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She gasps as she wakes up and the gulp of water kills her almost instantly, but she’s been doing nothing but dying for fuck knows how long now and she’s got it down to a science. Her lips are chapped and pruney, but she knows that if she presses them shut, bites down on them until they bleed right before she blacks out she can buy herself a few more precious seconds before her lungs fill up with water again. She’s wondered for ages what happens to the water already in there. She’s still not sure, but she knows how to buy time. And right now she needs time. Andromache is dying. Or maybe she’s dead already, but she’s not gonna think about that. Those fucking dreams can never be clear, but she saw her bleed and not heal, go down and not get up, and that means she’s not immortal anymore, and even if she isnt dead yet, any stupid, selfish hope of her finding Quynh after all these years definitely is.
Quynh, on the other hand, isn’t dead yet, but if she never gets to see Andy again she might as well be and the very idea fills her with so much rage, when she punches her coffin this time, her fist goes straight through. The surprise kills her, or maybe it was time...
Maybe it was the fucking drowning, she thinks as soon as she wakes up, and feels around on the outside of the coffin for the chains holding it shut. They’re weak, rusted through. The saltwater, while killing her over and over again, has also been helping her, and it only takes her a few more deaths (she’s lost track of time a long time ago, no light reaches this deep down so she can’t even distinguish day from night, and deaths are the only way to count time, but that’s a bit too macabre even for her to do in the long term) to rip off the lock holding the coffin shut (one of those bleeding out from scratching her arm on the ragged edges of the hole she punched through, which is a pleasant change of pace, and she chuckles at the thought, and drowns again, another one wasted).
When the lock is gone and the chains clatter down, the doors don’t open easily, they’re rusted shut, because why should anything be easy, but they’re also rusted weak and it doesn’t take as long as it could to kick them down. She finally clambers out and falls down to the seafloor and a ridiculous emotion passes through her when she realises she’ll never touch or see this coffin again. It’s not really sadness, but also not nearly as close to pure relief as it should be. Either way, she doesn’t really have a choice, it’s not like she could even lift it.
She doesn’t float, but she didn’t expect to. She hasn’t tasted air in centuries, and barely remembers how it looked like when the last bubbles left her lungs and escaped upwards. She knows if she starts swimming up, she’ll just sink back down when she dies again, so she starts crawling. She’d like to think her connection to Booker is pulling her in the right direction, but it’s just as likely she’s guessing. She drags her body on the ocean floor, barely stopping when she dies, reaching a hand out to grab anything and move forward as soon as she can move it.
After an infinity has passed, slowly she feels the water getting warmer, and after several more she sees a faint orange glow and rising bubbles in the distance. She crawls forward, until her skin turns red in the heat, until it starts burning and blistering and healing all at once and it’s unbearably painful, but it’s also so wonderful to finally feel something except the burning in her lungs, the stinging of salt in her scratched fingers, and feet and knees, and the endless cold, and even as she feels herself breathing in the boiling water and dying over and over she’s almost happy.
Finally, she reaches the crack in the ocean floor and feels her body being pushed upwards. She kicks out with the last of her energy, trusting the current to drag her up, and when she comes to she starts swimming before she can even open her eyes. The third time it happens she opens her eyes and for what feels like the first time ever she sees light. The water above her is faintly, but unmistakably lighter than the water below her, and she laughs and cries and keeps swimming up, and dying and waking up and dying again.
Booker’s long since perfected the exact amount of booze it takes to mellow down, if not drown out (he’s drunk enough to chuckle at the unintended pun, but sober enough to immediately feel bad about it) the mental background noise of Quynh’s constant suffering. He’s spent the majority of the last few months in precisely such a state, so it’s really no wonder he didn’t catch the difference between drowning while thrashing hopelessly in a cage and drowning while crawling purposefully towards freedom. He’s dosing off on his shitty couch, in his shitty flat, in his shitty life when he finally feels a change. For the first time in two hundred years he doesn’t feel cold while sleeping. He feels the sun hit pale and cracked skin, he feels a breeze, not waves, but a real breeze moving through hair. He wakes up in a cold sweat anyway.
