Argh, I am sorry this took so long, but in my defence I had to redo a chunk of it and I spent most of last week trying to lock down a new place to live, so. I hope updates will come quickly(er) now, but I have to spend November moving, so no promises. (On the other hand, writing is an A+ way to procrastinate packing, so who knows?) Also, I did so much research on Italian/Tunisian/Iraqi food I would never ever eat or cook for this chapter (I hate eggplant and tomatoes and cheese and, like, most sauces, so that eliminates a lot of food all the time, also I can’t cook :P), so I hope it holds water and if not – idk, yell at me about it and I’ll fix it for the AO3 version. :)
In honour of a line I got distracted while writing and nearly butchered to all hell, this is officially 'the chapter where Nicky tries to keep his heart in his pants' (or maybe out of his pants, whichever)
***
This is a mistake.
The thought has been in Nicolò’s mind, been curled, sickly, in his gut, for days now, about very nearly everything.
It is a mistake to put so much work into making their new house suit Yusuf perfectly – not because doing something for Yusuf’s benefit could be wrong, not because he is not owed at least that much of an apology, but because Nicolò’s heart takes an unacceptable kind of pleasure in it.
It is a mistake to let Yusuf touch him, to let himself thrill under that unexpectedly gentle hand, more than a mistake to let it be what fills his mind as he falls away into bliss.
It is a mistake to reciprocate, to let everything in his heart spill over into his hands, the more so for being no longer mad with lust when he does it.
It is, clearly and obviously, a mistake to accept Yusuf’s patent revisionism and push the careful boundaries they’ve drawn this much farther.
Nicolò has always been strong-willed – not only in defiance of others, but in his governance of himself as well. He does not succumb to temptation weakly and reluctantly; always he has either weathered it, or chosen to indulge of his own consideration. In truth (and he confessed it time and again as a young man) he’d always felt a hint of contempt for men who bewailed their weakness even as they sinned. If you wish to avoid a headache, he’d said rather sharply to Ugo once, simply do not drink so much wine!
This… inability to hold himself to what he knows he should do, this constant slipping, like a child who begins to run down a hill, only to find he cannot keep from running faster and faster – it is not anything he is accustomed to, and it is alien and terrifying.
It is a mistake, to embrace this new and flimsy limit rather than trying to hew closer to the old one, and it is one he already knows he is going to make.
“You seem very solemn today,” Yusuf remarks, and Nicolò starts, unaware until this moment that he was not alone.
“I’ve just been thinking,” he says, trying to reorient himself. The light in the sky is weaker than it should be. How long has he been staring into the garden?
“Of?” Yusuf prods. He’s smiling to cover it, but there’s concern in the line of his shoulders.
“Nothing important,” Nicolò tells him, making an effort to shake off his gravity. “Any number of things. I didn’t mean to woolgather so long.”
“Since there is no supper, I shall make some, I suppose.” Yusuf sighs. “May God grant me a travelling companion who pulls his weight in the kitchen!”
“Inshallah,” Nicolò says, dry as a bone, and finds a guilty delight in Yusuf’s laughter.
He rises slowly to follow Yusuf into the kitchen, with the intention of (admittedly) undermining himself by perhaps lending a hand with some of the preparation. The matter occupying his mind follows him, though, haunting his thoughts and leaving him frustratingly aroused. He can break it down into analysis and recrimination all he wishes, but underneath will always be the idea of his hands on Yusuf’s chest, his fingers tracing the curve of Yusuf’s thighs, his lips on the back of Yusuf’s neck –
No, Nicolò tells himself firmly. No, not that.
He pulls his chair more closely to the table to continue slicing eggplant and tomatoes for the giambotta, or rather his own near equivalent. “Did you find that translation you wanted?”
“I did.” Yusuf frowns at the chickpeas. “I thought we had more of these.”
Nicolò makes a sympathetic noise and slices through another eggplant. He’s not really watching what he’s doing, but he’s made so many meals that it doesn’t really matter. (And the worst he can do is bleed on the food; any wound he could inflict this way will close in seconds.)
“It’s not as faithful as I expected,” Yusuf goes on. “Although I suppose he was trying to make it equally relevant to the original, when it was written? But some of the comparisons are awkward, and they’re not nearly as relevant now as they were fifty years ago, so it was a very fleeting accomplishment.”
