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repaythedebtWho:
[*] Booker Dewittdewitt_investigations
(electric.alchemy@gmail.com)
[*]Elizabeth Dewittrepaythedebt
(jessa.rollo@yahoo.ca)
[*] Robert/Rosalind Letece (NPC)
shared.
What: a reunion.
Where: Rapture and beyond.
When: Roughly set during the events of Bioshock.
Rating: Varied; TBA
Status: On-going
Playlist:
• "Somewhere Beyond the Sea" - the Bobby Darrin cover
• "Enjoy the Silence" - the Tori Amos cover
• Damien Rice-- "Cold Water"
• Stone Sour-- "Through Glass"
• Akira Yamaoka-- "Hell Frozen Rain"
Living and dying. Everything ends and begins with water.
At first, the man isn’t completely certain whether he’s being held below the water’s surface by the grip of a stern-faced preacher, or by the many hands of a daughter he never raised. Anna DeWitt. Elizabeth Comstock. The False Shepherd knows the rough Where and When—the Dakota Territory, 1874—but not the Which, and he disjointedly wonders: Is Witting trying to save me? Or is Anna trying to kill me? He isn’t sure whether it matters, but he can see the murky distortion of river water swimming across his eyes, and he knows that when he opens his mouth to scream, it’ll be a cold wet blackness drowning his lungs——
——except that in the end, Booker DeWitt manages a strangled yell, inhaling gulps of recycled air. It stinks of damp and rust. His hands press against a cold surface like thick glass; and the space around him feels tightly claustrophobic, making him think of a coffin. Did they drop me in the river? he wonders, and begins striking what he presumes to be the casket’s transparent top with the heels of his palms. But the lid fails to budge; and as his panic mounts, the man brings his now-balled fists crashing into that unyielding surface. He’ll crack the coffin open, he thinks, even if that means that the water on the other side will begin to rush in. After a few hard blows, his knuckles already ache—a low throb like the scars carved into the back of his right hand. AD.
“Let me out, goddamn it!”
“You mustn’t shout, Mister DeWitt,” advises a woman’s voice, muffled from the other side of the glass.
A second speaker, this one male, continues: “If you do, they’ll hear you. In the state you’re in, I’d wager you’d die rather quickly.”
The woman again: “And dying would be completely counter to purpose.”
Both are cultured voices, their enunciation crisp and intelligent. Arched. Similar cadences, and a matching European inflection. They’re voices he’s heard before; and as that sense of familiarity washes over him, some of Booker DeWitt’s disorientation subsides. He’s standing upright (he slowly realizes) in a small cell or chamber, rather than a casket. When the paired glass doors unexpectedly part (their machinery whirring softly), they admit inward a faint odor of salt and brine. It’s not a river, he thinks. It’s an ocean. DeWitt’s sharp green eyes take it all in then——because what he’d initially thought were the sluggish waters of a Dakota river preparing to drown him is in fact the unimaginable weight of the deep North Atlantic.
The sea is held back by a glass retaining wall that stretches from floor to ceiling, a mere ten meters from the open door of the cell. And it’s only now that he’s aware of the crackling noise of an electric current all around him, akin to the hum of a street lamp—and each raw pop of electricity sends gleams of light though the ill-lit room in which DeWitt finds himself, the irregular sparks reflecting fitfully off the surface of the ocean. In this half darkness with its dancing shadows, DeWitt can now see them. He rasps, encompassing both the man and the woman with a single word: “Lutece.”
“Correct,” he says.
Robert Lutece, with his distant blue stare and aristocratic face. Everything about the red-haired man (including the tailored, pale-olive suit) speaks of his attention to detail. Lutece’s eyes flick briefly to his left, where Rosalind stands with hands folded before her. The woman is decidedly smaller than her supposed twin, and pretty in a severe sort of way that compliments her brother’s features. Both Luteces maintain impassive, indecipherably neutral expressions as they watch Booker DeWitt attempt a careful step forward. His lead knee begins to buckle, and the detective’s left hand reaches out to steady himself against the side of the metallic cell’s frame.
“Tell... Tell me. What... the hell is this?”
“That’s a vague question,” Rosalind observes, though her tone isn’t entirely unkind. “You might ask something more concrete, like Where am I? Or What year is it?”
“Or,” offers Robert, “Why am I here? But one thing at a time.”
Rosalind takes a half-step forward, though her hands remained clasped, and she makes no movement to offer DeWitt direct assistance as he carefully rights himself again, and takes a tentative but successful step out of the cell, and into the room itself. “You’ve just exited what the locals call a ‘Vita-Chamber’. Vita, of course, being the Latin word for life. It’s a STAGE-1 Prototype model. A few side effects are to be expected. Disorientation. Temporary weakness.” She pauses, as if considering her words. Then: “It was the most we could do.”
“It was also the least we could do,” Robert says.
