Fic: Nightmare (Comfortember)

[csi_sanders1129]

Title: Nightmare
Chapters: 1/1
Author:csi_sanders1129
Genre: Family. Drama.
Ratings: T
Word Count: 327
Pairings/Characters: Andy, Joe, Nicky, Booker, Nile, Quyhn.
Synopsis: In which the gang is alerted to a new immortal.
Comments: Written for Comfortember 2020, Prompt: Nightmare. First try at Old Guard fic. Comments and kudos would be awesome. Enjoy!

They all wake from the nightmare at the same time, snapped back to consciousness with grisly images of a car wreck fresh in their minds.

"Another one?" Nicky wonders. They'd gone hundreds of years between Booker and Nile and now there's another immortal within five years? What's going on?

"Shit," Andy announces, the first to come to the realization. "I know we called Nile a kid, but this is an actual fucking kid."

Nile's clutching her head in the same place they'd seen the girl smash hers against the window.

Joe's unwound himself from Nicky and started sketching a little girl, maybe 8 or 9. How the hell are they supposed to find her? Nile had been almost easy – a name on a uniform, enough clues to figure out a general location, an idea of what Nile had probably been doing. But this, all they'd seen had been a child in a purple jacket in a car, none of them had caught sight of a license plate or a road sign, just a one lane road through the woods at night, oncoming headlights, shattered glass splattered with blood. "I didn't catch many details – too dark, you?" he asks, looking to Booker and Quynh.

Booker shakes his head, "no, nothing helpful," he says, drags his hands over his face, "What the hell are we supposed to do with a kid?"

It's a solid question – they don't exactly have a child friendly lifestyle going on. What's worse, that girl will be trapped as a child forever, no matter how many years pass, now that she's died, she'll stay the same. None of them quite have an answer for it, either.

Until Quynh speaks up. "You bring her in," she says, glancing meaningfully at Andy, whom she'd finally made peace with after one hell of a fight. "You get her through this. You give her a chance at this family, like we've all been given and we go on, together."