Nicolò listens to him discuss the merits and pitfalls of trying to translate philosophical concepts in understandable versus technically correct language, feeling his heart swell in a very disconcerting way. It’s not, entirely, new, nor unexpected, but it is no longer possible to push the feeling aside and disguise it in the same trappings his innocent friendly affection used to wear.
It’s possible, he thinks, that he was doing that for longer than even he realized.
“That’s maybe a little more than necessary.”
Nicolò blinks, refocussing on his pile of eggplant to see that it is, in fact, larger than it should be by a noticeable margin.
“If I bore you…” Yusuf says, and Nicolò isn’t sure whether or not there’s hurt behind the teasing tone in his voice.
“You don’t think the philosophical terms were translated accurately, because the translator privileged ease of understanding over accuracy,” he says. “It was the task I was inattentive to.”
“Well, cut up some more tomatoes, I suppose,” Yusuf says easily. “And I’ll cook enough so we can make friends of our neighbours. If they complain for want of chickpeas I will tell them it is in the Genovese fashion.” He grins.
“I’m not sure it’s properly giambotta or moussaka anymore,” Nicolò observes, setting aside his excess of eggplant and returning to the tomatoes. “But I cannot imagine anyone complaining.”
“Such flattery.” Yusuf points a knife at him. “I see through your cunning plan.”
“If you want to be dramatic, you’re going to have to do better than that.” Nicolò considers the size of the knife. “That is much smaller than blades you’ve menaced me with in the past, and not small enough to be pitiful and provoke my sympathy. And if you wanted to be ridiculous about it, you should have used a spoon.”
“You’re trying to change the subject.”
“Ah, from my cunning plan. If hearing yourself named a competent cook is enough to ensnare you into making an effort more often, you have no one to blame but yourself. Be less praisehungry.”
“I never said what your plan was. Clearly, you have revealed yourself.”
Nicolò huffs a laugh. “Perhaps you are simply predictable, my friend.”
Yusuf feigns affront for a moment, but his smile is breaking through too much for it to be convincing.
For a moment, Nicolò’s world splits in two, so disparate are the emotions he’s experiencing. It’s as if half of him is still charmed and pleased by their nonsense, the easy comradery easing the sharp tension in his stomach – and the other half of him has blazed up in disgusted rage.
How could you be unsatisfied with this? it demands, throwing up a copy of the scene in front of him with everything in sharper relief: Yusuf’s smile, the cozy light of the kitchen, Nicolò’s own happiness. What kind of man sighs over a ruby because it is not a diamond? After everything, he is not enough? This is not enough?
You would risk it just in order to go to bed with him and then even that is not enough?
Yusuf has responded in kind to Nicolò’s teasing, so he raises his eyebrows and observes that plans are unnecessary when all he has to do to avoid cooking it to put it off until his companion is impatient for food, and when Yusuf is busy laughing, he lays his knife down carefully and pushes away the tomatoes.
“You’re distracted again,” Yusuf observes shrewdly. “If something is wrong –”
“No,” Nicolò answers swiftly. “No.” Leaving it at that would put a cowardly distance between them; worse, would be hurtful. He sighs. “I have been… thinking about old friends, lately. I cannot say why.” It’s true and it’s false.
“One never knows what will be a reminder.” Yusuf gazes thoughtfully out of the doorway, not really seeing. “I spent a week after we tangled with those horse thieves weeping for the sake of my mother in the night.”
This jars Nicolò severely. “You never told me that.” By the grace of God, it comes out more concerned than accusatory.
Yusuf shrugs. “We were not so close then.” He makes a gesture of concession, wearing the expression of an old man exasperated by his younger self. “And I suppose I did not wish to admit to it, for foolish reasons.”
“It’s nothing so poignant,” Nicolò tells him. “Only… it has been a long time since I thought of any of them. We parted ways, for various reasons, long before…” A short sweep of his hand glosses over those particular evils.
Of course, regardless of what he can or cannot say, he certainly knows why some of these people are on his mind: Ugo and Gianni have turned up in his thoughts lately because they are, like Leandro, former friends he no longer knew by the time he died.
And Leandro is on his mind because Nicolò is, in part, afraid of becoming him.
“Such things will come to mind,” Yusuf says sympathetically. “A bad parting?”
