Work Text:
All she sees are green eyes.
“You either shoot first, or you don't shoot at all” he says. Cradling his bleeding hand, his eyes burning with pain and contained fury, seemingly glowing in the shadows of the booth on the tram.
Every time she closes her own.
Every time she lights a cigarette.
Every time that comforting scent of bourbon invades her senses.
Beautiful jade eyes flash in her mind's eye.
He’s closing Slate’s eye. The hole in his head and the splatter of gore by the wall detailing in vivid, nauseating detail what his last moments were: “A Soldier's Death”
The sorrow in Booker’s eyes is undeniable. As expressionless as he claims to be, his eyes lay out every emotion for her to read like the books she so loves. And there is sorrow weighing down those eyes, adding to the weight of the sins he already bears.
If she holds him then. If he latches onto her desperately, even if just for a moment. If her cheeks heat up and her heart beats faster and she sees a glow of affection in his eyes?
No one but the corpse of Slate will be the witness.
Not even when resting can she be free of that damnable viridian gaze. In her dreams she sees them over, and over again.
They need someplace to rest. Booker is hurt and bleeding from a thousand different places and the damned revolution going on around them isn't doing him any favours. Lutece infusion or not he is only human, much to his chagrin, and he needs at least one good night's rest after tearing through Fink's personal security twice over.
It brings a small smile to her face when that bar, the bar they came upon in the last reality is not only standing, but still fairly busy all things considered. The corpses on the ground, the dead handyman and the blood splatters faze her little. She's been running and hiding and assisted in the murder of dozens by now.
And besides they're not Booker, so quite frankly, she couldn't give a damn.
The basement of the bar still holds a lovely queen sized bed, a chair, and more apples than both can consume in one sitting.
“Would you look at that...” he stumbles and trips his way over to the chair, and the guitar she missed in her quick once-over of the room.
“Booker, what are you doing?” she huffs, eyes curious and wary of what the beaten man is doing with a guitar that looks older than sin in his lap. There's that thunderous flash of concentration in his eyes however and she just sits back on the bed and lets him be, knowing getting anything out of him now is about as likely as beating a handyman in a fist fight.
When the soothing little melody of an almost-forgotten gospel song is strummed by his hands she is shocked. Booker is perhaps the least religious person in all of Columbia. Perhaps the world if she ever gets the chance to explore it, so him playing this song of all things surprises her to no end.
She only noticed she was singing along to it when his viridian gaze shifts to her.
His face is heavy with sin, aching with exhaustion, and there’s that glow in there. That beautiful spark of affection she remembers from before, when Slate’s blood was still warm on his hands.
“When you close your, earthly story~
Will you meet them in their bliss?~”
He strums the final chords on his guitar, closing his eyes as the haunting tilt of the guitar fades away into silence. When he opens them again and they land on her, that bright glow in his eyes, she feels like melting into an Elizabeth-sized puddle and slip through the cracks.
Booker expends what little energy and salts he can on Devil’s Kiss traps before falling into bed with her. She doesn’t protest when his exhaustion overwhelms him and he falls asleep in seconds.
And if his body, seeking her warmth, wraps his arm around her waist and pulls her closer to his frame? She can’t find it in her to protest either.
“He never once blamed you dear.” “Indeed, if anything, he went willingly.”
Robert and Rosalind, the only people in the Multiverse that understood her pain. And shite comfort providers when you came down to it.
Constants and variables. Constants and variables. Constants and fucking variables.
They might hold some sort of affection for her, might even wish for the very same thing she does just to ease her pain, but they do nothing.
Because they can’t, because even if there was some reality at the edge of the Multiverse where she doesn’t drown Booker, they’d drown him themselves in that damned river.
They keep balance, allow the Multiverse to exist by ironing out incongruencies in it. And she set down a precedent, holy writ by all intents and purposes. Comstock is dead. Booker is dead.
And they are bound to keep that record straight, as much for the Multiverse as for their own existence.
Not that they have to worry much however.
That Door closed the minute he stopped breathing.
And it hurts... it hurts so much...
She clings to him like a drowning man to driftwood.
He is covered in grave dirt and blood and the haunted gaze of a man who just fought the living dead and won. Her damned corpse of a mother just had to throw in that final hurrah, didn’t she? Just had to nearly kill her own daughter and her protector just because, didn’t she?
She remembers that sheer, inconsolable hatred against her person and her hold on Booker tightens. They look like they’ve wallowed in blood and mud for days without respite, which they’ve done. And she’s tired, oh so tired of everything right then and there. Her mother was the straw that broke the camel’s back and she just wants to rest. To rest one night in a warm bed without having to wake up every 5 minutes to the sight of Booker aiming his repeater at the door, to sleep with Booker’s arms around her and his beating heart to soothe her mind and calm her fears.
She’s half past dead asleep when they arrive at Emporias Marketplace. And she’s delirious by the time Booker deposits them in the bedroom on the second story of the Lutece residence.
It’s a small surprise her dreams revolve around blood and fire and dead men possessed by a vengeful spirit.
It is surprising when it’s not the vivid detail of her torture at the hands of her dead mother what wakes her from her subconscious hellscape, but the sight of the ex-Pinkerton choking on his own blood as the living dead tear him limb by limb.
