Malta

[peace_inthe_violence]

This is a fairy tale of blood and bullets
It is the story of three men and three women and a small island between Italy and Africa.
This is a story about tragedy and pain, about healing and hope, but mostly it is about
love.

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[orgilotes]

The kiss was lovely, comforting as he squeezed at her neck, and she hummed against Booker's mouth gently, letting him take the lead as Andy only did with him. The relationships were subtly different with each member of their family, though Andy held all of them jealously close.

"Good," she murmured, intending to let him do what he needed, even if she'd worry over it all the while he was gone. "So am I getting in, or are you getting out?" she asked, setting aside her drink, nearly empty but for some of the peach bits in the ice.

[transfuge]

"Do you want me to get out?" He was content like this but Booker was fairly content just lounging around with her all the time. There was a subtle joy in sitting around with any of them in peace and quiet. "Or do you want to come in here and cool down?"

He wouldn't leave without telling them all what his plan was and making sure there was some plan for if he didn't communicate with them or come back. The chances of that were slim, very slim.

"I'm here for you, you know that." He kissed the corner of her mouth. "Like always, boss."

[orgilotes]

Andy hummed thoughtfully, and shook her head at the idea of him getting out. "Swim back a bit, I'll get in," she said, levering herself up to where she could sit up and slide into the water.

"I know," she sighed gently, surfacing again in the water and kicking to keep her head above water. "You keep me steady, Book. More than anyone else."

[transfuge]

He finished his drink in two big swallows before he pushed away from the pool edge so that she could slide into the water. Booker understood why people worshiped her as a goddess as she got in. She was beautiful.

"You did the same for me after Jean-Pierre." That was when Booker actually joined them instead of trying to live his life like nothing had changed. He had come to them a wreck of guilt and grief and they helped rebuild him.

He swam over to her and caught her around the waist. He could keep them both up in the water easily. "I enjoy being your right hand. Your friend. Lover. Whatever you need."

[orgilotes]

"He hit you hard," Andy murmured, looping her arms around his shoulders and trusting her weight to him, gentle as it was in the water. "You're everything," she whispered, unafraid of pressing up against him and nuzzling into his neck.

He knew what it felt like, more intimately than the others, to lose everything, to feel ungrounded after everything was gone. "All of it."

[transfuge]

"He was the same age I was when I died." Booker pressed his face against her hair as he leaned back using just a little strength to keep them afloat. After all these years he still wished he could save him. All that on top already watching his wife age and die, then his other sons...

They both understood grief on a very deep, ugly level. Booker trusted she wouldn't flinch from his darkness.

"Well, you know me, I live to serve." He drew back and smiled at her. He didn't need to bring them down with talk of his family again.

[orgilotes]

"The hell you do," Andy chuckled, only momentarily startled when he leaned them back, leaving them floating with her half laid on top of him.

"This is nice," she said idly, carefully moving her head to rest it on his chest. "You make a good pool float." Better than a unicorn, anyway.

[transfuge]

Booker did think sometimes he lived to serve. He found most of the jobs and did a lot of the planning. He made sure they had money and supplies. They could all operate alone but together he tried his best to make sure everyone had what they needed.

"Thanks boss. It's good to know I've got a backup if this mercenary thing stops being profitable." It didn't take much extra effort to stay up if he kept his arms out. The only real downside was he couldn't quite touch her.

He did glance down at her. "You are ruining my tan though."

[orgilotes]

That only got one amused hum, and Andy smiled, hidden against Booker's skin. He'd feel it, but not see it without letting them sink in the water. "I'll make it up to you later," she said lightly. "Just be with me right now, hm?"

She wanted to spend time with them all, time to relax and unwind and just breathe in the same spaces. And that included Booker, where there was no pressure to do or say anything much; they could both snooze in the sun, floating in the cool water as far as they cared right then. "I was worried we'd lose you," she confessed quietly, imagining almost sinking her weight into him, though she didn't move. "Before we came here. You were so low, and I didn't know how to get to you."

[transfuge]

"No where else I'd rather be, boss." He turned his head and kissed her temple and let his lips linger there for a moment. While he didn't always want to be stuck immortal he couldn't deny that sometimes he thought himself lucky to have all of them and to love all of them and be loved in return.

"Without you I would have kept sinking." Booker paused a moment as he thought back to where he was when they first arrived in Malta. Hell, the years before that fight after fight, failure on top of failure even though they tried to do good. "Nicky fighting so hard to keep us together after the last job I have to wonder if he saw the same thing you did. How low I was. How bad I'd get on my own."