When her head first breaches the surface the sudden lack of pressure almost feels like pain. The first shaky breath she takes burns almost as much as the water slowly trickling out of her nose and mouth. She doesn’t bask in it, she just starts swimming again. There’s no land in sight and she’s not sure which direction she came from anymore, but for the first time in ages she doesn’t have time to overthink. After a few days (and oh how lovely it is to be able to count them again) she sees a ship on the horizon. It’s like nothing she’s ever seen before, huge and rectangular, but they fish her out of the water, give her food and clothes. They ask many questions but she pretends not to understand their language. It isn’t hard, since half the words they use weren’t around when she last spoke.
From there it’s... well not easy exactly, but it’s not painful and most importantly it’s fun. She's missed so much just living around people, and being thrown into a new time is not dissimilar to traveling to a completely new place, which she always loved. No. Which she loves still! And oh how wonderful it is to think of herself as alive again, as present, after so long.
It almost feels too easy when it turns out the ship she’s on is headed to France. She doesn’t believe in fate anymore, because she can’t accept that what was done to her had a purpose. But she does believe in Booker. After centuries of seeing nothing but darkness and snippets of his life she feels connected to him by an unbreakable thread and she feels it pulling her in the right direction. She believes in the new girl too, (and oh how glad she was to see the world through young, optimistic eyes after so long) and Nicky and Joe, but most of all she believes in Andy and she believes she’ll get to see her again.
The first time she saw Booker he was literally a light at the end of a tunnel. After an eternity of nothing but endless darkness and her own painful and chaotic dreams suddenly she saw a new face, and soon after the faces she’d almost forgotten, the faces she loves more than any others. It gave her back hope. She knows the link goes both ways, that everytime she cried tears of joy because she saw Andy in a new hairstyle, or Joe smiling or Nico kissing him, Booker was crying in pain, her pain. She can’t really bring herself to feel bad about it, but at least she feels guilty about that, and a skewed conscience is, in the grand scheme of things, not the worst thing she could have gotten out of her ordeal.
When she first steps into a city she’s overwhelmed. She saw how strange machines evolved and took over the world through Bookers eyes, but dreams are always vague and muted, especially underwater. Now everything is so loud, but she is most delighted by the smells. For so long she’d hoped to ever smell something other than salt again, and now bakeries and flowers and the perfumes of passers by almost overwhelm her. There’s none of the stench of people and animals she remembers in cities around here from when she last visited. It appears Europe has finally caught on to having a sewage system.
She honestly has no idea how to even begin to look for Booker. She knows he’s in Paris. Or maybe she thinks he’s in Paris, or she assumes it based on the dreams. Maybe she just hopes he’s there because she needs to see a big city. However (and she’s trying very hard not to think about it) the pull of her connection is even stronger on land. So she stumbles out of the train she took to get here (a terrifying, though fascinating contraption,) and keeps stumbling in a direction, which later turns out to be correct. She smells pastries on the way and wanders into a bakery (the ship crew had sent her off with a bit of money, not much, they said, but enough to get by until she figures herself out,) and as she’s walking down the street, eating a croissant, getting crumbs all over the comfortable, but grey and boring clothes she was given, a spot of red catches her eye. A beautiful bright coat, the color so vibrant it almost hurts her eyes, still unused to seeing anything. She assumes it’s a shop, because there’s a price under the coat, and it’s most of the money she has left, but she’s still not quite sure how much modern money is worth, and she can feel she’s close to Booker, and having no money seems like such an insignificant problem after the last half a millenium she’s had (when she finally figured out how long it’s been she wasn’t sure whether to scream at how much she’s missed, or sigh in relief, because it had honestly felt like infinitely longer) that she doesn’t hesitate and walks in to buy it.
The shopkeeper lets her try the coat on, helps her pick out a matching sweater and trousers, all while pretty blatantly flirting with her. She’s flattered. No, actually she’s ecstatic, it feels so human. She doesn't understand what the long string of numbers on a paper slipped into her pocket means just yet, but she will soon, and she’ll keep it, and the coat, for decades after, because she’s been denied the luxury of having anything for so long, after the last threads from her tattered shift had rotted away underwater centuries earlier.
