An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
None of the others seem to do it as much, Nile realises one day, as she blinks back alive. It's Andy's thing: it's always Andy who's there, her hands cradling their face.
"Still with me?" Andy asks.
Nile swallows blood and feels her spine unbreak and says, "Yeah, still here."
1.2k words
For Nile Week day 6: whump / effects of immortality / powers.
Hi! I'm Fleetling. I'm a few days behind on writing and posting my fics for nile week but I'm drafting for day 6 as we speak and i have plans for day 7. Are you going to close the ao3 collection at the end of the week? I can probably put in a mad scramble to get something written for them if you are, but I thought I'd ask before I panicked!
No need to worry lovely, it'll stay open forever! I'll make a more detailed post about it with thanks tomorrow, but do it on your own time.
Princess Nile is sent to a cold and distant land to marry a cold and distant king, Sébastien. They marry in the evening without fanfare, his face shrouded in shadow. When he comes to their marriage bed in the dark, he warns her never to try to look at his face. In the daytime, she begins to explore her new home, but it is harsh and desolate. She longs for her family, for the vibrant flowers of her homeland, for the chill to leave her bones.
One day, she meets a white bear who can speak. He tells her where to find the beauty and warmth here, while she regales him with songs and tales of the home she left behind. He is gentle and kind, and he listens to her intently. Soon she is spending every day with the bear, wandering farther from the castle and deeper into the forest, and contemplating the impossible: she has fallen in love with the bear. When she proposes they escape together, he refuses, reminds her that her marriage has saved her kingdom, and promises her husband the king will thaw.
But how long can Nile wait to see her husband's face, or his heart?
An East of the Sun, West of the Moon AU for @nileweek and Book of Nile AU Fest: fairy tale.
When I found the fairy tale bang back in January, I immediately thought of this AU, but couldn't get it to come together in time for sign ups, which required a pairing and a premise that could not change. With Nile Week 2025 coming to a close, I realized I could still at least invoke the image of Nile and her bear. This was a seven-hour endeavor over two nights, the most ambitious paper art I've ever attempted, and I'm really pleased with the results.
for the last day of nile week i want to talk a little bit more about nile the last immortal. It is so stupid in the movie, but again it doesn't have to be. What if nile IS the last immortal but it doesn't mean what discord thinks it means? We already know that the order of becoming an immortal and becoming mortal is not the same, so why should it start now. The team thinks for ages that since nile has her special powers, there won't be more immortals after her, but 200 years go by and suddenly they all wake up and know there is a new one, and then realise what this means. It isn't that nile is the last immortal to be born, she is the last immortal to ever die. For as long as there is humanity, for as long as whatever power creates them and keeps them running, she will be among them. There might be countless other immortals, countless centuries and millennias. The universe and space expands ahead of them, and all throughout it, nile will be there. nile will remain. what a curse that would be, and what an honour at the same time! she will outlive everyone, but she will also get to see everything. nile the ancient, nile the undying, nile from the planet long since gone.
I am so tired of waiting,
Aren't you,
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
And cut the world in two--
And see what worms are eating
At the rind.
Langston Hughes
🖤 Nile Week 2025 - Day 7 - Free Choice: Principles 🖤
THE SPIDER-WOMAN AU | 1.5ish words, slight andy&nile
: :
Okay, let’s do this one last time.
Her name is Nile Freeman. She was bitten by a radioactive spider, and for, like, six months, she’s been the one and only Spider-Woman. She’s graduated from high school, and she’s saved a bunch of people, and met her college roommates (what’s up, Dizzy! what’s up, Jay!), finally.
She never thought she’d be able to do any of this stuff. It’s pretty great.
But she’s not the only hero. Not by a long shot.
: :
When Andromache the Scythian flies in from out of nowhere, catches Spider-Woman by the waist mid-swing, and throws her down into an empty Chicago parking lot, she panics.
Snaps a bit of web right into the Scythian’s face. While the other hero’s choking on it, Spider-Woman rolls, scrambles to her feet, darts over one parked car and under another.
Something hits her in the shoulder – a dart, but it doesn’t punch through the suit that her mom made for her. Spider-Woman cranes her neck up and around, sees the shape of a sniper on the roof of the next building over. Motherfucker.
The Scythian gets the web out of her mouth, spitting, and then the rest of the Guard has surrounded Spider-Woman. She crouches, flexing her hands, wondering if she’s about to be – she doesn’t know. Brought in for illegal experimentation. Jumped into a gang. Given a firm lecture.
“Please don’t do that,” Andromache says.
“Sorry,” Spider-Woman says. “Uhm. You started it.”
The Punisher laughs. The other two smile, a bit, but he actually snickers, out loud, and when Andromache glares at him, he just snickers louder.
Emboldened, Spider-Woman straightens up to standing.
“So, what is this?” she asks. “You here to give me a participation trophy?”
