Chapter Text
It's amazing how much expectations change. The shitty little half below-ground Parisian apartment is twice as large as anything Booker had in his first life, with more conveniences and furnishings than he had for his first few decades of immortality. He'd been, somehow, more worse off back then than he was now.
All things considered, this is actually an improvement to how he was in, say, 1853. Then, he had slept in alleys and dormitories when he could afford it, and at the time he thought he was alone in the world. Now, he has a roof, a table and chairs, and a hundred year clock counting down until he'll see a familiar face again.
Yay, progress.
And he’s just smashed the bottle of swill that was supposed to last him the rest of the night. Pay no attention to the fact that it was already down to the dregs. He scuffs his boot through the glass and flops on the stairs.
Booker once charmed his way through a conversation at an ambassador’s ball while simultaneously directing Andy through the Parisian sewer system he had memorised. Now he’s too dizzy to even do the double task of both standing upright and taking out his keys.
So yeah. Expectations change.
His senses are dulled, and rusted, but even a sabre buried in the dirt for a couple of centuries can cut and kill. He's not a complete waste of space, despite what he often tells himself. He knows when his apartment has been compromised. He notices the door is unlocked the moment his hand touches it, then his gun is out and he's pushing through to the aforementioned shitty apartment, at the ready.
A woman is in his kitchenette, in a red coat, pouring herself a glass of water.
She knows his name.
"Booker." She says, with a smile. "It's nice to finally meet you."
Her face, it's blurry through the fog of alcohol. He tries to focus, to understand what he’s seeing.
Then she pulls a gun from her coat and shoots him through the eye.
Booker has been shot in the head more times than he can be bothered to count. He knows what it feels like to wake up.
It's not usually like this.
His body hurts all over, ripped to shreds by a barrage of bullets and sharp stabs of pain in every limb. He's cold, and it's dark.
She must have shuttered all the windows, or dragged him down to the catacombs, but that can't be right. The space is lit with cool blue floodlights,and there are other people, soldiers standing around, and bodies on the floor beside him.
A bullet pops out of his face and rattles on the concrete floor.
The bodies begin to rise.
That's Joe, beside him, pushing on his shotgun to kneel up, and Andy too, further along.
Booker doesn't just feel the pain of his body repairing from certain death anymore, now he feels confused.
“Wha-?” He says, then Andy charges at the soldiers, full of fury, and the soldiers open fire and Booker gets shot again.
“What the hell was that, Book?” Andy says, when all the soldiers have been dispatched. “You choked.”
She hauls him up to his feet by the tac vest and pulls his beanie off his head, searching for the proof that he's healing, that his time hasn't come yet.
“Wha-?” Booker says again.
“Off day, huh?” Joe prods him with a grin. He's wearing his backwards cap, and is not currently staring daggers into Booker's soul. Well. Interesting.
Andy is apparently satisfied that Booker still has that tricky thing called immortality, and stalks off to destroy the cameras.
“Don't mind her,” Nicky murmurs. “You had her worried.”
“What the fuck,” is all Booker can force out.
“I agree.” Joe grimaces.
“Where are the girls?” Nicky asks.
“There were no girls,” Andy says, pulling her labrys from the camera in the wall. “We've been set up.”
Finally getting his bearings, Booker, appropriately, freaks.
He pulls up his machine gun, muzzle and flashlight pointed directly at Joe's face.
“Whoa,” Joe says, raising his hands. “Sorry, I must have touched a nerve. You've been doing great today. Excellent form as always.”
“What the fuck is going on?” Booker demands. “This some kind of sick joke?”
“Apparently. The shoes were a grotesque touch,” Andy says. She turns and huffs like this is the first time she’s seen all three of her boys with weapons drawn on each other. It isn’t. “Now what?”
Booker doesn't flinch at the point of Nicky's sword hovering in his face.
“This really is a new low.” Booker sneers at them. “You couldn't just let me wallow in peace?”
Joe moves slowly, but still raises his curved blade. “This mission was your idea,” Joe reminds him.
“What mission?” Booker demands.
“This one.” Andy inclines her head at the carnage behind her. “South Sudan, the girls that got taken. Only apparently they didn't.”
Well, that makes no sense.
“No, no.” Booker shakes his hair out of his eyes, muzzle drifting between the other two immortals but not daring to cross Andy, not again. Not after what he did. “The set up was two weeks ago. It worked, we got captured.”
No one says anything, but their faces are horrified, which, being honest, is not a good sign.
“Where's Nile?” He asks.
“Who?”
Booker slowly lowers his gun.
Andy's eyes are piercing and clear and very, very worried.
