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Blood and sweat and tears
We learned each other's fears and
God, I'll miss the way you cry
(Did you know that?) Did you know that?
I am coming
Back, back, back into your life
To my enemies
Those were the best days of our lives
-Saint Motel, To My Enemies
Quynh was born during a storm.
That is how her mother told the tale, at least. A girl, not meant to survive the womb, born alone, away from a midwife, away from someone who could cut the umbilical cord with a bamboo knife.
No, Quynh’s mother—a woman she has long forgotten the name of, worn away by the years and the ache and the water—had been the one to cut it herself.
She grew up forging herself out of steel, the daughter of a storm, smuggled through to life by some force she did not know.
And when she emerges from the sea, she can still taste the iron and the burn of lightning on her tongue.
Most days, Quynh feels far more like a storm raging through a human body, the crackle of lightning above the sea, the crash of salt through the ocean riptide.
For so long, her world narrowed down to just Andromache. To the knowledge that somewhere out there, in between the crash of water down her throat, the drag of life to death to life to death and back again, Andromache had to be searching for her. She had to be. That’s how their relationship works.
But instead, when she finally emerged from the sea, the iron finally rusting away after all of these years, she found that five centuries had passed.
And while she had dreamed, off and on, of a pale, unfamiliar man with a coward’s heart hanging above a frozen field, Russian and French on the tongues of those around him, she had convinced herself that it had to be nothing more than a dream.
Because in those visions, Andromache had abandoned the search. Had stopped her quest.
And that couldn’t be right. Andromache would never do that to her. They were sealed in steel and sugar, in blood and in wine, in arrows and axes, the bite of each other’s blood stolen from the lips, holy in the only way that Quynh knew after so long away from her family’s faith.
They vowed their marriage to each other on over a dozen battlefields around the world, died in each other’s arms, woke in each other’s arms with blood on their mouths, tasted dragon fruit and lychee from each other’s lips, breathed each other’s first and last so many times that Quynh doesn’t remember what it’s like not to have her oxygen entwined with Andromache’s.
It’s impossible to imagine that there was a lifetime in which Andromache ever stopped searching. Not Quynh’s Andromache. Not the goddess who survived the fall of empires, the great deserts of multiple continents, the press of religion and storm and sea.
Everyone knows the story of Andromache of Troy, of her fidelity, of her loyalty, of her ferociousness—Quynh has never been convinced that some of that wasn’t a little bit inspired by her own Andromache and her legend.
If Quynh is born of the storm, Andromache is of the mountain, the unstoppable force and the immovable object.
Andromache would not have stopped. That is the fact that keeps Quynh going, pounding against the inside of the iron maiden, fighting to emerge for so many years.
Andromache has to be out there. She has to be searching. The sun would stop rising before Andromache would ever cease a quest, especially if it is Quynh on the other end.
---
Once, centuries before Quynh ended up in the iron maiden, Yusuf and Nicolò were taken by raiders, killed in the process again and again, and Quynh and Andromache fought over an entire desert to get them back. They were the sandstorm, the ravaging desert sand, and none could stand against them. They wouldn’t let that happen.
When they got there, they found that Nicolò had been kept pierced through on a blade, hands tied in such a way that he was not allowed to pull the blade out. He died over and over again, and the sound of his groans and Yusuf’s screams to bring him back echoed in Quynh’s ears for decades.
But more than that, she is not ashamed to admit, was a different sound that haunted her for even longer.
When they’d been fighting, Andromache had been killed, half-decapitated over the edge of a cliff, and Quynh had the option to save Yusuf, as she had been doing, so that they could have another member to fight. So she’d continued her efforts, and Yusuf had gone for Nicolò, rescuing him from the raiders, while Quynh had gone for her Andromache.
By the time she’d gotten to Andromache, her lover had gasped her breath back into her lungs, her head reattached where it should be, and Quynh carried that failure to be by Andromache’s side when she died and when she was born in her spine for centuries.
---
When Quynh emerges from the ocean, she is dying of thirst, salt having ravaged her throat for centuries. It takes her weeks to recover what it’s like to drink, to eat, to speak, she has been screaming and suffocating and drowning for so long.
But it only takes her one day to find her hunger for anger. For fury, as heavy and pounding as the ocean against the top of the iron maiden.
Because the moment that she stumbled upon photos of Booker, of Sebastian Le Livre, coward for two centuries, craven his entire life, she realized her dreams were reality.
And that Andromache had left her.
---
Quynh spends the next year tracking down Booker, the dispossessed, the depressed, the betrayer, the betrayed, that weakling craven who put his own desire to meet death over the people he loves.