“Some of them.” Ugo had simply gotten married and slowly stopped coming by. “Some were… necessarily bad.” He grimaces, but leaves Gianni for another time. “I think sometimes… there are many things I should have done differently.”
Yusuf laughs a little. “That is the fate of the old, is it not?” He nudges Nicolò, to remind him more tomatoes are needed. “We look back on our youth and think Ah, what a fool I was. We look back on our middle years and think How obvious the mistake I was making, why did I not see it. You get older, you learn better.” He shrugs. “Besides, these things are easy to see looking back – not so when you are looking forward.”
Nicolò opens his mouth to say that in the grand scheme of their lives, he is sure they have not yet reached their middle years, but he stops himself. The thought of eternity is strange, and if he looks too closely at it, it grows so large as to nearly panic him – but after this much time, he can interact with it in passing untroubled. But Nicolò’s mother died in childbed, and his father before Nicolò was twenty; he was in truth never very fond of his brother, and his trade was only ever a way to make a living. For Yusuf, who had family yet living when he was forced into immortality, a life to return to, it is a different matter.
Instead, he says, “One of them cheated my brother in a deal, so I pushed him into the harbour. I can’t say I’m sorry for that, even if I would do things differently now.”
That provokes honest laughter. “It’s hard to imagine you doing something like that.” Yusuf grins. “I never thought you were so close to Pietro.”
“It was the principle of the thing.” Nicolò raises his eyebrows at the tomatoes, and when Yusuf nods he puts the knife down and sets the vegetables aside. “I went to get the money from him and he made me angry.”
“Ah.” Yusuf considers this a moment; he has, after all, seen Nicolò get truly angry. “And did you get it?”
“I had his purse in my hand when I pushed him in. The force was sufficient for it to part ways with his belt. But he was less inclined to be bosom companions afterwards.”
Yusuf chuckles again, but he regards Nicolò with an expression of mixed understanding and fondness that makes Nicolò’s heart beat with an alarming arrhythmia. “Neither were you, I suppose. I hope your brother appreciated it.”
“He did not.”
The side of Yusuf’s mouth ticks upward wryly, as if to say Of course. Somewhere, underneath the aching softness filling his chest, Nicolò can feel the same easy-going fondness he’s always felt in the face of such expressions – but it is so difficult to unearth, now, beneath what feels like an ocean of ferocious adoration. With an immense effort, he keeps his expression as it is, rather than revealing himself by schooling all emotion from his face, and makes a reasonable excuse about washing before dinner.
Give An Inch (Fall A Mile): Joe/Nicky, Moving Goalposts (6a/?)
In honour of a line I got distracted while writing and nearly butchered to all hell, this is officially 'the chapter where Nicky tries to keep his heart in his pants' (or maybe out of his pants, whichever)
***
This is a mistake.
The thought has been in Nicolò’s mind, been curled, sickly, in his gut, for days now, about very nearly everything.
It is a mistake to put so much work into making their new house suit Yusuf perfectly – not because doing something for Yusuf’s benefit could be wrong, not because he is not owed at least that much of an apology, but because Nicolò’s heart takes an unacceptable kind of pleasure in it.
It is a mistake to let Yusuf touch him, to let himself thrill under that unexpectedly gentle hand, more than a mistake to let it be what fills his mind as he falls away into bliss.
It is a mistake to reciprocate, to let everything in his heart spill over into his hands, the more so for being no longer mad with lust when he does it.
It is, clearly and obviously, a mistake to accept Yusuf’s patent revisionism and push the careful boundaries they’ve drawn this much farther.
Nicolò has always been strong-willed – not only in defiance of others, but in his governance of himself as well. He does not succumb to temptation weakly and reluctantly; always he has either weathered it, or chosen to indulge of his own consideration. In truth (and he confessed it time and again as a young man) he’d always felt a hint of contempt for men who bewailed their weakness even as they sinned. If you wish to avoid a headache, he’d said rather sharply to Ugo once, simply do not drink so much wine!
This… inability to hold himself to what he knows he should do, this constant slipping, like a child who begins to run down a hill, only to find he cannot keep from running faster and faster – it is not anything he is accustomed to, and it is alien and terrifying.
It is a mistake, to embrace this new and flimsy limit rather than trying to hew closer to the old one, and it is one he already knows he is going to make.
“You seem very solemn today,” Yusuf remarks, and Nicolò starts, unaware until this moment that he was not alone.
