Winston's Wuerld @adhdismyfacade - Tumblr Blog

Vigil - Chapter 1

Summary: Using the genetic material extracted from Yusuf al-Kaysani and Nicolò di Genova, Dr. Metak Kozak initiates Project Eos as an attempt to artificially replicate immortality through forced human trials. Nine embryos are created, implanted, and birthed under controlled conditions. The experiments she conducts represent a grotesque evolution of Steven Merrick’s work.

When Copley first uncovers the program, Kozak’s records declare total failure: "Group Gamma yielded no viable candidates. All subjects compromised beyond analytical utility." But six weeks later, an anonymous lab technician leaks damning footage—a single surviving child, a three year-old male designated "IL-9" with confirmed cellular regeneration and disease resistance.

The team must address the danger this discovery represents. Nicky and Joe are confronted with a child created from their stolen blood.

A/N: A post-cannon story imagining the concept of a lab-generated immortal and how it affects the Guard. Could also be seen as an examination of parenthood. Mostly that, actually. Medical torture. Dr. Kozak is her own warning tbh. Child Abuse. Nicky is a doctor. Death. Immortal Parents. Hurt/Comfort. Illness. Blood. Angst.

11:00 AM. 30 Jan. 2025, Sheldwich, Kent County, United Kingdom.

Copley’s study smelled of eighteen year Macallan and citrus wood polish. It was a space of crisp angles and warm walnut paneling, where afternoon light slanted through floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the English countryside. Every detail was curated, devoid of personal clutter save for a single silver-framed photograph facedown on the desk. The hidden image of Copley’s late wife was the only concession to sentimentality in a room so meticulously tailored it might have been lifted from the lair of a Bond villain.

They sat in mid-century leather armchairs, tension coiled in the air. Gathering them like this was a liability. Intel could be shared remotely; discussions didn’t require proximity. Yet here they were.

Andy knew before Copley even spoke. There was something in the way he surveyed them, like the weight of an inconvenient truth was pressing down. He stood before his Scandinavian desk, crisp in a navy cashmere sweater, fingers resting on a dossier thicker than a Bible. Not with hesitation, but ceremony.

It was clear for everyone that serious news was about to be delivered, but she knew that this went deeper. They had been gathered to sit in a war room.

Booker denied the quiet itch in his hand to reach for his flask. The fact that everyone agreed to show up despite his presence and ties to Copley’s new intel had been nothing short of miraculous. The conditions of his exile had been clear, but the current circumstances demanded an annulment of sorts, a truce. He registered the heel of Nile’s boot thunking against the floor. She was the only one who agreed to sit near him. He wanted to tell her it wasn’t necessary, that the others were right to keep their distance. But the meaning behind the gesture lodged somewhere in his throat, there was a sharp feeling of gratitude.

For now, he alone knew why they’d been summoned. He wondered if she would stay so close once the truth hit.

Across the coffee table, Joe and Nicky occupied a leather loveseat. Joe’s hand masked his mouth, fingers pressed to his jaw as he leaned against the armrest, eyes unreadable. He hadn’t wanted to come. He’d argued with Nicky the entire drive, listing every reason why they owed Booker and Copley nothing of their time.

Nicky had listened then, patient, prepared. He knew Joe only needed to voice his hurt, to let it dissipate before it festered. Andy and Nile’s presence alone had been more than reason enough to go.

Now, Nicky sat perfectly still, his breaths measured, glacial.

"I've been tracking Kozak since Merrick," Copley finally began, thumb clicking the presentation remote.

The monitor sitting behind him on the glass top desk bloomed to life with a classified document header. The title "Project Eos" was written in stark black and white.

"Over six years now," he continued, "I've followed money trails through seventeen shell corporations across three continents. Dead drops in Geneva. Burner labs in Minsk."

A click. The monitor flickered, they each absorbed the blue-tinted security footage of a woman in a white coat.

Nicky could only stare. That same face had hovered over him while pieces of his flesh were carved away and dropped into plastic sample containers.

"This is in Cardiff." Copley narrated. "In a private genetics facility fronting under the guise of pediatric regenerative medicine."

Andy cut in, voice firm but tired. "Skip the build up, James. Just get to what's she's done." Get to why we're here.

Copley didn’t flinch. But when his gaze landed on Joe and Nicky, the mask slipped—just for a second. A swallow. A flicker of remorse.

“Kozak’s Project Eos attempts to artificially replicate immortality through forced human trials.” He paused. “She’s created, implanted, and birthed nine embryos under controlled conditions.”

His voice was too calm, the way surgeons would begin to present a case to a patient’s family before announcing complications.

“This was done using genetic material from you both. The nine candidates, labeled “Subject Group Gamma” were all listed as 'non-viable'.”

Genetic material.

Nicky could remember when Kozak extracted samples from a more intimate area of his body, particularly the special technique she used to procure what she wanted. When it was done to him, the act was undoubtedly degrading, but he was able to process the moment as a temporary humiliation. When she turned to do the same to Joe's unconscious form, Nicky's calm abruptly dissolved. He bucked against his restraints, unable to tolerate the sudden onset of searing anger under his own ribs.