And when she finds him, she slices him open, turns him to bloodied ribbons and the sort of muscle cuts that would have treated any starving mountain caravan well if the winter hit without food.
Then she sits there and she watches him put himself back together, the tissue and organs of his body healing itself back together right in front of her eyes, a groan escaping his lips as the lesson works its way through his limbs and guts and viscera.
Then she has Booker help her track down Andromache and the rest.
Yes, the rest.
Quynh hears about Joe and Nicky and the new immortal, the one that Quynh dreams of, some nights, who seems a nice enough woman, a warrior young and naive and hopeful and too soft to to the edge of the earth and its way.
And Quynh misses Nicky and Joe—or at least the version of them that she once knew, once her and Andromache’s Yusuf and Nicolò, last Joseph and Nicholas when she was trapped beneath the ocean—but these are the people that Andromache abandoned her for, the ones that abandoned her, and so Andromache is going to experience a greater lesson than even Booker had to suffer. Quynh will make sure of it.
---
Quynh dreams of killing Andromache, strangling her and bringing her back to life and kissing her and killing her again, just to repeat the cycle, over and over again, like water into the sea, into the sky, into the storm, rain driving itself into the desert and flooding the world to swallow all life whole.
Andromache once was so proud that she had learned how to love a storm; let her become reacquainted with the notion.
Quynh will teach her what it means to love the lightning and be fried open.
---
So Quynh lures Andromache into a trap.
It’s not that hard, using a threat to Booker to lure Andromache out to a town in the middle of nowhere, an alleyway where no one else will interfere with them.
Quynh sees the way that Andromache's bright eyes light up when they see her. The way that Andromache reacts, mouth parting like the Red Sea is supposed to have done back in the day.
The way that Andromache's eyes narrow into a familiar focus when Quynh lashes out with her first blow.
“You left me,” Quynh growls, except it’s half-wail, the shriek of a thousand ships wrecking themselves against the cliff.
Quynh has always been a woman made of shrapnel and storm. She does not remember her mother’s name or the scent of her skin any longer, but she does remember her mother’s story about the day she was born, about Quynh entered this world howling like a monsoon.
Andromache fights back, but there is something—off about it.
At first, Quynh thinks that it is because she is a creature of anger and rage, that she is fighting with the force of the sea that has crushed her for so long, that there is no way that she is not winning against someone who has not fought her in five centuries.
But then Quynh realizes that Andromache, for all that she is meeting Quynh blow for blow, is pulling her punches.
What an insult. What a dishonor.
“Fight me,” Quynh orders, "Fight me, you coward," and to anyone who might be watching them, it might seem like she is insane (and perhaps she is, perhaps she lost her mind a long time ago) because Andromache is fighting, her blade meeting Quynh’s, her hand meeting Quynh's, not in the sort of dance that they once made out of sparring back in the days where it was just the two of them, but something feral, something animal, something hungry.
Quynh wants to kill Andromache. She wants Andromache to feel what she felt all of those centuries. She wants Andromache to know what it's like to choke on your own fury and fear and grief.
Quynh knows her Andromache, knows that Andromache might be doing this because she pities Quynh, thinks her weak after her half-millenium trapped in the iron maiden.
But Quynh is not weak. She never has been. She has always matched Andromache blow for blow, ache for ache, death for death. She will push Andromache to meet her where she is so that when she kills Andromache, it will be earned. Andromache will know that Quynh did this to her, and there was nothing that she could do to stop it, that once she made the choice centuries ago to give up there was no other way this could end than Quynh killing her and bringing her back to live and tasting the blood on her mouth—
Quynh’s boot drives itself into Andromache's ankle, and Andromache's breath hisses between her teeth, a grunt instead of a scream, and that is no surprise, really—Andromache has always been someone who refuses to react loudly to anything—but then, as Quynh's other hand goes for her blade, Andromache's body follows the line of her ankle and topples to the ground.
Quynh's blades, quick as anything, make their way to Andromache's neck.
And Quynh is about to strike, about to press down, about to sever Andromache's neck beneath her blade, just to see it grow back together, just to kiss the blood from her healed skin—
But then Quynh sees it—a fracture that does not heal. A limp from a woman who has never bent in the entire time that they’ve known each other.
Such an injury never would have registered on Andromache the Scythian, a woman so old and so inured to pain so as to be considered a goddess. They once sparred so hard, before Lykon’s death, that they broke and bent and killed each other, once or twice, and Andromache never limped once.
Now, though—
Quynh remembers the blood on Lykon's lips. The knowledge, sinking in, that they all have been marked by death, it just takes longer for them to die than most others.
