A Life's Purpose

Nicky sometimes wonders why they are always warriors, those of them who have been chosen. He didn’t wonder so much when it was just him and Joe, when he held the edge of his blade against the throat of an infidel who refused to die and stay dead. Then, he was blessed by God, the Creator, to wage this war for as long as it needed to be fought, just as Satan, the manifestation of Evil itself, had cursed his enemy to live and die again and again.

Now he watches as Nile trains with Andy. She’s good, Nile is, and she fights with a clear-eyed ferocity that will serve her well going forward. Her fist lashes out, aiming for Andy’s chin, but Nile telegraphs the move so clearly, any of them could have ducked out of the way. Andy shakes her head, sighs. “Too obvious,” Andy says. “Let’s try that again.”

Nile frowns, but she also sets her shoulders on the worn, aging practice mat, and she faces off against Andy without the slightest hint of wanting to back down.

Nile is a soldier, like the rest of them, and like the rest of them, that’s all that she ever will be. They know the basics of medicine, of course. How to disinfect a wound. How to calm a fever. How to splint a broken bone. But those skills are incidental when they never have to apply them to themselves.

Nicky hasn’t told Joe this yet -- not because it’s a secret, but because there will be time to talk to Joe about it later -- but he still thinks of that woman doctor, the one who sliced chunks of flesh out of Joe, out of himself. The awe in her eyes as she watched their injuries close up, scar over, and then fade away into nothingness. Her conviction that she was making fair, just choices. He knows Joe isn’t ready to hear it yet, but Nicky understands why Booker and Copley made their own deals with the devil. They know so little about themselves, about who they are, why they are. What more could they have learned from people of science? What other lives could they save with that knowledge?

After the dust had settled and Booker had been sent on his way, they had spent an hour in Copley’s house, just tracing the lines of history that he had connected, following the pathways he had mapped between their pasts and their uncertain present. “When you think about how old you are,” Copley had said, “the good you’ve done for humanity becomes exponential.”

Amongst the photographs, the written accounts, the news articles, the maps scrawled over in marker, Nicky had found an old sketch that Joe had drawn of Booker, carelessly left behind in a Turkish café. Nicky knows he’s biased, but it’s a work of art, a stunning likeness of the man himself. There’s a heavy weariness in every line and an unsettling depth to Booker’s haunted eyes.

Joe is the artist between the two of them, the one who scribbles drawings on every scrap of paper he can find, the one who writes overwrought poetry about Nicky’s mouth in every new language he learns. Nicky had asked him once, back in 1497, during the time period that would later be known as the Renaissance, whether or not he would want to cast off their weapons and become an artist full time.

It had been an absent question, asked in the early morning light after a long, brutal night battle. Joe had laughed, and Joe had smiled, and Joe had said, no, of course not, while Quynh had watched them both, an almost pitying smile on her face. And Nicky had loved him, even then, even as he dedicated themselves once again to the endless war.

Later, when they had tucked themselves into a bed for the night, Joe had murmured into Nicky’s neck, “This is what we are. This is what we’re meant to do.”

Though Nicky was the priest, Joe has always had the stronger faith.

Nile finishes up with Andy and makes her way to where Nicky is sitting to grab a glass of water. She chugs it down in one go. Her face, neck, and arms are covered in a fine sheen of sweat. She grins at Nicky, still high on the endorphins of a good training session, and says, “Penny for your thoughts?”

“You’re overpaying him, Nile,” Joe calls out, warm and teasing, from where he’s been checking over their guns, carefully dismantling and cleaning every part of Nicky’s sniper rifle. It’s been many, many years since the first time Nicky saw shrapnel tear through Joe’s chest, since they first learned how to wield matchlocks, wheel locks, and flintlocks. As war changes, they change along with it, learning its new tools, new strategies of violence.

“Just the idle thoughts of an old man,” Nicky says, giving Nile a small smile.

“No wisdom to be found, huh?” Nile asks. As she has settled in, it’s become easier for her to laugh, to joke around with the rest of them. No longer just the stunned, scared young woman that Andy had trailing behind her to France.

Nicky considers her for a moment before speaking again. She’s still soft, still raw and tender for all her warrior spirit. The years have not yet worn away that softness. “I was thinking about how we have all been made in Andy’s image.”

