So I'd apologize for taking almost a week, but this ended up being much longer than expected so here it is. :) Thanks so much for all your kind words. (And yes, when it's done I will put it up on AO3.)
**
It’s nice to be in a city again.
It’s been a while – several years, perhaps? – since they visited one large enough to really feel like a city to Yusuf, who is perhaps biased as a dyed-in-the-wool son of merchants. It’s been even longer since it was this large without causing some kind of worry or other to twist through his spine and intestines and make the press of humanity or the noise and bustle of the market or the hundreds of people one passed on the street into a threat instead of something purely to be enjoyed. Was it in al-Qahirah, where he was finally less worried Nicolò would start murdering people or knife him for his possessions and disappear into a crowd before he revived, and more worried he would just… disappear into a crowd, never to be seen again?
That was years ago now, but it’s strange to think about.
Somehow, it is less strange to think that he used to be afraid one of them would have a public accident, be run down by a horse or fall off some height, and be seen reviving by a large group of people who would do miscellaneous terrible things in reaction. Of course, that in itself makes him feel strange. How many times can it be strange that something is not strange, he considers, until it ceases to mean anything but that you have crawled up your own ass? Probably at least two or three more levels.
Nicolò is, in fact, lagging behind again, but Yusuf is not really even concerned they will be inadvertently separated. They have been recommended an inn, and even if they did somehow lose track of each other, they could meet there. Still.
“Nicolino, anyone would think you object to bathhouses and real beds,” he turns to say, but trails off, because Nicolò isn’t just walking too slowly – he has stopped at least ten meters back and set down his pack. It looks as if he was going through it, but he’s not doing anything now, just staring at it, or maybe at his feet. Yusuf retraces his steps partway, but stops when Nicolò raises his head. There is pure agony in his face that hasn’t been there in years. Yusuf wants to go to him, to help him, but it brings so much memory of pain and resentment and anger rushing back that he cannot even move.
“Yusuf,” Nicolò says miserably. “I have been robbed.”
For a moment, Yusuf just blinks. “You have been… what?”
“It must have happened in the market,” Nicolò continues, forcing the words out almost reluctantly. “I had my purse on me and… I must – I must not have noticed –”
“You were robbed?” Yusuf repeats.
Nicolò’s eyes flash for a moment, but apparently he is too guilty and dejected to bother getting annoyed.
“Why were you going through your pack, if you were carrying your purse?” And why were you carrying it on you as you travel through a city full of cutpurses and thieves? he wants to ask, but doesn’t. (It’s possible it’s not entirely fair; Yusuf himself had stopped to buy tangerines.)
Nicolò sighs, shoulders slumping. “I hoped I had… remembered wrongly. That perhaps it was still in my pack.” He shrugs. “It was foolish.”
“I cannot believe you were robbed.”
“Yusuf…”
“How?” Yusuf inquires of a pedestrian. The man widens his eyes as if to say oh, a lunatic and continues walking. “Nicolò is careful with money. He is cautious in strange places. He is calm and watchful and not easily rattled –”
“Yusuf.”
“How,” Yusuf rounds on him once more, “were you possibly robbed? I cannot filch candied dates out of my own saddlebags at night without you having opinions at me.”
“Since you’re acknowledging it to be filching–” Nicolò takes a breath. “I don’t know. I’m not used to... cities like this.”
Yusuf frowns at him. They’ve been in any number of cities. He himself has never been to Genoa, but it is certainly… a city. “What in God’s name are you talking about? You never got robbed in Tarabulus or al-Qahirah.”
“I speak Arabic. My Persian isn’t any good. It’s… distracting.”
“What do you mean, distracting?”
“I don’t know! If I’d been paying proper attention, the money wouldn’t be gone now, and it is, so clearly I wasn’t. I’m sorry, Yusuf. I’m not used to being surrounded by people I can’t understand. It must have… taken up more of my attention than I realized.”
Something about this is still not quite right, but they’re perilously close to a quarrel, so Yusuf consciously relaxes, and says loftily, “An old man like you, one would think you’d had more diverse experiences.”
