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Yusuf had always thought he’d known what life had in store for him. He was a merchant’s son with a buttercup blooming over his heart for his radiant charm. He was destined to take over the family business, selling tapestries and spices and any goods he could get his hands on in all the many ports in the Mediterranean. He was supposed to live a peaceful life, mostly, with a moderate-sized ship and a minor fortune by the time he was thirty. He knew what was in store for him.
And then the Franks invaded one of the ports he was trading at.
Normally, Yusuf wouldn’t have gotten involved. He was a trader, nothing more and nothing less - he had no business sticking his head into some misguided campaign the Franks were embarking on. Customers were customers, his father would have said, whether they’re upstanding men or dirty Franks, as long as they pay then all is well.
But then they started pillaging. And raping. And cannibalizing.
Yusuf, for all his radiant charm, knew that not everything could be solved with pretty words. That was why, on one of his stops to Cairo some years back, he bartered his way into a few training sessions with the scimitar his uncle gifted him before he left home the first time. Knowing how to fight with a sword, he’d figured, was a skill that he was more glad to have and not need than the other way around. But, well. It looked like he would need it, now.
He pulled his blade at first only on those who were committing grave acts - killing women and children, raping mothers and wives and young girls, carving away at dead flesh to fill their stomachs. Then he realized that none of the other Franks stopped them, that these were not singular demons, but a whole army of them.
His blade got less discriminating, then.
When the Franks moved on, so did Yusuf, content that the port was safer now, after the invaders had vacated, intending to continue with his trading. Then they showed up at his next stop. And his next. He didn’t give them the chance for coincidence again because at that point he discerned it must be Allah telling him what he must do - stop these Franks from their siege on the Holy Land. It was his destiny. The blood red yarrows that appeared along his spine proved it, that he had the mettle for war.
It wasn’t until he met the Frank with the ocean in his eyes and bright yellow coltsfoot on his wrist that he questioned his new path altogether.
No one knew where the flower marks came from, or why they appeared, but everyone had at least one on their heart and its twin on the inside of their right wrist, and everyone from every culture knew what they meant without being told. Every new mark meant something integral to your soul, something that manifested itself as a physical indicator of what your heart felt most keenly. The marks did not - could not - lie.
And so to see the mark of justice on the wrist, in the heart, of such a deplorable invader made Yusuf’s blood boil.
He felt the burn of a new flower mark light across his ribs, one he paid no mind to. Instead he slipped a dagger between the Frank’s ribs and into his heart, slick and easy like butter, watching the light fade from his eyes.
In hindsight, Yusuf should have stepped back as soon as he delivered the final blow. Maybe then he wouldn’t have suffered a long slice of the man’s sword across his abdomen, his blood and intestines spilling out obscenely.
He was dead before he hit the ground.
Then, somehow, he was alive again.
He was on the ground, staring up at the ash-red sky, dagger still in hand. He reached up to feel at his abdomen, but where his shirt was sliced clean through - slick and sticky and slightly warm from his blood - his skin seemed to be unbroken.
He chanced a glance down at his stomach and saw only intact skin through the new hole in his outfit, covered now in a long line of cypress blooms under the tacky drying blood. He blinked hard, willing himself to see more clearly. He had died, was dead, yet somehow he woke up uninjured with death flowers laid across his front. Nothing made sense.
(He would only realize later, as he rinsed his own blood from his skin with fervor, that he had also gained a handful of prim globe amaranths on his ribs, the answer to a question he dared not yet ask. Immortality had splashed itself on his skin, and there was no going back from there.)
A groan sounded not far from him, and Yusuf looked to see the Frank struggling to stand. He, too, seemed relatively unharmed, despite the expert stab Yusuf had sunk into his heart a few moments ago.
The Frank looked towards Yusuf, eyes big and shocked and terrified . Yusuf could unashamedly admit he felt the same way.
After that, it all got easier.
