Prompt: watchdog
Post-Wounded Knee, pre-bring us the girl.
This one is shorter, but I hope it offers some context for what happened last chapter, even though it's later, and closer to the B:I canon.
Anna doesn't look a thing like her mother. It's the first clear thought he's had in hours, as he's watched this infant, this monster, this gift change colors: from bruised and bloodied purple, from her twisting journey into life, to a fierce and scowling red, and finally to a settled skin-pink, like every other baby he's seen born. Her face is still squished and monkey-ish, and even though she's the most beautiful and the most terrible thing he's ever seen, she doesn't look a thing like either of him. Not like him, and not like Mina.
He can remember when his little sister Charity was born, and his mother looked into Charity's face and then up into Joel's and said, "Ah, she has your nose," as though there was anything about a baby that was immediately recognizable. Their faces changed as their bodies grew, and he'd never understood how people could pick out traits like coins out of a fountain. But then he sees Anna, and he knows, marrow-deep, that his daughter looks nothing like him or Mina. She looks like Mina's grandmother, or she will someday; her eyes are the same startling blue. Despite the doctor telling him the color will probably change and settle soon, he doesn't think it ever will.
She's not anyone but herself, but she is also Mina's oma, and a trace of Booker's aunt on his mother's side, with the stubborn tilt to her chin and the way her earlobes are shaped. But she has none of him, and none of Mina, and it feels like a betrayal. It feels like a knife in the gut, a gun to his head. So much expectation, and it's coming from everywhere, and he can't bring himself to care. Not about the expectation, or the money in the till, or anything, really, about the baby on the table and the bed where his wife just died, and the way the whole place still smells like blood.
He turns nineteen in six months. The alcohol—it's not whisky, or bourbon, or anything really other than something brown and fiery in his throat—burns as he swallows. He turns nineteen in six months, he has a prison tattoo on the back of his shoulder, and blood on his hands. Screams in his ears at night. How is he supposed to take care of a baby? How is he supposed to take care of his baby, when he can't even keep himself from killing his wife?
He can't quite remember what the doctor said. The baby was too big. Something broke inside. Something was already wrong with Mina, and there had been nothing he could do to change it. But none of that makes sense, because everyone he loves dies—why not Mina too? Why, for one second, had he ever thought that Mina could be free of him, that they might be happy?
Don't be stupid, the Mina in his head says, wasn't your fault, but then again, Mina had always thought the best of him. She'd refused for so long to see the dark until it had finally swallowed her whole.
He looks at the baby on the table. Anna's awake, and looking at him with those strange, level blue eyes. Booker feels his throat tighten, his eyes burn. He'll take her down with him, he thinks. This creature, this daughter so dependent on him now—he's the only thing she has in the world, and he'll ruin her someday. He knows it like he knows his own knife. He should take her somewhere, give her to someone who will—not love her, because there's no one who loves her more in her life than he does at this moment, for forever—but to someone who will keep her safe, the way he can't. But he can't deny himself this. He can't keep away from her. And it will ruin them both, but he's too damn selfish to care.
He leans forward in his chair, drapes his hand in the basket, and the touch of her cheek against his finger is like a sudden breath. "Hey, little watchdog," he says. "You gonna cry?"
Anna does nothing. She just watches him. She's too young to grab his finger, or laugh, or even smile; all she will do, he knows, is just look at him and blink and cry when she's shit her pants or needs to eat, and how the hell is he even supposed to feed her?
"You're not a crier, are you?" he asks her, and Anna blinks, slow, quiet. She burbles. Something in him breaks, and he stands. His legs ache. He's been sitting for hours, and all the blood has gone to his feet. He reaches down into the basket, lifts the baby like he used to lift his sister, careful, tender, and he holds her against his chest as tight as he dares, cupping her head in one hand. She doesn't have a single hair on her head, not like Charity did when she was born. He thinks she might have dark hair, someday.
"Anna," he says, and he clings to her, a tether, a line, a tear in his heart, as outside the sun breaks over the skyscrapers.