faltered on the word, but rallied and pressed on. “Since the Crusades. Before that, even.”

Nicky’s face did something complicated before his lips twitched. “And you play Assassins Creed.”

Joe was momentarily taken aback, but let out a bark of laughter. “Yeah. It’s a little bit for the irony, I have to admit.”

Nicky laughed quietly, and Joe rejoiced to hear it.

“I was trained for this since I could walk,” he admitted quietly. “There’s a running gag in my family that the first toy we ever get in the cradle is a knife. It’s not true,” he added to Nicky’s startled gaze. “It’s not, but… it misses the truth by inches. We start young. Partly because that makes the life easier. Partly because we have enemies and that’s our best defence against that.”

Nicky’s face went blank. “Did they force you?” There was a thread of ice in his voice.

“No,” Joe squeezed his hands. “No. Not in the way you’re thinking. The family has enough money so that if anyone wants to opt out, or never really opt in, I guess, to the traditional career, they can. My uncle’s a chef; that’s actually literally his job. He never got into the life.”

“And you did?” Nicky said, sounding curious, not condemning.

“I wasn’t going to, at first,” Joe admitted. “Like, I was trained with the others, but I wanted to be an artist, you know? Go study, have things in galleries, restore things, all that. My mother used to say I was like the sun. I wasn’t suited for the night.”

Nicky ran his thumbs over Joe’s scabbed knuckles and fearlessly kissed them. “She wasn’t wrong,” he said. “What happened?”

Joe let out a breath. Now that the words were out there it was like a dam breaking, they were flooding up his throat and eager to rush out. “My sister, Safiya, you remember her?” He knew it was a silly question even as Nicky nodded. Nicky could hardly forget Safiya’s bitter presence on their wedding day, or how Joe had asked her to leave. “Right, well, she got into trouble. She and I, you know, we were.. I guess ‘prodigies’ would be the word. We weren’t just good, we were talented, even amongst our family who had carried the family tradition for a thousand years. Only I was older, and a son, and… there were a lot of reasons the older generation overlooked her to praise me, you know? I’m not saying I like it, but traditional values are erratically and unfairly applied the world over.”

Nicky nodded. “Yes, I think I understand,” he said quietly.

“And it was ridiculous, right, because no matter how good I was, I didn’t want the life. No amount of successful training missions or anything were going to change that. Safiya absolutely wanted to go into the family business. She worked at it. She wanted it so badly, she couldn’t see anything else.” Joe shook his head. “She would have been the greatest of our generation, perhaps the greatest in all our generations. The fact that I could keep up with her even though I didn’t want that… well, between that and the older generation all focusing their attention on me, Safiya had a lot of reasons for resentment, I guess.”

Joe sighed. “She was a savant, and impatient with it. It was only a matter of time before she exploded. She went out at seventeen and started taking contracts - way younger than the family would allow, at least in the modern day. She was so determined to get the family’s attention she signed herself off onto a perpetual contract with one of the big Russian oligarchs. You know, the ones with their hands deep in the shadows. What a fool,” he lamented. “The deal was just so bad, Nicky. She actually thought those guys would bring her fame and glory, as if she wouldn’t be treated like a favourite attack dog. It wasn’t a retainment, it was servitude. We’re assassins, not servants.” 

“You took her place,” Nicky guessed. “You offered… to take her place in the contract.”

Joe looked at him.

Nicky shrugged. “I know you.”

Joe kissed his cheek. “Yeah. She still hates me for it. But she was my baby sister, you know? She was seventeen. She had no idea what those assholes were into, and she sure as shit didn’t realise that she would just have been a murder doll to them. She was so desperate to be recognised that she’d have killed whoever they pointed her at, regardless. That makes her a good thug, but a lousy assassin. We,” Joe muttered. “Are supposed to be precise. Professional.”

Nicky nodded, following the thread. “Then what happened?”

