The ceiling high above swims into focus, the tiles bright and new and covered with beautiful paintings that she can't quite make out. Every now and then, a bird will go chirrup somewhere outside, just barely audible over the distant sound of hundreds upon hundreds of what might be engines of some sort, stopping, starting, roaring, churning, speeding through the city below. She slowly raises her head, trying to figure out where she's ended up. She's lying in a beautiful plush bed, still naked. The silken sheets against her battered and weary skin is like tactile ambrosia. The pillows are deep and soft and she finds herself sinking back down onto them before she can examine the room. Her eyes flutter closed. She's still melting from the afterglow. Even thinking about it is enough to make her feel a little shaky. Wandering the dimly-lit halls in that alluring skirt and blouse, and then in nothing at all... Not to mention the spanking! "You'd have to be crazy not to get turned on by it." she murmurs to herself.

"Are you still talking to yourself?" another voice asks. It's...her again. She tries to get up, but someone pushes her back down against the bed. "Hey, take it easy." the owner of the voice tells her as she comes into focus. "You need to rest. You've been through a lot."

"You would know." Elizabeth says softly, settling reluctantly back into her pillow.

The other Elizabeth nods with a smile. Her hair is long and beautiful, just like it was the day she met him. Her dress however is not the one she herself had worn. Instead, it's tight and modest, white with black stripes: one around the middle, one around the upper chest, one around the high-rise collar, and one for each of the cuffs. The bow is different too, Elizabeth notices, as the other her tilts her head and smiles fondly. It's red to her blue. Constants and variables, they both think at once. "How'd you do it?" Elizabeth asks.

The other Elizabeth shrugs. "I jumped around a lot. Wound up in a place where they'd invented artificial telepathy: a machine that lets you send your own thoughts. After I...borrowed it, it was just a matter of adjusting it to your particular 'wavelength'. It wasn't too different from my own, just enough to make it fun."

Elizabeth looks at her doppelganger, the corner of her mouth quirking upward in amusement. "You sure like to talk." she says. She wishes she could muster up the strength to kiss her.

The other Elizabeth almost blushes. "I'm sorry. I guess I started to get lonely after..." Elizabeth's smile fades. Suddenly she feels like crying. "Go ahead." the other girl says, like she's reading her mind. "You sound as though you need it."

Elizabeth fights back tears angrily. She pretends she doesn't want to get the sheets wet. The other Elizabeth lays down on the bed beside her, reaching beneath the sheets and wrapping a delicate white hand around hers. Elizabeth closes her eyes again, but the dams have begun to break. The final blow comes when Elizabeth feels her lips upon her own in a gentle and almost-but-not-quite-sisterly kiss. She can't take it any more; she breaks down, breaks away from herself and just starts sobbing silently. The other girl pulls her in tight, and Elizabeth feels her start to cry as well. They cling to each other in silent grief, mourning the death of innocence, the death of her father, the death of the Songbird, but most of all for her finger, for the idle and calamitous cruelty of the Luteces, for the hundreds of men, women and children that had to die for this moment to come about.

After a while, the other Elizabeth plants a trembling kiss upon the older one's head and says, "He's waiting."

"I know." Elizabeth whispers. She can see him now. They both can. "But I...I don't want to go..." They can't tell what will happen once the change occurs, how much of her will stay with Anna while she grows. Sometimes she forgets. Sometimes she doesn't forget; she remembers everything. The why remains elusive. There are some things these two will not, cannot see, no matter what they end up choosing. Omniscience is a variable. Chalk it up to the whims of the universe, the laws even ElizabethAnna ComstockDeWitt must obey.

The older one suddenly remembers Sally. "Sally?" she calls, sitting up and looking around the luxuriously furnished room. She's not there.

"You left her in Rapture," the younger one says. "She'll be safe. But it's not over for her. She still has a part to play."

Elizabeth doesn't remember this, but she doesn't have to. She sorts through the pictures in her mind, and then she knows why. "She kills him." "Get him!" the little girl shrieks, falling down onto the hulking misshapen brute. She stabs him in the neck with her needle. Others come to join her. "She kills Fontaine."

"They all do." the other Elizabeth says. "Jack, Sally, Bridget, Liselle-" She would go on but her lips are currently busy. Elizabeth runs her hands down the younger girl's back, pulling teasingly at the clasps of her conservative white dress. "You talk too much." she tells her huskily when she breaks away. The other girl nods breathlessly.

