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& i have built nothing for you that can survive it by paigian
Fandoms: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
16 Sep 2024
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Summary
Nicky is…unfathomable. Unfuckwithable. A sea wall with sea green eyes. No great incursion had shored up against it and won; no sinkhole could collapse it. When they first met (under less than desirable circumstances, mind you), before he knew anything about Nicky, Joe could intuit he was a dangerous human being just from the self-assured way he carried his body around, like it hadn’t ever failed him.
He also delights in telling people no in a way that’s only noticeable by the slightest uptick of his mouth or crinkle at his eye. He is tacit and serious about a lot of things, the mission, their (relative) safety, their role in the universe. Sometimes he sits down like he’s been holding the world on those big, broad shoulders of his, and his under-eyes are constantly bruised, like he doesn’t ever sleep well.
But then, out of nowhere, he’ll do something totally unexpected, like laugh at one of Joe’s terrible jokes, or place an atrocious bet against Booker sans prompt, or agree to do something fuckstupid just because Joe asked him at the right moment.
In which Joe's been immortal for six months; a long stakeout with Nicky provides him with an opportunity to reflect.
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christ, hold me like a knife by paigian for yusufsmoon
Fandoms: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
03 Jul 2024
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“Why did you do that?”
It’s not a question Nicolo had been expecting, mostly because the answer seemed so obvious to him, the reasoning so sacrosanct, that having to put it into words felt somewhat ridiculous.
“He touched you. You did not want him to.” The tilt of his head makes the blood on his face run down to his jaw.
“Of course I didn’t want him to but— Nicolo.”
His name, a blow. The rest of Yusuf’s sentence is lost to the ringing in Nicolo’s ears as he tries to recover from it. What would it take for him to understand that Nicolo would do anything — endure every injury, bury any body, cross the desert a thousand times — for him?
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"The voice on the overhead speaker announces that the train will arrive in two minutes. Joe closes his phone and scratches at his beard, looking around the cool blue morning. Joe could sleep in for another hour and take the express train, but he’d rather sit for a longer, quieter commute than stand in a packed carriage.
It’s definitely not because this is the same train that the hot dad with his adorable baby takes a few days a week. No matter what Booker and Nile say. It really is a nicer commute, even if pre-crush Joe would rather die than get up earlier than he needs to."
Or, Joe is a library tech with a long commute, and Nicky is a permanently tired single dad.
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It’s sometime in the afternoon the following day when Joe wakes for the fourth or so time. For a few moments he doesn’t open his eyes, trying to decide if he’ll let himself drift off again. He can just about hear the market, the distant sounds of people and movement barely reaching him outside the hotel grounds.
A stray cat is curled up on the rug in a patch of sunlight; Joe huffs, following her lead and rolling towards the window, crow’s feet deepening as he squints for the brightness in his eyes. He reaches awkwardly to stroke her ears, letting her sniff his fingers before opening his palm for her to lift her little head into.
Outside, oranges weigh down their branches, a sighing tree in the warm breeze making the sun blink drowsily between green-leaved eyelids. Below open shutters, he can hear Nicky’s voice, speaking to someone in Darija. It draws closer as he walks through the courtyard; Joe can’t hear another voice. A phone call, probably. Andromache, certainly.
Marrakesh will always smell like oranges.
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"I have a question for you,” Nicolo starts.
Yusuf, who was busy trying to get some sleep before Nicolo broke the silence, holds in a sigh.
Rolling onto his side, cheek resting upon his palm, Yusuf meets his eyes, ocean licked by fire. The flame of their camp flickers in the breeze, making them a firestorm of rolling waves.
“If you are going to ask me about Muhammad's cow again, please save it for when I am awake enough to stab you for it,” he says lightly, only half-joking.
In which Joe and Nicky talk about poetry instead of their feelings.
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there'll be feasting and dancing in jerusalem next year by paigian
Fandoms: The Old Guard (Movie 2020), The City We Became - N.K. Jemisin
09 Mar 2023
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Summary
Nile floods the city.
Every single neighborhood baby, from Edison Park to Hegewisch, from the East Side to O’Hare, she stands in the Heart of Chicago and she fills this beautiful city with herself. She becomes Chicago; her face a mosaic from underneath the L tracks, her legs as sturdy as John Hancock, planting her feet in the ground as if to say: you won’t shake us.
Her arms are the Dan Ryan and Kennedy Expressways; hundreds of thousands of pissed off commuters scream in her lungs as she raises the ground and brings every last inch of her home to life.
(Yes, even the parts that don’t want her. Especially those parts.)