Nicolò does not look cheered, and the wide web of implications which Yusuf had been annoyed at individually come together suddenly and knock him firmly on his metaphorical rear like a complete and utter fool.
“The money,” he says. Nicolò nods, his face a picture of defeat.
“Yusuf…”
“Did you separate–”
“No,” Nicolò says.
No. Of course not. Why would anyone keep their savings somewhere safer than where they kept their spending money? What earthly reason would any sane adult have to take such ludicrous precautions with their money? It’s not as if it would prevent an enterprising thief from making a beggar out of them instead of merely embarrassing them when they try to buy baklava.
He’s about to say as much, but if the other man’s expressions are anything to go by, he can read it all on Yusuf’s face already. He doesn’t argue, just purses his lips bitterly and sighs.
Ordinarily, this would be a foolish mistake that Nicolò would be hearing about for months; Yusuf would pay for anything needed with his portion of their money, and maybe lord it a bit over his friend’s head that he was graciously providing dinner and lodgings and whatever else.
Ordinarily, Yusuf has not spent almost all of what they had left after travel expenses to buy anyone from slavery and set them up with a new life, necessitating the sale of his and his companion’s horses to keep them in funds. Funds which Nicolò has been carrying, because the disagreeable but not particularly hard-trading Pisan they’d sold them too had insisted on dealing with only him.
(Yusuf remembers being reluctant to cede the actual bargaining, but impressed by how much Nicolò had managed to get. That part seems like a particularly cruel joke.)
“The inn,” he says, trying almost as hard as he can not to sound mournful, and not really succeeding.
“I’m sorry, Yusuf,” Nicolò says, voice laden with regretful sincerity. “I know how much…”
He’s made no secret of how much he was looking forward to a few nights in a proper bed, so there’s no point in pretending this doesn’t hit hard. He has enough to ensure they won’t starve or have to sleep on the streets, but it’s ‘clean and the food is edible’ money, not ‘highly recommended khan in the middle of the city’ money.
“We can always stay here a little longer and work for our keep,” he says as cheerfully as possible. “And maybe on the way to Baghdad we’ll be attacked by bandits again.”
That makes the corner of Nicolò’s mouth twist, finally. It’s no compensation for this drastic change in their plans, but it’s something.
“Let’s hope they’re rich bandits.”
*
The room is smaller than anticipated.
The bed…
They went into this with the tacit understanding that Yusuf would get the bed, unless it was unexpectedly large, since he isn’t the one who lost all of their money, but now – he doesn’t know if he can fit on that bed. He doesn’t even know if he wants to.
Yusuf and Nicolò exchange a speaking look.
Finally, Nicolò sighs and steps properly into the room. “We did pay for it.”
“I paid for it.”
“And I will be paying for that for the rest of eternity,” Nicolò mutters. He sits cautiously on the bed. “Maybe…” When he relaxes, insofar as no longer holding himself rigidly upright, it begins to make alarming noises, and he stands up hurriedly.
“Maybe not,” Yusuf says.
Nicolò considers the bed for some time. Then he removes the mattress and lays it on the floor, before pushing the bedframe (rather too easily) into a corner.
“It’s clean,” he offers.
Everything in this place is, although it’s maybe the best that can be said for it.
Yusuf eyes the mattress distrustfully. It’s thin, but serviceable. Probably.
“I’ll bring up some water.” Nicolò pauses at the door. “Yusuf, you do know I am wretchedly sorry.”
Yusuf is too dispirited to be encouraging, but a lackluster reassurance feels harsher than anger. He shrugs and raises his eyebrows, what can you do, and tries not to look too devastated. In a few years, he knows, this will be an amusing anecdote. In four or five decades, it will probably be hilarious, joining incidents like the time Nicolò had tried to stab him and instead fallen directly into a river, the death caused by a horse lying down on him (all right, maybe he’s still a little sore over that, but it’s been forty years and Nicolò finds it very amusing), and the camel that wouldn’t stop eating Nicolò’s hair.
