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If they are cursed to dream about each other until they meet, forced by fate's hands or a higher power intent on exponating the good they can do by pushing them together, then Nile dreaming about Quynh is not just about her pain, or her madness.
It is about understanding, about sharing, a presence in the mind of a woman condemned to mere minutes of agony in between seconds of death, replicated to near infinity. Quynh does not sleep, therefore she does not dream of Nile, as she did not dreamt of Sebastien.
They did, she does, plagued by that lone immortal broadcasting her need for help, for touch, for family to every channel avalaible, a never-ending cry of despair and loneliness that she cannot shake, not in the comfort of her comrades' arms, not even in the midst of battle or rescue.
Booker had his booze and his own grief to cancel that agony for two centuries. Yet it did not kept him sane.
Nile has nothing yet but kindness in her bones, aching for the woman Andromaque still loves.
It is her kindness that seals her lips, as she sleeps, and dreams, and wakes up, every day, head filled with memories not her own. She keeps them safe, those glimpses of happy lives, she let them overpower the taste of salt on her mouth and burn in her lungs.
She catches words in languages long dead, learns new ones like she is the one drowning for speech. Every night, every nap, is filled with knowledge of people, cultures and countries reduced to ashes, or so transformed by time that she mourns them all the same.
She mourns, silently, and she prays, believing in a paradise that she will not reach before every worshipper of her own faith is dead, her religion swept away by change and centuries. She prays for Quynh, for absolution, for an end that does not come, she prays in the name of the same religion that sentenced her to endless suffering.
She keeps her faith, mouth closed, the oxygen in her lungs an unusable gift, all for a woman she cannot meet.
She stays kind even as rage try to drown her, anchor her feet in the soil and raise her head to the skies, transformed from carbon to diamond not by the pressure of the sea but by the reminder that she is free.
She fills her own head with smell, taste, touch and laughter from those who are alive, each memory carefully conserved, as some unknown part of her tries her best, every times she closes her eyes, to share it like it was meant to be shared, with another.
She has a mission. Nile dreaming about Quynh is not just a lesson, or a warning. The others might have gave up, after centuries of scouring dark seas, but she's new, and age has not begun to erode her confidence, her will, her faith.
She gets help from Copley, trust him like she does not yet trust the others, because he alone can understand the anguish of being cast into the sea, feet chained, stripped from freedom and identity and air. They cannot save all of those who died at the bottom of the ocean, gasping for breath and for comfort, but this woman, they might be able to.
Booker was savy with a computer but he had no patience left for the ghosts in his head, only grief. This requires time, a thousand ship logs and data analysis, and to keep quiet so as not to fane the flames of hope before there is air for them.
Nile is kind, and patient, and quiet.
She goes to find Quynh, alone, let her slit her throat and rage and die at sea, but not of the sea. She anchors her ship where no one will find it, where Quynh only has wind and sun and the horizon to nurture her through the madness, through the pain, through freedom.
It does not take six months. Nile learns to catch and to cook fish, learns that they can die of scurvy. She still dreams about Quynh, but these are human dreams, made of tears and pain and of a tired mind.
Quynh does not dream of Nile, but she sleeps. There are thousand memories that Nile would have wanted her to see, to feel in her hazy mind, to grasp and hold onto as comfort but these are new times, and what she cannot send her, she can show : there are things called cameras, in this century.
Quynh dreams of Sebastien, of Booker, of the lost boy she was not here to save and guide. She dreams of Andromaque, and Nicolo, and Yusuf, of their quest for her, through the eyes of one who wishes to drown for his sins.
She learns to live with someone's else pain, and madness.
She learns to live with kindness at her side, warmth after years of cold water, with love filled words, old tongues and new ones, with a thousand sunrises.
It does not take a year. Quynh learns how to navigate, how to blend into human life again. She learns of the wars and the changes and the cultures. She does not learn that the air she breathes will not be stolen again.
They find Booker. Not in Paris, not in Europe. They find him in Russia, where the vodka is better and where he can lie in the snow and pray - This, this is the end, the first and only one, and everything else just a dream conjured by a dying man.
He stops dreaming about Quynh. He does not stop dreaming about the others, those that life stole from him.
It takes them a century. Those two broken people, who have been drowning for too long. The young girl who bury her family and her uniform but keeps her faith.
It takes them a century, to go back to the pub, to the sea ; where she was sentenced to die, where he was sentenced to wait. Where Nile choose, not just to be cursed, but to be kind.
Three are waiting, feet in the cold sand. Soon they will be just five.
But for those fleeting moments, where there is no man left behind, Nile does not need to dream.