In which Nile becomes a city, fights off an interdimensional Lovecraftian horror, and falls in love. Not necessarily in that order.
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With her artificial eye, Andy scans them again (she’s not sure when that will stop being strange, but Copley said she’d get used to it eventually), and again each one returns the same name: Nicolo di Genova. Eyes throat shoulders chest arms hips legs, all the same, from the mousy brown of his hair that he’s been growing out, the strands just brushing his shoulders, to the gentle arch of his Achilles’ heel. Indistinguishable but for the ring one of them is wearing on his hand.
Nicolo di Genova, in the plural -s. Forever an inflection.
After Nile becomes immortal at almost the same moment Andy loses hers, and Booker betrays them to a lifetime on Merrick's Pharma ship, an experiment with alien technology attempts to replicate Nicky's immortality.
It succeeds, with unprecendented outcomes for them all.
Or, a musing on home, identity, and memory, masquerading as a sci-fi/TOG fusion fic.
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the rest of you, the best of you (honey belongs to me) by paigian
Fandoms: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
24 Oct 2022
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Sleep-warm and drowsy, Joe hums quietly to himself, like he’s considering his own arousal. It sits un-urgent and low in his gut. A faint suggestion of want, really; but it’s been long enough since he felt it that Joe’s heart is thin and beats rabbit-quick.
Are you with me now? You feel very far away.
(Marrakesh was a lifetime ago. The steady movement of Nicky’s ribs against the inside of Joe’s thighs; the memories they drew out of each other’s mouths between hushed conversation. Now replaced by the hungry rot of time catching up to Andy and the open wound of Booker’s betrayal, still unhealed along her side.)
His left leg draws up, knee bending to give himself some room. A shiver sends goosebumps over his ribs.
Joe breathes.
After London, reeling from Andy's mortality and Booker's betrayal, Joe asks Nicky to take him away for a while. A sequel to 'felled by you, held by you'
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you made a fool of death with your beauty by paigian
Fandoms: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
03 Sep 2022
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Atef bandages the scrape along Yusuf’s knee, patting it gently with his hand when he’s done before scooching back to place everything carefully back into the little box.
When he’s done, his eyes flick to the fig seeds drying on Yusuf’s sleeve.
“I’m going to make you a deal,” he says then. “You can pick as many figs as you want, as long as you pick an equal amount for me. I cannot climb as high to reach the figs at the top anymore, so in this you’ll be doing me a favour at least.”
Yusuf goes to shake his head, fear striking his heart.
“I will never climb again,” he swears, with all the finality and graveness of a young boy who will certainly climb again.
A look into some of the ways Yusuf has dodged, (narrowly) avoided, or out-smarted death in his long life – or, a slightly exaggerated but mostly true account of the times Yusuf thought he would die, but didn’t.
Series
- Part 2 of you and me and the olives
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Joe’s breath knocks on the bones of his apartment. Loneliness echoes back to him with white knuckles.
There’s a ghost haunting this place; there’s love haunting his body.
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“I’m trying to help,” Nicolo insists, “I spotted you not far from this cove two months ago, and then again this week. I doubt I’m the only one.”
“So, you decided to trap me, to warn me that others might want to do the same?”
Nicolo burns hotter still. He opens his mouth, before closing it again.
Laughter echoes in the cave, brittle and hollow. “That is, quite possibly, the stupidest plan I’ve ever heard.”
Nicolo resists the urge to press his lips together in a thin line, shame twinging in his throat. The sea crashes against the shoreline beyond the cove, a dull roaring in his ears.
Nicolo captures a Mer off the coast of Genoa. It does not go the way he'd planned.
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through the pain (i always tell the truth) by paigian
Fandoms: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
30 Mar 2022
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“Why did you barge in here in the first place? Is something wrong?”
Oh. Nicolo’s face flames. “I thought you needed my assistance.”
“Sorry?”
“Not with that-” Nicolo makes an aborted hand gesture towards Yusuf before running his fingers through his hair. “I thought you were in danger,” he finishes lamely, settling his hand on his hip.
“Why on earth would you think-”
“Because it sounded like you were hurt!”
“Really, Nicolo, this is ridiculous-”
In which Yusuf makes some interesting sounds when he's in pain, and Nicolo struggles to keep his chill. Misunderstandings ensue.
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& every time you touched me I hummed like a lyre by paigian
Fandoms: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
28 Mar 2022
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Summary
Yusuf breathes.
A raw scrape of a thing, but it’s breathing nonetheless. His shoulders rise and fall unsteadily with each inevitable one, knees pressed to the ground. Lungs spasming on a twinge of pain running down his spine, radiating from where he’s reaching, clawing, digging; making a wound of himself-
He barely resists the urge to flinch away when he feels a warm hand settle on his shoulder. Above that useless flesh, knitting together just underneath his left shoulder blade.
