actually also quỳnh and nile have been bouncing around my head for a couple weeks now. none of my thoughts are comics compliant but it’s my blog and al gore’s internet so:
quỳnh walking out of the ocean and nile waking up in the med tent without a scratch are both women who have suddenly entered a new and very different world. that is a very specific and alienating experience and i think they’d realize that after spending five minutes in a room together.
quỳnh knows andy and nicky and joe the way you can only know people after many lifetimes, but she’s also lost so many years with them. joe and nicky’s eyes are so much older now — and oh, andy’s — and when she looks at them sometimes her chest constructs unpleasantly, like she’s just tried to take a step and only found air instead of the ground. it doesn’t help that while they look at her with love and gratitude sometimes she catches moments where they also look at her like she’s a ghost.
and nile still feels like she’s staring at the rest of humanity through a glass window she can’t go through. her friends, her family, her whole city is RIGHT THERE but she can’t reach them. she feels like a ghost, haunting people and places that aren’t gone yet. a woman with nothing but time, with no way to comprehend the sheer scale of it.
(booker and quỳnh are ...complicated. booker has only ever known quỳnh as literally a nightmare. he has only ever known the gaping, raw absence of her. she’s only dreamed of him in her semi lucid moments, but they add up. the point is, they’re not starting from scratch.)
nile, though, nile looks at quỳnh and sees ...well, just someone she knows slightly less than andy and the rest of the gang. she’s not new in the way that nile is new — that is to say, young. but she’s a woman whose whole world had tilted and tilted and tilted until it didn’t make sense anymore when she got back up, and right now nile gets that more than anyone.
quỳnh looks at nile and sees another new one. she remembers, more than she has in millennia, how disorienting and terrifying this is. and she remembers andy coming through the desert for her all those millennia ago, and she remembers finding lykon and yusuf and nicolò and the centuries in the sea, and feels fiercely grateful that nile has never had to know that kind of loneliness.
i imagine they both have trouble sleeping, and sometimes it’s just the two of them sitting in the dark in the kitchen or porch or balcony. quỳnh smoking cigarettes because she likes the way they fill her lungs and teasing nile (unable to shake a childhood of ‘smoking kills’ commercials) because she won’t. nile can be pretty blunt when she wants to be, and i can’t imagine that quỳnh would pass up many chances to talk after lifetimes in a box. i think they are both trying to understand the rest of the guard from different directions — especially andy. (if you’ve ever had friends — or god forbid one or more exes— from different eras of your life meet, you have a vague idea of what andy experiences.) i think in their own ways they’re overwhelmed with time: too much and too little at once. i think they’re both struggling to come to terms with what their life looks like now. and i don’t know, i think they’d like to talk to each other about it!
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