#me to joe: i bestow upon you the greatest honour i can. depression projection--

[nicolos]

silence

cw depression

Their safehouse in Vienna is an old house of three stories that Nicky tells her was left to Booker by an old woman who got attached to him "sometime before the moon landing" (though what the moon landing had to do with it Nile has no idea). It looks from the outside like it's been abandoned sometime in the sixties. From the inside it mostly looks (and smells) like kids from surrounding neighbourhoods used it as a place to smoke pot. It's fine: the kids have clearly only used the ground floor, which has not much more than a few (now broken) old chairs and a cupboard that a number of creatures have made nests in.

The second floor, which inexplicably has an unbroken lock on it, is where their stuff is. There's not much, not many old weapons kept lying around in a place that could be broken into, some books, a vase of a provenance Andy wouldn't tell her, and clothes. Old clothes. Nile spends a great morning having a look through it all and asking Joe what belonged to whom (he had the worst taste of the lot of them in the sixties, apparently, a fact he bore with much patience).

The third floor is a kind of storeroom and a spare bedroom. The bedroom is fine—Nile calls dibs so she doesn't have to share a wall with Joe and Nicky—but the store is, in one word, a mess. There's a broken window that's let cold air and probably some rain and snow in, and birds have made nests everywhere. It's filthy and smells like something died in it, and she's fairly sure she whatever the walls are covered in is six different kinds of health hazard.

It's not a problem. The place is big enough for them without the storage, and anyway there doesn't seem to be anything in there the others miss. Nile, for one, is happy just to be in an actual house after the last two weeks, which were in a cave.

Three days after their job in Vienna is done (without a hitch, for once) Nile wakes up to a note from Andy that she's going hiking, an activity she refuses to engage in with Nile because, she insists, Nile is such a young person about it. Nicky greets her when she gets out of her room, tells her he's going shopping and if she'd like to join him (emphatically, no), then leaves Nile to huddle down on the couch with a blanket and last night's football (proper football) match. God bless the VPN Copley's hooked her upto.

Just as they're approaching half-time, Joe appears, bleary-eyed and wrapped in a blanket. He gives her a mildly confused look, then goes into the kitchen. "Are you looking for Nicky?" she calls, eyes pinned to her screen. "He's gone shopping."

Joe doesn't respond, or she doesn't hear it over the noise in her headphones. After a couple of minutes, she forgets all about it.

Eventually, though, the match ends. Nicky still isn't back, so she figure he's weighing two identical pieces of fruit for pros and cons for half an hour, then repeating, and won't be back in time for lunch.

Nile decides to go looking for Joe.

He's not in his room, where she'd have thought he'd be, and he's not in the kitchen, though he's taken out a bottle of milk (Nile puts it back in the fridge) and the tea, but hasn't made any. She doesn't think she could've missed him leaving the house entirely, but she was pretty focused on the match, so she calls him.

The phone rings upstairs.

The door to the store is open, and the stench that immediately issues is almost enough to convince her that can't be it, but. She takes a step inside, and there Joe is.

He's perched on a rickety old metal chair that's more rust than metal at this point, staring out the window. There's not much to see—the window's covered in dirt, and the cracked parts open onto a taller apartment building across the street.

She hesitates. Normally, Joe's the most vibrant of them. But in the middle of the room surrounded by grime and dust and God only knows what else, Joe looks—faded. A bit like an old photograph. He can't have been there more than an hour, but there's a layer of dust settling onto his hair that makes him look part of the room—like it's encroaching.

She says, carefully, "Joe?" He seems surprised by that, but when he turns he's wearing an expression that's mostly empty. She keeps her voice even and hopefully neither overwhelming not condescending when she asks, "What are you doing here?"

"It's quiet," he answers.

She nods. "Was I making too much noise downstairs? I'm sorry if—"

He blinks, shakes his head, and the action makes him look just a tiny bit more like Joe. Alive. Not inert. "No, no. It isn't you, Nile. Sometimes I..." he cuts off, looking pained. "I can't talk. It helps if I'm not around other people."

That probably explains why Nicky had gone shopping on his own so early in the morning. She wonders why he didn't tell her.

"Okay," she says, not exactly equipped to deal with this, but she cannot in good conscience leave him here this way. She knows they can't die, but she can't imagine breathing in mould and all of this junk can be pleasant, and what she knows about bad days is that sitting in shit, literal or metaphorical, has only ever made her feel worse. "Do you—maybe want to come to the kitchen? I won't try to talk to you."

Joe looks—conflicted, but also distracted, like in the half minute it took for her to figure out what to say he's gone somewhere.

Nile presses her lips together. "Joe?"

He says, "I tried therapy once, in the early aughts." He barely seems to see Nile's surprised expression—explaining the immortality thing would probably stretch any psychologist's imagination (and patient confidentiality), but he does explain: "I couldn't exactly talk about the immortality, but there are other things. Doctor said—not that it was normal, but that these things happen in... high-stress environments. Days like this. Where I feel like if I speak to anybody, I'll fall apart. Physically, I mean."

Nile does know what he means. The feeling isn't quite so physical for her, but it's like—a dam, bursting full with all the things she can't talk about every single day. If she opens the gates, it floods. But the only thing that helps—the only thing that's ever helped—is talking to people.

Hoping she's not making things worse, Nile says, "You're speaking to me now."

Joe nods, looking grim. Not helping, then, but hopefully not making everything worse. "If I talk, I sound exactly the same. But I'm not. The dissonance is..." he trails off.

Nile bites her tongue on offering suggestions, or pointing out that he does not in fact sound anything like he does usually. The inflections are all identical, but he’s flatter, somehow. Joe's had a thousand years to think about it, she figures, and if Nicky and maybe Andy also think he'll feel better after being left alone then that might, possibly, be what he needs. But also: the room with the dead thing in it can't be helping, and the thought of leaving him there makes her skin crawl.

"Do you want me to go out?" she asks.

Joe's frown deepens. "You don't have to do that on my account," he says, like the very thought is painful. Nile wishes she could swallow her tongue.

What would she want, she thinks, if it was her hiding out in a room because being next to somebody and potentially being expected to say something was too. Not help, she thinks. She's never wanted anybody that wasn't her mom or dad holding her hand through it, because that felt like she couldn't handle it on her own. Not condescension, either, or the platitudes like she'll be okay.

She always knows she'll be okay—she's a fighter. As her mom's always said. That never changes what she's feeling right then.

"If you want to come downstairs," she says in the end, "I'm making lunch, and then I'll be watching more football. I'll probably be so distracted I won't even notice you're there."

Joe nods—barely—and Nile leaves the door wide open behind her as she goes back down to the kitchen. Her morning's mood isn't quite the same, but she puts up a match loud enough to drown out any of her worries or the burgeoning low anyway and makes herself lunch.

Just as she sits down to eat, Joe appears on the stairs. Nile carefully does not look at him, keeping her attention on her laptop. Joe disappears into the kitchen, and she can just about make out the sound of shelves opening and closing.

When he comes back out with a real mug of tea this time, he pats her shoulder as he passes by, still wordless. But he doesn't go back upstairs, only into his room, and leaves the door open behind him.

#the old guard #tog fanfiction #me to joe: i bestow upon you the greatest honour i can. depression projection-- #yusuf al kaysani #nile freeman #mine. #minefic