Joe shrugged. “I fulfilled the contract. It was pretty fucking shit, they owned me for years, but we have to honor that stuff. In this world… there are rules, understand? Laws. I agreed to the contract, so I had to.” He grimaced as he said it. He wasn’t very proud of his time there. He was sufficiently confident in his abilities to push back against the more heinous things those assholes wanted done and between his skills and the al-Kaysani name, his contract holder had been wise enough not to push too hard. But Joe had always known that cabal had other people, more brutal people, in their employ who were happy to do the heinous shit, and did. He hadn’t been able to not know, and he hadn’t been able to do very much about it either. His shame was his complicity. He had paved the way for the assholes in power, who of course used it to become even bigger assholes. He told all this to Nicky honestly - the time for secrets was over. His husband deserved to know the worst of it, the ugly masterpiece that Joe had unwillingly helped create. He didn’t sugarcoat it.

Nicky took it in stride. “But you got out,” was his summary once the flow of words had stopped. “You found a way out.”

“Honestly, by the time the contract was up I’d been in that world seven straight years. I was pretty jaded,” he admitted. “I’d lost my soul. And my boss, you know, he liked his sleek, purebred attack dog. He wasn’t going to let me leave without renegotiating. He wasn’t going to set me free without a fight and I was tired. So tired, Nicky. All the lights of the world were out. It was an endless night.”

Nicky’s eyes softened and he shuffled up next to Joe so he could press a warm, solid like against his side, as if he wanted to go back and hug that past-Joe too. Knowing his love, he probably actually did. “But you did get out,” he murmured softly into Joe’s shoulder, as if Joe might need the reminder. “What happened?”

Joe cracked an enormous grin. “Well, you know. It’s the little things. One moment you’re falling into a canal, drunk off your tits and despairing of having a future and the next thing you know some furious off duty paramedic is hauling your sorry ass to safety, scolding like an angry cat the whole way. And then you’re so mad that he’s proselytising at you that you end up standing on the pavement having a screaming match about philosophical differences at the top of your lungs while you’re both dripping wet at two in the morning.”

Nicky snorted and started laughing quietly.

Joe nudged him with his head. “Then you go stalk him to his favourite coffee shop every day just so you can win the argument. And so on. And so on.”

Nicky smiled, wistful, before his face turned to something a little like awe. “For me?” he asked, tone lacquered in surprised wonderment.

“For you,” Joe kissed his throat, then his cheek, then his temple. “Why not? Is that so impossible?”

“It’s just,” Nicky’s voice went rough. “It’s hard to imagine that… I could do such a thing without knowing it. It can’t just have been me, Joe. It must have been you, too. After all, you were the one that made the effort.”

Joe smiled at his love’s humility in the face of his own power. “Yes, I wanted to leave. But that doesn’t mean I could see a way out. Doesn’t mean I believed there was one. But… then, there you were,” he felt himself getting choked up in the face of it. “There you were. Sitting across from me in some nameless cafe on some nameless street and I remember thinking I want this. I wanted something other than just to survive. Endless night,” he cupped Nick’s face reverently. “Until the moon came out, and led me out of the darkness. Maybe you didn’t know that’s what you were doing but that was all you, hayati. Ya amar. All you.”

Nicky kissed him as he always did; recently, passionately, sweetly, open and vulnerable in a way that he never was with any one else.

Joe rested his forehead against Nicky’s, still faintly in disbelief that he was still here. “I went back to my contract holder, and told them that I was gone when the contract was up. And they tried to squirm out of it by giving me impossible work, an impossible job, but they underestimated just what I was willing to go through to walk into the light with you. I did the impossible, I tied off the contract and I walked away. I was never going to go back again.”

“You walked to me,” Nicky smiled. “I’m grateful. I thank God for it.” He looked around the basement. “You kept these things though. Why? Wouldn’t it have been easier for you to just… cast off the weight of them? You don’t keep them out of sentiment. You were ashamed of them. Why punish yourself to carry them?” He ran his fingertips down the length of Joe’s face. “Why punish yourself at all with this?” he asked plaintively. “You do not deserve it.”

“I… I should have gotten rid of them,” Joe admitted. “Maybe that would have been the wiser choice. But I… I told myself there was one reason… one reason why I might still need them. So I kept them.”

Nicky’s eyes searched his face. “What reason?”

“To avenge you.”

Nicky blinked. “You thought that I would die?”