Copley continued on, pulling him from his thoughts.

"But a whistleblower has since come forward, a lab technician recently moved from a Merrick facility in Geneva. They revealed that our previous intel was inaccurate. A false flag."

A new slide flicked across the monitor. The first horror. Autopsy reports.

"We gained the autopsy reports of the first eight subjects," Copley said quietly. "All infants. Seven died before reaching one year of age, but then there was a breakthrough. The eighth child lived to 18 months."

The details of the autopsy reports were clinical, detached. Causes of death: organ failure, hemorrhaging, neural degradation. There were only serial numbers instead of names. Nicky’s fingers tightened imperceptibly on the edge of the armrest. His eyes dialed in on the information, scanning the details as quickly as he could.

Joe didn't look. He couldn't look.

"The ninth child, named Subject IL-9, is still alive." Copley continued. "A three year-old male who demonstrates consistent accelerated healing, though they haven’t yet tested mortality."

A single photograph came next. A boy, small and pale with a shaved head, curled on a metal cot. His face was partially obscured by a black censorship bar, but what little of him was visible was unmistakable. He had Joe's nose and mouth. The child looked sickly, too young to be three. Too thin.

"What is being done to him?" Nicky demanded, voice impossibly level. He rested a hand briefly on Joe's thigh, to ground himself, to check in, but withdrew the moment he felt the muscle beneath twitch like a live wire. The act had been too soon. Some wounds needed pressure. Others needed air.

Joe bent forward, elbows on knees, face buried in his hands. His fingers dragged through his beard, rough and unsteady. The room tilted. He needed air. Needed to put his fist through something, or maybe feel someone else's fist collide with his cheek. He didn’t look at anyone. He couldn’t. His gaze fixed on the floor, on the wood grain under his sneakers, on the two birds chasing each other just outside the window, on anything but the screen where the deaths of eight children were dissected in unforgivingly clinical language.

He could only force himself to breathe. There was no other way forward, no other way to process what he was feeling from this violation—this mix of revulsion and hurt.

"The testing on the child has been...systematic." Copley's voice was measured, face souring as he carefully chose his words. The white plastic casing of the remote softly cracked under the force of his grip.

"Phase one consisted of pathogen exposure to common strains of measles, influenza, and tuberculosis. Each infection was meticulously timed to measure recovery rates." A click. Graphs of fever spikes, white blood cell counts. "They noted his immune response was 'anomalously efficient', with recovery achieved by day four of each trial."

Nicky’s jaw shifted, but his voice never changed. Always calm, always even. "How much information did you recover on his medical history?"

"It’s incomplete,” Copley began. “But the whistleblower provided us with daily vital logs, trauma and healing reports, neurological assessments, weight charts—"

"Give separate copies to me. Everything you have." Nicky interjected. He squinted as he read the numbers of a growth chart fixed on the screen. The last entry was from nearly two months ago, the child was recorded as 84 centimeters tall and weighing 10 kilograms.

"Phase two tested his resilience to environmental extremes." Copley’s mouth thinned. "Four hours in 2°C water. Five hours in a climatic chamber at 42°C. Timed oxygen deprivation just before the threshold of brain damage. Fourteen days of gradually reduced calorie and fluid intake.”

Joe rose abruptly from the love seat, his knee roughly bumping the coffee table as he stood. He crossed to the window in large strides, his back rigid, one hand braced against the window frame. The tendons in his forearms stood out like cables.

Copley continued, quieter now. "Phase three moved to physical trauma. Compound fractures—" A slide of an X-ray, a tiny femur snapped clean through. "—lacerations, burns. Healing averaged one to two hours for deep tissue, three hours for bone."

The cap of Nile’s pen snapped in her grip, but she continued to listen attentively. Those rates of healing were longer than what it took for them. Her eyes flicked over to the faces of the others, but there was no way to discern if their thoughts were following the same paths. Everyone looked ill.

For a moment, Copley showed signs of fatigue. He let the hand holding the remote fall to his side. He glanced at his desk before finishing.

“Phase four has not yet begun, but the whistleblower warned that this is when they intend to test his mortality.”

Andy’s voice cut through. "We don’t wait on this one." She stood, approaching the desk to seize the dossier prepared by Copley and Booker. "We go in and extract the boy. Steal every byte of intel, then scrub the place." Her gaze swept the room. "It has to be full sanitization. We leave no witnesses."

Copley nodded, clicking to the blueprints. "All intel indicates that he is held here, in a third floor isolation unit." He pointed the red dot of a laser at the west wing.

Booker leaned forward, tracing demolition points on the schematic. "C4 in the parking garage and ground floor support columns. Thermite cocktail here—" He tapped the server room. "—enough to melt their research into slag."