“You still got a bullet rattling around in that head of yours?” She asks. Her voice is casual, but the axe at her side is still dripping blood like it’d be happy to divorce his head from his shoulders. Booker’s head is not always on the best of terms with the rest of him, but he would very much like to keep the whole thing together for the kids.
“No, no, I’m fine, you-” fuck, she’s been shot , “fuck, fuck, fuck.” Booker drops his weapon and bats away Nicky’s sword to rush to Andy. He checks her all over, the blood on her face, her clothes scattered with bullet holes. She should be dead.
She’s not. She’s standing there, whole and complete and definitely not impressed.
“You want to explain-?” She starts.
“No, you explain!” Booker jabs her in one of the bullet wounds on her shoulder and she doesn't even flinch. “Why did you bring me back here? Back to the scene of the crime just to rub it in my face?”
“Booker.” It’s Nicky’s softest voice, which never bodes well. “What crime?”
They're really gonna make him say it?
“The, you know, my deal with Merrick and Copley.” Booker forces out. “To solve our little problem of immortality.”
Instead of Joe's expression on the banks of the Thames, the look of absolute disdain, he just cocks his head. “Merrick. Isn’t that some pharma company?”
“You did this?” Andy asks cooly, swinging her axe to gesture at the room. “You led us to the slaughter?”
Uhhh...
“No?” He says weakly.
Too late.
Booker thought the broken grief in Andy’s eyes after he shot her, quite literally, in the back was bad, but he would rather go right back (forward?) to that moment right now than endure another moment of her barrage of yelling.
Andy, as is known, has a set of lungs and fire enough in her belly to burn hotter than the sun. She's also been known to wield insults so fierce that more than one home in Georgian England had to have a physician stop to care for a man gone into a fever from being berated by Andromache the Scythian.
The sun has risen and they’re digging a hole in the desert to bury their bloodied garments, and she's still going.
“And another thing!” She’s still yelling. There have been five ‘another things’.
Nicky is worse. He doesn’t yell. He silently judges and condemns and wow, the man really was cut out to be a priest, huh? He turns his gaze towards Booker, pinning him under his steely gaze.
We’re disappointed, his eyes say, we expected more from you.
By the time they’re done berating him, Booker still hasn’t gotten a word in edgewise and is starting to believe the whole rotten business was a terrible dream. Come on, a new immortal in the mix, being captured, an exile, Andy losing her immortality? Exactly the sort of worst-case scenario that his pessimistic half-empty brain would have cooked up.
Except usually, in his case, the glass isn’t so much half-empty as fully-drunk.
The tricky thing about walking your friends into a set up mission is that there is no extraction. Their long helicopter ride and walk to the facility did not come with a return ticket, which leaves plenty of time while walking through the desert for more yelling and complaining. Booker grows more and more certain that his memories of going through with the betrayal, of shooting Andy and being captured, of being rescued by Nile must have all been nothing but a fever dream. Yeah. That’s the explanation.
They’ve been walking for some hours, Andy hardly losing steam with her barrage, until Nicky gently nudges the conversation away from all of Booker’s failings, and towards more bland comments about their time in Turkey and what they were missing in Marrakesh. Booker stays silent, more and more convinced he’d imagined those last few weeks. But then, Joe complains about the restaurant.
“And the restaurant, Nicky!” Joe cries.
Nicky releases a string of colourful language targeting Booker’s ancestry.
“Would you shut up about the restaurant?” Booker shoots back. He’s heard these complaints before. “ Ooh, French-Moroccan fusion, you simply must try it, chicken pastilla, and so romantic! ”
Nicky has stopped trudging up the hill and is staring at him with those freaky eyes.
“What?” Booker says defensively. “You told me about it.”
“When?” Nicky asks.
“I dunno. Yesterday.”
Nicky turns his gaze to Joe, who backs up his husband every time. “No, we didn’t.”
Booker’s mouth gets away from him. “Yes, you did, it was the place with live music, Le Comptoir something or another.”
The couple shares a glance.
“That’s what I was about to say.” Joe says, a crease between his eyebrows. “I definitely didn't tell you yet.”
Booker is saved from having to explain something he can't explain by Andy calling from the front of the line.
“They have our location,” she says, “they know who we are, what we are. What else do they know, Book?”
Booker’s heart is in his throat as he admits his failings again. “Copley knows safehouses Alpha through Juliet, just the ones northwest of Cairo. I knew you’d want to go after him. I was supposed to make contact, lead you back to him.”
There’s a beat of silence as they stare at him.
“Fucking hell, Booker.” Joe groans.
“Did you tell him about Malta?” Nicky asks.
“Ew, no, gross. You can keep that dirty little secret to yourself.”
“Then we scramble the plan.” Andy decides. “And I don’t much care to look at you right now, Booker. So we split up.” She’s looking down the valley at some train-tracks. “Follow the tracks. I’ll go north,” she points at Joe and Nicky, “you go south. We catch the first train going our directions.”
