*SPOILERS*

Disclaimer: All property is the property of their respective owners. I will also apologize in advance for any and all grammar errors I make.

If there was one word that accurately described Los Angeles, California, it would be diverse. Its citizens seemed to come from all over the world, and there were so many different languages and dialects. While the architecture may not have rivaled New York's sprawling skyline for sheer height, it was far ahead and above the Big Apple in entertainment.

Sally and Jack were overly well acquainted with the local attractions, and were relieved when Marcus sent them on ahead, promising to meet up with the two later. Elizabeth on the other hand was captivated by the range of theaters, restaurants, stores, and especially the street performers. Marcus had tried to guide her past one particular mariachi band, but their enthusiastic music proved too infectious for Elizabeth to resist.

Unwilling to join her, Marcus contented himself with watching Elizabeth twirl to the frantic music. The strange visions that had been plaguing him hardly reconciled with this image of Elizabeth. No woman could survive such a bloody revolution and still be so carefree. Yet, Elizabeth was. She clearly had no idea how to dance to the Macarena, not that he could teach her, but that hardly seemed important to her.

What troubled Marcus was the band itself. Compromised entirely of illegal Mexican immigrants, this group was on Shadow's watch list regarding Hidalgo's informants. The vihuela(1) player was a drug dealer known even to the Drug Enforcement Administration. However, they refused to interfere because his illicit business provided intelligence that allowed for mapping out operations higher up the Cartel's chain of command, if such a thing could be called a chain.

Unbeknownst to the so-called omniscient bureaucracy back in Washington, Shadows incorporated had began its own drug interdiction policies shortly after setting up shop, dismantling parts, and repurposing others, of the Cartel's network of informants long before anyone else had actually identified Hidalgo Delgado as a threat.

This gap in intelligence was why Marcus's first attempt to assassinate Hidalgo had proceeded without official sanctioning by any nation, sovereign or otherwise. Doubts over the legality had plagued him throughout the mission and the end result was "a failure to effectively prosecute the target despite the most admirable of efforts on the part of agent Delavee, codename Icarus." The truth was a little less then "admirable." Shadows Incorporated was under the impression that Marcus never had an opportunity to pull the trigger, when in reality he'd simply refused to go through with the deed.

There were too many questions Hideyori Datae had refused to answer. He'd almost done it anyways, they'd paid him after all, but his conscience had called forth an old quote from a high school course on Shakespearean literature, more specifically The Tragedy of Macbeth. It had come from Act I, Scene vii, Line 46-47: "I dare do all that may become a man; who dares do more is none." Marcus hadn't signed his contract intending to become a murder. They'd told him he'd be defending his country, not killing people for shady reasons.

Marcus now knew that his reasoning had been a mistake. After returning home to Cali' with several Cartel enforcers' blood on his hands, blood that troubled him not one lick, he'd learned the true scope of Hidalgo's operation. Besides dallying in exotic international drugs, the ruthless Spaniard, Marcus still labeled him according to his country of birth even though he was legally a Mexican citizen, had his filthy fingers in sex trafficking, political assassination, child kidnapping, and just about every other illegal activity that honorable human beings deplored. The Cartel was a snake. If Marcus had simply cut off the head there would have been no one with administrative and organizational skill-set required to run the business, and it was a business.

Racking in millions, if not billions, of American dollars every year made the Cartel one of the top grossing companies world-wide, yet another statistic the egotistical bureaucrats remained unaware of. Hideyori Datae's policy regarding the release of information to Washington was akin to hearing a shotgun load a round of 00, .33 caliber buckshot for an intruder in the dead of night. At least that was the best analogy this southerner' had.

Being a private company, Shadows Inc. wasn't governed by all the red tape most other agencies had to cut through. It was why they were so much more effective than the nations that employed them, and it was why Marcus had stuck around for so long. It felt good to do good without being punished for it.