“...Vita-Chamber?” DeWitt echoes, turning his head instinctively to survey the room. The tall ceilings are almost entirely lost in darkness, and the luminescent bulbs suspended down from above cast only a wan, yellowish light. Half burnt out. Three sides of the room—directly in front of DeWitt, and to the left and right—are dominated by the glass walls that seem more like enormous windows looking over a dark oceanscape. Tall silhouettes rise in the middle distance, their shapes suggesting buildings like submerged skyscrapers, their windows and neon signs lit sporadically and recalling an undersea Manhattan at midnight. Within, on this side of the glass, the room is dominated by what Booker can only assume is scientific equipment piled on tables (some of them partially collapsed), and faded diagrams written on wheel-mounted chalkboards. The electrical current Booker had previously noticed appears to be emitted from the Vita-Chamber itself, its sparks dissipating into the air around the chamber like an electrostatic corona.
“The Vita-Chamber’s chief purpose, Mister DeWitt,” says Robert Lutece, “is to revive the dead.”
Rosalind: “Do you remember?” Do you remember dying?
“I... died,” DeWitt murmurs, stumbling forward and away from the Vita-Chamber, catching himself on one of the tables arranged about the room. The two words are more statement than question, but the far-off sound of his voice makes it clear that the man finds it difficult to accept the reality of the situation. The vertigo hits him then, a disorientation deeper and sicker than the his awakening inside the Vita-Chamber moments ago. A world-tilting loss of balance that makes him dig his fingers into the edge of the wooden table, until his calloused fingertips have gone white. There’s the faint taste of copper in his mouth, the smell of it in his nostrils.
“So,” he manages. “Let’s say you’re right. I died. What now?”
The sound of Rosalind’s shoes (both utilitarian and feminine, with a low heel) tap lightly against the tiled floor as she approaches. “Your memories will reorient themselves shortly. A little confusion is unavoidable at first. But for now...”
“...For now, Mister DeWitt,” says Robert Lutece, who Booker notices is suddenly standing in front of a control console situated near the Vita-Chamber machine, “We have one more temporal stowaway joining us. Then the two of you can decide what happens next.”
“The two of us...”
“That’s right,” says Rosalind, and the air is suddenly filled with a rush of static when the pitch of the Vita-Chamber’s constant mechanical whine intensifies. As the doors of the chamber slide shut, the arcs jumping like miniature spikes of lightning coalesce in the machine’s center, within the empty cell. Robert’s long-fingered hands spider deftly across the controls, and on an inescapable instinct, Booker moves closer to the Vita-Chamber’s doors. The brightness grows, blinding like liquid plasma, finally forcing him to look away.
And this is how she’ll find him. Booker DeWitt—once upon a time, the False Shepherd and the White Injun. A man roughly six-foot-one, with a lean but powerfully-muscled build. Startlingly intent green eyes. A practiced monster who even moments after resurrecting like Lazarus smells inescapably of cigarettes, gunpowder, and blood. Angular, strong features gently creased by anger; worry; and most of all, by the ghost of a twenty-year guilt. He’s still slightly out of sync with time, dressed in his navy waistcoat and an archaic bright red ascot tie: 1912 rather than 1959. But most immediate of all will be the sound of his voice, fighting to reach her through the glass as he realizes what's happening. As he realizes Who.
“Jesus Christ—Elizabeth—Elizabeth!”
For a few dazzling moments before her curtains closed, Elizabeth could once again see all of the doors. The many lighthouses sprawling across the eternal ocean, poised at a perfect molten sunset. She saw the man on the plane, and how he would engineer her murderer's demise. More importantly, she saw Sally, safe and somehow cured of her sick affliction.
She was safe... Elizabeth almost felt she could rest simply in knowing that. After all, everyone she loved was dead. What real reason did she have? She could feel the seams of her mind struggle to hold, and if it only took her life to pay her debt, then--
Then so be it.
The how of the sudden visions might of concerned her, but with only precious moments left, she spent them instead sitting quietly and comfortably with her relief, and little sister Sally. Her scarlet lips lifted into a soft sort of smile she'd not shown since what felt like several lifetimes.
In her last moments, Elizabeth finally understood her own intentions, guiding her (in that heart aching voice) from the very beginning. It was the only way. The only way to save her. Thankfully, Sally made her last moments something tender, gently painting over the savagery of Atlas' beating with her small soft hearted company.
Elizabeth left peacefully, hoping the other side would be less lonesome.
That was supposed to be the end of the reel-- and yet, the show played on. Elizabeth stands at the lip of the stairs descending into the ocean's unforgiving cold waters, gazing upon infinite lighthouses scattered towards an endless horizon.
The sky suddenly swells the color of blood. Thunder threatens under its breath. Elizabeth loses her breath in a sudden attack of vertigo and ataxia; she clutches the stone rail as they pray together upon her, running through her mind and leaving it disrupted tatters.
Too many doors, too much at once. White burns out her vision and between the searing flashes, she sees him again. She sees the man with the chain tattoo on his wrist, ripping into poor defenseless Sally and--
No, no! It wasn't supposed to happen this way! Elizabeth needed to bring the man so he could save her, this-- this was all wrong! Visions of Sally's small doll-like corpse and the slick sick slug writhing in that merciless hand press the white from her eyes, and all at once she is back at the steps, gazing down at the wave licked pavement as small bright spots of blood begin to spatter the gray.