They fought some more on opposite sides of the war, killing each other over and over again until finally the city had fallen and neither of them had any more reason to stay.
They had a tentative truce and no shared language, opposite ideas on religion and hygiene, and a truly impressive amount of built up tension sitting between them.
But, at least they had flowers.
They spent months on end lost for words, refusing to learn the others’ language but not willing to part with their own, communicating only in sharp gestures and violence. They were passing North, through Cairo to places unknown to either of them. In Yusuf’s mind, this was to escape the threat of violence on even these shores, that surely the bloodshed would lessen the further they travelled. That, and he wanted to get as far from the Frank’s home as his own, mostly to satisfy his petty desire to pull the Frank as far out of his comfort zone as Yusuf felt.
Al-Andalus seemed far enough, he supposed, as full of mountains and greenery as their homes were of ports and salt, if he’d judged the Frank’s accent correctly. Roman, he’d guessed. When the man’s shoulders drew tighter and tighter the longer they went without smelling saltwater, he supposed he’d guessed right.
They settled, eventually, just outside Al-Hambra - the palace looming down from the green mountains over the farms below. Yusuf bartered for a room for the two of them - strangely reluctant to let the Frank out of his sight, something he marked down to simple distrust and not the roiling warmth in his gut at the man’s rare tight-lipped smiles - and directed the man towards it with shoves and pointed fingers.
The room was small but passable, with a window to the gardens outside. He’d asked the innkeeper why they would keep such a garden, and she had simply laughed. Obviously some notion he didn’t have, growing up where good freshwater was rare enough that it could only be used for growing food and bathing and giving life.
The Frank, who insisted on being called Nicolò of all things, glowered at the single bed. He spit something sharp in his language, ending on what must have been a question if his eyebrows had any say.
Yusuf crossed his arms. “I don’t care to know what you’re asking, but we don’t have the funds for more than one bed and I’m not letting you leave my sight to go ravage the local people. We’ve had enough bloodshed, I think.”
The Frank rolled his eyes. He sat down on the bed, then laid his entire body across it to offer no room to Yusuf unless he wished to climb atop of the man.
Yusuf stared at him, incredulously. This man, this bastard was going to be a scourge on his entire immortal life. Why shouldn’t he abandon him here, in this place? Why take blame for keeping track of him when Yusuf could simply leave him to his own devices? It was a tempting thought, for sure.
Either way, he needed space from the man, if only for a little while.
Yusuf turned around and stalked out the door, leaving it ajar. It wasn’t like the man could be truly harmed for long, anyhow.
He made his way downstairs and walked aimlessly through the square. The small market was so familiar yet so foreign to him, it all made his head spin. A year ago, he was ambling along in a market not unlike this, smiling at all the pretty women and men in hopes of enticing them with his eyes, his words, his yellow buttercup laid out over the soft parts of his wrist. It worked, more often than not, even by those who only approached to prove themselves immune to his fateful charms. Those were the sweetest to sway, watching them leave quietly bemused with arms full of spices with names they could scarcely pronounce, as if they’d just woken from a pleasant dream.
Often Yusuf had spent his nights concocting situations in which he would use those sweet words on someone for higher stakes than just turmeric - for a kiss, a touch, and night of passion and a life afterwards. Not that he didn’t often take bedfellows, but none that he felt inclined to convince to stay. He had sex, yes, but what he wanted was someone to share with, laugh with, love with.
But as to how he would gain any of those things with this stupid Frank under his purview, Yusuf didn’t know.
He wandered back towards the inn, taking a shortcut through the gardens. There were all manners of flowers grown there, from the patient ox eye to the deceitful dog’s vane. Yusuf stopped for a moment and gently caressed the tall tickweed flowers with just the pads of his fingers. Love at first sight. How he longed to be so lucky.
He turned to leave - no sense allowing himself to wallow in melancholy, he had a Frank to domesticate - when a cluster of small, near neglected blooms caught his eye. He leaned down to get a closer look and oh, they were perfect .