That being said, usually Shadows Inc. backed off of the Cartel's local street dealers, up until they ceased to have any utility. Even if any other members of this mariachi band were also involved in Cartel activities, Marcus had absolutely no authority to beat them senseless over their proximity to The Lamb-

*NO!*Marcus screamed internally to jolt himself away from that thinking. More calmly, he continued his thoughts. *She isn't The Lamb. She is Elizabeth.*

Sight blurring regardless of his awareness of the discrepancy, Marcus was almost convinced he DID need to bloody the musical ensemble. He hadn't quite figured out the best method, a garrote made from their own guitar strings held some appeal, before Elizabeth appeared inside his frame of vision.

"Marcus?" She asked with what amounted to bitterness in her voice. "You're bleeding." Elizabeth told him, raising a hand Marcus hadn't realized wore a metallic thimble to staunch the crimson dripping from his nose.

"Sorry." He mumbled, unsure about what actually warranted her emotion. Presumably, Elizabeth was upset over having to stop dancing just to ensure he was alright, hence the need to apologize. "I'm fine . . . just go back to . . . whatever that was."

A strange look had cast itself over her features, framing Elizabeth in a darker, unsettling light. There was an undercurrent of anger and regret that defined her voice when she told Marcus. "Never mind. Let's be going." On that note, she stormed past him and disappeared into the maze of bodies.

It took a moment for him to process her departure, but when it clicked he set off after her. "Elizabeth wait damn it." Marcus called out, suddenly thankful for the conspicuous nature of her blue dress. "Will you just stop for a second?" He yelled at her back, breathing a sigh of relief when she halted her pace.

"Finally." Marcus breathed, letting the tension ebb out of his excited muscles when he reached Elizabeth. Admittedly, part of him had been hoping she'd bolt. There were worse ways than running after an attractive young woman to get the blood pumping.

Marcus was in the process of trying to formulate a joke out of the thought, but he stopped when a small sob slipped past Elizabeth's pursed lips. Her hands balled up in fists, she shook with each tremor of her growing grief. "Elizabeth . . . Elizabeth are you alright?" Marcus asked, caught off-guard yet again.

Brushing her worries aside, Elizabeth angrily told him she was fine. She knew something was bound to happen, likely very soon, and she'd been a fool not to realize it before. There was more than one why to "contract" Tear sickness. More commonly, someone wound up inhabiting a world other than their own, but Marcus didn't seem to have that problem.

People knew him which meant he had far too many personal connections to this timeline. Besides that, a history of Tear-induced seizures would have certainly disqualified him from the occupation he currently holds.

That still left the question of why he would be experiencing memories associated with another reality. It had been subtle enough, but just now, when he had bled in front of the mariachi band, Marcus had been mouthing something about a "Lamb." Being taken away to another world creates unnatural memories within the Sea of Doors, and just like the tide they come in only to head back out.

The Siphons might have lessened the amount of control she wielded over her powers, but her memories still felt more or less intact. Booker needed to be avenged, and didn't it make sense to find a man like Marcus to deal with a man like Comstock.

*Only blood can redeem blood, right Prophet? Perhaps you didn't expect others to take that as literally as you do.*

Thankfully, Marcus didn't bother trying to initiate a conversation. He allowed Elizabeth to dwell on her troubles in silence as the pair strolled along the sidewalk.

Walking through the noisy Los Angeles streets left Elizabeth completely disoriented. A series of seemingly directionless twists and turns down overcrowded concrete walkways flanked by the city's structures made her question the wisdom of Jack and Sally's decision to go on without them. As for why they were exercising their legs at all, they had apparently walked, not driven, their way to the hospital, intending to check up on Masha and Leta at their work, and Marcus's emergency arrival had coincided with their own by accident.

While Marcus told her he knew exactly where he was heading, he didn't seemed to particularly care how they got there. Marcus was content to feel the sun warm his back with its golden rays, and enjoy the feeling of salt-laden winds against his face. He assumed Elizabeth was too.

But to Elizabeth, everything was a little too stifling. She'd grown up at an extremely high altitude, and this heat was a far cry from the howling gales that frequently assaulted Columbia. Produced by the uneven heating of the Earth as it orbited the sun, and complicated by the thinner atmosphere, Columbian winds could become incredibly frigid. Only the complex systems of pumps and furnaces installed throughout the city had kept BattleShip Bay a beach, and not a frozen lake.