She walks out of the shop, finishes her pastry and suddenly stops in her tracks when she recognizes the building in front of her. It’s all so easy she’s almost giggling when she goes around the back to climb in through a window. It’s open, because Booker is the type of person who believes if someone wants to hurt him he should just let them they will have no qualms about breaking a window, which he will then have to pay for, so he might as well just save everyone the trouble and leave it open.
As she climbs into his tiny apartment, and settles in to wait for him she's thinking about their connection. If Nicolo is right, if the dreams happen because they’re meant to find each other, failing to find each other for so long would only make fate? their souls? Fight more, to try as hard as they could to push them towards the other person. That’s certainly what it felt like. At the beginning the dreams felt like she was seeing Nicky and Joe again. But with them it only lasted a few years before she and Andy found them, and they did get more and more intense as time went on. With Booker. Well... time went on, and on, and on, and on…
For centuries she saw nothing but his life in her dreams, and she was always dreaming. She was never truly asleep, but neither was she ever fully awake and it was so dark half the time she wasn’t even sure if her eyes were open. So she dreamt, constantly, of him. His pains and joys, highs and lows, and the first time she saw Andy through his eyes she cried so hard that his eyes watered, blurring Andy’s face. And that was just the beginning. For two hundred years she had lived this man's life. Not actually, but definitely more than her own.
She’s never met him, and yet she knows him more than almost anyone in the world. Certainly in a completely unique way, in which no other human has ever known another.
She wonders what it will feel like when they finally meet. When the visions stop after they see each other will this metaphysical umbilical cord they share break? Her thoughts are interrupted when a bottle does, just outside the door, and she instinctively knows it’s him. She’d like that part to stay, it would be useful in a fight. He's drunk, she knows that too. Or maybe feels it, or maybe it’s just an educated guess considering how he spent the last months. She goes to pour him a glass of water instinctively, but as he opens the door she realizes he’ll probably assume she’s trying to poison him. She probably would assume it too, in his situation. Or maybe not, it’s hard to tell where her habits end (or how they might have changed) and his begin.
Booker walks into his apartment gun held high, not exactly sure why. Well he knows why, there’s someone inside, but he’s just a bit too drunk to figure out how exactly he knows someone is there, much less who it is, until she sees her, a blinding vision in her bright clothes, and the rising sun shining behind her. He almost doesn’t recognise her without the grimace of pain, the silent scream on her face, the darkness around her.
“Booker,” says the vision, taking a sip of water “It’s nice to finally meet you.”
And it is, he can’t really argue with that, but it’s also fucking absurd that after two hundred years of being tortured by her hands, or rather her mind, after all the shit that went down this year, she’d just show up. Standing in his flat, drinking his water, making small talk, and his drunk brain doesn’t have a clue how to react, so he doesn’t react at all.
“Put the gun down.” Apparently, she’s taking control of the situation, which is fine, because he’s busy reeling in shock.
“Or actually,” she continues, walking closer and closer until the gun (which would probably be shaking in his grip if he had a few decades’ experience less,) presses against her chest, “you could just shoot me. I've missed dying quickly.”
There's a twinkle in her eye that scares him, but he’s seen it before, in the mirror, so he puts the gun down, and fighting every single one of his instincts, turns his back on her to grab a fresh bottle of wine.
His entire being is screaming at him to turn back around, to not leave himself vulnerable to the woman who gave him nothing but suffering for most of his life, but he decides to ignore it, and ignore the whole problem, at least for now. Instead he does what he’d intended to do before walking in, and gathers most of the contents of the fridge: two slices of old pizza, half a round of camembert, and a tomato that turns out to be moldy. He throws it away, grabs some bread and goes to spread the food on the coffee table. Quynh joins him on the couch, sitting closer than he expected, closer than he’s comfortable with, but there’s nothing about this situation that he’s comfortable with, and moving away would definitely not make it any less awkward, so he doesn’t.
