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She comes for him when they're all finally dead. She waits at the edges of his blurred vision as his last son is lowered into the dirt. He's alone—too many questions, not enough answers. There's no one to judge him when he downs the first bottle, then the second.
By the time he starts the third, the pain that was numbed comes back: the stinging ache of his organs dying faster than they can repair themselves. She must be sick of watching him because she halts the drink before it hits his lips, having somehow crossed the distance from her quiet sentry across the field.
He wants to ask her how she found him again, how she knew when to come back. He's stopped dreaming about her—instead dreams of another woman, of water in his lungs, his ears. Maybe she's been watching him. Laughing to herself, the other two—the Italian and his boyfriend—as he desperately tries to hold onto the pieces of himself that they told him to forget. I told you so, her presence says.
He's sure she could kill him whether he was in a drunken rage or not, but the almost gentle way she shrugs him off when he swings at her is still humiliating. She casts away his fists, redirects the glass bottle that glances off her hip and shatters onto his child’s fresh grave. He screams at her, roars until there's no more breath in his lungs. All the while, she holds his wrists like a mother holding back a petulant child, and looks at him with a pity so distant and removed that he has half a mind to offer her a drink.
Even before he met Andy he was a coward. Sebastien steals the knife in her boot and slashes his wrists to the bone. She watches him die with all the resignation of a woman who has already seen all the unfairness the world has to offer.
He's sober when he wakes, in a house he doesn't recognize. For a few precious moments, he remembers nothing except the feeling of air in his lungs, blankets and the twilight breeze on his skin. It doesn't last as long as it takes to stumble around until he finds a bottle that looks like liquor.
Despair and sorrow gives way to a violent rage. He trashes the safe haven she'd built for him, the windows, the walls. There's no trace of her but he knows she's watching, enjoying his descent into madness. I told you. I told you. I told you.
He screams incoherently until someone calls the lawmen. They drag him down to the jailhouse before he provokes one into shooting him.
She's smarter next time. The house is a barn, isolated. No alcohol (perhaps the last time was mercy). The guilt burns him and the fury inside remains unsated.
He kills himself four more times before she shows herself.
When she does, he doesn't know how much time has passed, only that he's dehydrated and emaciated. She gives him one word and it's the funniest thing he's ever heard.
It's only a fit of coughing that cuts off his laughter and even then, his cracked lips are twisted into a thin sneer. “‘Enough?’” he parrots in a cruel mockery of her stiff French. “If you didn't want to see me suffer, you should have left me—“ he hurls a chair at her. She sidesteps it, of course. For the first time, there's anger in her eyes.
“You're not suffering here, you're wallowing.” The accusation cuts deeper than any knife he's turned on himself (she took those too eventually). Distantly, he knows she's right. He's pathetic, throwing himself at death hoping it will catch. Drowning in the loss of his wife and children, more raw now than it had been when they first told him of their hate.
For withholding a gift he couldn't give.
No, this existence, this life that keeps reigniting by some unseen force. This is his penance. He could've found a way, made a way. Instead he watched them wither and rot. Not helpless. Selfish.
When he asks her to kill him it's without fire or malice. He falls to his knees, defeated. She's done it once before, when he'd poised himself to cross a line he wouldn't have come back from, immortality be damned. One last time, to numb the pain, to revive this punishment anew: the moment when he remembers.
He clasps his hands in a prayer, desperate. One last time.
Her eyes soften, reflecting his bottomless desperation. He wonders what she sees: a kindred spirit? Another lost undying soul to save?
He begs her.
She helps him up.
Andy teaches him to fight. She needs someone to train with and truth be told, the sting and ache of sore muscles reminds him of blades and sharp things he doesn't let him hurt himself with anymore.
She's an expert in almost everything she does and it intrigues him. She holds an axe like she was the first to ever do so, a sword like she was there at its conception. The way she talks sometimes, he doesn't doubt that she was.
Some days, all they do is train. She quickly catches on to the fact that he isn't as clumsy as he pretends to be, noticed how the pain is sometimes euphoric. She doesn't touch him for a month after that, tells him that while they all have their vices, she refuses to be his.
Guilt hurts more than anything else, and stays with him when he dreams of Quynh and two men tangled in sheets. So he takes her words to heart and the next time she strikes him, he strikes back twice as fiercely. The nicks and wounds he earns are afterthoughts, mere side effects for what it takes to make her smile.
He starts to heal.
He formally meets Nick and Joseph somewhere in the States. Men die in droves in cotton coffins to infection and bullets that are tacky when his body pushes them out. Nick is soft-spoken, a far cry from what he's gathered in his sleep (neither man looks ashamed when he brings this up). He is wise, introspective, and jarringly merciful. He reminds him of his wife. Joseph is more of what he expected: introspective, yes, but also ostentatious and friendly. When he moves to greet Bas with a hug and he flinches, Joseph plays it off with a sheepish grin and apology. Andy watches them all test the waters with a serene aloofness.
