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Elizabeth shivered in the back room of the First Lady airship. Her skin felt cold and clammy. It was the first opportunity she had had to change in a few days and instead of it feeling like a relief, it felt like a conviction.
Luckily little of Fitzroy’s blood had seeped through her clothing to her skin or the underclothes beneath, though her skirt and blouse were ruined. “Lucky,” she scoffed aloud, guilt welling up from inside of her. Who was she to think of luck when she had just murdered a woman by stabbing her in the back? Who was she to think of luck when she thought back to her life in Monument Tower, to the thimble that sometimes seemed so heavy, to the bodies of the Lins on the floor like so much trash? Who – or what – was she?
She stood in her corset and undergarments, opening up the wide wardrobe that stood at the end of one room. It was surprisingly empty, holding only a small jacket and a long rich skirt. There were no other blouses she could use to cover the corset; the jacket would have to do. Mechanically she put the new clothing on and ran her hands through her hair, trying to smooth it.
Elizabeth shuddered. There was blood, tacky and thick, at the ends of her long hair. She supposed she wasn’t surprised. She remembered pages from Gray’s Anatomy back in her tower, describing the position of the aorta within the abdominal cavity. Her scissors had found their mark well, judging by how the blood had spurted.
She wondered at how she could think of something so clinical. What am I? she asked herself again. Then, is this how Booker comes to terms with what he’s done?
Elizabeth searched around for a hairbrush, unable to stand the idea of the blood in her hair. Perhaps she could comb it out. But there were no hairbrushes in the any of the desk drawers. There was only the bloodied pair of scissors, the ichor now dried. Before she could stop herself she grabbed them and wiped them roughly with her ruined skirt, then held her long hair between the blades. She closed her eyes as the blades sawed through her hair, and let out a heavy sigh once she had completely severed the last strands.
A knock came at the door, startling her. She stumbled backward. Then Booker’s voice came through the wood, gruff, but worried. “What are you doing in there?”
She swallowed the lump forming in her throat, and blinked, squeezing away tears.
“Why don’t you just come out of there?” She couldn’t answer.
He was silent for a moment. One last knock. “I know how this feels.”
She did not know how to face him. Which was stupid, really, a part of her argued. How many dozens – maybe even hundreds – of people had he killed to save her already? But he was used to it. He would probably think she was being childish for being upset, for her arms still feeling weak and limp, for the vomit that kept threatening to rise. She prepared herself and opened the door.
Booker stood at the controls of the ship, moving the levers with a clicking sound. His weapons and Sky-Hook lay next to his feet. He looked tired, she realized, even from behind. Something about the sag of his shoulders brought the tears back to her eyes as she walked to his side. He turned to face her, and was clearly taken aback.
“Elizabeth.”
There had not been a mirror in the other room, but she could imagine how different she looked. It occurred to her that she was still clutching her severed hair in one hand, and dropped it awkwardly. She wished there had been a clean blouse in the wardrobe. “This is all they had.”
“Listen –“ He held out a hand to her, but she leaned away, feeling unworthy of any kind of comfort. The tears burned, but she refused to let them fall.
“How… do you do it?” she asked, fighting to keep composure.
Booker was clearly puzzled by the question, though his face remained blank. She had gotten rather good at telling his emotions in the time he’d been with her. He asked, “How do I do what?”
“Forget.” She knew that she would never, but still hoped, somehow, there was a way. “How do you wash away the things that you’ve done?”
He sighed, and this time something did show on his face – guilt, and a wry pull of his lip and cheek that meant something cold and bitter. “You don’t. You just learn to live with it.”
Elizabeth had known that he would not have an answer for her. She had seen the way he looked in the Hall of Heroes. He would always have Wounded Knee. She would always have a stark building in Finkton, and a pair of steel scissors.
***
Emporia. A fancy name for a rich neighborhood. Booker wasn’t impressed. At the moment he just wanted to get through any Vox in their way, and finally put this Comstock down. His chest heaved as he caught his breath. The Vox behind them weren’t so lucky.
He glanced at Elizabeth. She was sitting on a bench outside the port, waiting for him to finish searching the abandoned luggage. She still looked shaken up, but he couldn’t guess if it was the blood on her hands or the reappearance of the bird that had her so quiet.
Her face had lost something. That girl who had laughingly asked him to dance – she wasn’t there. He used to think of her as a child, but there was a shuttered coldness behind her eyes now.
“Elizabeth. You holding up?”