He had memorized every inch of the building: entrances, exits, corridors, stairwells, and ventilation shafts. There was no escape route not pre-mapped out in his mind, no corner to hide in that he didn't know. The rotations of security and staff, the layout of the below ground parking garage, the brand of bleach the janitors used—over the last month, Booker had funneled all of his remorse into learning every detail about this facility.

He cleared his throat before focusing tentatively on Andy, finding her unreadable mask to be steadying in some way. This was only soul he knew to report to, who he knew to follow without question.

"The largest shift change happens just before 0200. That's the time to hit. Two nurses. One resident. Guards cut to skeleton crew."

Nile’s fingers drummed a marching rhythm against the armrest. "Andy and I can breach through security. Disable cameras, clear a path." Her eyes flicked to Joe’s motionless form by the window. "Nicky and Joe take point on extraction."

Nile, who sat stiff-backed, her dark eyes flickering between the screen and her family, so unflinching in the face of a reality that they all viscerally rejected. She never had a choice in the matter. Being an immortal of the modern era, she would never know the luxury the others once did—of lifetimes spent hiding in the shadows, of drifting untraced. Her immortality was always going to be a game of cat and mouse, and now, before she could even adjust, she was being asked to protect another life that would never know peace.

Silence settled after her proposal, seemingly as acceptance. Then—

"No survivors, then." Joe spoke, still facing the glass. His reflection was blurred, his words like a serrated blade, something not meant to cut clean. "What about Kozak?"

Copley was quick to answer. "Bern. She’s presenting at a private symposium tomorrow."

Andy sat back in her seat, legs outstretched. The lines around her eyes deepened as she stared at something at midline only she could see.

"We hit the lab first. Then we end this." It landed like stones—final, immovable.

"News from the lab will hit her immediately," Nile countered. "Doesn't that give her time to disappear?"

Andy didn't move, her eyes remained steady. She spoke with the weariness of someone who had seen more bodies buried than the ground could contain. "Let her run," she spoke so quietly that it might have been to herself. Then louder, with the full weight behind it: "I've hunted smarter prey. This stops now."

Copley cleared his throat. "For what it’s worth, we’ve had eyes on her financial trails for over three years. Every alias, every shell account. She hasn’t taken a step without us knowing since 2021." He looked to Nicky, then to Joe's back. "If you go for her first, we risk the boy being moved. The lab’s servers need to be melted before they can scrub the data."

Joe turned from the window, his face eerily blank, the kind of calm that came before a surge. This wasn't the absence of fury, but the absolute clarity that rage could provide when put to good use. Everyone expected him to walk out after Copley’s presentation. He had every right to. Every reason to slam the door, to vanish, to let the complex storm of shock and fear burning under his flesh fuel him through the English countryside until his legs gave out.

But he didn’t.

Surprising everyone but Nicky.

His attention locked onto Booker first.

Not Andy, not Nile, not Copley. Booker.

Because Joe knew Booker was the one who prepared this work. Because despite the betrayal, despite the fractured trust that still ached between them, Booker was the one who had always been best at this: the slow, methodical gathering of intel, the obsessive mapping of every variable. And now, he was here with them, trying to atone in the only way he knew how—by providing a way to fix this.

Joe crossed the room and dropped himself into the armchair Andy had abandoned.

"Walk me through your plan." He quietly demanded. His voice was hollowed out, the kind of tone that made the air in the room feel thin.

Joe and Booker sat and discussed for hours. Their gear was already sourced—untraceable weapons, ammunition, a van with plates that would burn clean after extraction. It was an hour's drive to Bristol, where a private plane would be waiting to take them quickly back to East London, then a second van to bring them back to Copley's house in Sheldwich. From there, they would work out where everyone would go next. Copley would monitor the situation and work through covering their tracks.

Nile and Andy joined in. The four of them hashed out the plan all afternoon, then well into the evening. Timing. Division of roles, who would be covering who. Contingency plans in the event the child was too weak at any point to be moved.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

01:17 AM. 31 Jan. 2025, Sheldwich, Kent County, United Kingdom.

The moment the intel presentation ended, Nicky didn’t join where the others were clustered around the coffee table, debating extraction plans and arguing timelines. He cornered Copley near his large desk, demanding the boy’s medical files.

To his credit, Copley didn’t hesitate. A laptop and two USB drives were deposited into Nicky’s hands without question. It was impossible to miss the flicker of guilt in the man’s gaze during the exchange. He understood what horrors he was silently delivering, he knew the pain that awaited.

For the next twelve hours, Nicky locked himself in the guest bedroom, the glow of the laptop screen painting shadows under his eyes. He operated with the urgency of someone who believed he could already be too late, racing against time to undo what might already be irreversible.

