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From: (Anonymous)

A/N: Quỳnh’s line about the fishes are a nod to this fanfic (https://archiveofourown.org/works/27076831) .

2. Quỳnh

“When we return to the wheel of life, you and I, we will find one another again and again... until the colonized and the enslaved and the abused will rise up with the holy strength of the gods behind them and, together, we will make it right.”

– Alaya Dawn Johnson’s Trouble the Saints

He knows Andy’s right, that even though he’s doing penance, he can try to stay connected with the others. But he doesn’t know where to start: he’s said I’m sorry and it wasn’t enough and I’m learning my lesson sounds juvenile – then again, he is in a time-out of one hundred years.

While he goes back and forth about who to reach out to first (he is not doing a group chat), he turns to who he knows the least: Quỳnh. Without the years of inside jokes, regrets, and memories, it should be easier; and low stakes is good practice right?

“Can I… practice with you?” he asks as she works a Rubik’s cube and he a Sudoku.

“I’m sure Andy trained you well, but no,” Quỳnh says primly.

Booker lightly punches her. “No, I mean getting to know you through the books you like. You’ve been reading stuff I haven’t read.”

(Quỳnh is not working. While Booker had forged some papers for her, she doesn’t need to work, she had come to him rich. She’d said, “Learning to live is a full-time job, thank you.” She takes it seriously, going out, trying new foods, reading alone in the sun – joins a salsa dancing class even.)

“Yes,” she says slowly, “let’s. Give me a book you think I’d like, and then I will give you one that shows you a different side of me.”

So, he hands her a book with a cover like a playing card. “It’s about gangsters of color in the U.S. trying to do the right thing with their magic.”

Quỳnh gives him an unimpressed look. “Between this and your books with Andy, I’m sensing a theme.”

“That’s not why I picked it for you.” She snatches the book from him, and two days later, announces she’s finished it.

“I don’t like sad books,” she declares.

“I thought you’d like Dev’s letter at the end.”

Quỳnh flips through the book until she finds it. Once she rereads it, she says, “Yes, I believe justice will come for everyone, and that I will be lucky to live long enough to see it. There are times Andromache and I have made the wheel of justice move faster, but there are other ways to make it right. Even the small things I do now will ripple with time.”

“You saw Copley’s wall of miracles, I take it?”

“What? No, I just had a lot of time to think, and a captive audience.”

“Me?”

She waves him off. “No, the fishes. They like being told stories.

“I already know the world seeks to grind away women like us. It is true, yes. And I also want to imagine something better than spending my life righting wrongs and lopping off the heads of each man who condemned me, and women like me, to die. I want to live.” There is a fierceness in her eyes, the determined set of her mouth. If she declared she was going to sail the world from south to north, he’d follow her. Instead, she suggests, “Speaking of better, why don’t we take a weekend trip? It’s cold here, and we could be warm at the beach.”

The town Quỳnh drives them to, is indeed warmer than Paris. She books a villa that reminds her of one of Nicky’s because of its blue and white tiling. Booker’s never seen that home, and he wonders if it hurt too much to bring someone new there when Nicky could remember her so clearly in this space – a space they could summon the memory of Quỳnh, since neither of them dreamt of her.

They go shopping, and Booker’s surprised when she insists he buy a swimsuit as well. She tosses a tiny Speedo at him. “You’ll complete my look,” she jokes. “You can look like my kept man.” Booker doesn’t fully get the jest himself, but he knows Andy would’ve loved it.

The next day, they go to the beach. They read on their blankets, and she indulges him when he insists they both use sunscreen. When she smooths her hair to the front, allowing him to rub the sunscreen onto her back, he realizes how little he’s touched her. Bare skin has an intimacy all its own. It’s not sexual per se; he and the others have wiped shit, blood, and other muck off one another. But he’s never touched Quỳnh after violence, only in these domestic moments.

Eventually, she bookmarks her page and steps to the shore. He watches carefully, and when she lets the waves lap her knees, he follows her.