If only that made him feel better now.
Lording it over Nicolò won’t help matters. He could leverage the other man’s guilt, but he’ll only feel worse. When they reach Baghdad, he can enjoy a wealth of sly digs and lofty insistences that he carry the money, but at present he’d rather they make the best of a bad situation together.
To that end, Yusuf attempts to make them a more welcoming place to rest. The mattress is certainly not big enough to share, but it is at least long enough to make a head-rest they can both make use of. He spreads out their usual bedrolls out of a sense of finality, even though it’s early in the day yet, and feels almost pleased with the result. It’s a depressing makeshift bed when compared to a proper caravanserai, but contrasted with sleeping on bare rock in the wind, or, for that matter, with two lonely, distrustful pallets meant for lying half-awake on while still clutching your sword-hilt, it’s not so bad.
*
It’s been a long time since Yusuf shared a bed with a comrade. In fact, as he thinks back, it might be decades, not only years. He doesn’t know what to think about that. It feels lonely, but he doesn’t know if it’s the solitary nights or the weight of his true age and what that means that causes this ache in his chest.
(There have been inns, of course, where he shared with Nicolò, but often they would be put in with others, cramped together with strangers in a way that is not the same at all as the comfortable way he used to share a pallet with a friend, or with one of his brothers.)
The two of them have always had their own space – first from abhorrence of any other prospect, then because their wary truce would not have survived the shock of too much intimacy, later still because one of them would always be on guard, and now… well, now it’s probably nothing but habit.
It would make putting on a show without touching each other rather difficult, he supposes, determinedly pushing away any bittersweet memories of curling up next to Faruq as a boy after whispering together half the night, or sharing a bedroll with Omran against the chill while travelling. That life isn’t his anymore, and if he’s going to reflect on it, better during the day, with distractions around him and the sun shining, than in the dark in a strange room with nothing to stop his mind from spiraling bleakly into eternity.
He rolls over onto his back, from which position he can view enough of Nicolò’s face that he sees the sigh before he hears it.
“Are you going to stop fidgeting at any time tonight?”
“Yes,” Yusuf answers, feigning affront.
“Good,” Nicolò says, throwing his arm across Yusuf as if to hold him still. It’s comfortable, so Yusuf doesn’t complain. He’s missed this, the warmth and companionship of lying close with another person. They shared a bed for the first time in, what was it, al-Qahirah? No, Tarabulus. It’s such a contrast to what came before that he can’t help smiling.
It’s then, at that thought, that something which has been niggling at the back of Yusuf’s mind all day comes clear. Staring into the dark, he says, “You told me you hated Tarabulus because you could barely understand the Arabic people spoke there.”
“What about it?”
“Why is this different from that? You know some Persian.”
“I do not have your facility with languages, Yusuf.” There’s a smile in Nicolò’s voice. “My ability after a set amount of time and teaching – patient though it may be – is not equal to what yours would be after the same.”
This is, perhaps, fair.
“But surely the streets of Tarabulus would have been just as distracting to you, and you were not robbed there.”
Nicolò sighs. “Perhaps I was lucky, Yusuf.”
“Nicolò…”
After a moment, he says very quietly, “It was different in Tarabulus because I was not the outsider.”
There is absolutely no way for Yusuf to parse this absurd statement, but Nicolò doesn’t make him ask. He draws a shuddering breath and continues, “When you’re stupid enough and arrogant enough to think the world is made for people like you, you can go anywhere in the world and the people around you will still be the foreigners, not you yourself.
“By the time I was no longer so young and so… foolish, I was quite used to Ifriqiya. I didn’t feel a stranger there.”
The word foolish has never encompassed so much quiet and unremarkable condemnation.
“Such things are not best contemplated in the dark,” Yusuf responds, more gently than he had anticipated.
Nicolò takes a breath that might be a poor attempt at a laugh, or might be him biting back tears. He rests his chin on Yusuf’s shoulder. “My world is much less dark with you in it.”
