[ the thing about— whatever it is she has now, omniscience, always being caught between herself and the infinite possibilities of the future... the thing about it is, it makes it seem like she should always know what's happening. she should always be on the path that she is meant to be on. how could she be anywhere else? but sometimes... sometimes she winds up in places — puts herself in places — and she doesn't understand. she steps through a door that leads to somewhere she wasn't expecting, and of course, her knowledge simply adjusts itself.
after everything, Columbia and Rapture, Booker and that one final Comstock, the cycles and cycles of death and hurt, victims and abuse, Elizabeth takes herself to a place that both is and is not Paris. and she is Elizabeth here, her hair long and her back without scars, not the girl who walks between worlds seeing the path ahead and behind her; or she pretends to be, in any case, just as she pretends that she could ever be happy in her naive little fantasy of what she always wished Paris would be.
and in Paris, her Paris, the place that she has run to now to hide from all her grief and guilt and the weight of her knowledge, Elizabeth steps through a door and she doesn't understand.
because there is Booker. just as she remembers him, just as she wants to remember him, as if she never put her hands to his chest and held him underwater until his struggling ended. not the imitation that Comstock attempted to be in Rapture, either; Elizabeth would recognise her Booker anywhere, and this is him, here in her city and she doesn't... she can't... did she do this? she doesn't remember— surely she would never, not intentionally, it's a wound that she tries her hardest to avoid for fear of pulling at it, making it so much worse than it is, as bad as she knows it could be.
but he's here. however he is, he's here, and she... ]
... Booker?
[ her voice is soft, on the verge of cracking, and she steps into the room — just an ordinary house, because that dark office where Booker DeWitt wasted away for two decades has no place in the splendour of her Paris, and what door did she even step through? does it even matter? ]
[ booker's life always seems normal until she walks into it. painfully mundane. he could be anyone, doing anything. she's the only thing of note he's ever done with his life.
when she comes through the door, there's a strong, strange sense of deja vu. like this has happened before to him. or to someone else. ]
...Hey.
[ kindness settles in the lines of his face, the set of his broad shoulders. she knows things. he doesn't. that's a lot of responsibility to heap onto a young girl's shoulders. in all fairness, booker did try to understand, when elizabeth was explaining to him. but he gave up when he saw that there was no matching her. that she was something special, beyond him.
it's nobody's fault but his own.
so he can't explain what he's going on here. he definitely wouldn't go to heaven, so he can't pretend he thinks that's where he is. but if there's anyone whose face he'd want to see at any time, it's hers. he's still not sure whether he has a right to feel that way about her. but he does.
[ maybe the two of them were never the most affectionate in their time together, their gestures smaller than anything so showy as an embrace and their love for each other unspoken — because she knows, without the reach of her omniscience, that Booker loved her, and she has loved him ever since she let herself be taken away in Songbird's claws rather than see him killed — but there's never been any hesitation between them, either.
and there is none now, when Elizabeth moves to him and reaches her right hand out to his face, fingertips (and thimble) just shy of touching. ]
Are you real? [ it's just as breathless as it was the first time they met, but there's grief in her voice now instead of wonder. ] I-I don't understand, how...
[ how, when he should be gone? not just dead but excised entirely from every future that could ever be, because of her. is this some silly, childish fiction like her Paris? she can't find anything in his face other than the Booker DeWitt she knows, nothing to suggest that he's a shallow reconstruction, nothing idealised. but then again... would she really make him any other way, if it was her doing? would her perfect Booker DeWitt be anything other than the flawed man who loved her so fiercely that he let her hold him beneath the water? ]
[ he'd tell her if he was just a figment of her imagination. that's what he thinks, what he decides to be the truth. of course, that doesn't mean he knows for sure. his little girl is so much more than he ever was, and he meant what he said when he said he was afraid of her and the things she could do. that much power on one woman's shoulders - on his girl's shoulders - and it's all because of him.
if he thinks about it like that it's almost too much to bear.
so he follows what she started, reaching forward to cup the side of her face in one big hand. ]
Feels real.