For years, now, since she emerged from the sea, Quynh has craved the taste of Andromache’s blood.
But in this moment, seeing the evidence of a possibility that Quynh watched bleed out on a battlefield a millennium ago—
Quynh’s blade clatters to the ground next to Andromache as she scrambles back off of the ghost of a woman that she once loved with all that she had.
But Andromache just lays there, staring at her with those bright eyes that have haunted Quynh’s dreams for centuries, chest shuddering up and down, as if the bottom has not fallen out of the world. AS if the storm has not crashed into the shore, wrecking everything once considered sacred.
Quynh still hates her. She is still boiling with rage. She doesn’t know how not to be.
But she looks at Andromache, the goddess, the demon on a horse, the tormentor of the Romans, and the Catholics, and the Mongols, and so many others, who has forgotten more ways to fight than entire armies will ever learn, who is now dying, and this time more than she has ever before.
“Andromache,” Quynh says, and her voice cracks, because the woman that she loves and hates in equal measure was inches away from breathing her last, and Quynh would have been the cause of it, and Andromache wouldn’t have stopped her.
“Quynh,” Andromache says, and her voice starts off steady, but it cracks as well.
"You're dead," Quynh says, and she should say you're dying, and yet—they've all been dying for such a long time.
Andromache gives a small, sad little smirk. "I've been dead for a long, long time. Ever since you entered that iron maiden and the riptide devoured you whole. Every breath I've taken has just been prolonging the burial."
There is something in Quynh that wants to scream. It was not supposed to go this way. It was not supposed to end like this, with the universe deciding that Andromache would be lost the moment that Quynh was found. She was supposed to be able to kill her, to taste her blood, and then bring her back.
But she cannot do that now. Because if she were to kill Andromache, there would be no chance to bring her back. No way to kiss the blood from her mouth. No way to bite her and claim her as her own.
No, there would be nothing but darkness and the depth of the sea for everyone.
So instead, she offers out a hand to Andromache, to lift her up, to give her a chance to stand, and it is a Herculean effort, an impossible request to make her hand do, but she still does it.
And Andromache swallows. Stares at Quynh's hand for a long, hard moment.
For a moment, the silence stretches. Impossible. Long. Louder than a fucking storm breaking against the Dãy Trường Sơn.
And then Andromache takes the hand.
---
From the moment that Quynh woke up after her first battle, her bow still in her twitching hand, she has dreamed of Andromache the Scythian.
Andromache has always been the first. The beginning. Through Lykon’s death, through Yusuf and Nicolò’s births, through all the new additions—she has always lasted.
For some reason, Quynh believed that she would also be the last.
And yet, here they are, at the end of the line, and Quynh is living, breathing, and so are Nicky, and Joe, and Booker, and Nile, and—
And the line between living and dead has never been holding on by such a thin thread.
---
Quynh takes Andromache back to her safehouse and bandages her up, splinting her sprained ankle, even kissing the aching skin there.
Her mouth isn't meant to taste the sort of injury that can last. Her mouth never has tasted an injury that lasts against Andromache's flesh. She has only ever kissed the blood from unbroken skin, healed quickly in that moment, or the blood that her own teeth caused from breaking through Andromache's skin and tasting blood before the skin healed the moment her teeth left.
And the kiss blisters more than the sprain does, because Andromache isn’t healing.
After five centuries of fighting and a year now of rage burning hotter and heavier than the tropic tsunami, than the lightning through the stormclouds, they have only a few decades left together.
Fifteen hundred years of love and life and death and life, and this is where they find themselves—with bruises that are not healing on Andromache’s skin.
And for all that Quynh craved to watch Andromache’s neck snap beneath her hands, to watch her bleed out on Quynh’s blade, now that she has the possibility of Andromache’s permanent death in front of her, a death that would lead to Andromache of Scythia, older than civilizations, to finally end up buried six feet under.
“I searched for you,” Andromache says as Quynh finishes bandaging, and it’s not enough, and yet, it has to be enough for Quynh to accept, because the possibility of spending the next few decades anywhere but here is unacceptable. “I need you to know—I'm sorry, that I gave up. Because I searched for you, for years, and I searched so long and so far that it started devouring me whole. I became nothing more than a singular goal, my eyes fixed on the horizon because the mountains blocked the sea and I had to focus on the flatline. And Joe and Nicky—they said I was unrecognizable, that my face had not changed in millenia and yet they did not know my face, and yet I still kept searching. I had to. It was the one and only goal I had for so, so long. I searched, and I searched, diving under the water, drowning myself, until the day I started forgetting what you smelled like. When I started forgetting what you tasted like. All I remembered, after so long, was what it felt like for you to press the blade into my hand, the sound of your arrows thumping into flesh, the only tenderness left that of a bruise. So I held tight to my last memories of you, but I knew that I couldn't taint what I had left of you with my rage and my fury and my grief. I had to cling to what I had left of you, and do what it took to keep it before it, too, faded away"
Quynh is all too familiar with the way that time wears away at memories like the ocean wearing away at the iron of a coffin, eroding and weathering away at something that was once considered stronger than anything.