Banishing the unwanted memories of home to the farthest recesses of her mind, lest she produce another accidental Tear, Elizabeth studied the people crowding the sidewalks. She wasn't sure what she expected to notice; only that something felt wrong. It took her a minute to realize that none of the passersby actually looked at the others. They walked blankly, staring into newspapers or speaking into what looked like small radios. Unlike Columbia, there were no friendly conversations with strangers, or even a basic acknowledgement that other people existed.

This feigned ignorance saddened Elizabeth. By her estimation, these people would have been perfectly content to hide themselves away in a tower. Before she felt enough time had passed to properly digest this depressing detail, a voice raised itself above the noise, calling her by a name no one but him could know.

"ANNA!" Booker roared. Confused, Elizabeth turned and saw her one-time father barreling his way through the crowd of people, eyes fixated on her. Knowing him, he would have likely refused treatment at Santa Maria's on financial grounds alone. It was almost amusing to watch the throngs of distracted Los Angeles citizens suddenly become aware of the ex-pinkerton's angry presence, the scowl on his face an exact match to the one he wore while trapezing around Columbia's skyline.

Briefly, Elizabeth could almost picture him framed by large, sloping windows which pandered to an impressive underwater visage. She could practically smell the briny depths slipping through a leak Booker was too inebriated to either find or care about. It wasn't until his reckless charge led him to bowl over a young couple, pulling her back to the present, that Elizabeth remembered when Booker gave in to his rage, blood was often spilt.

Not at all unexpectedly, Marcus had taken notice of the disturbance approaching from behind. Placing himself in-between Elizabeth and the furiously distraught man, he smothered the ex-soldier's charge by hunching himself over, spreading his arms wide, and pushing off the concrete ground to lock grips.

For a single second, Elizabeth was enraptured by their momentary struggle. Two pillars of colossal might had met each other, neither one willing to admit defeat. They were waging their own private war, right here on the sidewalk for all to see. There was passion on Booker's face, but only a cold, calculating brutality painted Marcus's countenance, and with his foe's momentum lost, Elizabeth knew the latter combatant intended to win it.

In the next second, Marcus slipped his leg through the gap provided by Booker's widened stance. Pulling back to hook the brawler's left knee, he simultaneously released his grip and launched a vicious thrust into the man's throat.

As Booker lost his balance and began to tumble backwards, Marcus, leading with his knee, followed him down and pinned him onto the concrete ground.

"What the Hell's your problem you crazy bastard?!" Marcus yelled out, perplexed now that he recognized his assailant as the occupant of the other vehicle in his earlier car accident. Unfortunately for 'Booker', as Elizabeth had called him, uncertainty was not a virtue this mercenary held in high regard, and doubt quickly gave ground to purpose.

Marcus's father had been one of the army rangers to climb the cliffs of OMAHA and storm Pointe Du Hoc. One of the many lessons learned on that longest day (2), imparted from father to son, was that blind rage is never worth it. Compressing that fury into something more directed, more useful, had proved to be an invaluable asset in Marcus's missions with Shadows Incorporated. Unbeknownst to him, that kind of lethal focus had just cemented Elizabeth's assertion that she had intended to bring Marcus along on her hunt for Comstock.

Regardless of her secretive calculations, it took a lot to bring out that directed fury in Marcus. Even an assault like this wasn't ordinarily enough of a trigger, but the repeated appearances of any man, especially one connected with his feminine charge , felt a little too much like targeting and that did the trick.

"Why did you attack me?! Who sent you?!" There was a small crowd forming around them now, curiosity replacing fear now that danger had abated. Fear had sent them all scurrying away earlier, and only Elizabeth seemed to have not moved throughout the entire spectacle, bearing silent witness to Booker's predicament.

It was strange, but looking into those crystalline blue orbs Marcus swore Elizabeth wanted him to hurt the man, but that didn't make any sense. She'd been desperate to save this man, and her every reaction to Marcus's psychotic urges to murder Booker on the road only reinforced this point. Believing his interpretation of Elizabeth to be a mistake, Marcus banished those thoughts and studied the man instead.

