A/N: Sorry for the delay in completing this chapter. Chapter 5 should be faster in coming!
Also, since the angst train is officially pulling into the station, I wanted to put out this warning again: I will be acknowledging Booker and Elizabeth's canon relationship. The realization is inbound!
And thank you, everyone, for reading! :)
FEBRUARY 17th, 1913, PARIS
They were stumbling. Her laughter was too loud; his, of course, was the low, barely audible rumble that it always was. She didn't think she'd had too much, but it was more than she'd ever had before, and she was warm and light-headed and pain-free.
She'd dragged him to the Louvre. The Mona Lisa was still missing, but there was plenty else to see, and the buzz around the blank space where it should have been was interesting in its own right. They'd headed to an ex-pat bar afterwards - Booker's price for going to a museum. It had turned out to be filled with writers and artists and hangers-on.
"Oh, god dammit."
She'd nearly spat out her drink.
They moved through the halls of their building, now, saying a whole lot of nothing and finding it hilarious. He was running his hand down her back and around her waist, and the way he was looking at her was making her ache.
He held open the door when they reached their room, let her in. She turned, opened her mouth to say something that sounded in her head like the height of wit. But then he grabbed her, roughly, and kissed her like he meant to devour her.
"Booker..." she breathed. She'd been taking him to her bed for the past few weeks, but he'd never touched or kissed her quite like that. He smirked and stepped away, took off his coat, started undoing his tie and unbuttoning his shirt. Oh my God. The ache deepened. Her face flushed, her pulse quickened; she smiled, slow, and titled her head down, watching him with narrowed, eager eyes. When he came at her again, half naked and beautiful and very, very salty, he shoved her up against the wall, pushed his hips hard into hers, ripped at her clothes. She yelped in surprise. He wanted her so badly! But then, she wanted him too, so she clawed at him and matched his desperation.
Later, hours after he'd rendered her insensible, she woke to him writhing and mumbling in his sleep, reliving the awful moments of his past in much the same way that she so often did.
"I'm sorry...I'm sorry..."
She touched his arm. He stirred, eyelids fluttering. And then he muttered a word that hadn't passed his lips since Columbia; a word that he'd made clear he didn't want to talk about; a word that, in the here and now, made her stomach roil.
"Anna."
...
JULY 19th, 1914, BOSTON
What have I done?
Wish fulfillment. That was what her tears were supposed to be, what they always had been: her soul reaching out, giving form to her desire. She did not desire this. She would never have desired this, nor any of what she had seen today.
The implications of that worried her.
Songbird fell toward the park, his body convulsing, his shrieks choking and sputtering and then stopping altogether. The light in his eyes flickered, died; the irises flooded with oil. Water dripped from him, sloshed from his beak. Pockets of the crowd, thrown off-balance by the initial surge of water, looked up, stunned. There were shouts, cries of alarm.
"...mother of God!"
It was a trickle, at first, a handful of Wobblies and police here and there, fixing their eyes on the sky and backing away, turning, running, and screaming for their fellows to do the same. And then, they all were moving, dashing toward one street or another in a mad, panicked scramble, leaving behind a mass of bodies. Some of the fallen were still alive, groaning and clutching wounds or clawing at the lawn. Elizabeth wanted to move them. She wanted to at least try to save them. But there wasn't enough time, and that knowledge left her cold.
Songbird crashed down. The ground shook; great gouts of earth shot up in an arcing spray. It struck her, and she retched and coughed and wiped at her face, the dirt mixing with water, caking and streaking. Momentum carried him forward in a wild skid, his head angling downward and his tail whipping back and forth, until he slammed into the fountain, smashing it. He rolled, twisted, came to rest on his side, and was enveloped in a cloud of mist and dust.
He'd carved a gouge through the park, some thirty feet wide. It was strewn with frayed wires, hunks of turf, bits of metal. Elizabeth walked to its edge. There were men and women who'd been crushed by the impact, she knew, but she avoided looking at them. She avoided looking at Booker, who'd wound up on the opposite side of the rut, and who was now making his way toward her.
She'd failed. She hadn't stopped Booker, hadn't stopped anything; she'd slipped and panicked and made it worse. Everything was wrong. The whole day, the whole week, the whole damned month. She'd spent a year and a half living a life that was mostly peaceful and mostly normal, and now here it was, all coming apart.
Damn Europe. Damn William Roche. Damn whatever the hell she was supposed to be.