Nicky took up gardening, back in 1920. They had all needed a long rest after what was then known as the Great War, even Andy, who had seen every type of violence humans could enact on each other and then some. He and Joe found a small farm in Canada and tended to it in the absent-minded way that the idle rich could. They spent their days learning to cook modern foods and to care for their goats and to fix indoor plumbing and to drive cars. They made love every night in every possible combination they could conceive of, some of which were more successful than others. But over the decade they spent there, it was Nicky who planted the vegetables and the flowers, who tended to their needs, who harvested them when it was their time. And though Nicky doesn’t regret going with Andy and Booker when they showed up once again on their doorstep, he misses it still. They have never in one place long enough to care for living things with that level of dedication again.

Nile says, “We’re all fighters, you mean.”

“Yes,” Nicky says, because even in the most peaceful, blissful days of the 1920’s, Nicky would still occasionally crave the weight of a sword in his hands. “I accepted who and what we are a long time ago, but I do sometimes wonder if it would have been better if we were something else: healers, artists, or even humble farmers. But no, that’s not why we were chosen.”

Nile takes his words, considers them. It is one thing that Nicky has always liked about her, her thoughtfulness and her care. Booker had been too wounded, too angry, too fragile when they found him. “I don’t like killing,” Nile says. “I’ll do it if I need to, but I still-- I don’t like it.”

Joe takes that moment to sneak up on them -- a futile endeavor, because Nicky knows exactly where he is at all times -- and places a hand on Nicky’s shoulder. Nicky lays his own hand over it, gives it a squeeze. “We have learned to pick and choose our battles,” Joe says. “That makes the decisions easier.”

Nile nods. “The world’s a lot bigger and a lot smaller than it was when you were fighting in the Crusades. Not all our battles need to involve violence.” She meets Nicky’s eyes with a level gaze.

It’s startling, her confidence. It would be easy to dismiss it as naivety. “But many of them do,” Nicky says. He’s always preferred his fights to be slow, measured, careful, to reduce unnecessary casualties. That’s why he hangs back so often, why he stares down the scope of his rifle. Why kill hundreds when you only need to kill the one? So he understands where Nile is coming from.

Nile shakes her head. “There’s a reason why I’m here, a reason why I was the one who was chosen. We don’t have to do things the old way anymore.” She looks at Andy, who has wiped the sweat off her own brow to join them. “There’s a lot of ways to fight that don’t involve killing anybody.”

Andy shrugs, instantly drawing everyone’s attention, because even with the sheen of immortality gone, she’s still their leader. “I’m not going to be around forever,” she says. “Maybe we should try something different, something new.” She smiles, and the tiniest bit of light comes back into her eyes. It’s the warmest she’s looked since they lost Quynh.

“I know y’all convinced that you’re too old to change, but if my Gran taught me anything, it was anyone can change. You just gotta be willing to try,” Nile is all American stubbornness in that moment, so convinced that the world can be tilted off its axis with nothing more than the strength of her convictions.

Nicky looks up, meets Joe’s eyes. They are still lovely enough to take Nicky’s breath away, so dark and so deep and so familiar. “What do you think?” Nicky asks him, because it will only be the three of them for a number of years, after Andy’s time has passed and before Booker’s time will arrive. “Can a few old dogs learn new tricks?”

The corner of Joe’s mouth curls up, showing off that wicked smile that had stolen Nicky’s heart centuries ago and had never given it back. “You know what I’ve always said, I’ll try anything at least once,” Joe says.

“That’s settled, then,” Andy says, because they’ve worked together long enough that she knows when they’ve reached an agreement without needing to hear the words. “Nile, the next op’s yours.”

Nile grins at that, and her unvarnished happiness makes her look impossibly young, impossibly sweet. She says, “Me and Copley, we’re going to show all of you how we do this in the twenty-first century.”

Nicky has never been one for hope. He’s never needed it when he already has Joe by his side. But he thinks about when they kissed under the fireworks in Paris at midnight on the turn of the millennium, and he thinks of when Booker first tried to explain the internet to them -- this box that held the world’s information at his fingertips, and he thinks of when he stepped off the boat and onto the sands of the Holy Land for the first time, and yes, the only way to describe this feeling is hope.

FIN.