She looked surprised to hear him speaking, as if he had woken her from sleep. “I guess. I mean, I don’t really have any other choice, do I?” That coldness was still there, and he realized that his chest felt heavy when he looked at her. He had thought her naiveté a liability. Instead he found he missed it.
“Well, no. But I –“ He paused. Trying to talk about himself was impossible, and worse, foolish. He struggled with the words. “You shouldn’t feel too guilty. Fitzroy was just another dictator in a different body. You saved that kid.”
“I could have found another way,” said Elizabeth, staring down at her boots. “What if I’d just convinced her it was wrong –“
“Good luck with that –“
“Or, or stunned her, or tried to find a tear to push her through,” suggested Elizabeth, but her voice trailed off. He could see the wheels turning in her head, could see that there had not been any other solution. Fitzroy had had a gun, and if Elizabeth had tried anything else it would have been her body lying there on the wood spilling blood. But the knowledge of that didn’t seem to soothe her.
“It takes a strong person to do what’s needed,” said Booker quietly. “Especially when it’s a dirty job.”
She looked up at him, her jaw set, eyes narrowed. “I’m not a hero, Booker.”
“Never dreamed of calling you one, since they ain’t real,” said Booker. “Come on. We’d better find a way in before it gets dark.”
***
“Booker!” Elizabeth screamed. She flung him another shotgun and he finally managed to kill the man who had jumped him. He reeled as the other man dropped to the ground. She cast a hurried eye around the hall and stairs. There were no more rebels approaching. She ran from her hiding place to where Booker was managing, barely, to keep standing.
“You’re bleeding,” she said sharply. He looked weakly at her, and in horror she realized his face had gone pale. He clutched his left side, and she could see a spreading patch of blood under his hands. But there was no medicine in sight.
“It’s okay,” said Booker. “Just need another one of those kits…” He wobbled and she quickly moved to his good side, shoving his arm over her shoulders.
“This way,” she said, and pulled him down after her. He was a tall man, but now he was bent over and leaning on her, and heavy. The Salty Oyster was just ahead of them, and she remembered they had found some supplies there they hadn’t had room to carry. “We’ll rest in the bar and get you patched up. Just stay with me. You’re far too big for me to carry on my own.”
Booker grunted as they moved down the last of the stairs and through the bar doors. He was panting with exertion, his face getting paler with every step. She shoved him into one of the little booths, panting herself. Food and some bottles of liquor sat upon the table.
“I’ll be right back. Your gun’s right here if anyone comes in, but I have to find you some medicine. Stay with me, Booker,” she repeated, and he managed an exhausted nod. She still wanted to call him Mr. DeWitt most of the time, but he seemed to respond better to Booker, especially when he was injured. “Eat something, if you can.”
She found what she was looking for in the back of the bar, and came running back to Booker’s table a few moments later, a medical kit in hand. Booker was looking a little more alert, though the circles under his eyes were still dark and grim, and his face was still paler than she would have liked.
“Let me see where you’re hurt,” Elizabeth said, kneeling down next to him. Booker took a long pull from one of the bottles, then nodded.
“If we ever get out of here, you could be a doctor, you know,” said Booker. Alcohol rolled off his breath. He pulled his tucked shirt out from his belt and held it up with his left hand, revealing deeply bruised skin surrounding a small bullet wound. The bleeding had slowed but was still oozing.
“I suppose,” said Elizabeth, distracted as she searched through the kit. Mercurochrome, forceps, suture and needle, bandages, and a packet of Dr. Boswell’s Miracle Antiseptic Pellets. It should be enough. She looked up at Booker. “I need to find that bullet.”
“It didn’t get too deep. I can feel it here.” He pointed with his left hand, and took another drink with his right.
“It might hurt,” Elizabeth said, pouring mercurochrome onto one of the bandages in the kit and gently dabbing the wound. Booker’s flesh crawled as she did so. She grabbed a new piece of bandage and cleaned her own hands with the disinfectant.
“You don’t say,” he said dryly. He drained the bottle in his hand. “Getting real tired of being shot at.”
Elizabeth grasped the forceps in one hand, carefully exploring the wound. Booker’s hand reached out and gripped her shoulder, hard, but he didn’t make a sound. She felt something soft and squishy with the forceps and shuddered, but then they hit upon fellow metal, and she grasped the bullet, pulling it out in one piece. Booker let out a long, slow breath. Luckily the bullet hole was small. It took only two quick stitches to bring the edges together. It unnerved her how used she was getting to battlefield medicine.
