What Time Leaves Behind

“I’m telling you,” Joe insists. “It was right here.” He gestures towards the gas station, which is all bright primary colors - mostly yellow with a dash of blue -- gleaming plastic and glass in the afternoon light.

Nicky shakes his head. He’s been letting his hair grow out again for the first time since the 70’s, and it’s hanging down just past his ears. Joe wants to get his fingers in it, wants to tug at it until Nicky’s eyes get all soft and unfocused, until his lips part, waiting for a kiss. “You have a beautiful, romantic soul, my love, but this location is too far to the east,” Nicky says. He squints in the summer sun, towards the east.

“Bah, nonsense,” Joe says. “I was right at the north-eastern corner of the city when I first pushed you off the wall.” He can see it in his mind’s eye: the slow approach of the siege towers, the banners caught in the wind, the relentless forward march of the foreign army. He stood atop the walls for a day -- maybe more. He remembers the stone underneath his feet, the anger that caught in his throat, the fear of the upcoming battle.

The Jerusalem of the twenty-first century has spilled out into a sprawl past the old walls -- which have fallen and been repaired more than once -- but he still has a sense of where everything is from the old gates, which are still located where they were nearly a millennia ago. Nicky says, “But after the fall, we were pushed westward and fought much closer to the gate.” He points in that direction towards a street cart that is selling sweet bread and pomegranate juice. He raises an eyebrow at Joe. “It happened over there.”

The fall hadn’t killed either of them, but it had hurt a great deal. Joe is certain now that they must have broken several bones, maybe even a spine, though they’d been too distracted by the battle at the time to notice. Joe remembers struggling to his healing feet, staring down a red-faced devil who was also lifting himself off the ground. It still feels crystal clear in his memory. It’s a moment he will never forget. “I love you more than life itself,” Joe says, “but you have grown senile in your old age. It was right here that we killed each other the first time.”

It had been in the heat of summer, and the sun was high in the sky, and Joe had never wanted anything in this entire world as badly as he had wanted to kill this ugly Frank who had the temerity to come to Joe’s city and try to claim it. He could tell that this ugly Frank was thinking something similar as their eyes met on the battlefield. The fighting carried on all around them. No one else paid them any mind. The goal of the invading army was the walls and the city itself; a lone soldier like Joe was nothing more than an afterthought.

Joe would like to be able to say their battle was one fit for an epic poem, but they were too tired, too injured, and too inexperienced to fight with any sort of skill or grace. Joe had swung his scimitar in wild, careless arcs, desperate to hit something, anything. His opponent blocked his movements with heavy arms, doing all he could to keep Joe’s blows away. They were both breathing hard, and the smell of blood and death was thick in the air.

It had been an especially careless swing on Joe’s part, desperation making him reckless as he aimed to separate his enemy’s head from his neck, but his enemy had also chosen that moment to lunge forward with his broadsword. The blade slid through Joe’s leather armor, nestled itself between Joe’s ribs, cut into Joe’s heart. Joe’s own weapon caught his enemy’s throat, slicing it open in a violent spray of blood. That had been their first death, and they’d had it together.

Not the most pleasant of memories, but a sweet one all the same. He thought of it the first time he took Nicky’s cock inside of him, that feeling of being split open, of being pierced. Even then, in that safe room, years and years after that first death, that first killing, Joe remembered the cruel kiss of Nicky’s blade and the way it had sunk deep into his chest, rearranging him from the inside into something different and something new.

Nicky sighs heavily. “It is your memory that is faulty, ya hayati. This is where you strangled me the next day. I was trying to follow the eastern flank when you chased me down and caught me here.”

Joe does remember that moment. Their first death had come midday and lasted long into the night. Their second had been shorter, under the shroud of darkness, lit only by the moon and the burning city behind them. They grabbed any weapon that was within reach: a knife, a bloodied spear. When they woke from those deaths, the sun was beginning to peek over the distant hills. Nicky woke first, so when Joe picked himself off the ground, he was already staggering away. Joe stumbled after him, catching him by his stained tunic and dragging him once again to the ground. They wrestled, as clumsy then as they had been the day before, grappling like children instead of warriors. At one point, Joe had gotten the upper hand, pinning Nicky to the ground. His hands found Nicky’s throat, their first touch of skin against skin. Despite the few times they’d already killed each other so far, what Joe remembers is how fragile and human his enemy had been, the unsettling power of feeling the life drain from Nicky’s body underneath his fingers, so close they could stare into each other’s eyes, as intimate as lovers.

Joe says, “You must have gotten further south than this before I caught you.” He looks around, trying to get a better sense of their journey, but the Jerusalem of 2019 is not the same Jerusalem as 1099. The city around him has been torn down and rebuilt many times, and some of the landmarks he remembers fondly are no longer there. He remembers this corner of the wall, though. Nicky is just plain wrong.

“Well, since we started much further to the west…” Nicky says. He smiles, then, that small curl of his lips that he gets when he thinks Joe is being ridiculous. The love that swells in Joe at the sight of it -- it feels too large for any single body to hold, even one as old and as ageless as Joe’s is. “But since you insist on being stubborn about it,” Nicky continues, “we can celebrate the anniversary here.”

They try to make it back to Jerusalem at least once a decade. It hasn’t always been doable, but as transportation gets faster and as they spend more time criss-crossing the globe, it becomes easier to schedule a stopover in between other jobs. Joe laughs. “Of course,” he says. “Just because of my stubbornness.”