“I’ve just been thinking,” he says, trying to reorient himself. The light in the sky is weaker than it should be. How long has he been staring into the garden?
“Of?” Yusuf prods. He’s smiling to cover it, but there’s concern in the line of his shoulders.
“Nothing important,” Nicolò tells him, making an effort to shake off his gravity. “Any number of things. I didn’t mean to woolgather so long.”
“Since there is no supper, I shall make some, I suppose.” Yusuf sighs. “May God grant me a travelling companion who pulls his weight in the kitchen!”
“Inshallah,” Nicolò says, dry as a bone, and finds a guilty delight in Yusuf’s laughter.
He rises slowly to follow Yusuf into the kitchen, with the intention of (admittedly) undermining himself by perhaps lending a hand with some of the preparation. The matter occupying his mind follows him, though, haunting his thoughts and leaving him frustratingly aroused. He can break it down into analysis and recrimination all he wishes, but underneath will always be the idea of his hands on Yusuf’s chest, his fingers tracing the curve of Yusuf’s thighs, his lips on the back of Yusuf’s neck –
No, Nicolò tells himself firmly. No, not that.
He pulls his chair more closely to the table to continue slicing eggplant and tomatoes for the giambotta, or rather his own near equivalent. “Did you find that translation you wanted?”
“I did.” Yusuf frowns at the chickpeas. “I thought we had more of these.”
Nicolò makes a sympathetic noise and slices through another eggplant. He’s not really watching what he’s doing, but he’s made so many meals that it doesn’t really matter. (And the worst he can do is bleed on the food; any wound he could inflict this way will close in seconds.)
“It’s not as faithful as I expected,” Yusuf goes on. “Although I suppose he was trying to make it equally relevant to the original, when it was written? But some of the comparisons are awkward, and they’re not nearly as relevant now as they were fifty years ago, so it was a very fleeting accomplishment.”
Nicolò listens to him discuss the merits and pitfalls of trying to translate philosophical concepts in understandable versus technically correct language, feeling his heart swell in a very disconcerting way. It’s not, entirely, new, nor unexpected, but it is no longer possible to push the feeling aside and disguise it in the same trappings his innocent friendly affection used to wear.
It’s possible, he thinks, that he was doing that for longer than even he realized.
“That’s maybe a little more than necessary.”
Nicolò blinks, refocussing on his pile of eggplant to see that it is, in fact, larger than it should be by a noticeable margin.
“If I bore you…” Yusuf says, and Nicolò isn’t sure whether or not there’s hurt behind the teasing tone in his voice.
“You don’t think the philosophical terms were translated accurately, because the translator privileged ease of understanding over accuracy,” he says. “It was the task I was inattentive to.”
“Well, cut up some more tomatoes, I suppose,” Yusuf says easily. “And I’ll cook enough so we can make friends of our neighbours. If they complain for want of chickpeas I will tell them it is in the Genovese fashion.” He grins.
“I’m not sure it’s properly giambotta or moussaka anymore,” Nicolò observes, setting aside his excess of eggplant and returning to the tomatoes. “But I cannot imagine anyone complaining.”
“Such flattery.” Yusuf points a knife at him. “I see through your cunning plan.”
“If you want to be dramatic, you’re going to have to do better than that.” Nicolò considers the size of the knife. “That is much smaller than blades you’ve menaced me with in the past, and not small enough to be pitiful and provoke my sympathy. And if you wanted to be ridiculous about it, you should have used a spoon.”
“You’re trying to change the subject.”
“Ah, from my cunning plan. If hearing yourself named a competent cook is enough to ensnare you into making an effort more often, you have no one to blame but yourself. Be less praisehungry.”
“I never said what your plan was. Clearly, you have revealed yourself.”
Nicolò huffs a laugh. “Perhaps you are simply predictable, my friend.”
Yusuf feigns affront for a moment, but his smile is breaking through too much for it to be convincing.
For a moment, Nicolò’s world splits in two, so disparate are the emotions he’s experiencing. It’s as if half of him is still charmed and pleased by their nonsense, the easy comradery easing the sharp tension in his stomach – and the other half of him has blazed up in disgusted rage.
How could you be unsatisfied with this? it demands, throwing up a copy of the scene in front of him with everything in sharper relief: Yusuf’s smile, the cozy light of the kitchen, Nicolò’s own happiness. What kind of man sighs over a ruby because it is not a diamond? After everything, he is not enough? This is not enough?