It took no time at all to barter for the flowers and make his way back to the room. The Frank was still there, spread out indecently, but this time he was on his back, lifting his head to watch Yusuf enter the room.
Yusuf offered an acerbic smile. He tossed the flowers he’d bought onto the Frank’s chest.
The Frank frowned, picking them up with his large hands, making the careful blooms look downright miniscule in his grasp. It took him a moment to understand - Yusuf had granted not just any flowers, but barberries for his unbearably short temper - but as soon as he did his eyes grew wide with surprise.
He should not be surprised, Yusuf thought, since as a grown man he should very well know his temper was terrible to contend with. Yusuf rolled his eyes and sat with his bags, ignoring the Frank in favor of returning his coins to their proper place.
The Frank, before Yusuf could register, snatched the purse of coins out of Yusuf’s hands and sprinted out the door.
Yusuf sat frozen for a moment, anger boiling slowly inside. Was this the Frank’s plan? Wait until they stopped at a town far enough from Yusuf’s home and leave him stranded there without money? He could have done that a thousand times over, simply slit Yusuf’s throat and taken his bags to run away like a thief in the night. If the Frank had truly waited until now, when they were near a market where Yusuf could surely earn back his coin quickly enough, then he was as stupid as Yusuf had feared.
Yusuf was debating leaving him here anyhow, in this place where the Frank neither spoke the language nor had any skills of use, Yusuf assumed, when the man himself burst back into the room. He tossed the coin purse back into Yusuf’s lap - appreciably lighter than it had been when he’d taken it - and sat across from him on the floor. He had a handful of flowers in his grasp, so many that Yusuf couldn’t quickly identify them all, but that problem was rectified quite quickly.
The Frank laid the flowers down, one by one, in front of Yusuf like he was telling a tale. As Yusuf identified them all in turn, he realized that was exactly what the Frank was doing. He must have been quite the poet, certainly, if he could paint such a vulgar message from only the blooms of a garden cultivated clearly for beauty.
After ten or so flowers were laid out - and at least twice as many left in the Frank’s hands - Yusuf stopped him with a hand on his wrist.
“Stop, I think I get the point.”
The Frank’s jaw twitched. He gestured towards one of the first ones he’d placed down, the spiked pink burdock that meant touch me not, your persistence annoys me . The intricacy of meanings a single bloom could hold had once made Yusuf’s mind soar. Now, it rankled at his already raised temper.
Yusuf eyed the flowers in front of him, the ones clenched in the Frank’s grip. He leaned forward and grabbed the mourning bride, shoving it back towards Frank, his foretold unfortunate attachment .
The Frank looked back at him, a determined slant to his brow. “Scì. Ti capi?”
The words were still slippery and distasteful to Yusuf’s ears, but he was starting to get it. “Yes, yes, I understand.”
They proceeded to spend far too much of their money on flowers but, in the end, Yusuf would begrudgingly agree that it was worth it. Handfuls of misanthropic teasel and broken corn stalks of quarrels were passed between them as frequently as spare looks, their own words tacked on to the end as if an afterthought. Yusuf learned quite quickly how to verbally defenestrate someone in the Frank’s - Nicolò’s - language, which he still had no name for, but at least they were communicating more freely, now.
Yusuf learned how Nicolò’s eyes got tight when he had nightmares, though he loathe to admit them (creeping cereus for horror and osmunda for dreams had long ago been tucked under the mattress, for such nights, and had since gone dried and flaky to the touch), how he feigned indifference with the monksflower tucked behind his ear on days when he would much prefer to rage at the world (those sharp eyes always fell hard to his sword on those days, hands clenched and shoulders tight as if he could fight God himself), how Nicolò hated to see anyone else in pain as much as Yusuf did, fingering the remorseful bramble he had hidden in his pockets that he thought Yusuf didn’t know about.