[ that's a paltry explanation, but when has he ever had anything better to offer her. she's so much more than he is. he's known she was something special ever since he first laid eyes on her. even now he can't separate having loved her from having not. the luteces would say that it's all the same. loves, loved, will love. but that's not how people work or how people feel.
that's what he thought at the time. now maybe he thinks that he's been a damn fool all his life. elizabeth probably already knows that too. she's so beautiful. he can't imagine how she could even begin to forgive him. ]
[ everything is such a mess if she tries to think on it too much. between the complicated knot of their lives and all the doors that she sees, there's an endless loop of lives and memories that she has but never lived, hers and not hers; it makes it hard to say if she forgives him, or if she never blamed him at all. she doesn't think that she did — or would, if she were Elizabeth alone, without knowing the lives of the girls that died before the end, or never made it out of Columbia. maybe another version of her wouldn't see a distinction between Booker and Comstock, might never forgive her father for taking her from that crib.
but that isn't her. that isn't what she saw. she knows Booker as the only person that has ever loved her, the man who grieved so deeply that he carved his daughter's initials into the back of his hand. who could have become Comstock, and chose not to. what could she ever blame him for, when he never wanted to let her go in the first place? it had been one mistake, just a single moment, and he had come for her so desperately, no no no, anna anna, give me back my daughter. and if they're here, if they're in her Paris and this is her Booker, then... then she can be that girl. just for now, she can pretend that the only memories are the ones they share.
her breath hitches on what could be a sob. the hand she reached out to him with draws back, and she covers her mouth, trying to suppress a shuddering exhale. it feels like something has suddenly hit her, some terrible thing that has been looming overhead for too long. ]
... I'm sorry. [ she never got to say it. didn't say anything before she held him under and she should have but she was filled with a thousand other lives and it doesn't matter, she should have told him, thank you or I love you or— ] Oh, Booker, I'm so sorry, I—
[ he would understand, he thinks. if elizabeth never wanted to see him again. even if she could look at him and see past comstock, he's still the man who sold her. even knowing he regretted it, even knowing he tried as hard as he could to get his daughter back, there was still a moment where he thought that was the right thing to do. giving up his baby girl.
she had every right to drown him. and in the end, it was what he wanted. he wanted to give her the life he never could by staying alive.
so he's trying not to think too hard about it. what he's doing here or how he got here or anything like that. he lets his hand slide from the side of her face around to the back of her head, protective and keeping her close. ]
Shh, shh. Ain't nothing you've done that warrants an apology. Especially not to me.
[ they're square. whatever debt once existed between them has always been on booker's end and never anna's. or elizabeth's. ]
[ she lays one of her hands on the arm he has raised to cradle the back of her head, her grip curling gently not to pry him off but just— wanting to hold onto this. feeling like she has to, for it to be real, because it would be so easy for her to trick herself with fake visions and if she holds on then it has to be the real Booker, it has to be. one good thing. just one good thing after they've been through in Columbia, after the things she did in Rapture, what she did to poor Sally just to see Comstock get a fitting end. (poetic justice, she could have done things so quickly but she wanted revenge and she did terrible things to make that happen so is she really any better than him, in the end—)
her eyes are stinging with tears, but she doesn't want to close them, doesn't want to take her eyes off Booker. she just blinks quickly, trying to even her breathing to keep herself from actually crying. ]
I missed you.
[ it's sincerity and it's grief, a tangled knot of love and despair caught in her throat. after a pause, though, her gaze shifts off to the side, to their surroundings, and she cringes. ]
... I wish you hadn't had to see this, though.
