Chapter Text
Dying isn’t always quick. It can be an agonizingly slow process. Not everyone can land a killing blow on the first try, a blade might miss a major artery or not puncture an organ that spells immediate doom for the victim. A gun is much the same but a gun wound can be far more horrific.
Yusuf knows this, has died hundreds of times already. He is dying now. Blood seeps between his fingers, the wound in his abdomen weeping an impressive amount of the crimson liquid with each beat of his heart.
He’d been run through and left to bleed out while the rest of his family was swiftly cut down. Their wounds are severe and it will take some time before they once again draw breath. Typically they are not caught so off-guard but these men, they had been waiting. They had known of the group’s arrival and had more than prepared for it.
The question at the forefront of Yusuf’s mind now is who exactly had tipped them off?
There’s a sudden commotion and Yusuf forces his eyes open to look. His vision is blurry but he can make out the shapes of bodies. Yusuf had counted eight men before, when they were attacking his family. There is a ninth now. A phantom who had slithered into the room unnoticed whilst the others gloated over the violence they had wrought.
One man lays dead already, a knife buried in his heart. The bone carved handle is familiar to Yusuf.
His eyes travel upwards to take in the scene happening on the other side of the room. The mysterious figure is fighting the men. The moonlight that spills in from the windows is only just enough to allow Yusuf to pick apart the masses of black silhouettes and begin to take in the other. It takes Yusuf a moment but he recognizes the man. The knife should have given it away in an instant but he blames the fact that he’s on Death’s Door for why his mind didn’t put it together the very second he had seen it.
His vision sharpens then, taking in the other in such wonderful detail: the soft-looking dark hair, the eyes whose color shifts depending on the lighting, the beauty mark on the right side of the face, the slope of a Roman nose. Nicolò.
The man drives a sword-stick through one of the assailants bodies, pinning him to a wall. With lightning fast reflexes, he grips the head of the man’s own sword-stick at his hip and swings around, the blade slashing another’s throat. Blood sprays from the wound like some grotesque fountain. A mess is what all this is but it seems to be Nicolò’s preferred method of killing. Decorating a room in as much blood as is possible.
Yusuf catches another flash of the man’s eyes as he whirls around to cut down another. Usually there is a feral, unhinged look in Nicolò's eyes but at this very moment something else has pushed it back. A cold fury. It’s not something Yusuf hasn’t seen before but it is unusual to see it so plainly, where there is no longer a hint of the man that Yusuf is so used to seeing.
He and Nicolò had first crossed paths some nine hundred years ago. Nicolò had killed their target before they had arrived. Andromache had been antagonistic, Nicolò had been amused, the other’s curious and wary. However, on top of those emotions, Yusuf had also felt somewhat entranced by the other. He had a sort of aura that Yusuf found difficult to not be drawn to. Even if he and his family didn’t agree with Nicolò's methods nor did they always agree with his targets thereafter.
Nicolò seemed to kill whomever he pleased.
Since that first meeting they had run into each other again and again. The longest he—and by extension his family—had gone without seeing the Italian was ten years. It had been a long decade.
Once, about a hundred years ago, Yusuf had wondered aloud why he and Nicolò continued to cross paths. Nicolò had only smiled in that barely there impish way of his and said in a quiet tone—his accent pleasing to the ear—that perhaps it was destiny just before he slit Yusuf’s throat and fled London.
It had been the first and only time he had killed Yusuf and he knew why. Andromache had promised Nicolò that the next time she saw him she’d lock him away somewhere as he was far too dangerous to allow to keep running around. Nicolò had used Yusuf to buy himself time. Though Yusuf should have been angry, he had found that he was not. He would never want to face such a fate either.
Nicolò is dangerous and unhinged and nothing about him should have been appealing to Yusuf and yet a thrill runs through him whenever they meet again. Perhaps Nicolò is right, perhaps it is destiny and their souls are twined together, destined to meet time and again for all of eternity.
Being drawn back to the present, Yusuf watches as Nicolò ducks under the blade of a sword-stick, his own coming up and disemboweling his attacker, the man’s intestines pooling onto the hardwood floor, visible threads of steam rolling off the gore. In the time that Yusuf’s mind had wandered, Nicolò had disposed of the others. The now eviscerated man had been the last.
Nicolò straightens up then. He pays the bodies no mind as he crosses the length of the room to where Yusuf lies. Blood is splattered on his clothes and an oddly attractive spray of it dots one part of his face. His eyes are alight, the fury gone, the feral look having returned. It was as if he sustained himself on bloodshed. Yusuf already knew he delighted in it.
“Ciao, Yusuf,” he says, a wicked grin on his face. “E buonanotte.”
Yusuf more than welcomes Nicolò's foot coming down to break his neck and put him out of his misery. If anything, it is a blessing to have death embrace him, to take away the pain.
Nicolò’s tally is now two to none.