“Sorry the job didn’t work out the way you planned,” she said. She taped a bandage over the two sutures, and gently tugged on Booker’s shirt, bringing the fabric down to cover the dressing.
“It never does,” said Booker thickly, but he didn’t add anything more.
Elizabeth got to her feet, wincing as she straightened up. Now that they had stopped running for a few minutes, she realized how tired she was. Coffee and furtive naps in abandoned buildings could only take her so far. But she didn’t want to sleep. She had a feeling that she might see Fitzroy clawing at her skirt again, the spray of blood, the stunned look in Booker’s eyes. Still, she could not bear the idea of running back out into the plaza.
“Maybe we should rest here for a few minutes,” she conceded, sliding into the booth across from Booker, her body sinking into the grimy cushion. She was so tired. She had tried to stay active in the tower, running across the library floor, dancing to the albums Songbird gave her. It hadn’t fully prepared her for a life literally on the run. She looked down at her hands. “Do you know how to sleep without dreaming?”
Booker opened another bottle, and drank deeply from it. The label on it said scotch. His throat pulsed as he swallowed, and the alcohol smell grew thicker. “This.” He gestured toward her with the bottle, now significantly emptier, even though she had remembered reading about how strong the stuff was. “It helps sometimes.”
Elizabeth’s eyes drifted over the table, falling on the bottles lined up next to Booker. They had been sealed when she had left him twenty minutes ago, she was sure of it. Three of them were now open. She remembered some of the places they had been, bars and homes. She had laughed at his bleary eyes after drinking three or four bottles, but it suddenly occurred to her how much alcohol that really was.
Elizabeth was too tired to care about being polite. She looked at Booker, cradling the bottle in his hand like a lifeline, his eyes dull and cast down. “You’re an alcoholic,” she said softly. “Aren’t you?”
He shrugged, as if there was nothing to say, but she caught a glimpse of shame in the way his mouth tightened. Shame. Funny the way it seemed to tie them together.
She reached out and put her hand on the bottle. “Give me that.”
Booker’s hand tightened around the bottle’s neck. “I’m drinking that.”
“No,” Elizabeth said calmly. “You’re sharing it with me.”
***
Elizabeth giggled and stood up, swaying only slightly. “I think I feel a dance coming on,” she said brightly, but even through the glow of whisky in her cheeks Booker could tell it was an act, an attempt to keep things light.
“I shouldn’t have let you drink that,” Booker scowled.
“Well, if it keeps you from being too drunk to defend us, I’ll take one for the team,” said Elizabeth. She slid out of the booth and into the open part of the hallway, beginning a little jig. “Besides, it’s not the first time I’ve drank.”
He ignored her jibe. “How’s that, hmm? That tower looked mighty empty of spirits last I recall.”
“Songbird might be clever, but even he makes mistakes sometimes.” She twirled in place. “He thought that crate of wine was juice. I thought so too, but when I dipped into it later, well, I was surprised.” She laughed at the memory. “I believe I may have stripped all my clothes off and pranced around the library singing as loud as I could for an hour. Then I passed out, and when I woke up, the crate was gone.” The look of amusement on her face shifted suddenly to one of anger. “I guess that was my handlers, sneaking in when I wasn’t around to stop them.”
“They probably thought you might open some crazy tears if you were drunk,” ventured Booker. God, why had he let the girl drink?
His head felt warm and muzzy, the pain in his side slowly fading to a dull ache. He’d dutifully taken the antiseptic pellets Elizabeth had forced upon him, though to tell the truth, he thought the scotch had probably done a better job repairing him.
That was why he had let her finish the last few swallows in the bottle, he knew. It took a lot to get Booker DeWitt drunk, but while she had been fiddling with bandages and stitches, he’d been busy, too. He had hit that point of no return, where he could fly off the handle with an ill-chosen word – or agree most amenably to a kind face. And her calling him an alcoholic… He hated the truth in it, hated it, but he wasn’t going to lie to this girl ever again. So instead he’d given in to what she asked.
“Maybe I should have,” Elizabeth said, her eyes narrowing. “They would have deserved being swallowed up in something terrible – the sea, or a frozen mountaintop. If I could have opened a tear into outer space like in a Jules Verne story, I would have.”
“I think they’d be getting off easy then.” His mouth quirked. It was almost a smile that he gave her. He saw the way it cheered her.
