Chapter Text
Hatred is blind; rage carries you away; and he who pours out vengeance runs the risk of tasting a bitter draught.
Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
His Marseille safehouse was, in a way, a metaphor for Booker’s mind.
His family’s home had been in the Old Port district of the city. The Nazis razed the entire neighborhood to the ground during the war, demolishing buildings block by block with artillery and dynamite. The treads of their tanks had even crushed the little churchyard in which his wife and two of his sons had been buried, leaving him nothing at all. Nothing except a few precious scraps hidden away in dusty caves and mines far from Marseille.
The others spent the decade after the war walking on eggshells around him. Not that he could blame them.
He got his pound of flesh from the Nazis and then took them for a few pounds more.
The shape of the streets remained the same, however, and people did what they always did by rebuilding on top of the rubble. From this he was able to trace where his home had once stood, and in his lucid moments away from the bottle, began to buy up a piece here and a piece there, until he owned the entire block.
Of course, the various property deeds didn’t all use the same alias, but all the false names were his. And with that, he began to build.
Apartment buildings had already been erected over the space where his old family home had been, with shops on the lowest level. There was nothing unusual about it, but he knew people who knew people who knew people who wouldn’t ask too many questions. What he couldn’t build with his own hands, he had others build with cash paid under the table.
Well-concealed trap doors leading to dead end tunnels, hidden doorways that opened on blank brick walls, and secret staircases, some of which went nowhere. There were corridors and chambers between the floors and walls and below the streets where the normal, ordinary people lived. And Booker lived in the space between.
Through the decades, the ordinary people never wondered why the occupants of certain apartments remained unseen, as their doors remained stubbornly closed and locked. Others grew accustomed to the creak of strange footsteps and disembodied noises they would hear within the walls, but were unable to trace the source. Ghosts , they assumed, and shuddered. But it was only just Booker.
No one else knew the ways in or out to his puzzle palace, not even Andy. In any event, the others were not even aware of what he had been doing and weren’t invited.
At least, this was true until Quynh crashed into his life.
The average human body has five liters of blood in it. As shitty as his Paris apartment was, it probably didn’t deserve to be coated with dozens, or possibly hundreds of liters of his blood.
“I’m really sorry,” Quynh mumbled, hiding her face behind her bloodsoaked hair and looking sheepish as she huddled on the floor against the kitchen cabinets.
Booker lay on his back on the floor, looking up at the crisscross of arterial spray on the ceiling. He dimly wondered if he could cut the ceiling out and then pass it off as a Jackson Pollock painting. It could possibly work.
“Nothing you have to be sorry for,” he said, not getting up. He turned his head to look at her. She appeared as tired as he felt, and he wondered if her anger had burned itself out. For now at least. They were immortals but even they couldn’t stay in a heightened state of emotion forever. Sooner or later, those emotions would crash back down, and there would only be emptiness and exhaustion in the void left behind.
He heard a sniffle. “You were careless, you know. I just had to find out what city that tower was in and then ask around the bars.”
“Well, yeah, I probably deserved it for being stupid and letting my guard down,” he said with a humorless chuckle. And for more reasons than that too, probably , he thought ruefully.
Silence. Then, “I’m still mad at you.”
He didn’t reply. What good would that do?
“I was trying to make you stop. I saw what you were trying to do. But you didn’t.” She let out a ragged sigh. “Foolish boy.”
He heard her push herself to her feet, her steps coming closer to him and then stopping. He steeled himself for another round of murder. Maybe she’d make it quick, or maybe she’d just open him up from sternum to crotch again and pull out his organs one by one. Either way, it didn’t matter.
When the blow didn’t come, he dared crack open an eye. She stood over him, her gaze fever bright with fatigue, her trembling hand outstretched.
“Get up.”
Booker’s apartment bathroom was a total loss, the drains clogged with gore. They cleaned themselves the best they could, and he found a cheap hotel for them to hole up in. The proprietor had wisely chosen to look the other way once enough money had been pressed into her hand. They both looked and smelled like they’d crawled through an abattoir, and that actually wasn’t far from the truth.
She flinched when the hot water from the shower head hit her bare skin. Quynh gritted her teeth and forced herself to stand still. Water had been the cause of her first death, and water had failed to kill her for half a millennium. She would not let it break her now.
Quynh stepped out of the shower and back into their tiny hotel room, towel draped around her shoulders. Booker was sitting on the single armchair and drinking from his hip flask again because of course he would.
She snatched it from him and hurled it out the window. Then she broke his arm.
Afterwards, she apologized for hurting him again. Quynh stared at her hands while she lay on the too-soft mattress in the dark and wondered where she had gone wrong.
“Why did you come to me first?” Booker asked, and Quynh had no answer for him.
They were on the train to Marseille. She practically had her face glued to the window, amazed at the sheer speed of the train as it made its way southward. Booker had immediately nodded off for a brief nap in the seat opposite hers when they had boarded.
Staying in Paris made her uncomfortable for reasons she couldn’t quite quantify. She needed to get out, to move. He’d sensed her restlessness, and decided that two train tickets to Marseille was in order. Why that particular destination seemed like a good idea to him, she didn’t ask.