If he were being honest with himself, as Yusuf strived often to do, he knew much more than that even, about his companion. There was very little privacy in their small room, and so he saw more of Nicolò’s skin than was strictly polite quite often. He saw the monkshood painted along his ribs for knighthood, which Yusuf expected, but also the small white syringa flower cradled by a string of bulbous yew flowers between his shoulderblades that spoke of disappointment and sorrow. A judas blossoms in the cradle of his collarbone, not far above the cypress that sat over his heart, in the same place Yusuf sunk his blade that fateful eve.
He shuddered to think what Nicolò might have survived, to gain such sad flowers. Yusuf’s own were joyful - imaginative lupines circling his wrists from the first time he picked up a paintbrush, jesting southernwood along the top of his left thigh that first bloomed when he spent his afternoons thinking up pranks to pull on his cousins, truthful nightshade spread across his right shin when he refused to lie to his mother about the broken vases, a shamrock behind his ear from when he first laughed with a boy who’d accidentally knocked over a whole table of spice jars just to make him feel at ease. The only marks they shared were the cypress, from their first death at each other’s hand, the globe amaranths of immortality along Yusuf’s ribs and Nicolò’s hipbone, and the red yarrows of war that lined Yusuf’s spine and Nicolò’s forearms.
So, it would be earnest to say that he knew quite a lot about the man, and at the same time nothing at all. Nicolò never spoke of any of his flowers, never said a word save in anger for months on end. It wasn’t until one day, after they’d established a tentative rapport, that Nicolò admitted to him in small gestures and a marigold tucked in the breast of his tunic that he was grieving, just as long and hard as Yusuf was.
Yusuf looked hard into Nicolò’s eyes, so pained and wet, and resolved that they were no longer to be enemies of each other. This man who was so sad, who kept all his emotions buried inside, who had nothing but grief etched into his skin, could not be hated as easily as the nameless Frank who’d buried a sword in Yusuf’s abdomen. This man was in pain, and through that pain Yusuf could finally see he was not angry at all, but devastated at the loss of everything he’d ever known.
For Yusuf, he supposed, it was easier. The people here spoke Arabic, there was a market and a place to sit and sketch and the food wasn’t so far off from the dishes he would find in the inns back home. Nicolò, the Frank, the man who was probably further from his home than he had ever been, who had been a priest according to the schinus flower that drew his religious fervor along his bicep, this man was so far from anyone or anything he could understand, and he was grieving. What started as a petty decision against the man who ravaged his home had now turned into a cruel deniance of any comfort for this man who has had his world turned on its head just as surely as Yusuf had.
With a nod, Yusuf walked to their collection of flowers in a large vase on the floor, rifling through the stalks and blossoms until he found the one he wanted. He walked back towards Nicolò, fingers wrapped around a mourning bride, the same blossom from which their mutual understanding bloomed.
He held in between them, watching as Nicolò’s eyes turned down and his breath hitched as if to prepare for another shouting match.
Yusuf shook his head, catching Nicolò’s gaze. “No more.”
He took the mourning bride and, with a swift gesture, stripped it of its petals, which fluttered sadly to the ground. He threw the stalk out the open window to the garden below, to show this man he was done with it all. They were no longer unfortunately attached to each other, not now.
Nicolò looked at Yusuf without words for a long time, head tilted as it was when he searched for the perfect flower to portray his disdain. After a long moment, he too walked to the vase and took an armful of the flowers, nearly all of them, and threw them out the window as well.
Yusuf couldn’t help the laugh that escaped his chest at the gesture, and the thought of the poor person who would be tasked with cleaning up such a mess. Nicolò, through his tears, joined in.
When asked later, Joe would tell anyone who listened that it was Nicky’s laugh, loud and bright and entirely new to him, that sprouted the acacia flowers under his left shoulderblade, the start of their tenuous friendship made immortal in his skin. But, in truth, Joe had no idea when it popped up, despite the burning itch that accompanied most flower marks. He just knew that one day, he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the window as he pulled on a shirt and knew it felt so right to connect it to Nicolò that there was no room for argument, even in his own mind.
