#dedicatedfollower467

Now things start to get interesting. Does the ship make it safely back to port? Is there a manifest of some kind that they can use to try to figure out where she was dropped? The ocean is big, the kind of big that humans can’t really comprehend on some level, because it’s just too vast. This is true now, and it was truer when Quynh went into the water, when the size of the oceans was something that people didn’t even really have much of a theoretical grasp of, let alone an actual internalized understanding. All the islands of land across the world had not yet been reconnected by people, there are still people all over the world who don’t know that there are landmasses beyond their own, people in Europe to whom the idea of the Americas is still a little unbelievable if they’ve heard of their existence, definitely people in Australia who have no awareness of Europe, since Europeans don’t land on the continent until 1770, although there were already some maps of the coast at the time from dutch exploration. 

So let’s say the ship makes it back, and Andy, Nicky, and Joe are able to find someone who was onboard, and get them to talk. Someone who hadn’t been from the town, who was willing to tell them where they’d pushed Quynh overboard. Here’s the thing - it’s not like that person will have had a gps on them, to record the exact location, so it’s all very approximate. And that’s if they’re lucky. Maybe they don’t ever find a sailor who will talk to them, or worse, maybe they find several. And they all give different locations. They don’t have the kind of studies that tell you that people being tortured don’t provide accurate info, but we do. And so these sailors lie, maybe they don’t know the answers, maybe they just don’t want to tell the truth, whatever, they lie, but andy is desperate, so they go and search those places. Except what does that even look like? They’re limited to free diving, or using diving bells, which I learned about in a fic about Andy searching desperately, they’re giant bells that force air down with you, but obviously not as much as you can get with scuba, and there’s no light, and so searching is already virtually impossible. They can drag the depths with chains, but the ocean is DEEP. 

Maybe the eventually find a ship manifest, but like. There’s no way that had accurate info about what? Where they threw a human overboard? That just doesn’t seem like something with a paper trail to me. And all of that stuff up above about figuring out where to search, even with the fact that searching is almost impossible to do in a way that could be effective, still assumes that they’re able to get an idea of at least the general area where they should search beyond “somewhere off the shore of England, maybe not too far off but who knows?” And that relies on the ship having made it back! Which like! Maybe it did, but who knows. 

Anyway, the main point is that it’s not working. Andy has been searching for a long time now, she’s desperate. I’d guess that she’s been consumed by it for fifty, a hundred years. And it isn’t working, and she doesn’t know if she just hasn’t looked in the right places, if the spot they dropped Quynh is too deep for any chain to reach, for any diving bell to get her down there. Hell, with some of the dangerously deep free diving she’s done and dives with the bells when she got down so deep that the water went dark even when she went down at midday with the sun high and bright and so strong that she and Nicky had turned red for up to an hour at a time before their skin healed and reburned again she doesn’t know if she’s been within a few yards of Quynh, within eyesight if only she could have seen. When she gets that deep all she can do is reach around herself, wave her arms almost frantically as she starts to run out of air and feels the depth and oxygen deprivation getting to her, and still she’s never bumped up against what she’s reaching for so desperately, never ended up touching cold iron, though she thinks by now it must be corroded. 

And that oxygen thing - she’s drowned a lot of times at this point. Like. A lot. A. Lot. But not as many as Quynh must have, she knows that much at least. And Andy begins to get frantic with it, insisting to Nicky and Joe that she has to keep trying, and she dives deeper than a normal person would dare, because she’s not like them, she will come back, so she doesn’t need to save breath for the way back up - she can die as many times as it takes getting back to the surface. Once after she’s down for a long time, and Nicky has to dive in after her, Joe insists that she tie a rope to herself, so that at least they can pull her up, and not have to hope that she’ll float up to the top as she dies and drowns and dies and drowns, not have to just hope that she won’t get caught under something, or swept away by a deep current. 

Andy doesn’t know how to tell them that sometimes it’s the only thing that feels real anymore, drowning, the water filling her lungs, because at least when she’s drowning she’s keeping her promise. Together. 

But they’ve known her quite a while, and after almost a century of this Joe and Nicky sit her down and tell her that she can’t keep doing this, that she’s destroying herself, that she’s scaring them. They tell her that they love her, that they love Quynh, and that this has to stop. She’s furious. She screams, tells them they are faithless, walks out and doesn’t speak to them for a year, walks out the door of the cottage they were staying in and just keeps walking, then keeps looking for Quynh, drowns a lot more times, and a year later she ends up back there, at that same fucking cottage, not even really on purpose, but it’s close to the coast where Quynh would have left from, but they’re still fucking there, as if they’ve been waiting for her, and the second she sets foot into the house she breaks down sobbing, screaming, but not at them this time, not even words, just incoherent grief. They can tell that in the time she was apart from them she’s barely taken care of herself, has worked herself to exhaustion, and they just hold her, because this is what it is have family, family that is inescapable and endless and beloved. 

And so after about a hundred years of searching nonstop Andy admits to herself, and to them that she doesn’t know what to do anymore, that she doesn’t know how to care about humanity, but she also doesn’t know how to find Quynh, but doesn’t feel like she can stop looking while she’s still out there. 

And they suggest that she doesn’t have to entirely stop, but that she could, perhaps, do other things also, that she’d do at least one search every decade say, and she frowns and says that doesn’t seem like enough, and Joe, so relieved that she’s listening, that she’s acting more like the woman he’s been so proud to call sister he almost wants to cry, laughs instead and says, then do it every five years, or every two, but let’s also travel, and exist in the world. 