She is also all too familiar with the way that fury can dissolve away everything that you once considered good about the person you love.
Quynh swallows. "I can give you back some of those memories, you do know," she offers.
Andromache's brow furrows. "How can you do the impossible?"
"It is somewhat our role, is it not?" Quynh asks, and kisses her ankle, right above the bandage. Andromache shudders, because she is more mortal than ever, and yet, this is a reaction that Quynh managed to pull out of her even back when they were both immortal, the world at their feet, their memories strong and bright as the moonlight.
---
A witch, they’d called her. One who dances with the devil. One who kisses Satan, because how else could she survive a blade that would be lethal in any good man?
Quynh has never been any good man. She has never believed in a devil. Never made love to a demon. There has only ever been one goddess for her, and she knows that the same is true in return.
What happens when god becomes mortal? When you are confronted with the fact that your god is dying?
---
She lays Andromache out on the sofa—this strange, cushioned update to the benches that they once lounged on if they could give themselves the chance—and she turns long-lost and faded memory into lightning-bright clarity.
They never had castles before. It was always inns and safehouses and tents under the night sky. That’s the sort of thing that hasn’t changed in the past five hundred years, Quynh supposes, even if the world has shifted so much on both of them.
And Quynh does to Andromache what she has done on so many occasions before, and what Andromache has done for her.
Where there is death, there is birth. Where there is a supernova, there is a nebula. Where there is the setting of the sun, there is the rising of the moon.
Andromache’s fingers clench in the fabric of the sofa, in the blanket, in the pillows, as Quynh’s mouth dips between her thighs, worships her, nibbles the inside of her thigh, makes mincemeat out of her—
There has always been a certain tenderness between them. When the world seeks to destroy you, to hunt you, to make an experiment out of your bones, to declare everything that you are unholy, you learn how to be gentle to each other. How to make each other experience softness for the first time in your long, long life. How to maintain that tenderness as you go.
But then again—tenderness is something used for bruises. For meat. Tender like a bruise. Tender like something you will feed on.
Andromache grits her teeth to refrain from letting out any noise, as she once would in inns in places where their sort of love, this wicked desire, was forbidden.
But Quynh was raised in a world that didn’t discourage the touch of two women. A place that understood that life is short and hard, and it is no pain to take the small amounts of pleasure as you can, as long as you make sure that life endures beyond you entering the grave. She never carried the sort of religious guilt to her that Nicolò did, that sort of priestly ache that came from growing up and dedicating yourself to a religion that made the bones of saints more important than the living.
Quynh has only ever dedicated herself to this one altar, the one that began when a goddess found her dying of thirst in the desert, aching for any sort of tender touch.
So Quynh bites the inside of Andromache’s thigh to get her to open her mouth, and it is a song to ears so used to drowning, to being suffocated, as Andromache gasps, hips bucking upward.
Quynh flicks her tongue to encourage more, to see what Andromache might give her, and she wonders if Andromache has lied with anyone in the five centuries hence their last meeting, but she knows that no matter if she has taken a bed partner, no one could ever learn Andromache as she has. No one has ever had the time.
And now that she’s dying, well—
At the end, Andromache cascades over the edge, gushing into Quynh’s mouth, and Quynh is smirking as she pulls back to wipe at her lips, to press her thumb hard into the evidence of Andromache's life against her mouth. It's not blood, not as she dreamed of, but this is certainly not a terrible trade. As a matter of fact, she would be more than happy to chase this for however long she has left with Andromache.
“Holy shit,” Andromache says in a language that was dead before even Yusuf and Nicolò were born and died in their holy lands, a language that Quynh knows for a fact has not been spoken by any living tongue in five hundred years, and yet she still speaks it as fluently as that first day in the desert, a warrior on a horse descending from the mountains to bring Quynh to a new home. “I haven’t felt something like that in—”
“Five centuries?” Quynh asks, a smirk on her lips, because the world is falling apart right when she re-entered it, but she does still have this, at least. She is still the woman that Andromache knew back then.
And Andromache gives her that half-smile that has launched half a hundred ships in its time, the sort of smile that has tormented artists with its enigma, the sort of smile that only Quynh has ever been able to read properly for its true feeling.