Booker came up beside her. "Elizabeth." She turned away from him. She didn't want to talk. Not now, not yet. She watched the tears collapse, felt her awareness shrink. Wondered why. He touched her shoulder and said her name again.
"What?" she finally asked.
"What just happened?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know?"
"No." She looked at Songbird. Why him? Why, of all creatures and all things, would he be what she reached for in a moment of panic? And the way he'd come... Where had she pulled him from? It wasn't the act of forcing him past his boundary that had killed him; he'd already been beyond hope. Had she done something to him, somehow?
Did it even matter?
"Uh, okay." Booker shifted, rubbed at the ground with his foot. "Where's Mrs. Roche?"
She hesitated. He wasn't going to like her answer. "I told her to get out of here."
"You what?"
"What would you have had me do?" She spun to face him. "The fight was growing worse, and instead of leaving with us, you were...getting involved."
His jaw worked. The green of his eyes darkened and his shoulders rolled back. "The job was, we watch her, not send her off. You shoulda stayed with her."
"And left you to it?"
"I woulda been fine."
She shook her head. He didn't understand. She knew that he realized the amount of influence she'd had on him, but he had no idea just how hard she'd worked to give him the chance to be a better kind of man. And his chance was also hers, because before their escape, she'd been giving in to the call of anger and violence, herself. She'd had no choice. She couldn't have left him, job or no.
"Look, why don't you head home?" he said. "I'll deal with the Roches. Long as she's safe, should still be able to get our pay."
"I promise you, she's fine." People started to move back into the park, slowly, cautiously, whispering and pointing at Songbird, edging toward him. The police shouted to one another. A siren sounded in the distance. "I'm not... I don't..." It was suddenly hard to form words. "Aren't you at all concerned with what's happened here?"
"I'm more concerned about you. I asked you to tell me if things started going south, and you didn't."
Oh, God, no. She couldn't do this right now. "By the time I would have said something, it was too late."
"Can't say I much like the sound of that." He peered back over his shoulder, took in East Broadway, swung his gaze around to M. "We gotta get outta here, either way. Place is gonna be overrun. And...Jesus, Elizabeth, Songbird? What..."
"I don't know, Booker! Would you leave it be?" Her stomach churned. She was confused, and scared, and ashamed, and so many people had died and she hated it, and she wanted him to shut up and leave her alone. She turned away from him again. "If you would just..."
She stopped, sucked in a breath. Her gaze had fallen back on Songbird. There was...something, a trace, a single line. She could hardly see it, but she could feel it tremble. Feel it beckon to her and beg to be plucked. The thrill of possibility washed over her, overriding her frustration.
No. Don't even think about it.
It was foolish. What if something went wrong? What if she was dragged under again?
What if she could figure out what had happened?
She started walking toward him. Booker said something and followed after her, but she ignored him. There had to be a reason for this. There had to be a reason why her power had changed and become unstable. What if she could find a piece of the answer right here, right now? What if she could find it at the other end of that thread? At the very least, she had to try, because if she could make it work, then that would mean there was hope for her.
She thought back to how she had felt outside the tavern and at the beginning of the rally, about her inability to see alternate paths for Booker and herself. Things kept happening that weren't supposed to. But how could she even know that? And how could it even be so, when she had seen so many possible lives unfold for so many different people? The reason was there, intuitive, but she couldn't grasp it. She needed something more, something that would push it to the forefront.
Songbird loomed ahead of her, still menacing, still a source of so much fear after all this time. Her nerves buzzed. And as she approached him, his body was overtaken by a surge of electricity, causing him to jerk and spasm in a parody of rigor mortis. His torso shook, his beak dropped open, his head and tail lifted off the ground. Elizabeth jumped and cried out; when he fell back into stillness, she closed her eyes and pressed a hand to her chest. Her heart pounded. She gulped and forced herself to walk on.
She gave the remains of the fountain a wide berth, but the pump was still shooting enough water for it almost not to matter. Her heels sank into the ground; mud splattered her stockings, the hem of her skirt. Mist beaded on her cheeks and forehead. She'd only be able to get so close, wet as she was. It would have to do.
She left two yards' worth of distance between them. His eye was pointing toward her, and it was empty and dead, but she half expected it to pop and swivel, for him to squawk and pull himself up and reach for her. A familiar melody sounded in her head. The air thickened in her lungs. Calm down. She licked her lips, catching dirt on her tongue. Took a deep breath. Squinted, focused. And after a handful of heartbeats, the line unfolded and danced before her, bright and sure. She could dig her hands into it, there, right there...