[ this being Paris. she feels like a silly little girl all of a sudden, uncomfortably aware of this ridiculous fantasy she's constructed for herself; this fake city where everyone knows her name, where her hair is long and she has no scar from a needle in her spine. where even now they stand in some home of extravagant architecture, with Elizabeth's favourite songs playing on a record player off to the side.
and here Booker is in the middle of it all. she isn't sure whether it makes her fantasy feel more or less believable. ]
[ living in space sucks. maybe because this particular spaceship is derelict and abandoned, but — sometimes it feels a lot like being back in Wonderland. it's the way they're trapped in here with no hope of escape and no one waiting on the outside for them. it's that sense of constant danger, the blade overhead that could fall at any moment. Minatsuki got used to living her life day-to-day not knowing when she might die, but that was supposed to be something she'd put in the ground, and only recently at that. she didn't want to go back to it. she had been looking at a future where she could think further ahead than the next day.
but it's back to what she knows, and that includes finding ways to kill time. the first thing she learned in Wonderland is that when people are trapped in a cage and they can't see more than one day ahead of them, they just look for how to deal with the monotony. the group of them stranded here have examined the place top to bottom, and from the way things are set up, it seems like this ship was some kind of luxury cruise liner before it was their prison. although much of it has lost the shine it probably once had, left behind to collect dust and rot away, there are decks of the ship that were once for leisure. a grandiose dining hall, a movie theatre, the biggest swimming pool she's ever seen.
most importantly: a whole deck just for the gardens, which Minatsuki immediately commandeers. they're the kind of gardens that are as much for show as they are for survival, with so much space to fill they didn't need to choose one over the other. from hydroponic crops on one end of the deck to ornamental flowers on the other; a berry orchard, a grass lawn, trees reaching towards the ceiling that supplement the ship's oxygen reserves. all of it was overgrown when they first arrived, but it's been brought under control with time and grunt work that she'd roped in others to help with. now, though, it's a matter of working with what they have. they have to tend to the plants that are alive, and make sure the seeds kept in storage on the ship will be able to grow.
there aren't a lot of them who got torn from their lives and dumped on this ship. they're spread thin, most of the time, trying to make sure they'll be able to stay alive out here just one more day without any kind of power failure or hull breach. so there aren't a lot of hands to put to work in the garden, and Minatsuki doesn't need them anyway. she'd refused to teach anyone, too — she's not holding someone's hand while they're still trying to keep the plants alive, she had said, she'll do it later when she's not fucking busy. but there is one person who she doesn't mind, since he seems to know what he's doing, or he's at least not completely useless.
really, given the size of this ship and how few of them are on it, it feels like she might go days without seeing another person if it weren't for Caduceus Clay. it's strange, after the close quarters of Wonderland, and then the lack of privacy in the prison they put her in when Wonderland fell. but she doesn't mind it. spending her days in a massive room where the air is fresh and clean, quiet but for the hum of machines cycling air and water around, the view of stars through those towering windows surrounding them. she dreamed of a place like this, back in Wonderland. if she can't have a life of her own, at least she can have something better than the little flower garden she used to keep for herself in her room.
speaking of those flowers, these ones that were replanted when they cleared out the overgrowth are wilting. she's still learning the lay of the land here, between the size of the place and the damage done by all the time it spent abandoned. she thinks they should be salvageable as long as they do the work to save them now. and she could do it by herself, but— ]
Oi, Caduceus! [ she's not sure where he is, but she's sure he'll hear her if she shouts. it's not just quiet in here, it echoes. the only places on the ship that don't sound empty are the rooms with carpeted floors. ] Get your ass over here.
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this is frankie ALSO IF YOU DON'T LIKE THE PROMPT WE CAN DO WHATEVER my heart is broken
WHAT A THING TO WAKE UP TO OH MY GOD....
after everything, Columbia and Rapture, Booker and that one final Comstock, the cycles and cycles of death and hurt, victims and abuse, Elizabeth takes herself to a place that both is and is not Paris. and she is Elizabeth here, her hair long and her back without scars, not the girl who walks between worlds seeing the path ahead and behind her; or she pretends to be, in any case, just as she pretends that she could ever be happy in her naive little fantasy of what she always wished Paris would be.