It is surprising when Booker’s voice and touch are not enough to soothe her half-broken mind that he is alive and with her and holding her so close to him if she were any more sound of mind she’d be short of breath by now.
It is surprising when she feels his lips against her own. When the distinct taste of bourbon and cigarettes mixed with nutmeg stops her brain cold.
She needs this, she notes. She needs the comfort of his lips and skin against her, needs to feel his love and passion to ensure her own frail sanity remains intact.
She’s known the man for less than a week, of which she has spent running and bleeding and killing throughout the city. But she needs him now more than ever.
His eyes are bright with care, and affection, and love love lovelovelove so much love for her.
They spend the night together, drowning in pain and sorrow and love but it works. Because maybe two broken people might just make a whole.
She knows she’s gone insane when she hears his voice. Knows her mind is breaking apart in seven different pieces and scattering to the wind when she feels his arms around her, when his lips press against her neck, when his cologne and ethanol infused scent invade her senses.
But she knows it’s merely an illusion. This fake’s eyes are dead, cold and unseeing like she sees in her mind’s eye every night as nightmares claim her.
There’s no vibrancy, no life, no love in those eyes.
Whatever comfort the wight within her mind summoned was swiftly taken away as the memory of her deed flooded her mind.
HIs eyes are so full of guilt. Of horror untold as she sees the man she loves, her lover her father, come face to face with a truth fit to break lesser men.
Booker didn’t balk at the weight of his sins.
He shouldered on, in that stupidly brave way with which he did everything.
“Neither.” His last spoken words leave her ears ringing as she puts him underwater. Because she knows he's right. At this moment, behind this particular door there's not enough regret and pain and sorrow for there to be a Booker. Yet there's not enough of that religious idealism, that blind faith and that fascist thought process which molds the monster of Comstock.
But he was Booker. To her he'll always be Booker.
Those eyes stare up at her.
Those beautiful, beautiful green eyes which made her fall in love time and time again.
Those eyes that though clouded with terror and horror and crushing, soul-rending guilt still shine so brightly with love.
Booker DeWitt dies smiling, looking up at her one last time as though she were his saviour before closing his eyes forever.
Something breaks within her the minute she can no longer see his eyes, something she knows she will never get again dies alongside him. (Anna?Elizabeth? Neither?)
DrownthesonofabitchDrownthesonofabitchDrownthesonofabitch
She is a goddess now, she can change and alter the universe as she sees fit. Time and space and the knowledge of infinity realities within her grasp.
“I love you.”
She never told him that. It seemed like a given thing, no sense of urgency to utter the words since they would have a lifetime in Paris after they got an airship and got guns for a revolution and brought a dead gunsmith back to life and traipsed through universes and die for the revolution Booker and fought her mother's wraith and killed the Vox and being lost and tortured for months and kill Comstock and constants and variables Booker and Neitherneitherneitherneither out of Columbia.
And it's pitiful really, that the first and last time she utters those words are when she's pretending that he can hear them. That now that they're on shore and the sun is drying them out and his head is in her lap and she's humming that song while she runs her hands through his hair she'll say the words and he'll wake up and she will see those two words shining back at her through jade-colored lenses.
(And if she does this for so long that the sun sets and his body cools? If she only realizes that this isn't a nightmare when his body stiffens in death, that this is real, this is a reality that she chose and she can never take back? If she begs him to forgive her, begs him to come back and let Comstock live because she can watch a million worlds burn to the ground as long as he is next to her?
No one but his corpse and her own broken, desperate sobbing are there to bear witness.)
So she keeps looking.
It's a futile endeavour, but it's the only thing that makes her life have any meaning.
Finding Booker again, in some hidden, forgotten edge of the Multiverse. Finding him, looking into his eyes and being home once again.
It's eons after.
Eternities she has looked and found nothing.
She has traversed infinity and found it wanting.
She loves her vices now: the smoke tastes faintly of him, the ethanol singing in her veins numbs the pain of loss and brings back ghosts of half-forgotten memories, the weight of a weapon brings comfort instead of fear or revulsion.
She makes a poor replica, she is aware of this. She can try to be Booker, cater to his vices, pretend she is him if only to feel that faint connection to him which is all she has left after all this time.
But she is tired, exhausted of it all.
The vague comfort of the smoke curling in her lungs has faded after centuries, becoming nothing more than a habit that establishes a sense of routine. A motion to go through to distract her from it all.
The alcohol no longer sings so much as whimpers pitifully as the protection she so seeks is forgone and she is left to fight her own demons alone.
The weapon on her person whispers to her an alternative to her fruitless quest. An end to millennia of agony and guilt and unending sorrow. And its calling has become oh so attractive, so seductive.
She resolves to heed the siren's call
... after one more attempt. God made foolish girls so he'd have something to play with.
And this city underneath the water, one of so many countless others, was the last she had the energy to look through.
She arrives in front of the door for the PI (so similar to his own back in New York a million worlds ago). And knocks, ready to be disappointed again.
Ready to have her heart, what little remains of it, be torn further apart. ready for an end to her suffering
And then the door opens.
She hears that gruff voice, tempered by grief and anger.
She smells that intoxicating mix of bourbon and cologne.
Her breath hitches and she looks at this man, searches in that gaze what she has lost for so long.
All she sees are green eyes.