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After Booker's exile and an agreement was reached with Copley, Nile expected for them to find somewhere to settle down for at least a few weeks, to let Andy heal and for them all to get used to working together. The last thing she expected to hear was Andy informing the three of them that she was taking a break until she was healed but she didn't want to slow them down. They were to go on without her and she'd catch up.
Nile couldn't help looking at Joe and Nicky, hoping one of them would argue her out of this nonsense. They weren't ready to go out together, not without at least a passing familiarity of each other's skills. She had no doubt that they'd probably worked with US Marines before, but they'd never worked with her, and as a small woman she'd had to adapt some of the Marine combat skills in order to make it work for her.
And she had definitely never worked with people with the sheer breadth of experience that these three people had. She had no doubt that they'd learned almost every hand-to-hand form known to man, and had combined them in some interesting ways. But without the chance to practice with them, Nile was going to just get in their way.
But Andy was backing away, one slow step at a time, and it was becoming increasingly obvious that neither of the two men were going to do anything to stop her. "Wait!" she cried, her voice ringing in her own ears.
It worked, though - Andy immediately came right back, and with that, Nicky and Joe looked a lot less freaked out. "What is it, Nile?" and while the words were impatient, the tone of voice was anything but.
"This doesn't make any sense," Nile said. "You going off on your own, the three of us jumping right into missions without learning anything from each other." She met Andy's eyes levelly. "If you're just going off to die, I think you owe it to your family to be honest about that."
Joe made a choking noise, while the sound that came from Nicky was more indescribable, other than it obviously originated with a lot of pain.
The look of guilt on Andy's face told Nile that she was on to something. "You were, weren't you? What happened to doing all the good you could do while you could do it?"
"I'm just going to slow you down," Andy said bitterly. "I go first, I always go first, but now I can't. And I'm too old to change - the leopard doesn't change its spots, Nile."
"Bullshit," Nile said as calmly as she could. "That's bullshit. Would it require training? Yes, of course. But I need that anyway, and who would be better to teach me than you?"
"She's right, Andy," Nicky said in a quietly earnest voice. "You trained us, after all."
"And you two can take some time off and train Nile, then. You don't need me." Andy's mouth was a hard slash of a frown, her stance firmly set like she knew she was in for a battle.
Nile was going to make sure that she was going to get one, too. She had no doubt that Joe and Nicky were perfectly adequate teachers. But neither Nile or her father had become Marines because they wanted to be adequate. She could no longer make her family proud as a Marine, and they'd never know that Nile was still out in the world doing good, but she'd know, and that had to count for something.
Nile's sob caught her by surprise. She'd made it through basic and AIT without crying a single time, she'd been through her tour in Afghanistan without shedding any tears, but this? The idea of Andy abandoning them to go off and die? She found she couldn't bear it.
Her parents and her brother had been her first family, and the Marines had been her second. She'd thought that this little ragtag bunch was going to be her third and the most long lasting, but Booker was gone for a hundred years, and Andy was mortal. It was breaking up before Nile could catch her breath, and the pain hit her like a blow, sharper than the knife that slit her throat, harder than any of the punches Andy had thrown at her in the airplane.
The next thing she knew, she was crouched down, her arms wrapped around her knees as she rocked, sobbing. Joe and Nicky were kneeling in front of her, murmuring at her in languages that sounded like she should recognize but there were differences that made it impossible. Nicky had one hand on her shoulder, rubbing her as he whispered to her, and Joe looked like he was physically holding himself back from grabbing her in a hug.
But that meant the hand on the back of her neck and the female humming had to be Andy. "I can't do this without you," Nile cried. She craned her neck around, trying to catch Andy's eye. "All of you."
Andy rolled her eyes, but there was a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. "Well, I mean, I knew you were the baby of the family, but if it will spare the boys more tears, I guess I'll stick around for a while."
Relief washed through Nile. "And we can take a break for a while? That gut wound - it needs to heal and heal properly, Andy."
The sound that Andy made sounded like a growl from the back of her throat. "Do I have to?" she whined, so like the teenagers that Nile knew that it helped Nile dry the last of her tears.