He could have run from her, but he didn’t, and his presence at her side was strangely comforting to her. It was the same and yet not the same as when she had been beneath the sea, when he had been her only solace. A tortured solace, but a balm from her own torture nonetheless.
His question was spoken in her father’s tongue, shaped as if the Frenchman had been born to it. It was what had startled her out of her reverie of violence back in his little hovel of an apartment.
“I don’t know,” she answered in the same language, after a long pause to take a delicate sip from the coffee cup that had been placed in front of her. It was too sweet. Across the table from her, he clutched at his coffee cup as if he were expecting it to whisper the secrets of the universe to him. Booker preferred his coffee black, maybe with a little milk or cream if there was no whiskey to be had. He didn’t remember, but he hadn’t taken his coffee with sugar since the death of his wife.
She knew little things like that, things Booker had forgotten or never realized. Like how he sometimes tilted his head to one side to better hear someone speaking, but it didn’t always help and the words remained murky-sounding anyway. He had still never figured that out, but she had.
Maybe he knew little things about her too, like how he could speak the language of her childhood, from long ago on the shore of a different sea.
She knew some of the big things too.
He stared into the dregs of his coffee. “You should go to them. Andy is … “ he trailed off.
She shook her head. “I know about Andromache.” He seemed to shrink further down in his seat. While he remained silent, she could hear the words clawing their way up at the back of his throat, ones he’d repeated endlessly already. I didn’t mean for this to happen. I just want to stop. I want everything to stop. No one was supposed to get hurt. Imsorryimsorryimsorry —
“I don’t think I want to,” she said, each word drawn out slowly, hesitantly. “Not yet.”
Five hundred years had passed since she’d last laid eyes on Andromache, Nicolo, and Yusuf. They had five hundred years of experiences she did not. For five hundred years, they had traveled paths Quynh could not.
And for two hundred years she had caught glimpses of them through Booker’s eyes.
The names they wore now fit oddly in her mouth: Andy, Nicky, and Joe. Time had left its mark and had changed them in subtle and myriad ways, and she could no longer be sure of her place among them. And then there was the new one, the young African woman who also called herself American.
This man though, she thought, as Booker stood up to reach into the overhead bin for their meager baggage, she knew . Better than he knew himself, perhaps.
She would stay. For now.
“Stick close,” Booker told her, as he opened up the cover of an electrical fuse box. They were standing in the cellar of one of the apartment buildings he owned at one of the entrances to his home.
He had briefly considered getting a hotel room for them or a rental on short notice, but that seemed too impersonal. Which left the only one other option: his safehouse, his sanctum sanctorum, his puzzle palace.
He flipped the switches in the proper order, the apartment numbers corresponding to the day and month of his eldest son’s birthday, followed by his wife’s birthday, inverted. The occupants of those apartments were long used to the weird disruptions so long as they were brief.
The secret door behind the fuse box swung open, revealing a narrow black passage that looked more like a tomb. He fumbled with the flashlight he held in one hand while ushering Quynh in with the other. The door closed behind them with a muted click.
“How do you ever find your way around here when you’re stinking drunk?” she asked, as they came to the foot of a stairwell that seemed to dead end at the ceiling.
“I don’t always,” he replied with an ironic twist to his lips. A hidden switch caused the ceiling to retract, and the staircase continued upward. It let them into a crawl space, and Booker continued onwards on his hands and knees.
“This is a bit extreme, don’t you think?” she said, and he found her teasing exasperation with him weirdly invigorating. He wondered if she realized she was speaking to him in Occitan again, and not the modern version either. Well, he’d let her figure that out on her own.
“I got tired of people breaking into my house when I wasn’t around. Just because I’m gone for a few months, years, whatever, it is not an open invitation to vandals and looters. They call themselves ‘urban explorers’ now and say they’re more interested in preservation but they can still fuck right off.” She laughed. He managed a shrug despite the cramped environs. To be fair, it had only happened once but the violation had left him so rattled he had sworn he’d never let it happen again.
After a few more turns, he swept open a false-door-that-wasn’t that led into, well, his home. “Sorry for the mess. I don’t get many visitors,” he mumbled, face flushing with embarrassment. This had been his last stop before Marrakesh, and with everything that had happened after he hadn’t been back since.
Bottles covered most of the available space, and even some were tangled in the sheets of the still-unmade fold-up wall bed. A system of mirrors and prisms piped down natural light from the outside, illuminating the pathetic scene. Some bottles had labels dating back decades, their contents long dried out. A few foul mouthfuls clung to the bottom of some of the newer ones.
Maybe bringing Quynh here hadn’t been the best idea, after all.
He dared risk a glance at her. Maybe she’d gouge his eyeballs out this time? Instead, she stood with her arms crossed, looking disappointed rather than angry.
He found that more unsettling than her fury.
She took a careful step forward, and picked a bottle off the small table he’d rescued out of a dumpster years ago. Quynh turned to him, and said very, very , firmly, “You are going to help me clean all this up and make it a place people can live in, not pigs.” She looked around, still frowning, a finger pressed to her lips now. “How do you take the garbage out in a place like this?”