(The quiver of an arrow, its shaft broken, lies just off to his side. They’d gotten away, at least. They were safe.)
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the deaths of nicolo di genova, in ascending order of sexiness and descending order of actual dying by paigian
Fandoms: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
09 Feb 2022
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They fall together, curled around each other’s figures, blood pouring out around them, until it becomes impossible to tell whose it belonged to. The fight continues on around their lifeless bodies while the sun burns and the city walls bear witness. What’s two more lives lost? What did their deaths mean? A better question: what did it take?
Night falls like a hush, washing over the fallen. Outside the wall is still and quiet. And then it isn’t.
Nicolo di Genova is dead. And then he isn’t.
Series
- Part 1 of you and me and the olives
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tell me again what it means to find god in your sock drawers by paigian
Fandoms: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
25 Jan 2022
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Summary
He just looks so delicate, is the thing.
Joe doesn’t wear this look very often; Nicky loves and aches and desires for him in all forms, in all ways, but he would be lying if he said he doesn’t have a soft spot for the way Joe’s hair curls at his ears, and the feel of his beard under Nicky’s hands or between his thighs.
Still, sometimes it’s different. Usually longer, or beard more closely trimmed – but occasionally, rarely, Joe does this.
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In the here and now (whatever that means), Joe points out in English, “You could’ve stayed in bed, you know.”
Nicky rolls his eyes. “I wouldn’t have slept without you, and you wouldn’t have gotten out of bed either, if that were the case. Besides, what does our good friend here say? Misery loves company?”
(Has Booker said that yet? Is this just another memory he’s already living inside of?)
Before he can stop himself, Booker opens his mouth and blurts out, “have you two ever had a threesome?”
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there's an ache in you (put there by the ache in me) by paigian
Fandoms: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
18 Dec 2021
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Joe has been back home for less than a week when he sees Nicky in the cereal aisle of the local supermarket.
Nicky, who he hasn’t heard from in six months.
Nicky, who told Joe between lingering kisses that he’d call when he came to port, as he’s done every time he’s set off for the last ten years, so they could see each other again.
Nicky, who Joe’s been irretrievably in love with since he was seventeen.
Nicky who is leaning on a cane clutched in his right hand.
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Thighs pressed together, Nicky feels Joe’s thickening cock against his own, nestled in tight briefs and held in place, and it makes him throb. Joe makes a noise as Nicky presses their hips together, hard enough that it rubs and hurts against Nicky’s pubic bone. It only makes him roll forward, kissing along Joe’s jaw, reaching down to slip his hand in the back pocket of Joe’s jeans and squeezing, drawing him closer still.
Joe’s fingers slide underneath the strap along his hip, caressing the skin there, and Nicky shivers. He kisses Joe again, open-mouthed and messy.
“I can’t wait to feel you inside me.”
Nicky has to close his eyes, swallowing against the arousal burning through him. It’s too much, there’s too much he wants to do to Joe, with Joe, so turned on he’s shaking with it.
Series
- Part 1 of sense made intimate and aching
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"Nicky keeps his hunger quelled (felled) at the knees of fig leaves and unburdened light. Eased by time and love, it doesn’t ache the way it used to. Slowly now, it unpeels in him like a drowsy afternoon, rumbling underneath the earth of his body.
Joe’s hair and name is shorter these days; Nicky wraps the sounded softness of it around his mouth and fingers just the same. He’s currently got a hand tugging at those curls at the base of his neck. His teeth bite into Joe’s necklace dangling in the hot air between them, silver tongued and trying not to make too much sound."
A 'felled by you, held by you' epilogue.
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“You let him tie you up.”
Yusuf looks at him. “That wasn’t a question.”
Nicolo’s fist closes around the ribbon. “Why did you let him tie you up,” he clarifies.
“Because I like it,” Yusuf says simply. “It makes me feel good. It’s not something that I always want, but I haven’t been able to in some time, and if I go too long without it I get restless.”
Nicolo nods, before pausing. “He could have hurt you, though.”
Yusuf grins, “Sometimes that’s the point.”
“No, Yusuf,” Nicolo interrupts, dropping the ribbon on the bed. “He could have hurt you. What if he found out you cannot die whilst he- and he used that information against you?”
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A few years after becoming friends, Yusuf goes out seeking to scratch a particular itch, but finds the process impossibly complicated by immortality and constant travelling. Nicolo, ever-kind and attune to his friend's needs, offers to help. Porn and pining ensues.
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