"You do," Joe said firmly. He rose to his feet and held out his hands - one to Nile and one to Nicky - to pull them up as well. "Andy, she said only what Nicky and I were feeling. We have lost one sister, and we are facing a world where we're going to lose another. Don't make us do that prematurely, please?"
"Fine, fine," Andy said, and Nile was sure that she was trying to sound out of sorts and frustrated, but she just sounded pleased by the fact that she had been pushed to stay after all. "You don't get to decide where we're going to - "
"Malta," Joe and Nicky said simultaneously.
"God dammit," Andy swore. "The two of you are not going to spend the days fucking like bunnies. The whole point of this break is for you three to train while I heal, not for you to get your rocks off while I have to listen."
Horrified, Nile turned and looked at Andy. "They're that loud?"
"No, the Malta house is that small," Andy said. "It's got bedrooms, but the walls are made of freakin' tissue paper, I swear."
"Don't listen to her, Nile," Nicky said, with a small smile. "The Malta house is actually one of our larger houses. You will not see us or hear us in a, ah, compromising position if you don't choose to."
Nile was confused for one moment, before coming to the conclusion that she was too tired and too heartsick to deal with whichever one was teasing her. Instead, she just shrugged her shoulders. "Sounds fine. I've never been there, though, and I don't have a passport. How do you suggest we do this?"
"Copley," Andy and Joe chorused together. "It'll be a rather low-key way for him to prove himself - get you documents to get over the border," Joe finished.
"And while he's working on that, you and I need to find a make up store," Andy said. "A good one, that can teach you how to contour your face so that you look completely different."
"Me?" Nile was taken aback. "What about you?"
"Oh, I know how to do it already, but no one is looking for me. My face also isn't on the news as the latest Afghanistan KIA." Nile had no idea what her face was doing, but it couldn't have been good because Andy sighed and gripped her shoulder in what Nile was sure was a silent apology.
"I know what you're giving up, Nile. You don't know how grateful I am - we all are," Andy said, her hand resting on the back of Nile's neck and massaging it gently.
Thinking about her family felt like a gut punch - no, a knife or bullet wound, and how scary was it that she had a point of reference for that now? She wished she could go back to being just plain old Corporal Freeman, but like her mom always said, if wishes were fishes, beggars would eat.
Then she had to blink really hard to chase the tears away.
"Well, it'll probably take a few days for Copley to get the documents we need," Andy said. "So, let's find a hotel where we can stay. And we're not telling him where we're going or how we're getting there. My trust for him only extends so far."
While Nile knew she was more trusting in Copley than Andy, she wasn't going to argue. Instead, she followed in their wake as they threw around words in enough languages to make a polyglot blush. "English?" she finally said when she finally hit her frustration point.
"Sorry, Nile," Joe said, though he didn't particularly sound apologetic. "Hopefully you'll pick this up soon enough - Nicky really isn't all that comfortable in English when speed is necessary."
Nicky had been able to communicate with her just fine up to now, and Nile suspected that she was being hazed. But the look on Nicky's face wasn't reflecting so much as the smallest smile, so she just rolled her eyes. "Fine, then. What are you guys discussing?"
"What documents you need and which name we should put on them," Joe said as Nicky said something firmly to Andy.
"And of course I'd want no say in that," Nile said with a snort.
'We were thinking River Jones - making you Joe's little sister? If you had a name with a common last name it would be easier, but they are definitely going to notice a black woman named Nile, and right now you can't make it easy."
Nile really didn't want to give up her name even if it would keep her from being discovered. For the sake of the others though? She'd do it with a minimum of bitching. And there was something about being listed as Joe's little sister that made her heart melt, just a little. She'd already looked up the meaning of soralina and discovered that it meant Nicky was calling her little sister, and Joe called her habibti more often than not, and every time it made her feel warm.
It was a little scary how easy she was slipping into their family dynamic, and it worried her a little, made her feel like maybe she was betraying her mom and brother. Something must have shown in her expression, because Joe frowned suddenly. "Habibti?" he asked, and the expression of affection spurred her on.