He cross-referenced every procedure, every notation, every spike or drop in vitals. His fingers worked tirelessly over the keyboard, constructing a meticulous chart—weight fluctuations, heart rate anomalies, the jagged decline of a body pushed beyond its limits. The reports were inconsistent. Sometimes his injuries closed unnaturally fast, other times his fever raged for days unchecked. Nicky knew how stress at these levels could inhibit healing. Even if the boy’s body could repair at a similar rate to them, the constant strain he was under would greatly disrupt his abilities. If Kozak’s team was truly nearing phase four, the boy would be in no state to recover quickly. His body would be eating itself alive to keep up with the pace of forced regeneration.

With this information, Nicky knew he had to work under the guiding principle that the boy was mortal. He would plan for the worst, and then hope for the best—against evidence, against the gnawing dread in his chest.

He made an exhaustive list of the medical supplies they would need, things Copley could source quickly from his connections. Pediatric IV kits, bags of standard saline as well as lactated Ringer’s solution, nasal cannulas, oxygen tanks, a portable blood analyzer, a glucose monitor, pain killers, broad spectrum antibiotics, a child-sized pulse oximeter and blood pressure cuff...

Nicky also made a separate list of practical items and things for comfort: clothing, toiletries, toys, books. The reports had been clinical in their omissions. There was no mention of play time, of going outside, or of any schooling. Nicky had doubts about how much interaction this child received. Did someone come consistently whenever he cried? Did the staff take the time to talk to him, to teach him words? The sparse references to toys were particularly bleak. They were used only as bribes during cognitive and neurological tests, brief rewards taken away the moment the boy’s cooperation was ensured.

The grandfather clock in the hall hummed past midnight when the others finally dispersed. Footsteps retreated in different directions down the corridor, doors softly shut one by one.

Joe padded quietly into their borrowed bedroom, his face a mask when he found Nicky still sitting on the bed, laptop open on his legs.

The door slid closed behind him with a click, sealing them away from the outside world.

Neither spoke.

There was a certain weight in the way Joe moved that was all wrong. His limbs operated too cautiously, not with the calm before battle, but with the quiet of someone trying hard to control his breath, as if an undetonated bomb shared this space with them.

The silence stretched in the room, tight as a piano wire. There was only the faint crackle of dying embers in the Malm fireplace, their glow creating warped shadows across the floor.

"You should sleep." Nicky murmured, voice hardly above a whisper.

Joe let out a rushed exhale, not quite a laugh. "You first."

Nicky’s gaze flickered over him in the dim light, reading the lines of his body like a map. It was as if he could see right through his skin. The hurt was still there, simmering beneath buffering layers of calm. But even deeper under that façade, Nicky knew there was something wounded, something terrified.

Joe settled down onto one of the winged armchairs next to the vintage fireplace. They were given the largest of the bedrooms. Nicky imagined that it had at one point been used by Copley and his wife, but he would never ask. Joe's elbows rested on his knees while he began rifling through their shared suitcase, searching out his desired clothes for sleepwear. The thermal henley came off in one rough tug, the fabric catching briefly on the curve of his shoulders before he wrenched it free. His jeans followed, discarded in a heap beside the chair. He dressed for bed with the same efficiency he might use to strip a rifle—methodical, detached. He opted to wear one of their stretched out sleep shirts and a pair of joggers, glancing down at his feet and internally debating for a moment before deciding to keep his socks.

Wordlessly, he plucked his toiletry sack from the side compartment and slipped into the ensuite. His face remained distant, checked out.

Nicky waited until he returned from brushing his teeth, watching the way he traipsed over to the bed. Joe sat down on the edge, but didn't turn, didn't move to settle himself back against the headboard. His dark eyes gazed through the floor to ceiling windows that comprised the entirety of one wall in the bedroom, watching the unrelenting rain continue to fall outside.

"Talk to me."

Joe’s arms loosely crossed, his fingers gripping his elbows, his jaw taut.

"What is there to say?” He demanded softly. “Tomorrow we go in and we get him out. We burn the rest."

Nicky’s attention didn’t waver from his husband's back. "And after?"

The question hung between them, heavy with everything they could not say, sagging under the weight of all that they didn't have time to discuss.

Joe’s fingertips skimmed over the skin of his arms, a motion meant to self-soothe.

"After, we make sure no one else comes. We rip the weeds out by the roots, then salt the earth."

"That’s not what I meant—"

"I know."

"Do you?" Nicky wondered in what was barely above a whisper. "This isn’t a mission, Joe. This isn’t extraction and extraction alone. If he is—" He stopped, the words stuck in his chest, too difficult to give form.

Again, Joe had the encroaching feeling that he couldn’t breathe. He scrubbed a hand over his mouth, raked his fingers through his beard.

They submitted once more to the awful quiet. The wind outside caused the windows to rattle.

Joe's arms uncrossed, hands now resting down at his sides, his fingers unclenched only to curl again into the fabric of his sweat pants. His head bowed forward, the words scraping out like gravel underfoot.

"I can’t stop thinking about how we didn’t know."

The silence that followed was leaden.

Nicky watched the strain build through Joe's body—the rigid line of his shoulders, the way his breath stuttered before he forced it to steady. In that moment he ached to reach for him, to press his palms against the tension and work it loose with his fingers, his mouth, his whispered reassurances. But Nicky knew that it wasn't the right time, that whatever he would say would only fall flat.