Give An Inch (Fall A Mile): Joe/Nicky, Moving Goalposts (5a/?)
**
It’s nice to be in a city again.
It’s been a while – several years, perhaps? – since they visited one large enough to really feel like a city to Yusuf, who is perhaps biased as a dyed-in-the-wool son of merchants. It’s been even longer since it was this large without causing some kind of worry or other to twist through his spine and intestines and make the press of humanity or the noise and bustle of the market or the hundreds of people one passed on the street into a threat instead of something purely to be enjoyed. Was it in al-Qahirah, where he was finally less worried Nicolò would start murdering people or knife him for his possessions and disappear into a crowd before he revived, and more worried he would just… disappear into a crowd, never to be seen again?
That was years ago now, but it’s strange to think about.
Somehow, it is less strange to think that he used to be afraid one of them would have a public accident, be run down by a horse or fall off some height, and be seen reviving by a large group of people who would do miscellaneous terrible things in reaction. Of course, that in itself makes him feel strange. How many times can it be strange that something is not strange, he considers, until it ceases to mean anything but that you have crawled up your own ass? Probably at least two or three more levels.
Nicolò is, in fact, lagging behind again, but Yusuf is not really even concerned they will be inadvertently separated. They have been recommended an inn, and even if they did somehow lose track of each other, they could meet there. Still.
“Nicolino, anyone would think you object to bathhouses and real beds,” he turns to say, but trails off, because Nicolò isn’t just walking too slowly – he has stopped at least ten meters back and set down his pack. It looks as if he was going through it, but he’s not doing anything now, just staring at it, or maybe at his feet. Yusuf retraces his steps partway, but stops when Nicolò raises his head. There is pure agony in his face that hasn’t been there in years. Yusuf wants to go to him, to help him, but it brings so much memory of pain and resentment and anger rushing back that he cannot even move.
“Yusuf,” Nicolò says miserably. “I have been robbed.”
For a moment, Yusuf just blinks. “You have been… what?”
“It must have happened in the market,” Nicolò continues, forcing the words out almost reluctantly. “I had my purse on me and… I must – I must not have noticed –”
“You were robbed?” Yusuf repeats.
Nicolò’s eyes flash for a moment, but apparently he is too guilty and dejected to bother getting annoyed.
“Why were you going through your pack, if you were carrying your purse?” And why were you carrying it on you as you travel through a city full of cutpurses and thieves? he wants to ask, but doesn’t. (It’s possible it’s not entirely fair; Yusuf himself had stopped to buy tangerines.)
Nicolò sighs, shoulders slumping. “I hoped I had… remembered wrongly. That perhaps it was still in my pack.” He shrugs. “It was foolish.”
“I cannot believe you were robbed.”
“Yusuf…”
“How?” Yusuf inquires of a pedestrian. The man widens his eyes as if to say oh, a lunatic and continues walking. “Nicolò is careful with money. He is cautious in strange places. He is calm and watchful and not easily rattled –”
“Yusuf.”
“How,” Yusuf rounds on him once more, “were you possibly robbed? I cannot filch candied dates out of my own saddlebags at night without you having opinions at me.”
“Since you’re acknowledging it to be filching–” Nicolò takes a breath. “I don’t know. I’m not used to... cities like this.”
Yusuf frowns at him. They’ve been in any number of cities. He himself has never been to Genoa, but it is certainly… a city. “What in God’s name are you talking about? You never got robbed in Tarabulus or al-Qahirah.”
“I speak Arabic. My Persian isn’t any good. It’s… distracting.”
“What do you mean, distracting?”
“I don’t know! If I’d been paying proper attention, the money wouldn’t be gone now, and it is, so clearly I wasn’t. I’m sorry, Yusuf. I’m not used to being surrounded by people I can’t understand. It must have… taken up more of my attention than I realized.”
Something about this is still not quite right, but they’re perilously close to a quarrel, so Yusuf consciously relaxes, and says loftily, “An old man like you, one would think you’d had more diverse experiences.”