“I have missed you,” Andromache says, and they are words that defy language, defy time, defy any sort of usual understanding. They are words that are wholly not enough, for everything that has passed between them. For everything that they have failed to be for each other, and everything that they are for each other.
---
A millenia ago, two gods met in a desert. There was a tale going around, about forty days wandering in the desert before an angel descended, a gesture of a god's will, but Quynh had never paid attention to it.
No, the only tale she ever needed was what it felt like to have a canteen handed her and an invitation offered to wander the world together as the moon rose above the horizon, the desert lit silver by the moonlight as Andromache wrapped a shawl around Quynh's sun-bitten shoulders.
(Yes, sure, they healed, but she had been burning so long that she had forgotten what it was like to feel the rain—the ultimate crime for a daughter of the storm.)
The two of them ended beneath the sunlight, no one in the world stopping the iron maiden from dropping into the sea, but here they shall begin again the same way that they began in the first place: beneath the moonlight.
---
They end up on the roof of the safehouse as the moon breaks silver through a gap in the clouds, a full moon just as it was back over the steppes all of those millenia ago.
Before she broke through the surface of the waves, Quynh had not seen the moon in five hundred years. It had been nothing but darkness at the base of the ocean, only broken by the distant bioluminescent flicker of light outside of the iron maiden and her own dreams.
Now, though, Andromache is dying, and Quynh is not, and they have decades where they once had an infinity of forever, but there is something still and peaceful about this world in a way that there wasn’t before.
It took a moment of effort to get up here, but Quynh has never been someone who lacked in strength, and Andromache has never been someone who lacked in stubbornness, so an arm of Quynh's under Andromache's arm had guided them up here.
Now, they lie back on a blanket and stare up at the stars, talking quietly about how they have changed in the last five centuries.
The sky here in New England contains different stars from the steppes or the desert where they met, or from even europe in the 1500s, and yet—
The moon is still big and bright, and Andromache looks much the same beneath it, the moonlight rinsing away the ache of the millenia, and it's hard not to think just a little bit of hope when sitting here with her.
And so it is as easy to make a vow to her now as it was back in those days, in that desert, in those steppes, again and again on every battlefield and over every gasp back into life. “I will stay with you for however long your forever is," Quynh promises, and she means every word as she says, "You may not have stayed with me, but I shall stay with you until you expire.”
“That could be tomorrow,” Andromache says, forever the practical one, “Or it could be three decades from now.”
Quynh shrugs. “And I shall be there the entire time,” she says, simple as that, a vow made in all of the blood that they have spilled over the millenia, now spilled and dissolved in the saltwater of the sea.
Andromache swallows and looks up at the sky. A single tear leaks from her eyes, but no sob accompanies it—it is a single, silent glittering jewel, the sort of thing that so few have had the privilege of seeing over the millenia. “Can you promise to be the one that kills me? I don’t want to die by cancer, or old age, or whatever it is. I want to die with your blade in my flesh."
It sounds like the sort of vow that Nicolò and Yusuf might have made on the battlefield outside of Jerusalem, their god dripping from their tongues.
And Quynh cannot bear the thought of being the one to finally kill Andromache, not when she finally got her back, not when she is going to have to lose her entirely again, but she cannot bear the thought of anyone else getting to have the intimacy of such a role. What human, with their puny, fleeting, mortal lives, should get to have the privilege of finally severing Andromache the Scythian from this mortal plain?
It is an offer that cannot be refused: an offer of revenge, an offer of love, an offer of peace. Quynh as the last person who shall ever get to paint Andromache's blood on their skin.
So Quynh nods. "It would be an honor," she says in a long-dead language, that variant of language spoken in Scythia and Văn Lang that was only spoken by their two combined tongues.
Andromache's mouth turns upward as she leans over and takes Quynh’s chin between her fingers, as she first did all of those millenia ago, and it is lightning crackling beneath her skin, the storm in her veins, as Andromache leans in and presses their mouths together, her mouth opening when Quynh's tongue presses back at the seam of her lips.
And at the end of it all, their first kiss in five hundred years tastes of salt, because Andromache is crying, but it doesn’t taste of iron, because there is no blood on their lips, nothing but the storm finally passing through their veins, a string of lightning sealing two hearts together.
believe in the mouth, in the bottom lip trembling beneath your thumb, suddenly something holy, suddenly something loved.
unplanned, unforeseen, like lightning striking the pine, setting the entire night on fire.
and every electrical nerve lights through your skin.
—Emily Palermo, Before The Ghost Girl Was A Ghost Girl