The stench of nicotine-laced ash was horrendous, and years of stains colored his shirt. While he could smell alcohol trapped in the fabric of his clothing, Booker's eyes weren't clouded by drink. Truth be told, the man's muscle mass felt greater than Marcus's own, and only superior positioning was keeping him on his back. Why Elizabeth was fond of Booker defied reason. Then again, going through Hell and back had a way of warping one's perception of acceptable character traits. Booker had been kind to her. That was enough.

Feeling a small modicum of remorse for treating Elizabeth's friend like he was a common street thug, but more out of compassion for Booker's efforts in rescuing his charge, Marcus began to rise off of the man's chest. What he'd failed to notice was that Booker was staring at Elizabeth, and he had drawn an entirely different conclusion regarding his foe.

As soon as the pressure began to ease off, the ex-pinkerton summoned all of his rage from regrets formed over years of being indebted to the New York mafia, alcoholism, and the pain both had inflicted upon his daughter, to land a stiff elbow deep into the other man's abdomen.

The mercenary's eyes had bulged and he'd been forced off of Booker's chest with a satisfying gasp as all the breath fled his lungs. Booker didn't wait after hauling himself upright to make sure his opponent was going to stay down, instead he did his best to ignore the growing throb spreading throughout his chest when he strode painfully towards Anna and steeled himself against whatever excuse his daughter planned on giving him to explain what she was doing here in this strange city, traveling with a strange man as if all the lessons he'd taught her weren't important.

Booker was so focused on trying to formulate effective counter-arguments against what he supposed Anna would try and say, and subsequently failing to debunk even his imaginings of her, that he almost missed her outfit. The richly dyed fabric with its smooth texture evident to the eye, it didn't take a private investigator like Dewitt to notice that this particular dress was made by high-quality tailors and almost certainly very expensive, which meant . . .

"Who did you steal from this time Anna?" Booker's voice was quiet and it even sounded sad to a degree, like he was more disappointed than anything else, but there was anger boiling just under the surface, threatening to melt the thin ice Elizabeth was standing on.

Confusion and half-formed expositions raced through her skull. This was not a young Booker, yet he called her Anna. Elizabeth was certainly not a newborn in her crib, yet Booker recognized her face. If Booker recognized her as Anna and not a baby, then that meant . . .

"Oh my God." She breathed, only able to finish the sentence in the safety of her mind. *I stole my father with that Tear. I orphaned myself again, except this time Anna's already a grown woman.*

"I asked you a question Anna. Who did y-"

"You . . . You BASTARD!" Anger, hot and irrational surged through Elizabeth. Never mind the fact that she had been the one to bring him here, Booker had left her all alone AGAIN. The smell of cigarette smoke and cheap whisky permeating his soiled shirt only added fuel to her growing fire. "I trusted you to do the right thing, and this is how you repay me?! You were supposed to become a father, to stop this!" Elizabeth accused in a voice hoarse with unconcealed rage. She held the fabric of his red handkerchief in front of his face, forcing him to acknowledge her evidence and all its ash-covered, liquor-stained blemishes.

"Anna." Booker growled in warning, unprepared for the savage condemnation in her tone. Grabbing onto her arm, he held her firmly in place. "Now you listen here or-"

"No, you listen." Elizabeth cut him off, more angry than afraid of the idea that he might strike her. It would just be more proof of how horrible a father this man had turned out to be, how ridiculous her fantasies of actually living an ordinary life in any reality with this drunken excuse of a parent had been.

No, that wasn't quite right Elizabeth realized. She'd just miscalculated what that kind of existence was to Booker. What she wanted was no more realistic than the Fairy Tales Songbird used to bring her. The man gripping her upper arm was more akin to the Grimm Brothers, after all; violence was their norm too.

She quieted down as her zeal began to bleed away, leaving a bleak sense of loss in its place. "Do you really not remember anything Booker? Did you forget all about Comstock? Columbia? Me?" She asked desperately, searching his eyes for some kind of sign that 'her' Booker was still in there.