Misery loves company was a good joke but he did get pretty miserable on his own. "You don't have to save me on your own, at least. You've got backup."

[orgilotes]

Andy sighed gently against him, trying to find the words she needed; the sun was warm and spoporific, as was laying on Booker, and she didn't want to drag him down touching on any of the topics again. "We both saw it," she answered. "He and Joe watched what happened when we lost Quynh, and...we didn't want you to fall that far. Not without us there to catch you," she murmured.

She'd rarely talked about how bad it got once Quynh had been lost, but Booker had known them all this time. He could guess.

[transfuge]

It had been a very close thing. Booker hadn't felt that... bad in a long time. Bad was a cheap way to put it but he didn't know how to put into words the wet blanket of grief that clouded his mind and dragged down his heart.

"I think that's why I need to see them. I have to put it to rest in myself or I'll end up consumed by it." Booker had thought about it more and more as he dreamed of Jean-Pierre. The hurt just kept killing him again and again.

He was quiet for a moment. "Do you want to see if we could find her? With modern technology and perhaps new information discovered by some historian?"

The ocean was still so unknown Booker wasn't hopeful but there were better methods now than before. Maybe they could help Andy bury her grief as well.

[orgilotes]

"I understand," she murmured, quiet and still once he mentioned looking for Quynh again; Andy had looked for fifty years, getting more and more desperate to find her, and nothing had come of it.

"Did Nicky and Joe ever tell you how long we looked for her?" Andy asked, voice soft. It wasn't a conversation she had often, because even after five hundred years it was still painful. Quynh had been her lodestone, her lover, her everything: she'd dreamed of her for near a thousand years before ever meeting her, and she was like an angel to Andy, the closest she'd ever come to believing in the divine. "Fifty years, and we--I had to stop. I couldn't... All I could see when I closed my eyes was her being dragged into that coffin. She screamed for me the whole time, and I couldn't get to her."

[transfuge]

Booker slowly directed them towards the shallow end of the pool. As nice as it was to float around he needed his arms which meant his feet had to hit the bottom. Luckily, he was tall enough to that comfortably once they were in the five foot depth.

He touched down with his arms wrapped around her tightly. They understood grief on a level that might be hard for Joe and Nicky who still had the great love of their life. Their pains were different was all.

"They told me a little bit." Those times Booker's nightmares had woken them and he was a babbling mess over it. He turned his head and kissed her hair as if he could pour comfort into her. "We don't have to. I never want to put you through that pain again."

The last thing Booker wanted was to hurt her.

[orgilotes]

She'd taken a breath to say it was alright, that talking about it wouldn't break her again, but at that kiss to her head silenced all the thoughts with a quiet twitch of her mouth that even Andy would have been hard-pressed to predict as a smile or not.

"I wish I could look again. I miss her--she was...everything," Andy confessed. "I know they don't understand, because they still have each other. But it's like re-learning how to do everything, just...missing something. Everything feels wrong for a long time." And some of it never feels exactly right.

"It's okay, Book. You're not hurting me." Not any worse than she could hurt herself by thinking about it, anyway.

[transfuge]

"It's like... waking up from an explosion before the inner ear heals," he said softly as he thought about his wife. She had died in his arms, old and tired. She had asked if they could live forever together and he had wept so hard because he couldn't give her that no matter how much he wanted to. "Your balance is off even if you're lying down. Everything wobbling and spinning as you wait for it to heal."

His world had started falling apart with her death. Then he lost Michel out at sea and Jean-Pierre got cancer... it was misery without his wife. It was hell until his heart scabbed over enough to go on.

He still kept his lips against her hair and his arms solidly around her like he could protect her from it or at least help her carry that burden. He would do that for her.

"You say the word, Andy, and we'd all be willing to try to find her. Where you go, we follow."

[orgilotes]

She nodded, toes barely skimming the pool floor where they were standing, weight secure in Booker's grasp. "Something like that. The whole world has shifted," she said, finally picking her head up to look at Booker's face, hands framing his jaw.

"I'm not supposed to be making you sad again," Andy murmured, voice softer, almost apologetic as she took one of his hands and carefully laced their fingers together: he'd be her otter, holding hands so they wouldn't float apart from each other in the pool. It wasn't that big, but any distance seemed too much right then.