and in Paris, her Paris, the place that she has run to now to hide from all her grief and guilt and the weight of her knowledge, Elizabeth steps through a door and she doesn't understand.
because there is Booker. just as she remembers him, just as she wants to remember him, as if she never put her hands to his chest and held him underwater until his struggling ended. not the imitation that Comstock attempted to be in Rapture, either; Elizabeth would recognise her Booker anywhere, and this is him, here in her city and she doesn't... she can't... did she do this? she doesn't remember— surely she would never, not intentionally, it's a wound that she tries her hardest to avoid for fear of pulling at it, making it so much worse than it is, as bad as she knows it could be.
but he's here. however he is, he's here, and she... ]
... Booker?
[ her voice is soft, on the verge of cracking, and she steps into the room — just an ordinary house, because that dark office where Booker DeWitt wasted away for two decades has no place in the splendour of her Paris, and what door did she even step through? does it even matter? ]
i'm so sorry
when she comes through the door, there's a strong, strange sense of deja vu. like this has happened before to him. or to someone else. ]
...Hey.
[ kindness settles in the lines of his face, the set of his broad shoulders. she knows things. he doesn't. that's a lot of responsibility to heap onto a young girl's shoulders. in all fairness, booker did try to understand, when elizabeth was explaining to him. but he gave up when he saw that there was no matching her. that she was something special, beyond him.
it's nobody's fault but his own.
so he can't explain what he's going on here. he definitely wouldn't go to heaven, so he can't pretend he thinks that's where he is. but if there's anyone whose face he'd want to see at any time, it's hers. he's still not sure whether he has a right to feel that way about her. but he does.
hi, kiddo. ]
don't be sorry i love u
and there is none now, when Elizabeth moves to him and reaches her right hand out to his face, fingertips (and thimble) just shy of touching. ]
Are you real? [ it's just as breathless as it was the first time they met, but there's grief in her voice now instead of wonder. ] I-I don't understand, how...
[ how, when he should be gone? not just dead but excised entirely from every future that could ever be, because of her. is this some silly, childish fiction like her Paris? she can't find anything in his face other than the Booker DeWitt she knows, nothing to suggest that he's a shallow reconstruction, nothing idealised. but then again... would she really make him any other way, if it was her doing? would her perfect Booker DeWitt be anything other than the flawed man who loved her so fiercely that he let her hold him beneath the water? ]
i love u 2
if he thinks about it like that it's almost too much to bear.
so he follows what she started, reaching forward to cup the side of her face in one big hand. ]
Feels real.
[ that's a paltry explanation, but when has he ever had anything better to offer her. she's so much more than he is. he's known she was something special ever since he first laid eyes on her. even now he can't separate having loved her from having not. the luteces would say that it's all the same. loves, loved, will love. but that's not how people work or how people feel.
that's what he thought at the time. now maybe he thinks that he's been a damn fool all his life. elizabeth probably already knows that too. she's so beautiful. he can't imagine how she could even begin to forgive him. ]
no subject
but that isn't her. that isn't what she saw. she knows Booker as the only person that has ever loved her, the man who grieved so deeply that he carved his daughter's initials into the back of his hand. who could have become Comstock, and chose not to. what could she ever blame him for, when he never wanted to let her go in the first place? it had been one mistake, just a single moment, and he had come for her so desperately, no no no, anna anna, give me back my daughter. and if they're here, if they're in her Paris and this is her Booker, then... then she can be that girl. just for now, she can pretend that the only memories are the ones they share.
her breath hitches on what could be a sob. the hand she reached out to him with draws back, and she covers her mouth, trying to suppress a shuddering exhale. it feels like something has suddenly hit her, some terrible thing that has been looming overhead for too long. ]
... I'm sorry. [ she never got to say it. didn't say anything before she held him under and she should have but she was filled with a thousand other lives and it doesn't matter, she should have told him, thank you or I love you or— ] Oh, Booker, I'm so sorry, I—
no subject
she had every right to drown him. and in the end, it was what he wanted. he wanted to give her the life he never could by staying alive.
so he's trying not to think too hard about it. what he's doing here or how he got here or anything like that. he lets his hand slide from the side of her face around to the back of her head, protective and keeping her close. ]
Shh, shh. Ain't nothing you've done that warrants an apology. Especially not to me.