Instead, Elizabeth watched his green irises flare in shock as Marcus reappeared and wrapped his arm, now warped by a familiar, unsettling glow, around Booker's neck. Knowing his intent, the former member of the seventh cavalry instinctively tucked his chin against his chest to prevent the arm from actually going deep enough to stop the flow of blood through his carotid arteries, although the man was already pretty damn close to accomplishing that feat by both men's reckoning. Releasing his grip on Elizabeth to try and pry the impossibly powerful limb away from his neck, Booker stiffened when Marcus spoke menacingly into his ear. It was obvious Booker's blow still pained him though, because his words were accompanied by labored breathing.

"You let Elizabeth go, good on you. Now stop resisting, and for her sake, I'll release you. Keep struggling, and you'll learn why kidney punches aren't allowed in the ring." Marcus snarled with a self-satisfied smirk on his face. He knew who'd just won the fight. Booker couldn't move without running the risk of letting him inside his guard, so when the older man went slack it was no surprise.

Neither was the sudden attempt on his part to whirl around on Marcus as soon as the mercenary removed his arm. After proving he wasn't above fighting dirty, it was almost expected. That was why the first thing Marcus had done after letting go was to drop his arm to just under chest height. So when Booker had almost completed his spin, he found himself turning into an immobile limb.

Clotheslined, he landed hard on his back, but the expected weight never dropped down to pin him again. Rather, Booker found himself being offered a hand. Marcus was standing over him with his arm outstretched, a silent offer of assistance.

Pride stinging, Booker slapped the hand aside and rose to unsteady feet under his own power. The two faced each other suspiciously, waiting for someone to launch another blow. When no one did, Marcus swallowed his own pride and offered Booker a second olive branch, his tone indicating how futile he believed the gesture to be.

"I was just about to join my friend Jack for some lunch. Would you like to accompany me and Elizabeth, Booker? I think we've got a few differences to talk through, don't you agree?"

There were a lot of ways to acquire information. Breaking and entering, intimidation, and even violent interrogations were no stranger to Booker Dewitt, but the few times anyone had ever offered to speak with him across the dining table they'd always intended to talk.

Anna was quite the grifter, and conning this fool into guarding her must have been one extraordinary ruse. She must have not only given Marcus a false name, but she'd even convinced him that she needed protection against her own father. Abuse was Anna's most likely weapon, but since Marcus hadn't seen fit to rough him up any more than was necessary, "for her sake", Booker suspected she'd cried something other than wolf. At least until he knew what and more importantly why, Booker decided to attend. Who knows? There might even be an opportunity for a few drinks with their meal.

"Alright, that sounds like a fine idea Mister . . ." Booker paused, fishing for a name.

"Delavee, Marcus Delavee."

"Delavee." Booker repeated, committing the details of his face to memory.

*I'll remember you buddy. It's obvious you've been trained somewhere, but I noticed something you probably didn't. When you punch you always lead with your right. For a lefty like me, that kind of discrepancy in fighting styles could come in handy (3.)*

(1) A vihuela is a high-pitched, round-back guitar used for rhythm.

(2) Published in 1959 by Cornelius Slate, and produced into a movie in 1962, The Longest Day tells the tale of D-Day (The invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, whichever you prefer.) It just seems like the kind of thing Marcus would reference, not to mention that movie rocks.

(3) Seeing as how Booker used the Skyhook with his left arm, I always pictured him as being a left-handed fighter. In every other regard he seems to use his right, but no one can just strap a mechanical hunk of metal and wood to their forearm and kill people without having some kind of training right? Right?

Author's Note: I included the scene about Elizabeth bashing Booker's parenting of Anna because I see no real reason he would've changed. Alcoholism and gambling are powerful addictions, powerful enough to make Booker sell his own daughter. Additionally, there was no real support groups for him to go to. I wanted Anna to have a happy ending just as much as I wanted the same for Elizabeth. Sadly, I don't believe Booker was capable of change any more than Comstock was.

Any-whoo, on another note would someone please leave reviews. I've received one from "Merl", for which a thank you is long overdue, that tells me that I've at least provoked interest. That being said, I haven't received any other feedback, positive or negative. I'll be just as thankful to read a scathing review as I would a glowing one.