Boots squelched in the mud. Booker came to a stop just behind her, close enough that she could feel the heat of his body on her back. There was a pause, and then, "what exactly are you fixing to do?" To his credit, it was the first time he'd spoken in minutes.
"I'm going to see if I can tell where he was before I opened the tear."
"You think that's a good idea, after..."
She glared at him over her shoulder. She was doing this, and damn the consequences. He huffed and backed away.
"Fine, do what you're gonna do."
She turned back, found it again. A spot of light, pulsing, yearning, singing her name. She almost had it, if she could just... There was a wall, like those she had seen before, but it was thin. So thin. And here, it was brittle and flaking, and if she put out her hand, and concentrated on that point, then all she had to do was...
...push.
She's bathed in light. No; she's madeof it, and there's clarity - perfect, sweet, and terrible. Tears are an amateur's game. Hers is an absolute power, and the panopticon is her gaze.
She sees another city, no less incredible and rotten than Columbia, floundering under its own civil war. She sees a space, safe, away from the madness, removed from the center of all things by little more than a set of steps and a corridor. Songbird turns on them, bears down on them, but she knows what to do. What she must do. What she's already done. She splays her fingers and Comstock's ship melts away, and the rubble of her tower is replaced by a pane of glass, thick, reinforced. On the other side is Songbird, surrounded by ocean, drowning and succumbing to the crush of pressure.
Booker is behind her. She feels something for him that she now knows she shouldn't, and she can see the paths that would have let her act on it, can see herself tasting his lips and resting in his arms. It hurts like hell. When she reaches out to say farewell to Songbird, she glances at the thimble on her finger, and wishes it were there for a different reason.
It never is. It never will be.
She'll give him a choice, as the weave allows. He'll choose the way he must, and she'll do, she does, she did the same. She doesn't want to face that yet, to face him, so she remains focused on Songbird. But as she watches him die, something...changes, abrupt and shocking. A piece of her awareness is rent and wrenched away. A door opens, swallows him, tugs at the glass. Booker shifts and mutters a curse.
Ice forms and hardens at the base of her spine. "No," she whispers. She didn't see this. This isn't supposed to happen!
The vision collapsed. She stumbled back. Mud seeped up and around her boot; she fell, arms wheeling, and Booker caught her, but his arms gave no comfort. She felt only sorrow, coupled with a profound sense of loss.
And she had no idea why.
Something inside of her burst. She convulsed, started crying. Booker drew in a breath, sharp, and hoisted her up, pulling her to him. "Easy." The tears fell harder. "The hell did you see?"
She shook her head. She didn't know! When she'd been in it, she'd known everything. She'd known more than she'd ever wanted to. But now, almost all of it was gone! It was a fading dream, and she had nothing to show for it but a handful of images and vague impressions. She felt like she was going to lose Booker, and then lose herself, and that there was no way to stop it. She felt so many awful things, and she couldn't connect them to anything.
The walls. All of the walls. She'd been protecting herself. She still was. But from what?
We did something wrong.
No, no, that wasn't it. Something was different, but it wasn't their fault. They hadn't known the choice existed.
What choice?
She twisted her head against his shoulder and looked down at her hand. What was that about her finger?
"Let's get you outta here."
There's no getting out of here. You know where you're going. You've already been there.
She let him move her. There was a crowd again - onlookers, some whispering, some wringing hats, some openly crying. Cops, starting to move through them, to tell them to clear away. No one argued this time.
No one else would die today. No one else.
Except for him. He'sgoing to die. And I'm going to be...
No. He was alive. His body was hot and it was curled around her, and that's how it was going to stay. She shook her head, strained to be present, and noticed that he was taking her to East Second. The job. An anchor to reality. She latched onto it. "She went this way."
"What?"
"Mrs. Roche. Perhaps she hasn't completely left; perhaps she's in the crowd."
Booker sighed. "I don't really care right now."
"We can still do this." She swallowed. She was still crying; she tried to stop it. "If she's here, we can check on her, and then we'll have done exactly what we were meant to do."
He stopped and looked down at her. His face was tight with worry. "You sure?"
"It'll only take a moment."
He pinched the bridge of his nose, and then, after a time, he nodded. "All right."
They pushed their way into the press of bodies. She stole a glance back at Songbird, who was now being approached by a wary group of police, guns raised. The tear at his heart was still there, offering her the chance to take another peek, to try again.
On her pinkie, the thimble burned.