“Yeah,” Andromache says. “Kind of. We like to keep tabs on the up-and-coming talent, and you’re Chicago’s first real hero. You’ve been doing good work, kid.”
Spider-Woman narrows her eyes. She’s not sure she likes being called kid. But the sentiment is nice, she guesses.
“Okay,” she says. “Great. Are you gonna be leaving Chicago … ?”
Andromache looks at her. Her mouth twitches.
“We will be,” she says. “We’ll give you a number to contact, if you need help.”
“Right,” Spider-Woman says. She’s not gonna be contacting that number.
The three men are grinning under their masks, although they all hide it when the Scythian looks at them. She snorts, and then hands Spider-Woman a business card with nothing but a phone number on it.
Spider-Woman reads the card, commits the number to memory, and then hands it back.
The men are in silent hysterics. Andromache narrows her eyes.
“Good luck, Spider-Woman,” she says, and unfurls her adamantium-edged wings and launches herself in the air.
The men are left staring at Spider-Woman, who stares back at them.
“Uhm,” she says. “’Bye, I guess.”
She swings out of there before any of them can say anything.
: :
Two blocks down, she stops. There’s a tracker, left on the shoulder of her suit by the dart that hit her. She can’t seem to get it off. Luckily, she has a backup. She strips out of her suit and into normal clothes, leaves the suit wedged inside the seat of an L train, and calls it a day.
: :
Nile expects that to be the end of it. Big things don’t really happen in Chicago – like, sure, she loves her city, it’s the best place in the world, but it’s not exactly a hotbed of megalomaniac villain shenanigans, you know? It’s more of normal-crime kind of place. There’s no reason for the Guard to come back here.
: :
Her roommate Dizzy is interning with this lab when she brings something to Nile because she thinks something fishy is going on. Dizzy’s studying chemistry, and Merrick Pharmaceuticals is the highest-tech, most cutting-edge place on the market. But there’s some janky stuff going on in the top floor labs, Dizzy says.
Add into that the fact that last week, Andromache and her Guard publicly got their asses kicked in South Bend, and they haven’t been heard from since. It’s all starting to add up in a way that isn’t sitting right with Nile.
Nile does the one thing she had sworn to herself she would not do. She calls the number.
A voice with an English accent answers. “Hello?” he says.
“Hello?” she says. She’s Spider-Woman now. “I’m – uhm, I’m calling for Andromache?”
There’s a long pause. “She’s not available,” the voice answers. “Who is this?”
“Any of the Guard?” Spider-Woman asks, desperate. “Any of them?”
“They’re not available,” he insists. “Who is calling?”
She takes a breath. “This is Spider-Woman,” she says. “Andromache told me to call this number if I needed her.”
There’s silence for a long moment. “The Guard have been unavailable for several days,” he says. “We’ve been – looking for them.”
“I know,” Spider-Woman says. “I think that I might know where they are. I think I might know how to get them back.”
: :
His name is Copley. He’s their handler (“their handler,” Jay mouths, giggling), which, as far as Nile can tell, is kind of like being their Mom, in that he also makes their suits and ensures that they are fed and obsesses over them when they’re out fighting crime.
Copley helps Jay and Nile get into Merrick’s lab along with Dizzy, and makes sure they have a secure way out. They make it up to the penthouse lab without much opposition – Nile has to web a few security guards, Dizzy and Jay cheering, but she doesn’t even change into her suit.
All three of them break into the lab successfully, breathless with exhilaration. The four Guard are there, in normal clothes, strapped to four medical cots, staring at them like they have six heads each.
“Watch out!” one of the men says, and Jay clocks the doctor that was about to stab her with a syringe, knocking her down.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Andromache says. She looks rough, dark-eyed and pale and sweaty. “It’s not safe.”
“Shut up,” Nile tells her. “Dizzy, can you swipe and wipe as much of the doctor’s work as you can?”
“On it,” Dizzy says, going to the computer. Jay starts untying the Guard.
“I mean it,” Andromache says, raising her voice. “You don’t know what kind of people you’re dealing with here –”
“Yeah, yeah,” Nile says. “You wanna get out of here or not?”
They get the Guard on their feet, and Dizzy destroys as much of the research that was done on them as possible, and Andromache makes a last-ditch effort to throw herself on a grenade for Nile.
“You girls go,” she says. “We’ll fight it out. We can –”
“God, do you listen to yourself?” Nile says. One of the men, the white guy with the buzzy blue eyes and the unfortunate haircut, is frowning at her thoughtfully. “We’re not leaving. We’ve got an exit, arranged with Copley.”
The Guard stares at her. The guy with the wild dark beard says, voice incredulous, “You’re working with Copley?”
Three security guards take that moment to burst through the door. Everyone startles; Nile reacts quickest, snapping web into their faces and gun hands, wrapping them up like a spider’s dinner.
There’s a heavy moment of silence. Then Andromache says, “Motherfucker.”
“So cool,” Jay says.