The problem starts there.
Nick is far more perceptive than Bas is comfortable with and Joseph’s touch—for all his apologies—ignites a warmth he'd left forgotten five decades prior. It's casual, it's familial, and it scares the shit out of him.
He tells himself it's okay. These are people who don't die And Andy promised him he'd never be alone again. But he panics when he's out of their sight, when he dreams of one of them because it means they're out of arms reach. He latches onto them like a leech and hates himself for it.
Nick dies sometime in the 70s and Andy has to tear him off his body before he remembers he’ll wake up.
He starts drinking again.
They never bring it up, never call him out but Nick makes a point to reassure him specifically that he’ll be back whenever he leaves. Joseph holds him tighter, longer, leaves him with more sweeping touches than what would be considered normal. Andy can't take away the knives anymore—their lives are now too dangerous to go without them—so she counts them. He feels her eyes on him when he enters the room, unfailingly cataloging the pockets and folds he has them hidden in, however discrete. She checks his sleeves for blood. They start taking death a bit more seriously for his sake.
You don't deserve it, the voice in the back of his head tells him. Sometimes it's Amelia. Sometimes it's one of his sons. When he's drunk enough he tells them they're right. He shrugs off the touches, lashes out at Nick’s coddling. He build up his walls from the inside, plugging any leak or hole that dares to let the memories in. He keeps them out and he silently berates them when they let him in.
He does the dirty jobs they don't want to do, takes the fall so they don't have to and the only reason they don't notice is because they're drunk on their own relief. It makes him feel human again.
He burns the bodies, destroys the evidence. He gets the jobs, vets the correspondents, cleans up when it's done. He restocks safehouses, picks out new ones, torches the old.
In 1890 he takes too many bullets and when he wakes up they're gone. There's a note from Andy with a short apology and instructions. He holes up in northern Germany and drinks until the panic attacks stop. Eternity lasts four days before she's shaking him awake, passed out on the couch.
Neither of them have showered in days and she's still covered in someone’s blood, her own viscera, but when he sees her face he lunges. Their foreheads press against each other and he grasps at the collar of her shirt, not nearly close enough. Not even the vertigo of standing so fast overcomes the sheer relief. He shakes while he clings to her, silent. She hushes him, hand curled around the back of his head, clutching him just as tightly while he falls apart.
His face buries in her neck and the voice chants a broken mantra: Don’t leave me. Don't leave me. Andy’s back hits the table, a chair, then the wall, and she's still cradling him. “I promised you,” she whispers and it's broken enough that he pulls back. Her eyes are haunted, guilt-ridden. The bags underneath are dark and heavy and he realizes that however much he needed her the past few days, she needs him more now. And by God, he’d fall on his sword for the rest of his life if it took the anguish from her heart.
His gaze drops to her lips for a split second and he knows he's fucked. Still, he freezes, doesn't dare do a damn thing until she asks him. There isn't a man he wouldn't kill, a mountain he wouldn't climb, a war he wouldn't start if she only said the word.
A tear slips down one cheek and the aborted motion of his thumb to wipe it away catches in his throat. She knows he’ll wait forever if she asks him to.
His name falls broken from her lips and he catches it with his own.
She lets her walls down that night, carves her pain into his shoulders. She hurts him with a primal desperation he eagerly returns, until the sheets are streaked with blood and sweat and tears. She uses him to fill a void she's nurtured for centuries and he adores her all the more for it.
Laying in the aftermath of their tortured existence she admits a wish no one could possibly grant her. Booker kisses the tears from her face and worships her until the sun rises.
Booker is not alone in his torment. Like Andy said: vices.
Joe has a bad habit of getting himself into bloody situations, ones where he can justify unchecked massacre. He infiltrates slave trades and hostels, leaves the walls painted with brains and licks the blood off his lips. The way Nicky talks, it used to be a lot worse. Joe has a dark side, one a bit closer to the surface than the rest of theirs.
Nicky is an optimist but even he has his days. He smokes. And when he can't smoke, he disappears. Sometimes for an hour, sometimes for weeks. Not even Joe knows what he does when he leaves, only says that Nicolo needs space from time to time. He jokes, calls it a Catholic thing and Book smiles when he doesn't understand. It’s clearly an inside joke.
Andy shuts down. She burrows away inside her head and goes somewhere they can't follow. She won't eat for days, won't speak. The first time it happens Joe has to tell him not to bother, she’ll come back to them when she's ready.