Nicolò does not look cheered, and the wide web of implications which Yusuf had been annoyed at individually come together suddenly and knock him firmly on his metaphorical rear like a complete and utter fool.
“The money,” he says. Nicolò nods, his face a picture of defeat.
“Yusuf…”
“Did you separate–”
“No,” Nicolò says.
No. Of course not. Why would anyone keep their savings somewhere safer than where they kept their spending money? What earthly reason would any sane adult have to take such ludicrous precautions with their money? It’s not as if it would prevent an enterprising thief from making a beggar out of them instead of merely embarrassing them when they try to buy baklava.
He’s about to say as much, but if the other man’s expressions are anything to go by, he can read it all on Yusuf’s face already. He doesn’t argue, just purses his lips bitterly and sighs.
Ordinarily, this would be a foolish mistake that Nicolò would be hearing about for months; Yusuf would pay for anything needed with his portion of their money, and maybe lord it a bit over his friend’s head that he was graciously providing dinner and lodgings and whatever else.
Ordinarily, Yusuf has not spent almost all of what they had left after travel expenses to buy anyone from slavery and set them up with a new life, necessitating the sale of his and his companion’s horses to keep them in funds. Funds which Nicolò has been carrying, because the disagreeable but not particularly hard-trading Pisan they’d sold them too had insisted on dealing with only him.
(Yusuf remembers being reluctant to cede the actual bargaining, but impressed by how much Nicolò had managed to get. That part seems like a particularly cruel joke.)
“The inn,” he says, trying almost as hard as he can not to sound mournful, and not really succeeding.
“I’m sorry, Yusuf,” Nicolò says, voice laden with regretful sincerity. “I know how much…”
He’s made no secret of how much he was looking forward to a few nights in a proper bed, so there’s no point in pretending this doesn’t hit hard. He has enough to ensure they won’t starve or have to sleep on the streets, but it’s ‘clean and the food is edible’ money, not ‘highly recommended khan in the middle of the city’ money.
“We can always stay here a little longer and work for our keep,” he says as cheerfully as possible. “And maybe on the way to Baghdad we’ll be attacked by bandits again.”
That makes the corner of Nicolò’s mouth twist, finally. It’s no compensation for this drastic change in their plans, but it’s something.
“Let’s hope they’re rich bandits.”
*
The room is smaller than anticipated.
The bed…
They went into this with the tacit understanding that Yusuf would get the bed, unless it was unexpectedly large, since he isn’t the one who lost all of their money, but now – he doesn’t know if he can fit on that bed. He doesn’t even know if he wants to.
Yusuf and Nicolò exchange a speaking look.
Finally, Nicolò sighs and steps properly into the room. “We did pay for it.”
“I paid for it.”
“And I will be paying for that for the rest of eternity,” Nicolò mutters. He sits cautiously on the bed. “Maybe…” When he relaxes, insofar as no longer holding himself rigidly upright, it begins to make alarming noises, and he stands up hurriedly.
“Maybe not,” Yusuf says.
Nicolò considers the bed for some time. Then he removes the mattress and lays it on the floor, before pushing the bedframe (rather too easily) into a corner.
“It’s clean,” he offers.
Everything in this place is, although it’s maybe the best that can be said for it.
Yusuf eyes the mattress distrustfully. It’s thin, but serviceable. Probably.
“I’ll bring up some water.” Nicolò pauses at the door. “Yusuf, you do know I am wretchedly sorry.”
Yusuf is too dispirited to be encouraging, but a lackluster reassurance feels harsher than anger. He shrugs and raises his eyebrows, what can you do, and tries not to look too devastated. In a few years, he knows, this will be an amusing anecdote. In four or five decades, it will probably be hilarious, joining incidents like the time Nicolò had tried to stab him and instead fallen directly into a river, the death caused by a horse lying down on him (all right, maybe he’s still a little sore over that, but it’s been forty years and Nicolò finds it very amusing), and the camel that wouldn’t stop eating Nicolò’s hair.