"We felt Nile. We felt Booker." Joe's voice dropped lower, rougher. "How could we not feel any of this?"

This.

A child's suffering. The silent agony of the ones before him. The way their own blood had been turned against them, used to create and destroy in equal measure. Centuries of war, of loss, of resurrection. He struggled to think of a prior experience that could have prepared them for this particular feeling of helplessness

"We can't be sure how it works." Nicky said carefully. "Maybe because he wasn’t born. He was made."

Made. The implications of the word curdled between them.

Joe's lashes fluttered as his eyes slipped shut. His jaw clicked as it shifted minutely to one side.

"Or maybe because we weren’t paying attention."

Nicky didn’t have a response. The guilt was there, in both of them—a silent, aching feeling that they had fallen short.

He found himself wishing so deeply that they had the time to help each other ease into this. It was a cruel stroke of irony: that immortals who inherently had only an abundance of time, suddenly found themselves with none. There would be no slow unraveling of this pain, no gentle easing into the horror.

Joe let out a breath, his head turning to glance over his shoulder. "What are we supposed to do after we get out of there tomorrow?" The question was hushed and lost. "Because, Nicky, if he lives, if he’s ours to—"

He stopped himself, rocking slightly as he failed to continue that line of thought. Because what he was really asking was too callus to be voiced outright. How do they help a child who was never meant to be a child? How do they teach trust to someone who has only known pain? How were they to care for something born from theft and defilement?

Nicky leaned forward, his knuckles skating over the small of Joe's back. "We do what we have always done." he murmured. "We adapt."

Joe closed his eyes. "And if he dies in that lab before we reach him?"

"Then we make sure no one else suffers like him again."

An ember cracked in the fireplace, spitting crimson sparks into the darkness. Nicky blinked against the dry ache in his eyes—he'd been staring at screens and reports for over twelve hours. The medical jargon blurred at the edges, but the numbers were still stark imprints in his mind.

He closed the laptop, letting it click shut with finality.

"You haven’t read any of it, have you?"

Joe turned to properly look at him then, his head twisting in gentle disbelief.

"Why would I need to?" His voice frayed at the edges. "I know what they do in places like that. I remember."

Nicky's fingers slid down the laptop's edge before he set the device aside. He chose his next words carefully. "They infected him with tuberculosis back in November. He recovered in three days." A deliberate pause. "They broke his femur to test the rate of regeneration. Twice."

Joe flinched as if struck. "Nicolò—"

"As far as I know, they never gave him a name." The words were meant to be informative, but his tone was like broken glass, brittle and fragmented. "In the reports, he’s just IL-9."

The air left Joe's lungs in a wounded rush. He surged to his feet, pressing the heels of his hands against his eyes, as if trying to erase the images flooding his mind. "Stop."

He took three stumbling steps towards the bathroom before he whirled, his composure shattered.

“How can you?" The words tore from him, accusatory, unable to hide his own disgust any longer. "How can you spend hours looking at that? It's torture. Every fucking line.”

Nicky didn’t flinch at what he was saying, even if a small part of him did feel incredulous towards the man across the room from him. His gaze held Joe's with a terrible sort of patience, aching with something too vast to name.

What was he to say? That he feared turning away from what was done somehow made him complicit? That bearing witness was the only absolution left to them? Even for someone like him, it was too self-righteous a thing to say out loud. He knew that the reality was much simpler, much uglier.

Truthfully, Nicky thought that if he focused on the broken bones, the fevers, however much blood was drawn, he wouldn't have to consider the greater violation—that this child only existed because someone had stolen pieces of them both. If he let his mind wander beyond the boy’s physical wounds, he would have to face the enormity of what had been done. Not just to this child’s body, but to himself, to Joe.

Instead of saying any of this, Nicky only blinked. And now, his own throat burned as he struggled to speak normally.

“Someone must.”

The truth sat between them like a third presence.

Because it’s a child, a child made from your blood and mine.

One that we may have failed before we even learned of his existence, before he ever received a name.

Nicky rose from the bed, his eyes never straying from Joe. His hands hovered between them as an offering—a rope cast out amongst the waves they treaded. He didn’t come close enough to touch, but enough to feel the heat radiating from his husband’s rigid shoulders.

"Maybe," he began, voice roughened from spending hours in silence, "if I know what they did, I can learn how to undo it." The words were frail sounding, the intention of hope behind them so unstable. "So when we bring him home, I can meet him where he is."

Joe’s lips compressed together into a tight line, the skin around his eyes folded. The look he leveled at Nicky wasn’t just sadness, it was the quiet devastation of someone watching their beloved grasp at threads.

"There may be no 'after' for him."

The gentleness in his tone made it worse. This careful doling out of mercy, as if Nicky hadn't already dissected every horrific possibility in the twelve hours he'd spent with those files. As if the image of a small body wrapped in sheets wasn't already seared behind his eyelids.