“No,” was Joe’s swift and implacable reply. “No. The only way you’d die is if they went through me first. What I mean was that, if you ever got to the point where you could tell me about… the scars… about who did that to you, then, if you wanted, I would dig up all of this and make sure they could never hurt you or anyone else ever again.”

Nicky looked at him, and then at the stuff Joe had dug out of the basement floor, silently chewing on that, the expression on his face not one Joe saw very often, and not recently. It was that flat blankness his husband used to have just after a nightmare sent him to the waking world screaming. Joe had a special hatred in his heart for whatever bastard had taught Nicky that face, drained of all possible colour and tells. Like he had buried himself in a grave to hide.

Nicky wasn’t saying no, Joe thought. He wasn’t protesting. Maybe he wanted to, maybe he felt he should, but the fact that he wasn’t told Joe that someone was still out there that deserved a killing.

“Joe,” Nicky croaked without looking at him. “About mine… I…”

“No,” Joe tightened his grip on Nicky’s hands and pressed his face into the side of his husband’s head. “No, no, no. You don’t have to. You don’t. Not if you’re not ready. Not even now.”

Nicky made a soft, painful sound. Joe felt a wet line of salt hit his nose where it was pressed to his husband’s cheek. Nicky was trembled and oh, how Joe despised it. But his love at least did turn his head so they could press their forehead together. “Besides,” he murmured in the silence. “For merely practical concerns, maybe we should only deal with one enormous crisis at a time.”

The joke landed. Nicky huffed a wet laugh, nodding against him. “Yes, perhaps that is wise,” he said hoarsely. He closed his green eyes; more tears leaked out. “I wish I’d never bought that fucking car.”

“Oh hey, none of that,” Joe admonished him sternly, bumping their foreheads together. “This isn’t your fault. You couldn’t have known we’d meet some gangster wannabe at a petrol station. You sure didn’t make him a fucking proprietary asshole, either. Dumb fucking bad luck, that’s all this was.”

Nicky made a soft noise, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. “He was so… so arrogant,” he said with hushed anger. “So blase about it all. I’ve met people who slough off human lives like they’re worth no more than dead skin, but I’m still amazed there are so many such men in the world.” Nicky sighed. “God knows how many other people he has done this to,” he added with bleak sadness.

Many, probably, Joe thought, but didn’t voice. “Right now, we have to focus on us. He’s not going to be very pleased to find out we survived. We have to go to ground. We have to leave this place,” he looked at his husband sadly. “Leave and never come back. We’re not safe here anymore. I’m sorry, habibi,” he added quietly because he was sorry, and angrier about it for Nicky’s sake than he was about anything else. This place had been his husband’s refuge. He had slowly had less nightmares when they settled here, slowly started not waking bolt upright at the slightest noise, slowly stopped getting up and checking the locks at night. Merrick had ripped that away from him, as if Joe could hate that son of a bitch more.

“I quit my job.”

Joe blinked at the non sequitur. “You what?”

“Today. Yesterday now, I guess. Before I picked you up in the Mangusta,” Nicky explained. “I quit my job. Walked out. I couldn’t stand the new management anymore. The only reason I was staying was to save up for that car. Once I’d done it, I walked away.”

Joe waited. Nicky wasn’t impulsive; he was a planner. There had to be some thread behind this that Nicky was weaving.

“I thought… maybe,” Nicky shook himself and started again. “I thought we might just… leave. Maybe you could quit your job too, and we sell this place and you and I could… just, go. Go somewhere. Somewhere else. You, me and that car.”

Joe felt his eyebrows all but fly off his head. “What? Why?”

“Because you were happy with me and I with you,” Nicky took a hand to squeeze. “But we were so desperately unhappy with the rest of it. More so because we were trying so hard not to be.”

He met his husband’s gaze, and Joe didn’t flinch.

“And I thought maybe this was it. The end of it. This was a lovely place, I’m fond of it, but it had changed from a… a nest we could hide in into a cage we couldn’t escape. And I was sick of seeing you so very unhappy, even though you were trying so hard,” Nicky gave him a soft smile. “I thought… maybe it was time to leave it behind and find out who else we can be. Just you and me, over the horizon. I don’t know what lies over it, and I don’t care, as long as I’m with you. I still don’t, Joe.”