And that’s what they do. And it keeps not working, but she hasn’t given up. She has started to worry that maybe Quynh is dead though. She remembers Lykon dying in her arms, and she wonders sometimes if Quynh’s time has come. If she’ll eventually find an iron coffin, and open it, only to find a rotting skeleton. That question is answered decisively in 1812, when Booker dies and comes back, and they find him, and the first night they spend with him he wakes up screaming, a lot like Nile will more than two hundred years later, and asks about the woman who is drowning. And Andy cries again, and while Nicky explains and Joe tells him that she really isn’t usually this weepy, for which she slaps Joe, and then smiles through her tears and gives him a friendly (but still fucking hard, Andy that hurt, just because the bruises heals fast doesn’t mean it’s ok to beat up your friends!) and nods firmly, and tells Booker (Sebastien de Livre at this point, it’s a while before someone decides that it’s really funny to translate his name to English) that she’d begun to fear that she’d never see her again, that she was already dead, before sobering, and asking if he sees any clues to where she might be. He looks at her incredulously and says, rather hopelessly “the ocean.” Which isn’t helpful, but she didn’t really expect much more than that. 

Still, every time Booker wakes from a nightmare of Quynh’s endless drowning he tells her, and it is a reminder that there is still hope, that she can still find her. 

It isn’t until the twentieth century that she starts to think she really might be able to pull it off though. She’s so sure sonar is going to be a game changer, especially in 1915 when the tech was first able to detect submarines (another thing she’d tried as soon as she could). And then in 1943 scuba diving is invented, and again she’s so so sure that this is it, this is what she’s been waiting for (well. as noted above she hasn’t been waiting for shit, but she thinks it might be what actually lets her find Quynh). And she still can’t find her, and she rages about it sometimes, exhausts herself with misery about once a decade, and every few years she makes another attempt, and now that there are better ways of mapping she’s able to more accurately catalog where she’s looked, and there’s a house now where the cottage once stood, and she put Booker in charge of keeping it in their possession via a variety of aliases once he joined them, but it’s got shelves and shelves full of maps and records of her attempts down the centuries. 

And so, when Nile’s dreams change, just six months into Booker’s exile, and she sees first Quynh alive, and then Quynh with Booker, Andy’s already at the house, because suddenly it didn’t matter that Quynh hadn’t died yet, because Andy was dying, running out of time. She didn’t have forever anymore, she couldn’t keep to her slow method. She was still willing to do jobs, but she'd dedicated herself to spending more time searching. 

And so when Quynh comes for them it’s there, and when she opens the door Andy is there in the main room of the house, the one with the maps on the walls and the records on the shelves, neatly ordered by location and then year. 

And Quynh walks in with Booker behind her, anxious, and terrified, and still sorry, obviously terrified that they’re going to be furious with him for being there after such a sort period, but also clearly very frightened of Quynh (it will later turn out that she has uh. definitely killed him a few times already, some fun torture etc. we will excuse this between friends, between family, but it will be a long century or so before he really lets down his guard around her). But beyond Nicky shaking his head in response to the apology already falling out of his mouth as if to say “not the time” no one is looking at Booker, not when Quynh is standing there. 

She’s already found herself weapons, though Andy, Joe, and Nicky are fully aware of just how dangerous she can be even without them, and no one has even really had time to process anything before she’s walking right up to Andy and stabbing her in the gut, wrenching the knife out, crying, saying “Just you and me until the end, that’s what you said, that’s what you promised me Andromache! And you left me to drown!” and the others are already moving in, already catching Andy’s body as Quynh drops her, clearly expecting her to start regenerating, and Nile helps her to a chair, as Quynh looks on confused, and when Nile says “Didn’t Booker tell you? She’s mortal now, you’ve killed her.” with a quiet fury and anguish and shock, Quynh goes silent, and turns to him, says “You weren’t lying?” in shock. 

“Why would I lie about that?” Booker looks stricken, like someone who thinks he’s just killed the best friend he’s ever had for a second time, which in fairness, he has, hasn’t he. 

And Quynh gets a mad look in her eyes, rushes towards Andy, begging her to say it isn’t true, babbling about how it can’t end like this Andromache, I was going to kill you again and again, I haven’t even drowned you yet, and she’s crying, and in her rush to get to Andy she knocks a book off of the table onto the floor and a bunch of maps spill out, and as Andy bleeds onto them Nicky thrusts them into Quynh’s face and she realizes that they’re maps from attempts to find her, and he’s telling her that Andy searched nonstop for a century, but that even since then she’s never stopped looking, that it’s fucking hard to find someone at the bottom of the sea, that Andy has wrecked herself, drowned a hundred times over looking for her, and Andy, who is uh, actively (but slowly look it’s my headcanon i do what what I want) bleeding out here guys, please focus, it’s like you’ve forgotten that some people die? shakes her head at him (well, wobbles her head a little, shaking is beyond her at this point), and rasps that no, she gets it. Quynh has drowned so many more times, she didn’t look hard enough, she gets it, and then she smiles and says “but I got to see you before I go.” And her eyes close.

And at this point Quynh is screaming in fury that Andy does not get to do this, that Andy cannot leave her alone again, and Nile is on her feet ready to rush Quynh and give her at least one more death herself, possibly with a butter knife off the table from when they had lunch earlier that day at this point, telling her that she did this, and Nicky and Joe are just standing there in shock, because they didn’t really expect Andy to make it long enough to die a natural death, not with the way she lived even after becoming mortal, but they also didn’t really expect to lose her so soon, but also Quynh is here, she’s back, and they’ve missed her too, and also separately Booker is there, and Nile looks like she’s about to crack in two, Nile who just a few months ago they watched give Copley the ok to have her family notified, Nile who made the choice not to contact her mother, her brother even though it had been so clearly agonizing to make that call, who had adopted their family with such intense loyalty, and Nicky is already moving towards her when Andy takes a breath and her eyes pop open, and the wound in her side... starts to knit itself closed.