Nicky didn’t argue. He studied the tremor in Joe’s clenched hands, the way his husband's gaze darted to every exit but never once to the laptop on the nightstand.

"No, perhaps not." he agreed softly while stepping into Joe's space. His palms mapped the familiar terrain of Joe's arms, sliding down to pry open his stiff fingers. "But we still must plan as if there will be."

With an unsteady exhale, Joe surrendered to Nicky’s touch, letting him manipulate his wrists and hands however he wanted. Even in anguish, he was taking the time to consider his love's words, much like he always did. Though his emotions were known to burn bright, he was a man capable of immense reflection, always able to land at the core of things. Here, Nicky could see him trying to measure their needs, much like a merchant pouring over the figures in his books—what surplus still remained, what could they salvage? All of his calculations looked to be coming up short. This pain was too thick to quantify, stuffed away for survival’s sake yet hanging over their heads with mocking laughter.

Nicky guided Joe’s palms to his own ribcage, pressing them flat against the rise and fall of his breath. His large hands settled over them, anchoring them both there.

"We learn what he is—” He murmured, the bass of his voice the only steady thing in the dark. “—we learn what they made him. Then we try to become what he needs."

Joe swallowed before nodding. His eyes closed tightly for a beat, then a soft curse slipped from his lips.

Their bodies folded together.

Nicky’s chin tilted in wordless invitation, allowing Joe to press his face into the familiar hollow of his neck. They inhaled each other, finding the very scent of home—a place they had been able to carry with them for centuries because they understood that it could never be tied to a single location or physical dwelling, but rather to this life they carved out together. Nicky hummed as his husband’s hands fanned over his shoulder blades, each of them finding solace in the other's frame. They remained like this for an uncertain amount of time, listening to the sounds of their own breathing, the wet click of their throats swallowing, their syncopated heartbeats.

The silence between them had always been its own language. It was Joe who eventually chose to break it.

"It wasn't just him." He said, voice thick and trembling. He tried to steady his hands by finding Nicky's waist. "Eight others. Brought into this world and snuffed out. And we never had the faintest clue."

Nicky had avoided this, because he could not afford thinking about the others. Perhaps years from now, when enough time and distance sat between them and this revelation, he would step into a quiet church and light eight individual candles. He would recite familiar prayers, not for forgiveness, but for the grief he’d been forced to bury away. But this would be a ritual for far into the future—for a time when he and Joe had steadier ground beneath their feet, for when their family was no longer in such immediate danger. Now, they could only focus on what they still held the power to change.

“Yes.” His agreement was quiet. “But now he is all that matters.”

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

02:21 AM. 01 Feb. 2025, Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom.

Joe sat cross legged on the floor of the van, his back pressed against the metal wall.

The weather report had promised a dry night, but Cardiff exhaled a bitter, icy mist all the same. The fine drizzle floated through the air, the small droplets clinging to hair and clothes alike, needling through layers until it penetrated the bones.

The operation had been clean, until it wasn’t.

Disabling the cameras took Nile ninety seconds. Andy dispatched the entrance guards and those posted inside with barely a pause—they fell one by one as she and Nile pushed deeper, silenced by blade before their shouts could form. With each fallen guard, Andy and Nile called out their kills through the comms system. Joe and Nicky flowed a few paces behind them in perfect sync, sealing exits and watching angles. Only Booker broke rhythm from the group, vanishing into a side stairwell to descend to the lower levels, his bag filled with enough C4 to demolish a building twice as tall.

Locating the boy on the third floor cost them the most time, a dangerous amount of time. They had to force access code information from the two nurses on duty, the type of work that is never pretty.

Andy bent fingers backward one by one until one of them sobbed out a series of entry numbers.

Three minutes. A result that was nowhere near her personal best.

Nicky and Joe went in alone to collect the boy.

Fifteen minutes total.

That's all it took to breach the facility and extract what should never have been taken.

Now, the mangled security gate screamed under the van’s tires as Andy drove them away.

Joe hadn’t been able to touch him back in that sterile room. They found the boy lying in an elevated metal crib, it's barred walls looming over him more like a cage than a bed. His small body was tethered by electrodes and wires. Velcro straps pinned his arms outstretched on either side. Even as he slept, they felt the need to keep a sickly three year-old restrained.

In the van’s rattling dark, Nicky cradled the boy against his chest, swaying slightly on his knees. His gaze flickered over their gear, pausing on the thin padded mat they’d brought for the child. It had seemed practical back in planning. Now, with the boy’s shallow breaths warming his collarbone, his body too weak to properly lift his head, it felt unforgivably stark.

Something in Joe awoke. Without hesitation, he wrenched over the nearest duffel, rummaging past weapons and wire until his fingers caught on familiar fabric—a shared sweatshirt that belonged to them, soft and threadbare from years of use, still carrying traces of Aleppo soap and sandalwood. He undid the zipper and spread it across his lap, creating a buffer against the cold damp of his tactical gear. Shifting forward, he quickly lifted his vest up and over his head, tossing it aside.