You would risk it just in order to go to bed with him and then even that is not enough?
Yusuf has responded in kind to Nicolò’s teasing, so he raises his eyebrows and observes that plans are unnecessary when all he has to do to avoid cooking it to put it off until his companion is impatient for food, and when Yusuf is busy laughing, he lays his knife down carefully and pushes away the tomatoes.
“You’re distracted again,” Yusuf observes shrewdly. “If something is wrong –”
“No,” Nicolò answers swiftly. “No.” Leaving it at that would put a cowardly distance between them; worse, would be hurtful. He sighs. “I have been… thinking about old friends, lately. I cannot say why.” It’s true and it’s false.
“One never knows what will be a reminder.” Yusuf gazes thoughtfully out of the doorway, not really seeing. “I spent a week after we tangled with those horse thieves weeping for the sake of my mother in the night.”
This jars Nicolò severely. “You never told me that.” By the grace of God, it comes out more concerned than accusatory.
Yusuf shrugs. “We were not so close then.” He makes a gesture of concession, wearing the expression of an old man exasperated by his younger self. “And I suppose I did not wish to admit to it, for foolish reasons.”
“It’s nothing so poignant,” Nicolò tells him. “Only… it has been a long time since I thought of any of them. We parted ways, for various reasons, long before…” A short sweep of his hand glosses over those particular evils.
Of course, regardless of what he can or cannot say, he certainly knows why some of these people are on his mind: Ugo and Gianni have turned up in his thoughts lately because they are, like Leandro, former friends he no longer knew by the time he died.
And Leandro is on his mind because Nicolò is, in part, afraid of becoming him.
“Such things will come to mind,” Yusuf says sympathetically. “A bad parting?”
“Some of them.” Ugo had simply gotten married and slowly stopped coming by. “Some were… necessarily bad.” He grimaces, but leaves Gianni for another time. “I think sometimes… there are many things I should have done differently.”
Yusuf laughs a little. “That is the fate of the old, is it not?” He nudges Nicolò, to remind him more tomatoes are needed. “We look back on our youth and think Ah, what a fool I was. We look back on our middle years and think How obvious the mistake I was making, why did I not see it. You get older, you learn better.” He shrugs. “Besides, these things are easy to see looking back – not so when you are looking forward.”
Nicolò opens his mouth to say that in the grand scheme of their lives, he is sure they have not yet reached their middle years, but he stops himself. The thought of eternity is strange, and if he looks too closely at it, it grows so large as to nearly panic him – but after this much time, he can interact with it in passing untroubled. But Nicolò’s mother died in childbed, and his father before Nicolò was twenty; he was in truth never very fond of his brother, and his trade was only ever a way to make a living. For Yusuf, who had family yet living when he was forced into immortality, a life to return to, it is a different matter.
Instead, he says, “One of them cheated my brother in a deal, so I pushed him into the harbour. I can’t say I’m sorry for that, even if I would do things differently now.”
That provokes honest laughter. “It’s hard to imagine you doing something like that.” Yusuf grins. “I never thought you were so close to Pietro.”
“It was the principle of the thing.” Nicolò raises his eyebrows at the tomatoes, and when Yusuf nods he puts the knife down and sets the vegetables aside. “I went to get the money from him and he made me angry.”
“Ah.” Yusuf considers this a moment; he has, after all, seen Nicolò get truly angry. “And did you get it?”
“I had his purse in my hand when I pushed him in. The force was sufficient for it to part ways with his belt. But he was less inclined to be bosom companions afterwards.”
Yusuf chuckles again, but he regards Nicolò with an expression of mixed understanding and fondness that makes Nicolò’s heart beat with an alarming arrhythmia. “Neither were you, I suppose. I hope your brother appreciated it.”
“He did not.”
The side of Yusuf’s mouth ticks upward wryly, as if to say Of course. Somewhere, underneath the aching softness filling his chest, Nicolò can feel the same easy-going fondness he’s always felt in the face of such expressions – but it is so difficult to unearth, now, beneath what feels like an ocean of ferocious adoration. With an immense effort, he keeps his expression as it is, rather than revealing himself by schooling all emotion from his face, and makes a reasonable excuse about washing before dinner.