That’s not what happened in Booker’s dream.
“What about me?” Booker asks.
“You walk. East.” Andy has no sympathy. “Everyone, take a few months. Muddy your trail, stay off the grid. We’ll meet at the Whiskey Site on the first day of September. Then we decide what to do with you, Booker.”
Three months is a lot better than a hundred years. Booker will take it. He says his goodbyes and trudges along, it’s not his first time stuck somewhere without resources or a way out. He’s adaptable. The weather is uncharacteristic to the region in that it’s not overwhelmingly hot, so the walk is tolerable. It’s long after midday and his stomach is cramping and his body is bone tired when he arrives at a small town with electricity and a spot in the shade for him to fall against a twisted tree and have a quick sleep.
He’s been fighting all night and walking all day, and he still has a niggling feeling that this morning he was in a Parisian grocery store. It’s an image that he can’t quite shake. But still, he lets himself slip into sleep, the world can wait an hour or two.
A knife, half a nametag, big wide eyes. Choking on blood-
Booker startles awake, grabbing at his throat.
Fuck. Fuck.
That's too damn freaky. No way, no way in hell his mind cooked up a new immortal only to be right about it.
He jolts up and rushes into the town. He tries half a dozen languages to ask for a computer, for internet, and only succeeds when he mimes out typing and waves a banknote.
When he’s finally seated in front of a desktop that has seen better days, he boots up the search engine and types in two words.
Nile Freeman.
He gets a few hits. A Chicago Highschool newspaper features a Nile in both the athletics and art sections. As well, Booker finds her public service record as Corporal Freeman, Marine.
He accesses his backchannels and finds she was stationed in an undisclosed location in Afghanistan. A bit more digging reveals she received transfer orders to Germany, only an hour or two ago. It must have been just after she resurrected.
Fuck.
It wasn't a hallucination. Whatever it was, whatever Booker believes he's lived through, it wasn't fake. He actually met one Nile Freeman, baby immortal.
So what the fuck happened?
He never got the info from Andy, where exactly Nile was picked up. And they're split up right now, no way to communicate, co-ordinate.
Okay. Focus, Le Livre. Focus.
He's back in time. Somehow. Two weeks or so. Back to experience the worst thing he's ever done and not back early enough to stop it.
But already, it's different to how he imagined it. Remembered it, whatever. He told them he betrayed them, and the plan changed already.
Andy's going north. That'll put her on the right track to find Nile anyway. The dreams will tell him if Andy tracks her down.
They're off the grid, and if they avoid the continent and put their usual disappearing act skills to use, Copley isn't likely to get wind of their tracks for months, right?
It also means Booker won't be able to talk to the others for another three months, won't be able to explain what happened to him.
But he doesn’t know what happened anyway, so, hey, what’s the rush?
He rubs a hand across his jaw, and ugh, he needs some mouthwash.
The handful of phrases he knows in Nuer manages to get him a series of bus tickets to get himself to Mogadishu. He doesn’t have water, and suffers two bouts of heatstroke before he gets to the bustling city.
Booker doesn’t have more than a couple of centuries behind him, but he’s savvy. He can make enough money to live on with a 40 euro phone and an internet connection. So he does.
Sure, it’s scamming, but that's how all he knew before he died, and as his grandmother always said, start as you mean to go on.
He watches the dreams carefully, sees how Andy sits across from Nile in some hole in South-East Asia, stubborn and silent. He sees flashes of streets and watching a hand that must be Andy's picking through different materials and foods at markets.
Joe and Nicky don't show up in the dreams, they must have decided to keep their distance. Wait for the whole Merrick thing to blow over. Before it even happened. Yeah, that's the plan.
Four weeks into living in Mogadishu, Booker gets the uncanny feeling that he's being watched.
Every time he turns around sharply in public, he sees the sweep of movement, ducking out of the way, behind a wall or into a store. It puts him on edge.
But he knows how those shady corporate-hired mercenaries work. He keeps exposed, too public to take down or out without a million videos streamed worldwide.
They wouldn't dare.
It's a bright Sunday afternoon when Booker gets shot again. It's almost sloppy, twice to the gut and one to the ankle before he goes down. People are screaming, phones are out and filming, and as another bullet goes through his heart and drains him of blood, he thinks of all the streamed videos that will be online by the time he wakes up. Public, indisputable proof of immortals walking among them.
Andy's going to kill me Booker thinks, as he dies.
He groans. A bullet falls from his cheek and clatters to the cold concrete floor. It's dark, chilling, and familiar.
The figure beside him gets to his knees, and it's Joe, and Booker is back on the kill-floor in South Sudan.
Goddamn it.