They don’t talk much as they eat. She asks a couple of questions, technicalities of the modern world, nothing personal, but mostly she knows a scary amount of details of both recent and not so recent events, which probably means she knows even more about him, personally, but he’s not gonna bring it up if she won’t. She eats the food with significantly more gusto than stale pizza deserves, drinks a glass of wine. The discomfort fades, until it feels strange to think it was ever there to begin with, even though she keeps sliding closer to him, until their knees touch, and their elbows bumping together as they eat. She isn’t cold, like he’d expected her to be, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t feel cold, and he can’t bring himself to push her away, nor does he really want to. He’s missed being with people who understand him, and eating in awkward, but companionable silence with her feels exactly like sharing a meal with an old friend after a night of heavy drinking. He supposes that’s what she is, in a very convoluted way. Speaking of the night of drinking, the day is in full swing now and he still hasn’t slept, and he’s slowly reaching his limit. Not really, but the few months without action have made him soft. He's a guilt ridden alcoholic, not a masochist and for the same reason he buys a fresh baguette every day whenever he’s in France he also makes sure to get his four to sixteen hours per night. Or day, in this case. He tells her as much, in fewer words, and leads her to the bedroom.
The thought of leaving her to sleep on the couch, or offering to take it himself never even crosses his mind. It’s not a rule exactly, but definitely a custom among them. No one sleeps alone unless they have to. He’s often slept on the floor rather than take the second bedroom in a safehouse. Of course they split up quite often, this isn’t even the longest he’s gone without seeing them this century (yet,) but that just makes those times they were all together all the more significant. He doesn’t technically know Quynh, but she feels familiar, and she’s undeniably part of the team (probably more than him, but he tries not to dwell on that.)
Quynh follows him, changes into the t-shirt he throws at her and joins him on the bed after he's collapsed on it.
She crawls under the covers and wraps herself around him like an octopus, which is maybe not the most sensitive simile, but definitely accurate. He was expecting some touch, maybe crossed ankles, the back of a hand grazing his shoulder, because that’s how he sleeps with Andy, but he can’t even imagine how touch starved she must be, nor is he going to pretend he doesn’t need it just as much, so he settles into her embrace, and falls asleep almost immediately.
She doesn’t. She feels almost dizzy with the amount of contact. She still feels cold most of the time but Booker is warm, and alive, and she rejoices in the way her hand on his chest rises and falls with his breath, the oh so human smell of wine and sweat. She’s feeling overwhelmed, euphoric, almost shaking with glee. She didn’t realize how much she missed touch until this moment and she’s happy, truly happy, not just proud or determined, for the first time in five hundred years. She muffles a giggle in his shoulder, soaking his shirt with tears and slowly drifts off into sleep.
When Booker wakes up the sun is setting, shining between the curtains and Quynh is thrashing on the bed, kicking and scratching him. It seems ironic that he be woken up by Quynh herself from his first sleep in two hundred years without nightmares about her. He tries to calm her down, hugs her tight to his body, which usually works for most of the team, but that only makes it worse, which he should have known, considering her past. He barely has the time to think that before in her aimless thrashing and scratching she knocks him out with a headbutt.
When he comes to, she's awake, sitting up against the headboard. Her hand gently resting on his shoulder. He can see blood on his chest and arms, which means she scratched him more before she woke up, which is pretty dark, but also doesn’t really matter, since it’s already healed. And hey, he was unconscious and didn’t feel it anyway.
When he looks up, there are tears streaming down her face but she is not sobbing. Actually, she’s barely breathing. Her lips are tightly shut and he can see blood at the corner of her lip.
He puts his hand on hers and slowly she unclenches her jaw, takes a deep breath.
“I’m sorry,” she says, not looking down.
“It’s fine.” It comes out automatically, but it’s true. It’s nothing compared to how he’s hurt the rest, and she hasn’t even mentioned that. He lays his head in her lap and holds her hand, and she slips the other into his hair. Later, they’re gonna have to make a plan, and he’s going to have to own up to a lot of shit, but for now it really is fine, and most importantly, it’s going to continue being fine if he has anything to say about it.