Joe’s heart burst with love for this man, for all the ways he saw him and knew him and was brave in the face of his secret world. How lucky was he; what angel had decided that he should have such a miracle as this? Joe kissed him again, wishing he could just open his chest and pour all of his love into Nicky the way Nicky deserved. “I do not deserve you,” Joe murmured against his skin.

“Nor I you,” Nicky smiled. “And yet, here we are.” He looked out over the basement floor. “What must we do? I’m no stranger to running for my life with nothing but a bag, but… it has been a while.”

He never would again after this, if Joe had any say in it. Joe opened his mouth.

A knock on the door made them both jump. Joe had a hand on the back of Nicky’s neck ready to shove him down and out of the line of fire before he thought it through, Nicky tense and coiled as a hare. 

Joe took a gamble. He yelled up the stairs in Dutch “Clean up?”

“That’s right!” a voice yelled back.

“Just a moment!” Joe yelled back. “It’s alright, it’s just the cleaning crew,” he reassured Nicky.

“Cleaning?” Nicky blinked.

Joe cleared his throat. “Crime scene clean up.” He got off the couch and went over to the lockbox. “There’s an outfit in most major metropolis’. Assassins keep them on speed dial.”

Nicky followed him. “Assassins have service industries?” he asked, baffled.

“Yeah, well, bloodstains sometimes require professionals,” Joe admitted. “And it’s a lot faster than doing it with one set of hands. We’ve been around a long time, habibi,” he said softly to Nicky’s wide eyed stare. “We have laws. We have history. We have a culture. Even a government, of a sort. There are a lot of people involved in it who don’t actually kill people. They just help keep things running. Here,” he hefted the lockbox into his husband's hands. “Help me.” 

Nicky, who could deadlift an adult man onto a stretcher, gave a huff at the weight as they hauled it in tandem over to the basement table, cleared of Joe’s game controllers. “Joe, what is madre di dio!” he exclaimed as Joe lifted the lid. “Is that real gold?”

“Pure gold,” Joe grinned. “I should have mentioned; we also have a currency. This isn’t exactly legal tender anywhere else unless you feel like melting it down,” he held up one of the coins to the light. “But we do use it amongst ourselves to pay for goods and services; it’s kind of almost like a token, representing a favour.”

“A gold plated favour,” Nicky took one, flipping it a few times to see both embossed sides. 

“Okay, so, quick rate of exchange lesson,” Joe said, aware there were a bunch of nondescript people waiting patiently outside their door and the neighbours around here would almost certainly notice something the longer they waited. “Usually, it’s one coin per service, although that can vary depending on the service. In this case, that’s one coin per body,” he counted out nine coins. “Plus two more, for us.” He dropped two more coins.

“For us?” Nicky blinked.

“If anyone asks, they moved eleven bodies,” Joe shrugged. “Muddies the waters. Information is at a premium in this world. Merrick’s a dumbass neophyte who wishes he was in it, but his family has got connections to it; maybe enough to get info from a broker who deals in that stuff. So, eleven bodies on record. Make them wonder. The less Merrick is able to find out, the safer we’ll be.”

Nicky thought about that silently. “How much to ask them to torch the house?”

Joe blinked, poleaxed. “What?”

“Well, we’re not coming back, are we?” Nicky pointed out coolly. “If a false record muddies the waters, destroying this place will certainly prevent them from finding anything suspicious if or when they come to check on their missing men, especially if the police end up involved and, I assume, will pass the information along. I’d like to see them track DNA through a pile of ash.” Nicky looked Joe dead in the eye and deployed the old Italian spit of defiance. “Into the mouth of the wolf.”

Joe’s mouth snapped shut in the face of the steel in Nicky’s eyes. He’s not going to lie, he might be a little turned on right now. “May it choke, my love.” And added four more coins. A job that big deserved a tip.