She tried to do another twirl, but aborted it halfway through the motion. Her heart had clearly gone out of it. She tried smiling back at him, but he could see it happening: the collapse of the whiskied good mood into despair. It had been a long time since alcohol had brought him anything like euphoria, but he still retained a distant memory of that blown-glass feeling, where things could feel so uplifted – and yet so fragile, prone to shattering at a single bad thought.
“Elizabeth…”
Her shoulders slumped, and she quickly turned her back to him, putting her face into her hands. She took a few deep breaths. “Oh, Mr. Dewitt,” she said, her voice cracking. “I don’t know what I am. But whatever it is… I don’t like it.”
“I know,” he said. The words came easier now than they usually did. Sometimes alcohol froze him. Sometimes it loosened things he had forgotten were there. “I’ll tell you true, I’ve hated – men like me. World would be better off, without people like me.”
“Am I like you, Booker?”
He stared at the back of her, the line of her body bent in sorrow. A flash of something tore through him, but was gone before he could put a name to it. “No. Not at all. You’re a good person.”
“You saved me, though.” Her voice was small. He could see the way she was convinced the two of them were alike – and the way she tried to save herself by thinking of him as a good person.
“Haven’t saved you yet.” He swallowed, tasting scotch. “But I will. Elizabeth, I will.” Fuck New York. Fuck the debt. He had never meant anything more in his life. He would get this girl out. “Maybe… getting you out can wipe away some of what I’ve done. Some. Not all.”
“Have I done too much to be saved?” She turned to look at him, her eyes red and swollen, her cheeks splotched, her hands now trembling at her sides. Her fingers moved, rubbing against each other as if trying to wash themselves.
“No,” he said vehemently. “You did what needed doing, though it cost you.”
“But I still feel like a monster!” The exclamation surprised her, and she cringed from the way the last word still rung in the air. She bit her lip.
Booker ached for her. “Believe me, if you can feel like that, you ain’t one. It’s when you stop feeling it that you need to be afraid.” He stared down at the bandage covering the wound on his hand, and the scarred lines that read AD.
Slowly, testing the integrity of the stitches, he got to his feet, using the table as leverage. She looked up at him, her trusting gaze both heartening and a burden.
“I have to apologize to you.”
“About Paris?” she said, a hint of accusation back in her face. She crossed her arms.
“About everything.” He gestured to the corpses still piled at the end of the hall from their first excursion into the bar. “About them, about all those other bodies all over Columbia. You should have never had to see that.”
“It’s like you said, in Battleship Bay. I should have expected it,” Elizabeth said, her stance softening. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear with her normal hand.
“Doesn’t mean it was fair for you to see it.” He picked up one of the bottles on the table, but it was empty. He set it back down, where it wobbled for a moment on the wooden surface. “But I’m sorry for Paris. And I’m sorry for what I said back in the airship.”
“About what?”
“You asked me how to forget what you’ve done,” he said heavily.
“You said that you don’t, you just learn to live with it.”
“That was a lie too.” He felt his face crack into a bitter smile, the only type he knew. “I don’t know how to live with it, either.”
Elizabeth looked steadily at him, studying him the way he supposed she studied books in her tower. The shadows under her eyes seemed magnified, like an old woman’s, and yet she was a girl struggling to make sense of a world fucked beyond the telling of it.
“I forgive you,” she whispered. She stepped forward, hesitating, and without warning he found himself being embraced like he was the only thing holding her on the ground. Haltingly he lifted his arms and pulled the slender girl in, letting her head rest against his chest. They stood for a moment, the girl clinging to him, his arms around her like a promise. It felt right. It felt right.
***
Elizabeth stood in the ladies’ washroom, splashing water onto her face to help wake up after her nap. She had curled up in one of the booths while Booker kept watch. Her dreams were dark and ominous, shadow and flame, figures moving through the smoke. Still, though, she awoke refreshed.
Elizabeth straightened the sleeves on her jacket, and ran her fingers through her shortened hair. There were no more tangles or snarls, no blood thick and heavy on the strands.
She felt prepared now. What was more, she felt calm. She knew the steel scissors would never leave her mind entirely, and that she would atone, again and again, for what she had done. But there was no more time for her to suffer. She had to focus on the escape.
She stepped out into the hallway. “I’m ready,” she called to Booker, who stood near the door waiting for her. Booker raised his weapon and almost smiled, and faithfully he followed her out.
She felt they could handle anything. She was Elizabeth, not a thing, not a monster; and Booker was her friend.