A/N: Be advised: this does not shy away from Booker and Elizabeth being related.
It's July, 1912, and she's...dreaming. She dreams of metal ravens and floating islands and burning men. She dreams of armies driven by religion, by the delusional horseshit her father taught her to distrust and Emma Goldman taught her to hate. She dreams of a woman, a people, reaching a breaking point, taking up arms under a banner that reminds her of the socialists' pamphlets, of the missives thrust at her when she walks to the factory.
She dreams of herself, as a prisoner, then as a fugitive, running through dark and violent streets with a dark and violent man. She can't see or hear him clearly: she turns to take him in, and his face blurs and slips away; she strains to make him out, and his voice muffles and fades to static. She figures, when she's feeling frustrated, that he must represent her relationships with men: vaguely defined, never going anywhere. Her father was a widower by her age, but here she is, hardly able to keep a dance partner.
"These boys, they ain't good enough for you. That's the problem," he says, every time the subject comes up. He leans over the table, eyes glazing over, liquor sloshing in his glass, and jabs his finger at her. "You know just what they're after, and you ain't givin' it to them. That's why they're takin' off. But don't you give in, Anna. Don't you let 'em take advantage."
He always offers her a drink, then, just as he does most every night they happen to be home at the same time. She thinks he does it just to make himself feel better about his own vice, but she doesn't really care. She still accepts, more often than not, and soon she's on her third or fourth, and she's a little drunk, and they're playing cards, and he's telling her not to be like him even as he's teaching her how to be.
Least I've been turning the lessons to better use than you ever did.
On those nights, she buries her contraception even deeper in her clothing, piling on top of it the few camisoles and pairs of drawers she owns. He'd be angry, and he'd worry, and neither of them needs that, and she's gotten very good at protecting him from the things he doesn't want or need to know. Yes, Dad, I'mjust a suffragist; no, Dad, I haven't joined a union; no, Dad, I've never been to a rally.
Yes, Dad, I've been sleeping just fine. Why do you ask?
The dreams cling to her. The streets hum and the machines buzz and the fabric chafes, and she swears her skin smells of gunsmoke. The workers are whispering about revolt, and they're using the wrong names. The dancehall is a platform on a beach, and the men and women are soft, too soft to be the people of her neighborhood. The El is hanging in midair and missing its train. The lines are blurred. There are no lines. Manhattan isn't an island; it's a city in the clouds, and the city in the clouds is falling.
She tells herself it's getting better, even though she knows it's getting worse. She ignores the chill on her skin, the twist in her stomach, the feeling like a second set of memories is trying to push its way into her head. She ignores the tingle in her fingertips, the shimmer in the air, the sense sometimes that her waking self is less real than the version that takes over at night. And she ignores the moments when the light shifts and the hard outlines of her father take on a different cast, a cast that reminds her of her dream self's constant shadow. She has to ignore them, because the way that girl is starting to feel toward her companion is not at all the way a woman should feel toward her father.
You can't blame her. She doesn't know.
Doesn't know what, Anna?
During the times when she can't deny that something's wrong, she wonders if she's going mad. She's been exposed to enough shit at work that it wouldn't surprise her if she's taken on some kind of brain disease; much worse is known to happen to those who haunt the factories for too long, and the laws written after the Triangle fire won't do much for the people who've been working for years without them. She worries, and her worry centers on her father, and she thinks about the poor drunk being left with nothing and no one and wishes there were something she could do. But the doctors they can afford can't help her, and she doesn't want to be sent away sooner than is necessary, so she focuses on holding it together, and starts to dread the night.
She loses out on sleep. Some nights, she's so tired and she's been worked so hard that she can't help but drift off. But on others, she hardly sleeps at all, and it's because of this that she notices he isn't sleeping, either. It's because of this that she starts paying attention, and things start to break apart.
His eyes are bruised and puffy with fatigue. His hand shakes when he cleans his gun or tips the bottle. He stares off into nothing and taps the table and smokes and smokes and smokes. Sometimes, his eyes slide off of her, like he can't bear to see her. There's a Sunday when he grabs her hand, opens his mouth, and the weight of what he wants to say warps the space between them. But he isn't able to actually say it, and he drops her gaze and takes a long, hard swallow from his glass.
"Dad?"
"Jesus, Anna." He presses his fingers to his temple. "Can you... You got somewhere else you wanna be right now?"
She starts to wonder at things she shouldn't wonder about. She starts trying harder to make out the shape and name of the man in her dreams. And she almost can, now. She almost can.
She hears him mumbling.
It's hot, hot enough for anyone who's sane to be on the roof, but they're here, in their stuffy rooms, trying to pretend that everything's normal. She moves from her room into the main, to the sagging mattress in the corner. Her heart is pounding. She's reminded of the first time she mustered up the courage to attend an anarchists' meeting: she's excited and scared and feeling as if she's about to cross some boundary, to step through some door that will slam shut behind her. He's on top of the covers, twitching and sweating and talking in his sleep. She leans over him and reaches out, telling herself that she's intending to wake him, that he's obviously having a nightmare.
Instead, she listens. And although she can't make out most of his words, the one that she can sucks the heat from the room.
"Elizabeth."
The other set of memories snaps into place. Columbia, the tower, Songbird, Madame Lutece, books and books and time, so much time, and a power that doesn't work the way she wants it to, and a window onto all of the things that she can't have, and a door without a key, and a man, suddenly a man, and violence and murder and truth, terrible soul-crushing truth, and how will she live with this, how can anyone live with this? She is a symbol of oppression, and so is the entire city, but the Voice falls into the same trap and what does that say about the way of things? The whole thing is rotten. The whole thing needs to go.
She looks at him, and he's her...no, no, he's just Booker. He's a monster and a thug and he's lovely, and he lied to her but he came for her, too, and he's not giving up on her, and he's not letting her go, and she's not letting him go, either. There is so much need and want, a desire for him so greedy and intense that it staggers her. She strikes the dresser and presses her palm against the surface, catching herself.
He's still your father. He's still your father, even then.
No, no, no.
Your lover is your father.
He's not, he's not, and anyway it doesn't matter, because he wasn't there. He is mine, he is mine, he is mine.
Her nose feels wet. She lifts her fingers to her face, and they come away red.
Booker, you're bleeding.
She knows what it means, to bleed. They had to have come through a tear. And if they came through a tear, then that means that this is not the original space, not the original reality.
The room spins. She wobbles, tries to stay afloat, but the current is swift and it's pulling her down, down, down. Black and red spots dance before her eyes, and air rushes past her face, and the floor comes up to meet her. And the last thought she has before she loses consciousness is that none of this should be possible.
...
It's August, 1912, and she's...dreaming. That morning, she'd woken up on the floor and chalked it up to the heat, so now, she's sleeping under the stars. And in the dream, the stars are all lighthouses, and all of the lighthouses are doors, and the doors lead to other worlds. She knows that she should be able to see what's in the other worlds, and to then venture into them, but for some reason, every door she opens reveals only empty space.
She wakes, wondering. Climbs down into the building. Bids good morning to her father, who insists on staying inside no matter how hot it gets. Changes. Goes to work.
Perhaps, she thinks, when she lies down to sleep that night, she'll be able to have the same dream again.