"Are you going to spank me for it?" she asks almost hopefully.

"Now there's a thought..." Elizabeth murmurs, planting a kiss behind the younger one's ear, then below the ear and all the way down her neck in a spiraling arc until she can go no further. The neckline of the dress is in her way. She leaves another trail of kisses behind her as she inches up the other girl's neck, who moans softly. Elizabeth claims the girl's mouth with her own, all the while struggling with the dress. Frustrated, she props herself up on her elbow and leans over the other Elizabeth, attempting to get a better view of the problem. The long-haired one takes the opportunity to let her hands do some wandering of their own. She finds the older girl's bottom and gives it a firm squeeze. Elizabeth yelps and moves back to glare at her counterpart. "I thought you said you wanted a spanking, not that you wanted to give one." she growls playfully.

"We have time for both, don't we?" the other Elizabeth asks.

"A woman after my own heart." Elizabeth says approvingly.

"Why bother? I already have it." the younger girl grins before rolling away and off the bed to her feet. She hurries over to the full-length mirror beside the table, which in turn is within spitting distance of the door, and begins a frantic struggle to undo her dress. Elizabeth climbs out from beneath the sheets and makes her way to the other girl, swaying her hips like she learned how to do in Rapture. The effect is even more stunning when she's not wearing anything. "Could you give me a hand with this?" the other Elizabeth asks, having failed to notice the little sashay. Between them, they manage to unlace it and help her out of it. She lays it gently over the table before turning back to her lover. "We still have the corset to do." she says apologetically. "And the stockings. And the...underwear."

"I'd rather just do you." Elizabeth's voice is sultry and dark. The other Elizabeth blushes.

"First things first." she says.

The corset takes substantially longer, in part because the younger Elizabeth keeps running her hands over her older self's body. She's careful to avoid the place between Elizabeth's legs, but she lavishes attention on her breasts, which are just barely bigger than her own. Once or twice, the older girl tries to tell her to stop, but that just makes her use her mouth instead of her hands, swirling her tongue round and round Elizabeth's nipples until Elizabeth's legs give out beneath her and they both tumble to the floor, the soft heavy carpet absorbing most of the impact. The younger one lands on top. She can't stop giggling at the absurdity of the situation. She just made herself...cum, and now she's lying atop herself, barely clothed and not clothed at the same time. The older one smiles shakily, then tugs her lover down for another kiss.


In a tangled mess of limbs and love, they make their way back to the bed, now fully naked and glistening with sweat. Elizabeth's makeup is beginning to run. She's surprised it didn't happen sooner. She's surprised this is happening at all. "Is this incest-" she whispers as the other Elizabeth nuzzles her neck lovingly. "-or...?"

"It's not incest," the other Elizabeth says into her neck. She surfaces and looks down into her lover's eyes. "What the Luteces do, that isn't incest. It's just..." She leans in and kisses Elizabeth, slipping her tongue into her mouth for the first time. "...learning to love yourself." she finishes.

"It's masturbation." Elizabeth breathes.

"MUTUAL masturbation," the other Elizabeth corrects her. "From what I hear, you need all the help loving yourself you can get."

"So what are you waiting for?" Elizabeth asks. The girl grins and disappears beneath the bedsheets. Elizabeth has always been a quick learner, and her younger self is too. Her tongue slides in and out of Elizabeth's lower lips, lapping and twirling, thrusting and poking (as much as a tongue can at any rate). The feel of her long beautiful hair brushing the skin beneath Elizabeth's navel doesn't help matters, and soon she cums, clenching her hands tight as the pleasure pulses through her and moaning her name. "Oh god, Elizabeth..." she whimpers. The other Elizabeth pokes her head out from under the sheets.

"That good huh?" she asks.

Elizabeth can hardly find the words. "Let me show you." she says and wiggles down to join herself.

Her younger self is merciless. Even as Elizabeth settles in between the other girl's legs, the girl returns to her ministrations, coaxing her to a third and sudden, but by no means last, orgasm of the morning. Elizabeth gives as good as she gets however; maybe even better, if the state of the other Elizabeth's backside when all is said and done is any indication.


She leaves herself and the past behind, diving headlong into the future. It won't be easy, whichever way the universe chooses, but somehow she knows it'll be all right. She has Booker, after all. And he has her.