"When you call Copley, can I talk to him for a few minutes?" she asked.
"Not going to stop you," Andy said slowly with a frown of her own. "But do you want to tell us why?"
Nile shrugged. "I thought I might see if he could find a therapist somewhere I could work with remotely. You have to admit that this has been a lot, and it can help to have someone neutral to talk things out with. I'd have to leave some things out, of course, but I'm pretty sure I can talk around those."
Andy drew back slightly, her frown getting deeper. "Therapy? Like that quack, Freud?"
"Is there anyone you didn't know?" Nile asked and then pivoted to the actual answer. "Therapy has come a long way since him," she said. "I did therapy after my dad died and it really helped. You guys have to have done it at some point?"
The blank expressions on their faces answered her better than words ever could. She sighed. "You know, Andy, a therapist might be able to help you with accepting your limits within mortality so that you don't get killed doing stupid shit."
"Eh," Andy waved her hand. "I'll die in a fight sometime. It'll be nice."
But Nile was listening for it now, and heard the tension under her words. "Just tell them that you got a terminal diagnosis and you want to talk about things you might be able to do to accept it." Looking at Joe and Nicky, she added, "You could do the same thing - you've had a family member receive a terminal diagnosis and want to talk it out."
"Are you suggesting that we are not the paragons of good mental health?" Joe asked as Nicky murmured under his breath and Andy threw up her hands in apparent frustration at Nile's words.
"You just had to exile the only immortal other than us and Quynh because he's so depressed that he tried to use medical experimentation. Even if you were accepting that Andy was going to die with perfect calmness, I'm sure you're angry about that?"
Now Joe started to frown as Nicky rubbed his hand up and down Joe's arm.
"It couldn't hurt and it might help," Nile said. The gaze from the other three immortals was enough to almost make her fold and if she wasn't absolutely certain that she was right about this she might have given in. But they were wrong that it was easy to accept everything they'd been through, and help was available for the asking. Why not ask?
One thing that she'd learned early in her Marine training was the trick of staying silent to trick your opponent into saying something just to fill the void. So instead of saying anything else, she met each of their eyes evenly and then, staring right at Andy, she shrugged and started to turn away.
That got a strangled "Wait!" from Joe, and Nile paused, not looking back but not continuing to move away. She just plastered an expression of calm on her face and waited patiently for Joe to get his thoughts in order. When he could make his voice work again, he asked, "Are you sure we need therapy? We've gotten by this long without it."
"I think that this is an unprecedented situation for all of you, and just having someone - someone not intimately involved in the situation as well - to talk to certainly couldn't hurt," she said without hesitation. "I know it will help me, because as much as you talk about how well I've adapted," she couldn't stop herself from sniffling a little, "I still really miss my mom and my brother, and while you all listen when I want to talk about them, there's a little part of me that can't help but be angry that I don't get to keep them forever too."
"Oh, Nile," Nicky said softly, his voice breaking. "Of course, if this is something that will help you then this is a thing you must do." He glanced at Joe without turning his head and said something in a voice so low that Nile couldn't even tell what language it was, much less what he said, but then he said, "And I also will talk to someone. I am still very angry at Sebastien, and I no longer want to be. It eats me up inside, and if talking to one of these therapists might help with that, I will certainly try."
Before she could react to Nicky's words, Joe reached out to take her hand, giving it a tight squeeze. "I have my doubts about its ability to help us, but where Nicky goes, so goes my vote and my world. So I guess sign me up too."
Nicky and Joe turned to face Andy, and Nile turned as well, though slower. She didn't think she could bear it if she saw disdain or dislike on her face, or if she decided that now was the time to put her foot down and insist that they not do this. Andy was staring at her, her wise eyes in her stern face, and asked, "You're really going to push this?"
Nile shook her head. "Therapy doesn't work if you're forced into it," she said. Then she smiled, just a little. "I'm hoping you'll do it because you know I'm right."
Something in Andy's eyes softened, just a little. "I'll try."
It wasn't much. But at the same time it was everything.