"Set him down." Joe swallowed to make his voice cooperate. "It's—it's okay."

Nicky bent downward, murmuring, “Fai piano, tienigli la testa…” (Easy, support his head...)

Joe’s hands rose on instinct to help settle the boy's delicate weight. His palm pressed to where the back of the child’s neck met the base of his skull, fingers splaying to support his head. The contact was like a hot spark landing in dry tender—real, real, suddenly too real. A child, a living thing made from him, taken from his body without permission, now lay cradled across his lap. Not quite his, but certainly of him.

His mind stuttered when he looked down at the boy’s face, so undeniably close to his own—from the slope of his nose, to the arch of his brows, Joe could see his own features mirrored back at him in miniature. Distinct echoes of Nicky were threaded throughout: in the stubborn set of his chin, the unique shape of his small ears. It made something sick and heavy coil in his gut. This was no miracle. It was violation given form, a life wrenched into existence without thought of mercy or consent. And yet—

The boy stirred weakly, his cracked lips parting around a soundless gasp. His fingers twitched against Joe’s thigh, the movement barely there.

Before he could think, he shushed him, the back of his fingers smoothed over his brow. The motion came without his explicit permission, pulled from some deep, unguarded place.

His eyes snapped up, meeting Nicky’s over the boy’s trembling body.

“Help me get this off him." He jerked his chin down towards the off-white lab blanket. The stench of bleach and something sour, like sweat gone stale, clung to the rough fabric. He couldn’t stomach the thought of the child being wrapped in anything from that place for a second longer. Not when they were meant to be taking him somewhere far away and safe.

Nicky didn’t argue, able to plainly hear the plea beneath the words. With careful hands, he helped peel the blanket off and tossed it aside. Together, they worked to swaddle him in the material of the old sweatshirt, the garment dwarfing his emaciated frame.

Around them, the others kept up their careful pretense of focus—Andy’s hands steady on the wheel, Booker’s tense silence in the passenger's seat. Nile was positioned just behind them, her head stuck between the two while she watched the road.

“What’s the time on detonation?” She demanded, directions provided by Copley pulled up on her phone.

“Don’t worry about it.” Booker dismissed her question as Andy turned onto a side street. “I gave us enough of a window.”

None of them for a single second doubted Booker’s calculations, in the same way they still trusted his ability to forge their identification papers and to iron out the logistics for the next mission. Nile's question was more about filling the silence, about not disturbing the intimacy of the moment Nicky and Joe were sharing behind her. They were giving them this, at least: the illusion of privacy in the cramped, rattling space.

The gentle clunk and swish of the windshield wipers continued against the rain. Still only a few blocks away from the lab, the aftermath of Booker’s work would come soon enough. The Tesco across the street from Kozak's facility would rattle with the force of the explosion, glass windows would shatter out into fragments against the pavement.

The lab would be left as a hollowed shell.

Nicky was already pulling supplies from his med kit, his movements fluid despite the van's jolting rhythm. A stethoscope draped over the back of his neck, he shifted to kneel before them, steady even as the vehicle lurched, his large hands hovered at the sweatshirt's zipper.

"Joe.”

His name sounded different as it left Nicky's mouth, not a summons but a tether, spoken so it wouldn't travel any further than centimeters of space between them.

Joe blinked, like surfacing from deep water, the sounds of the present drawing him back from where his thoughts had spiraled. His dark eyes slowly sharpened, the weight of his gaze shifting from shock to awareness. He didn't realize how tightly he had been clutching the sweatshirt, his fingers felt nearly fused to the cotton fabric.

"I need to check him." Nicky’s voice was firm but not unkind. "So I can see how to help him."

The words passed easily. Joe managed a stiff nod, his throat dry with a sort of helplessness they had been unable to shake ever since they were gathered in Copley's study. His hands fell away from the small body stretched across his lap.

Slowly, Nicky worked down the zipper of the jacket. He unfastened the shoulder snaps of the boy's grey medical gown, pulling back the thin fabric to reveal his bare torso. The signs of malnourishment jumped out at them, his body was all sharp angles and prominent bones. Each breath he drew pulled the skin taut over his ribs.

The boy's eyes, a lighter shade of brown than Joe's, watched as Nicky warmed the diaphragm of his stethoscope between his palms. There was no reaction when the metal made contact with his chest, his half-lidded gaze continued to travel warily between the two men hovering over him.

The child’s breath sounds were guarded and shallow. When Nicky shifted the chest piece lower, he could only frown as he listened to the ragged pull of air through his lungs. He gently felt for the pulse at the boy’s carotid, finding it slightly elevated, the rhythm fluttery against his fingertips. The lymph nodes along the column of his throat were normal, though his skin still held a feverish heat.