[transfuge]

Booker smiled a little and yes it was sad and there were a few tears in his eyes but that was how it always was when he thought of his family. He would never stop grieving them. "I can be sad with you. You'll make me smile a few minutes later."

They wouldn't wallow. He wouldn't wallow in it. It wasn't like that night she found him drunk. That was a very bad night.

"And it's no hardship to spend a little time now admiring you in the sun." He brought her hand up and kissed her knuckles like he was a proper gentleman.

[orgilotes]

"I try."

Andy usually did attempt to keep her mood light and fluid, knowing how dark it could get otherwise, and it spread easy among the others the longer they spent time here. It wasn't the longest break from the mercenary life the group had taken: Andy remembered the better portion of a year spent rebuilding a destroyed Aboriginal school, somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Australia. Booker had been in high demand given his penchant for reading to the children and she knew he'd loved it.

The memory and his bringing her hand up to his lips made her smile, a little joyful laugh escaping her throat. "Sebastien Le Livre, you terrible flirt," she teased. Andy liked seeing him so free, and happier than he'd been in a long time. Maybe ever, certainly since the death of his wife; none of them could take the place of his first, mortal, family and Andy knew that. It wasn't even a matter of trying hard enough and getting through. Nothing would erase them, not the painful memories of watching his children pass before him. Andy hasn't always made herself obvious about it but even when Booker's youngest was in the hospital she'd watched him, ready to step in when he broke from the weight of carrying and denying that silent, hulking inevitability.

The poets had had something true with their words. How terrible it was to love something death could touch.

[transfuge]

There as nothing any of them could do to completely erase the love or the hurt he still felt over it. Booker's heart would always hold his mortal family close. Just as he would always love the three of them, his found family. One love didn't overshadow the other. One love simply hurt more because it was gone forever.

"I happen to think I'm a very good flirt," he mused as he tugged her further into the shallow end so her feet could touch the bottom of the pool. Then he swept her up and began a somewhat awkward waltz.

It was much harder to waltz in water but that was sort of the point. Let her laugh. Let her tease him. Somehow, they had to find happiness again after all the darkness or they'd be lost.

Booker tried very hard not to get lost somewhere these people couldn't reach him.

[orgilotes]

Andy laughed,surprised when Booker twirled her around, toes dragging on the pool's bottom until she caught his rhythm, though the water swirling around her legs and hips didn't help her keep up. She loved being able to see Booker smile: his expressions were contagious more than anyone else's and Andy loved seeing it on his face.

"You remembertrying to teach me this the first time?" she asked, having settled into his arms.

[transfuge]

"You were without a doubt the most improper woman I had ever met," he teased gently. Though it was true. When they first met Andy was nothing like what he expected a woman to be or behave like.

In time, he had learned to appreciate that instead of being disgusted by it. He had done the same with Joe and Nicky. Booker had not been the best member when he first joined but he was also in not the best state of mind either.

"And for someone so graceful in battle you were not good at dancing."

[orgilotes]

"Still am," Andy laughed. She knew it, and didn't care: she'd seen the rules of society change with regards to women and had frankly ignored all of them. When they'd met Booker she'd had short hair, wore pants, drank and cursed and shot better (or worse) than most men.

He'd been appalled.

She had laughed, and they'd taken him with them anyway.

"In my defense I'd never had to dance. I had to learn to fight," she chuckled, wrapping her arms around Booker's shoulders and settling into just swaying and standing with him, cool water sparkling on their skin in the sunlight. "You got used to us eventually, though. For which I'm glad," she murmured, nuzzling at his collarbone.

[transfuge]

Booker leaned in and trailed a few kisses up her neck as they danced. "I learned to love you."

Love her. Love Joe. Love Nicky. They all took up space in his heart. Booker saw immortality as more of curse but these people were a blessing.

"And extract my own head out of my ass." It had only required them murder him three or four times because he had been such a prick. Booker wouldn't say he was a good man but he was better for knowing them and letting them teach him how to better.

[orgilotes]

Andy smiled, shaking her head with a hum and tilting her neck to give him room. "God, Nicky was so mad at you when you punched me," she chuckled, able to laugh at the memory now, though that fist to her cheekbone and nose had fucking hurt at the time.

They'd managed and gotten around it, the hurt and the anger, and now they were here. "We all learned to love you, too," she murmured with a soft smile only a little teasing around the edges. "Come here, and give me a proper kiss, then. Like a lady."