Chapter Text
Six months later, Booker blurrily returns to the apartment after finally getting thrown out of the bar at, oh, 600. He glances at the fragment of drafting tape he always leaves from jamb to bottom corner of the door. It hangs loose from the frame.
He’s deadened his fine motor control pretty well this morning. Now his poison of choice slips from numb fingers. Cognac and glass go everywhere, and he manages the coordination to kick at the shards before collapsing on the stair to wait for death and capture.
He waits a while.
…
See, the thing is, he’s stopped dreaming of Quynh.
He’d been seeing her, dying with her for over two hundred years. Nightly or daily in his sleep yes, but also every time he died. He’s familiar with the light at the end of the tunnel: It’s blue, and it bubbles with her waterlogged screams.
Booker breathes in air instead of ocean on resurrection, and that difference always knocks her from his eyes. The world rushes back in. But he’d always known he’d see her again when he slipped off, to momentary deaths or just to dreamland.
And then, three months after the only date that matters, it stopped.
…
See the thing is, he’s had over two hundred years to ponder this.
Not the whys, for that way madness lies. Not even the hows, for his life itself seems lunatic, and he has lost any hope that medicine will explain its mechanisms. No, just the whats and whens. When will it happen? What can he rely on?
He thinks he’s got the gist of it: they dream of each other when one of them dies.
Nothing impressive, nothing world-shattering. The wretched magics all stem from the immortality with them. One of them dies, and that sends out the visions.
Sometimes, when Nicky’s gotten into his head, Booker even has a reason. Not destiny, not being meant to find each other, nothing nice. But clearly something wants them alive and unmarked. Misery maybe, and its love for their company. The cruel universe at large. Whatever it is, if one of them dies, it’s a problem in that thing’s book.
So it alerts the others, the ones who aren’t already aware of the fallen, the ones who aren’t already at the departed’s aid. Prods them to protect a once and future peer.
…
See the thing is, he’d lied.
Lain. Lain still.
Because about fifty years into the bleak and lonely agelessness of his new existence, a woman from his dreams found him. She stepped out of his head and into the flesh, and almost immediately thereafter she stepped into his heart.
He wasn’t the only one anymore.
She wasn’t the only one, either. They’d separated for the search for him, and in those days messages took so long to travel, but relative to the vast stretch of isolation it was no time at all. Weeks maybe, months at most, and then there were two more in his unrelenting heart.
He never again saw them when he drank himself to death. He would only see them after, when he was back, because they would help him back up.
Instead he saw her, over and over again, vivid detail and excruciating continuity where before there had been only flashes. He saw her in every single one of his deaths, in every single one of his dreams.
It started the very first time he slept in the room with them all, exhausted from the euphoria of finally meeting the men. He had jolted awake, which had then awoken the others.
He told them his dream, and they told him what it meant.
None of them slept again that night, but there was the night after to reckon with. And the next night as well, and many more after that. He could not cease from dreaming of Quynh, could not ease from dying with her, and he woke the rest with his rousing.
It cut them all in a way that would not heal: Nicholas, Joseph, and most of all Andrea, that their beloved begrieved suffered still. Him, to see their sunken faces.
So he stopped. With time he learned to lie still through the suffocation and sorrow. When they realized his night terrors no longer disturbed them, Andrea asked if it could be because Quynh was finally at peace.
God stop saving him, he said yes. Let it lie.
…
See the thing is, he can’t tell them.
Forget betrayal and imprisonment and torture, forget one hundred years of solitude, forget Joe’s hurt anger and Nicky’s hurt silence and Nile’s hurt forgiveness.
Ay there's the rub: He is the boy who cried safety, was the wool disguising the wolf. He lied to Andy for fifteen decades, and she doesn’t want to see him again.
He cannot tell her that the dreams are over, that Quynh is truly gone, that Andy has gotten her wish for them both.
He can only wait for it to be one hundred years to the day from the only date that matters.
…
See the thing is, waiting is easier when he’s drunk.
It’s much easier when he’s drinking himself to death once more.
He’d only stopped when they’d begun making the shipwrecked faces he remembered from those early days of waking them. He hadn't been able to stand hurting them, and so he had stopped.
Now he couldn't hurt them worse than he already has.
And see the thing is, he sees Quynh again when he dies. Not drowned, not dark, not dying and dead. He sees her in flashes, alive and on land.
He revives gasping and wearing his first smile in months. He doesn’t know where she might be, has no way to track her in those parts and situations unknown. But she is no longer trapped, no longer alone.
Or maybe the loneliness has gotten to him.
Either way, soon enough he's dying just to see her.
…
He staggers up and pushes the key into the lock only to discover that it pushes open the door.
Suddenly his gun is in his hands, unwanted lifetimes of readiness beating out half a year's dismal acceptance.
He must have waited on that step a long time for his finger to be so solid and steady on the trigger as it points at Quynh.
But he will not pull it. Could never again. Not on his family, not when she stepped out of his head and out of his death and into the flesh. Not when she doesn’t need to step into his heart, because she flooded it eons ago.
“Booker,” she breathes, breathes out soft sound and air instead of screaming out ocean. “It’s nice to finally meet you.”
She raises a glass of water to her lips.