Carefully, slowly, Nicky's hands skimmed over his narrow extremities, feeling each bone with light pressure. There were no obvious fractures, no bruises or abrasions, but the joints were too prominent, the wrists too fragile. Despite the gentleness of his touch, Nicky still detected the flash of a grimace across the boy's face. He managed to free one of his small hands from the folds of the jacket. When applying pressure to the nail beds, he noted how the color drained and returned slowly—poor perfusion.

He reached for the penlight set out amongst his tools, clicking it on with his thumb.

The moment the beam touched the boy’s pupils, he jerked back with a sharp gasp—the first real reaction he’d shown since they’d taken him. His face screwed up, turning away from the light like it burned.

Joe caught him before he could retreat too far, one broad hand cradling the back of his head, the other bracing his cheek. "Shh, almost done." he murmured, his thumb smoothing a circle across the boy’s temple.

Nicky worked quickly to check his pupillary response. The reaction to light was slow, but equally present. Finally, he brandished a thermometer. There was a quiet beep in the boy's ear before the digital readout confirmed what he already knew.

Low-grade fever. Dehydration. Aches. The beginnings of an infection simmering.

He began to clear away the unnecessary supplies back into his med kit, leaving out only what was needed for an IV. "He needs fluids," he said quietly. "And likely antibiotics."

Joe considered the information, his gaze trained down towards the boy. His palm lightly brushed over the crown of his shaved scalp, noting the angry red patches of irritation—a sort of allergic reaction to the electrodes' adhesive.

"He breathes like he's in pain."

The child weakly tried to turn his head from Joe's careful touch, his hands flinching at his sides.

"Tranquillo, piccolo. Fammi vedere questa mano, sì?" Nicky spoke gently to him as he settled his small arm across his knee. His fingers nimbly fastened an elastic band around his skinny bicep before he turned his palm upward. (Easy, little one. Let me see this hand, yes?)

The Italian was deliberate. Not just for comfort, but as a boundary against past memories. Nicky wanted his voice and words to be nothing like the sterile English used in the lab. He knew that the boy wouldn't fully understand, but he hoped that the tone of what he said would still register. It felt important to create a distinction from the doctors he had known before, so he would eventually learn that his and Joe's hands would never seek to harm him. Nicky knew that the severe dehydration would make finding a suitable vein more difficult, and the moving conditions of the van were not ideal for steady hands, but there was no choice. He took a moment to center himself, slipping into the focused calm he'd learned to hone over centuries. These were the same measured breaths he took when perched on a rooftop with his rifle, in moments where there was no room for error. He glanced upwards to Joe, silent understanding passed between them. Joe had the boy's head resting now in the crook of his elbow. Carefully, he turned his face towards him, shielding his view from the needle. A slight tremor ran through his small body as the needle pierced skin. There was the subtle feeling of resistance when the IV catheter met vein, then a small amount of blood filled the chamber, signalling success. The boy's breathing caught, but he didn't cry out. Nicky suspected that he was too weak to even whimper. "Tutto fatto." He whispered, as much to himself as to the child. He taped the line in place, his thumb brushing the inside of his elbow in silent apology. (All done.) Joe began fixing the jacket around the boy's body once more, assuring he was well covered. He sat back and watched as Nicky busied himself with hanging the bag of Ringer's solution on a makeshift hook. His husband made the necessary calculations in his head before drawing a syringe of pain medication, administering the dose directly through the IV bag's port. Nicky's silence could often be more telling than any outburst. There was something unsettled in the calm way his eyes scanned over the child, a sort of anger kept well guarded under the water's surface. It could never be lost on Joe that the person lying across his lap was just as much of Nicky's flesh as of his own, and so this violation felt all the more heavier. What wounded Nicolò only wounded him doubly.

"He needs a name..." Joe whispered, the words raw. There hadn't been time to comb through all of the records Copley and Booker amassed before the raid, but that crucial piece of information was listed nowhere. The boy had a number, but no other identifier tied to him.

As the child fought against the pull of sleep, the message of what needed to be done was silently understood. What Joe was proposing was a tentative step towards trying, towards undoing. It was their attempt to stand between this child and a world that sought to exploit him.

It came together organically. A discussion they never once held before, but in that moment they found themselves inexplicably equipped with the answers.

"Ilyas." Nicky breathed, only loud enough to be heard between them.

Joe nodded as he exhaled, his thumb smoothing over the boy's cheekbone. The prophet Ilyas was known to have been ever faithful, resurrected before bringing down fire from the sky. He was someone taken and then returned. Neither he nor Nicky were particularly religious anymore, but symbols were never lost on them. This was a name that fit the person receiving it, and that fact alone brought a small modicum of comfort. What remained of life if our words and names no longer carried meaning?

"Ilyas Nicolò." Joe finished, his gaze still trained downward.

Nicky’s head tilted, just slightly, but his fingers curled around Joe’s wrist in agreement. No paperwork, no witnesses, they only had this. It was a tentative claim voiced within the shuddering dark of an unmarked van.

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

Winston's Wuerld