“Can we go now?” Spider-Woman says, shrugging off the blazer she’d worn over her suit and pulling up her mask to cover her face.
: :
When Merrick tries to push Andromache, without her wings, out the window of his skyscraper, Spider-Woman grabs him and flips them both off the edge of the building.
She catches them before they fall, of course. She strings him up in a spiderweb, a big fat fly, with a thumbdrive of all the dirty laundry she and Dizzy and Jay had managed to dig up on him stuck to his chest.
Then Spider-Woman watches from the next building over while the Guard and Dizzy and Jay get into Copley’s exit vehicle and drive off. There’s something aching in her chest, but that’s okay. She’s the one and only Spider-Woman, after all.
: :
The week that classes end, as Nile’s packing up to leave the dorms, there’s a knock at her door.
When she answers, there are four people – she guesses she can’t quite call them strangers – standing there. Andromache the Scythian, in jeans and a tank top and sunglasses, is at the front.
“Hey,” Andromache says.
“Hey,” Nile says. She eyes the Guard uncomfortably. “You guys here to try to intimidate me again?”
“No, actually,” Andromache says. “We came to thank you. And to … apologize.”
“Oh,” Nile says.
“It seems like we never really got properly introduced,” Andromache says. She extends a hand to shake.
One last time, from the top: her name is Nile Freeman. She was bitten by a radioactive spider, and for the last year and a half, she’s been the one and only Spider-Woman. She’s just finished her freshman year of college, and she’s saved Chicago, and she’s made some new friends along the way.
It doesn’t seem possible, that a girl like her from the South Side could be a hero. But it’s true. And she’s not the only one; she knows that now.
“I’m Nile,” Nile says. “Nile Freeman.” She reaches out to take the other woman’s hand.
“You can call me Andy,” she says, and squeezes Nile’s hand.
while i think "nile the last immortal" is silly and i don't like how it reduces her into a macguffin in the movie, i think if handled differently the idea of nile having special dark powers could have worked and been really interesting. Imagine the incredible whump potential of forcing nile to hurt the new people she has grown to care about and consider family if she is threatened with discord hurting her original family. the turmoil and the angst could be so incredibly delicious. nile believing she has to leave because she is a danger to her new family (and maybe that she is not worth their love) her new family proving to her that they love her and want to be with her no matter her powers, that they're not afraid of her and that she is worth all of their love no matter what? it's so juicy!! nile wanting to protect everyone by isolating herself and everyone else going NOPE you are stuck with US because we love you!
canon divergent au where it is nile who has secretly been in contact with her family when the events of tog 2 happen and discord uses that connection to threaten nile to join her so this time the team has to rescue nile instead of the other way around EXCEPT while being kidnapped by discord nile meets and gets to know quynh and start working together behind discord's back so when the team arrives and fails at their rescue mission (which discord was able to prepare for) nile and quynh take her by surprise (and actually nile's family is safe bc they knew what was happening and were not kept in the dark so they were able to contact the team and get help from copley or something) and then nile and quynh together kick discord's ass and also become emotionally close
Nile builds out her internal map of Andy, Joe, and Nicky, the topography of their personalities and the watersheds of their character. She notices the way Joe hums when he does the dishes, his (at first, confusing) pleasure in sinking his hands into suds and making things clean. It’s a while before she notices the yin and yang of it, the way Nicky cooks food, however simple, however complicated; appreciation in the way Joe clears the table afterwards. She learns that Andy’s internal clock runs fast, then slow; that some mornings she’s up long before dawn, watching for something Nile can’t quite pin down, while on other days she burrows in bed, snoring gently, long after everyone else is awake. She learns the pace at which they walk, and the things that signal danger to each of them, and the music that they listen to together, and the music that they don’t.
She wonders what the atlas of her own self looks like, what hills and valleys the others are inking in their minds. Do they notice the way her hands shake on occasion, entirely without her direction, when the rate at which she’s deluged with new information becomes more than she can bear? Do they mark the times when she laughs as much as the times she sets her jaw and leaves the room to cry? Do they know what it feels like to miss a particular street corner, the smell of a high school, the texture of Afghanistan? She wonders and wonders what they make of her newness; she wonders if they know why she waits to ask.
But on the days when novelty isn’t a feckless din in her ears, when there’s calm she can access, and sweet, slow time, she glimpses their skill at cartography. She feels the resonance of Nicky’s description of sailing beyond the sight of all land, like a bell has been struck inside her chest. And though Andy remembers the shock of the jungle with its wild, green heat, not desert and rock and dryness and sand, Nile knows that feeling of being far from home like a bile-sharp sensation at the back of her throat.
She still feels like a globe spinning wildly on some baffling axis. But the next time her hands shake and she presses them against her thighs beneath the kitchen table, Joe reaches over without ceremony, and takes one of her hands in his.
germansingergirl
dailybridgerton
origamiaround
romaincrisis
dededos
janainaart
snowghoul
yousharknotpass