There's no judgement between them. They each have skeletons that come back to haunt them, ghosts they won't share even in the darkest times. There is validation in their suffering; it proves that they're still alive. Because after all their fighting and dying, they're still afraid. Not necessarily of death. Of losing each other. He adopts a new mentality: that it will hurt far less if he leaves them before they leave him.
It makes Booker terribly bitter at first. Joe and Nicky move around each other with an ease no other couple will ever achieve. He fumes at the ridiculousness of it all, hates them for being lucky. How is it that their curse is also their blessing? They have what he couldn't give his kids, his Amelia. In his darkest moments, Booker prays for one of them to die.
They lead a kill team in occupied France. Being back home is personal for Booker and each day that passes watching Nicky and Joe bask in each other’s existence is a punch in the gut.
Joe steps on a mine.
For a horrified moment, Booker thinks that's it. That's how they beat their curse. Nicky goes into shock. Andy has to snap his neck to get him to calm down long enough to get them to safety. Joe comes to after a torturous half hour. During that time, the seconds tick by like molasses and Nicky prays in languages Booker’s never heard before. He thinks Andy prays too. The anguish on Nicky’s face is heart-wrenching.
It takes a year and a half to reconcile the full blown argument he has with Andy. Nicky's eyes turn cold and cruel when she dares to admonish him for nearly getting them all killed. They have a vicious shouting match in old Italian, Joe stops him from intervening. At the end, Nicky hisses with a burning finality, “He dies. I die.”
Booker leaves before anyone can ask him to.
No one asks him to reconnect with Copley. No one asks him to do anything really anymore. Andy gets more tired with every resurrection, Nicky and Joe are as star struck as they were when he first met them and frustration starts to build.
He spends more and more time in Paris, lost in the past. He visits old streets that still exist and tries to picture the buildings that don't.
He visits the graves.
Quynh senses his turmoil, he can feel it. Every fleeting moment of consciousness, she urges him to act, to do something.
He screams at the mirror one night when he's drunk and sees her out of the corner of his eye. He thinks about the weapons he has stashed around the apartment, thinks about how many times he can get away with it before anyone notices. Violently, he returns to the ever-present belief that he would have been better off had Andy never come for him.
He thinks about what she told him.
It takes him about half a day to track down a number that isn't deactivated. Copley answers on the third ring.
Just me.
He doesn't realize how bad he's fucked up until he wakes up after having taken a grenade to the face and Nicky and Joe are gone.
It was supposed to be me.
He takes his exile willingly. Writes ‘selfish’ on his arms with blood, drinks until the days bleed together. He finds he'd almost rather face Joe’s unfettered wrath and Andy’s pained look of betrayal than be alone.
But they ask him for a hundred years.
He wishes they asked for more. He wishes he'd left before.
He has nightmares about dying alone, for good. Of seeing Amelia in the darkness, shaking her head at him. He dreams of Andy bleeding out on Copley’s carpet. I killed her, he whispers when he wakes up. Anguish turns time into a watery void and eventually he stops hurting. He stops drinking. He doesn't need to. He just decides to stop.
Starvation is a sad way to go but he endures. He doesn't know why the seizures start but they stop the dreams from coming. Andy barks at him, ”Enough,” in his head. In his head, he shoots her through the hip and she screams. Replaying. Over and over.
He wishes he was lucky enough to have been alone all his life.
Quynh disappears for a long while and he dreads that when she comes back it will break what's left of his mind. It doesn't though. When he wakes up, she's sitting on the side of his bed.
You've finally lost it, he sings to himself, promptly falling back into unconsciousness. Except she's still there when he wakes. She brings him water, food. She never speaks, never asks him to eat or drink. If he turns away, she leaves without a word. She never leaves him completely though. Her footsteps are deliberately soft, but still audible enough that he can tell what room she's in.
He waits for her to kill him, to vow revenge for Andy breaking her promise. A part of him hopes she'll torture him, just so he can prove to her that they won't come. You're not worth it.
He starts moving again. He gets up and moves to the couch. Then he starts cleaning up, he does the dishes, takes out the trash. He shaves, showers. Quynh is still there at the end of it all, sitting on his counter.
He ends up stabbing her with a steak knife to prove to himself that she's not real. She pulls it out of her thigh, calm, patient. Red stains the fabric of his boxers, his shirt.
“Quynh?” he rasps.
Finally, she smiles. “It's nice to finally meet you.”
His mouth is dry. The only thing that comes out, “Why?”
She reaches up and caresses his cheek. Booker melts, eyes fluttering shut. “I know what it's like to be alone,” she whispers. Her breath smells like the ocean. He wonders if it bothers her. “It’s okay. You can ask, Booker.”
The words barely make a sound between them, lost in the breeze and birdsong. Sunlight dapples the tile under their bare feet. It smells like spring.
“Please don't leave me.”