The cleaning crew were the same as any crew in this line of work: pragmatic, professional, methodical and extremely thorough. The bodies were duly lined up, nearly wrapped in plastic, and carted away into the waiting truck, stacked neatly as logs. Their weapons were collected, stripped, and racked for recycling. Bloodstains were cleaned - even fires didn’t destroy everything, and destroying DNA evidence was therefore a wise choice - glass was swept up, intact windows were cleaned, surfaces wiped, damaged furniture removed. It was all very clinical, very emotionless. The leader of the crew was a wizened old man with crooked teeth and a quiet demeanour, who’s few questions about the specifics of what needed doing were conducted in a low, soothing tone. He referred to Joe as al-Tayyib only, and Nicky was ‘sir’, and he asked no probing questions.

All too soon it was time to leave. The crew was prepping the house for burning. It would be a good burn, Joe knew, professional. There wouldn’t be enough left to leave a trail. 

It still hurt to watch Nicky reach into their everything bowl and falter. “I forgot,” he muttered. “He took my crucifix. I hope he is careful with it.” Nicky had carried that crucifix as long as Joe had known him. It was, he believed, the only thing he carried from his time before.

Nicky went over to their mantlepiece instead. He took a jar of coins they kept there, although the ten extra euros it probably represented in total wouldn’t add much. Joe didn’t stop him; Nicky was coping with this as best he could, but Joe could see the line of sadness in his broad shoulders as he said goodbye to their little house. This became especially poignant when he reached for one of the picture frames in the mantlepiece - a wedding photo, one of many they had strewn around. With quick, sorrowful fingers, he loosened the print from the frame and left it empty, tucking the photo away.

Then he turned to Joe. “Time to go?”

Joe nodded, mute in the face of his love’s grief. He would fix this, he promised himself. He would make it right, somehow.

They shouldered their bags; Joe hefted the contents of the lockbox, Nicky ably managed with the awkward weight of the long hard-shell case Joe had finished extracting from the concrete. They left through the broken patio door, leaving the crew to complete the final work, and out through the garden where Joe’s heart ached anew watching Nicky run his fingers over all the things he had lovingly planted here in the last seven years. Maybe he was wondering who would care for them now. Joe couldn’t stand the thought of asking.

But Nicky didn’t linger on it. He climbed over the back fence, reached down to haul Joe’s bags over it and then pulled Joe himself up. They continued like this down the block, like drunken teens on a dare, sneaking through their neighbours yards under the cover of the night. 

Several rows and several blocks later they reached the cramped council tenements that backed onto the rail lines and cargo depot.

“Where are we going?” Nicky murmured as they, essentially, broke into it. 

“Southbound,” Joe told him, creeping along the tracks. “We’re taking a freight train to Folkestone, and then we’ll take the passenger train to Dover, and then the ferry to Calais. After that, we’ll improvise. I’ve got friends in Paris who are going to help us.”

Nicky nodded silently. Perhaps if only because there was a train going the right direction just starting to pull out of the depot, and they were suddenly using all their breath and skill to reach an available car before it moved too fast.

Joe managed to reach the car first, wrench open the doors and haul himself aboard. Nicky, long legs accelerating to a sprint, threw the case and his bag in after him and then had to push to maximum speed to keep up.

He reached up. Joe reached down.

Nicky was seized and hauled aboard in one joint wrenching pull. They both hit the dusty floor of the car, breathing hard. “You always take me on such interesting holidays,” Nicky panted into his husband’s heaving chest, which made Joe let out a bark of laughter, wrapping his arms around his husband tightly.

Maybe there was still a small part of him that couldn’t believe he was still here after everything.

They got up to stack the bags and close the car door, so they could settle in properly. When Nicky went to slide the door shut his eye caught a plume of smoke bifurcating the night sky, lit from below. Even as he parsed what it was, there was a squall of fire and police sirens echoing somewhere in the surrounding streets.

He stood there, at the door at the tracks cursed away and the plume slowly started to disappear from view.

Joe slid his arms around him from behind, burning his face in his husband’s neck. “I am sorry, my heart,” he murmured against his husband’s skin.

Nicky turned in his arms, lifting Joe’s chin with his gentle fingers, his gaze so full of love and happiness that Joe momentarily lost the ability to breathe. “Don’t be,” he said simply. “I’m not.”

Joe kissed him.

The train took them over the horizon, and away.