If only that made him feel better now.
Lording it over Nicolò won’t help matters. He could leverage the other man’s guilt, but he’ll only feel worse. When they reach Baghdad, he can enjoy a wealth of sly digs and lofty insistences that he carry the money, but at present he’d rather they make the best of a bad situation together.
To that end, Yusuf attempts to make them a more welcoming place to rest. The mattress is certainly not big enough to share, but it is at least long enough to make a head-rest they can both make use of. He spreads out their usual bedrolls out of a sense of finality, even though it’s early in the day yet, and feels almost pleased with the result. It’s a depressing makeshift bed when compared to a proper caravanserai, but contrasted with sleeping on bare rock in the wind, or, for that matter, with two lonely, distrustful pallets meant for lying half-awake on while still clutching your sword-hilt, it’s not so bad.
*
It’s been a long time since Yusuf shared a bed with a comrade. In fact, as he thinks back, it might be decades, not only years. He doesn’t know what to think about that. It feels lonely, but he doesn’t know if it’s the solitary nights or the weight of his true age and what that means that causes this ache in his chest.
(There have been inns, of course, where he shared with Nicolò, but often they would be put in with others, cramped together with strangers in a way that is not the same at all as the comfortable way he used to share a pallet with a friend, or with one of his brothers.)
The two of them have always had their own space – first from abhorrence of any other prospect, then because their wary truce would not have survived the shock of too much intimacy, later still because one of them would always be on guard, and now… well, now it’s probably nothing but habit.
It would make putting on a show without touching each other rather difficult, he supposes, determinedly pushing away any bittersweet memories of curling up next to Faruq as a boy after whispering together half the night, or sharing a bedroll with Omran against the chill while travelling. That life isn’t his anymore, and if he’s going to reflect on it, better during the day, with distractions around him and the sun shining, than in the dark in a strange room with nothing to stop his mind from spiraling bleakly into eternity.
He rolls over onto his back, from which position he can view enough of Nicolò’s face that he sees the sigh before he hears it.
“Are you going to stop fidgeting at any time tonight?”
“Yes,” Yusuf answers, feigning affront.
“Good,” Nicolò says, throwing his arm across Yusuf as if to hold him still. It’s comfortable, so Yusuf doesn’t complain. He’s missed this, the warmth and companionship of lying close with another person. They shared a bed for the first time in, what was it, al-Qahirah? No, Tarabulus. It’s such a contrast to what came before that he can’t help smiling.
It’s then, at that thought, that something which has been niggling at the back of Yusuf’s mind all day comes clear. Staring into the dark, he says, “You told me you hated Tarabulus because you could barely understand the Arabic people spoke there.”
“What about it?”
“Why is this different from that? You know some Persian.”
“I do not have your facility with languages, Yusuf.” There’s a smile in Nicolò’s voice. “My ability after a set amount of time and teaching – patient though it may be – is not equal to what yours would be after the same.”
This is, perhaps, fair.
“But surely the streets of Tarabulus would have been just as distracting to you, and you were not robbed there.”
Nicolò sighs. “Perhaps I was lucky, Yusuf.”
“Nicolò…”
After a moment, he says very quietly, “It was different in Tarabulus because I was not the outsider.”
There is absolutely no way for Yusuf to parse this absurd statement, but Nicolò doesn’t make him ask. He draws a shuddering breath and continues, “When you’re stupid enough and arrogant enough to think the world is made for people like you, you can go anywhere in the world and the people around you will still be the foreigners, not you yourself.
“By the time I was no longer so young and so… foolish, I was quite used to Ifriqiya. I didn’t feel a stranger there.”
The word foolish has never encompassed so much quiet and unremarkable condemnation.
“Such things are not best contemplated in the dark,” Yusuf responds, more gently than he had anticipated.
Nicolò takes a breath that might be a poor attempt at a laugh, or might be him biting back tears. He rests his chin on Yusuf’s shoulder. “My world is much less dark with you in it.”