(Nicky knew exactly when his had appeared days even before that, the day he purchased the marigold to show Yusuf, the day he saw the man who’d plagued him for so long kneel down to help an elderly woman pick up a fruit that she’d dropped, offering to take her groceries home for her. Though, even then, he thought that friendship was too small a word, and watched as the edges bled into yellow, writing a secret love onto his skin. He told Yusuf his mark was in too intimate a place to show off, when Yusuf had run to him to show off his own acacia, but truly his issue lied not with the intimacy of his inner thigh, but with the connotations that were held within the petals that grew more and more yellow with each passing day.)
Their relationship progressed more quickly after that, using their basis in flower language to propel them into something akin to actually speaking to each other with their own words. Their coin pockets started to empty far too quickly, and so Yusuf spent some precious change on art supplies, and filled journal after journal with sketches of flowers to tell Nicolò how he felt or what he wanted. They decided, this way, to start their travel once again, this time hurtling towards Greece to find a place where they might both be able to speak the language, since Nicolò’s Latin and Yusuf’s Greek were both quite passable, and to be in a place where they might find more opportunities for learning and working and possibly trying to figure out the strange miracle they’d been given.
It was on their way to Thessalonica that it happened.
They had stopped in a port city with barely a name - though it was a longer journey, they both mutually preferred the taste of saltwater on their tongue to the arid weather more inland - and taken a room for the night, much larger than any they’d taken before since it was, as far as either of them could tell, an extra house whose occupants were out on travels to Constantinople for an audience with the Emperor (a circumstance that they both thought unlikely, but were seldom wont to look a gift horse in the mouth regardless). There were two beds this time, a luxury that had never before been afforded to them, and as such the both of them picked a bed and hunkered down to sleep without much discussion.
The only problem being, Yusuf, after so many nights with Nicolò shoved into the same bed as him, seemed unable to sleep alone. He tossed and turned, too cold even in the summer heat, arms reaching for a figure that was not there.
“Nicolò,” he whispered into the dark.
Nicolò huffed. “Ti no dormi ascì?”
Yusuf understood snippets by now, the words you and sleep and what sounded like a variant on yes penetrating his mind. “No, I can’t sleep.”
He stood and walked towards the bed Nicolò chose. Eyeing Nicolò’s bare chest, he reached out slowly, giving Nicolò ample time to stop his hand. He didn’t.
Yusuf brushed his fingers over the bright red cypress etched into Nicolò’s breast, just over his heart, almost an apology. That was Yusuf’s doing, the first time they had crossed blades, and he would do anything to take it back, if it weren’t the very thing that drew them together in the first place.
He heard Nicolò’s breath hitch, felt his chest expand under Yusuf’s fingers. He knew he had always been begrudgingly attracted to this man since the beginning - a passion he had funneled into seeking him out to bury his sword into the other man at first, no pun intended - but with their friendship growing stronger day by day he feared letting his heart lead over his head, like his mother had warned him against so many times before.
But this, having Nicolò warm and bare and breathing so heavily under him...this was something he wasn’t sure he could resist.
Nicolò’s hand wrapped around his wrist, pressing Yusuf’s fingers harder into his chest. An assurance, a warning, telling Yusuf the feelings weren’t one-sided, necessarily. Something that surprised Yusuf, since he was sure that holy men of Nicolò’s religion weren’t allowed this, especially not with a man.
Yusuf’s other hand moved to trail over the schinus blossom on Nicolò’s bicep, the one that told Yusuf of his religious preoccupation. A clear question.
Nicolò huffed. “O l'é il pasòu,” he whispered, reaching around to lay his hand over Yusuf’s back, where his acacia flowers lay, “ti ti ê o mæ futûro.”
With a smile, Yusuf settled himself beside Nicolò in the bed, curling around each other like they were made to be there.