Four-hundred years ago, they had celebrated with a small feast at the nearest inn, eating and laughing with Quynh and Andy late into the night. When they stumbled out into the darkened streets, Joe found a shadowed corner, an alleyway where he could push Nicky up against a stone wall and drop to his knees. He sucked Nicky off as slow and as sloppy as he could, wringing every bit of pleasure he could from Nicky’s body, while Nicky had bitten his knuckles bloody to keep himself quiet. Afterwards, Joe had licked the newly-healed skin clean, his tongue tracing the familiar bumps and ridges of Nicky’s hand, and it had felt like a fitting way to remember the first time they had spilled each other’s blood.

Nicky reaches into Joe’s pack, pulls out a Polaroid camera. Andy has soured on photographs over the years, but Joe is still fond of them. He has a few that are aged and browning left behind in their safe houses, usually stored along with his drawings and his poetry. His favorites he keeps hidden inside the notebooks he carries with him, so that he can look at them whenever he pleases. More often than not, they’re of Nicky -- Nicky smiling and Nicky laughing and Nicky still and watchful. But some of them are of the others, too. Andy frowning over a map or Booker napping in some awkward corner with his mouth hanging open. It’s been over a hundred years, but there’s something about film, the power to capture light on paper, that still feels like magic.

“It’s too bad Nile didn’t want to come with us,” Nicky says. “She could have taken the picture.” Andy had decided to stay behind in London to work with Copley on their next plan of attack, citing the fact that she had been with them for several centuries of their anniversaries already and didn’t need to be there for this one. Joe suspects that she just wants to take some time off to heal somewhere away from Nicky’s hovering and fussing.

Nile tagged along with them as far as the hotel, but then she said she was going to “leave them to their honeymoon bullshit” and then headed in the opposite direction with a handful of colorful English-language brochures she procured from the hotel lobby.

So now they’re here, ducked underneath the awning of a modern day gas station, fumbling with a camera, probably looking incredibly out of place. They get a few odd looks, but since they’re close enough to the Old City, it’s not so unusual for tourists and other foreigners to be floating around.

They try at least one selfie, lingering outside the station while they wait for the photograph to develop. The picture isn’t great; their faces are too close to the lens, blotting out any trace of their location. (“You and your obsession with composition,” Nicky snorts in Italian, and he plucks the developed photograph from Joe’s hands before tucking it into his shirt pocket so that it sits right over his heart.)

Joe decides to ask the bored-looking teenager behind the gas station’s counter to take the photograph for them. He picks up a bar of halva and a bag of Bamba to make the effort at least seem somewhat worthwhile, but the effort probably wasn’t necessary. She perks when he explains why he wants the photograph taken. In English, just to preserve their whole personae as visiting tourists. “This is the place where my--” he glances towards Nicky, who is staring off into the distance, probably considering the very wrongness of his initial assessment of their location, “--we met here for the first time.” He still doesn’t quite have a single word to describe what Nicky is to him. He’s filled pages and pages of his notebooks, has scribbled down every new word he learns, new turns of phrases that pop into his head. All of them still seem to pale in comparison to the real thing.

“That’s so cute,” she says as he takes the camera from Joe’s hands. Her English is Arabic-accented with a bit of an American lilt to it. “How long ago was that? This thing is an antique!” She fumbles with it a bit, trying to understand how to operate it.

Joe smiles. It’s impressive to him, how quickly new technologies seem to come and go. “I have a fondness for old things,” he says, and he doesn’t stop watching Nicky.

The gas station is otherwise empty, so they head outside, to where Nicky is waiting for them.

“You just have to look through this lens and then press this button,” Joe explains, and she nods in agreement.

“This is so vintage! It’s so cool!” she says.

Nicky gives Joe a look that communicates every bit of his amusement, and Joe grins back as he shuffles over to stand next to him. Their shoulders bump against each other. Joe considers throwing an arm around Nicky’s back.

Their photographer backs up, far enough that she can capture the gas station logo in the frame. “Okay,” she says. “Three, two, one…”

As she snaps the picture, Nicky leans over, presses a kiss against Joe’s cheek. His lips catch as much beard as skin, but the gesture still warms Joe from the inside out. It’s hard to keep up with what displays of affection are acceptable where, since the standards and mores are always changing. They’ve defaulted to keeping their distance in public and closing that gap once again when they’re alone. A public kiss from Nicky always feels like a bit of defiance, an announcement to the world louder than any speech that Joe could ever give.

“You two are adorable,” their photographer says as she hands the camera back to Joe. A car pulls up to the station, so she waves goodbye and heads back inside the rest stop so she can get back behind the counter.

They stay for a moment longer, waiting for the photograph to develop. Joe shakes it to get it to develop faster, despite being told multiple times over the years by Booker that it doesn’t speed anything up. When it’s done, he has to admit it’s a good photo, worthy of his extensive collection. The sunlight gives the scene a warm, golden glow, and they’re both smiling with Nicky’s lips against Joe’s cheek, and they look happy.

Joe loves doing these anniversaries, because it feels like a reminder of just how far they’ve traveled, not just in distance but in time. Everything about this place would have been foreign to the man he once was, the man who looked at Nicky and saw nothing but an enemy to slaughter. He likes returning to the place it all began (no matter if Nicky insists otherwise), to get a measure of how much things have changed and can continue to change.

“I love you,” Joe says in Arabic, and then he repeats it in Italian, English, and Mandarin, just because he can.

“I love you, too, even when you’re wrong,” Nicky says as he swipes the bag of Bamba from Joe. Those are a weakness of Nicky’s that they discovered a few years ago, and Nicky tears it open with a viciousness that probably means Joe is forgiven for claiming victory this time. “Let’s go back to the hotel. I want to get my mouth on you before Nile comes back.”

“All right,” Joe says. He takes one last look at this spot before he leaves. Who knows what it will look like in the next decade and the decade after that. He can’t wait to find out.

FIN.