“Are you…” he’s not sure if there’s a good way to say this, “going in?”

“Yes,” she says, with a pinched look to her face.

“Did you… It’s okay to be afraid. I died by hanging, and it took me a long time to look at rope without that flash of fear.”

The corner of her mouth twitches up, and the wind blows her hair. “I can hold my breath a long, long time. Don’t worry if I take awhile to come back. I will, you know.” Despite her pensive look, she winks at him. And then she dives in.

He waits for her in the ankle-deep water. She takes long enough he begins to worry, but he sees her surface far in the distance, then plunge back under. When she at last emerges close to shore, standing in the waist-deep surf, he goes out to meet her.

She wraps wet arms around him. “I wanted to know if I could love the sea again, having hated it so long.”

“Ah,” he replies. “Can you?”

“Yes,” she says, “yes.”

They walk home, and once they shower, they throw a towel over the couch in the living room and sit there. Together and naked, they look out at the clear sea and blue water.

She stretches her arms along the back of the couch and asks, “Why do you keep casting me in the role of avenger?”

He thinks back to the book he gave her. “We left you; you should be angry.”

She shakes her head. “That’s your guilt. You and Andy have painted yourselves in it long enough. I don’t need it and I don’t need to. I gave all of mine back to the sea. You need to find someway to let go of that. Have you tried sex?”

Booker groans. “That’s what Andy said. Did she learn it from you?”

“Works for Andy,” she shrugs. “Joe has his art, Nicky cooks. Does he still over salt things?”

“Over salt? He under salts it!” Quỳnh’s mouth crimps in a way that suggests she thinks he’s full of shit.

“They call you Booker because you like to read. So read. Not just what you think you should to be better, but read about things that feel good. Read things that show you not just who you are, but who you want to be.”

“I’m not even sure where to begin,” he admits. “How do I find my way out?”

“I have a book about that. Would you like to read it?”

“Yes, please.”

She pads to the bedroom, and brings back a slender book for him. He opens it, and she opens a yoga video on Youtube. “I used to be limber,” she says poker-faced. “You never know when being flexible is handy.” He’s not sure if she means for sex, fighting, or crime, so he turns the page and reads.

The rest of the week is a blur of sand, salt, and trying different foods. Quỳnh manages to touch her toes, and Booker finishes the little book.

“I get it,” he states. “I can choose to love in a different way. I can love something other than my misery. Like Andy’s trying.” Quỳnh waits out his silence, stirring her bouillabaisse, so he lets his question trip off his tongue. “That’s the way out. Is… that what you thought of, all those years?”

Quỳnh is silent for a moment. “Did I think these exact thoughts while I was gone? No. But I read this, and I knew it was true. It helped me understand the shape of my thoughts. Andy promised me we would be together until the end, and she –” Quỳnh hugs herself, and Booker thinks she would not welcome his touch, so he does not offer it. “Andy was just as lost as I was. We are two halves of a kite; it is a choice we made; so when we drown, or when we love, we do that together too.”

“It still feels like love, even after all this time?”

Quỳnh huffs. “I have a memory of love. Who both of us are now are different. We are strangers now, people in love with a ghost. It is easy to love a ghost. It’s harder to love a person. When we meet again, we can decide if now is when we part ways, or if we will go together once again, and learn to live together again too.

“But before that, I need to learn to breathe again.”

“Me, too,” he admits. Quỳnh might not want to be touched, but he does. He stands to her side, and nudges her hand with his. She takes it, holds him loosely, as she stirs in the salt. Needing to lighten the mood, he asks one more question, “Hey, can I taste it to make sure you salted it right?”

Her eyes gleam, and it turns out it’s not the salt he needs to worry about, but the heat.

“She remembers Giang’s hand in hers, remembers running through corridors. Remembers that, in the midst of bleak despair, she found the way out for both of them.

That’s what matters.”

--Aliette de Bodard’s Fireheart Tiger