[ they're square. whatever debt once existed between them has always been on booker's end and never anna's. or elizabeth's. ]
no subject
her eyes are stinging with tears, but she doesn't want to close them, doesn't want to take her eyes off Booker. she just blinks quickly, trying to even her breathing to keep herself from actually crying. ]
I missed you.
[ it's sincerity and it's grief, a tangled knot of love and despair caught in her throat. after a pause, though, her gaze shifts off to the side, to their surroundings, and she cringes. ]
... I wish you hadn't had to see this, though.
[ this being Paris. she feels like a silly little girl all of a sudden, uncomfortably aware of this ridiculous fantasy she's constructed for herself; this fake city where everyone knows her name, where her hair is long and she has no scar from a needle in her spine. where even now they stand in some home of extravagant architecture, with Elizabeth's favourite songs playing on a record player off to the side.
and here Booker is in the middle of it all. she isn't sure whether it makes her fantasy feel more or less believable. ]
some kinda generic space jamjar setting
but it's back to what she knows, and that includes finding ways to kill time. the first thing she learned in Wonderland is that when people are trapped in a cage and they can't see more than one day ahead of them, they just look for how to deal with the monotony. the group of them stranded here have examined the place top to bottom, and from the way things are set up, it seems like this ship was some kind of luxury cruise liner before it was their prison. although much of it has lost the shine it probably once had, left behind to collect dust and rot away, there are decks of the ship that were once for leisure. a grandiose dining hall, a movie theatre, the biggest swimming pool she's ever seen.
most importantly: a whole deck just for the gardens, which Minatsuki immediately commandeers. they're the kind of gardens that are as much for show as they are for survival, with so much space to fill they didn't need to choose one over the other. from hydroponic crops on one end of the deck to ornamental flowers on the other; a berry orchard, a grass lawn, trees reaching towards the ceiling that supplement the ship's oxygen reserves. all of it was overgrown when they first arrived, but it's been brought under control with time and grunt work that she'd roped in others to help with. now, though, it's a matter of working with what they have. they have to tend to the plants that are alive, and make sure the seeds kept in storage on the ship will be able to grow.
there aren't a lot of them who got torn from their lives and dumped on this ship. they're spread thin, most of the time, trying to make sure they'll be able to stay alive out here just one more day without any kind of power failure or hull breach. so there aren't a lot of hands to put to work in the garden, and Minatsuki doesn't need them anyway. she'd refused to teach anyone, too — she's not holding someone's hand while they're still trying to keep the plants alive, she had said, she'll do it later when she's not fucking busy. but there is one person who she doesn't mind, since he seems to know what he's doing, or he's at least not completely useless.
really, given the size of this ship and how few of them are on it, it feels like she might go days without seeing another person if it weren't for Caduceus Clay. it's strange, after the close quarters of Wonderland, and then the lack of privacy in the prison they put her in when Wonderland fell. but she doesn't mind it. spending her days in a massive room where the air is fresh and clean, quiet but for the hum of machines cycling air and water around, the view of stars through those towering windows surrounding them. she dreamed of a place like this, back in Wonderland. if she can't have a life of her own, at least she can have something better than the little flower garden she used to keep for herself in her room.
speaking of those flowers, these ones that were replanted when they cleared out the overgrowth are wilting. she's still learning the lay of the land here, between the size of the place and the damage done by all the time it spent abandoned. she thinks they should be salvageable as long as they do the work to save them now. and she could do it by herself, but— ]
Oi, Caduceus! [ she's not sure where he is, but she's sure he'll hear her if she shouts. it's not just quiet in here, it echoes. the only places on the ship that don't sound empty are the rooms with carpeted floors. ] Get your ass over here.