She's bleeding-- in her visions and in the flesh, a thick dark line snaking around her mouth, creeping down towards to jaw.
In her mind, little sister Sally stands beside her, silent and too forlorn for tears.
'I'm sorry... I'm so sorry, Sally... I never meant-- I never meant to hurt you. I thought I saved you. What can I do,? Tell me, what can I do to make it right?" a frightening rawness lurks just beneath the cold sternness the woman had learned to adapt.
Little girls cried, and she was one no longer; but her eyes sting, and she rips her gaze away and throws it to the deep dark ocean. From the depth bubbles rise. Bathospheres begin to bob up at the distant docks, and from them... Splicers. Splicers more twisted and grotesque than she'd ever seen in her brief and bloody stint at the bottom of the ocean. A deep dread twists in Elizabeth's gut like a knife-- her eyes dart back to Sally, who winds a tiny hand into the night black of her skirt.
"Help us, big sister. Please?" her voice keeps a deeper darker distortion tucked, like a secret, under the sweet innocence of her plea.
Elizabeth's eyes snap open, pupils like pin-pricks in ice. Her senses are severely disorientated and nothing makes any rational sense-- but a voice. She knows it instantly, without a sliver of hesitation.
Booker. How many times would the sound of his call bring her out of darkness? Karmically correct, she dizzily supposes, not ready to trust the authenticity of it just yet. It wouldn't be the first time her mind used something familiar (or even, desperately yearned for) to band-aid a crackling mental state, and after what she had just seen, well. Her mind did not jump start on an optimistic set.
The more she listens, the more she needs to be proven wrong. Her bare bones need for him kick starts as a basic essential function of her mind. If there is even a half chance that she is really hearing him...
Elizabeth pulls herself from her half-conscious state like coming up from deep waters. She pushes to make sense of all the rumbled, seemingly random stimulation. She seems to be slumped inside some kind of glass container with metal sides. Her days under Doctor Petifog and his equally as detestable partner gave her a predisposition to panic under such conditions, but as her mind starts to make sense of things again, she begins to realize just what she is seeing.
Booker. Just beyond the glass.
Consciousness comes with the remnants of the skull splitting headache that often accompanies those pesky little nose bleeds, but that is one of the last things on Elizabeth's mind. Her limbs feel almost as if severely asleep as she attempts to piolet them. She manages to push herself into leaning against the apparently (though not honestly) seamless glass in front of her.
There are likely things about the woman that Booker will recognizes, but there are vast and likely concerning differences. Her clothes are bold dark and sharp, Rapture-esque and womanly in ways that blended with the local's sensibilities (and, perhaps, matched the darkness of her intentions at the time she took them) and clashed with Columbia's less severe, more humble clothing. The skin-hugging blouse. The fishnet stockings. The sharp black heels. And, perhaps as a gift from spacetime, the elegant black and white bird pin nested in the center of her collar's blood rose colored tie. A few blood spatters pepper her clothing, her shirt slightly askew. The sky blue of her eyes seems haunted by something, but they begin to light little by little as her senses clear.
"Booker... Booker!" her fingers ghost the glass, deftly searching for seams. It matters little because the next moment, the doors open with a sterile sigh and there goes the only thing poor Elizabeth was leaning on. The feeling of suddenly being at gravity's mercy made her weakened stomach flip, and with a tight sharp inhale she flails to grasp something to keep herself up.
One pale lithe hand grasps tightly where Booker's neck meets his shoulder, tightly grasping fabric. The warm gentle press of her kisses his chest as she braces for balance. The blue of her eyes would not leave the green of his. She searches his gaze.
She is rapidly running out of will to doubt that this really is--
"Are you real?" a moment reincarnated, a question from a woman rather than a girl. When her hand floats out on the temptation to brush his cheek, there is no thimble, no shortened pinky. Only scarlet nails and and a faint suggestion of menthol. She is hardly reined in her senses enough to notice anything beyond him-- Rapture is peripheral but somewhat familiar at this point. She hasn't even noticed the Letetces. Nothing else in that moment really matters.
For a long, surreal moment, Booker DeWitt experiences another spell of vertigo. Dreams, memories, the present: their boundaries blur.
Once, after crossing the threshold of a door that stood at the center of his life—at the core of everything he’d ever done wrong and done right—Booker had turned to face an Elizabeth with neither the emblem of a bird nor a cage on her throat. Knee-deep in baptismal water, Booker DeWitt had realized the girl before him then (her pretty lace choker strangely blank) had not been his Elizabeth. The man’s vivid green eyes are locked now on that godsend, the black-and-white pendant.
I just can’t decide, she’d told him once, holding out two open jewelry boxes: the bird or the cage. He recognizes the bird. And however much different the young woman is from the girl he’d known, he recognizes her too. He’d made that choice for her.
As the Vita-Chamber’s doors slide apart and pitch the unbalanced Elizabeth forward, he moves to intercept her. The motion of his limbs feels weighted, as if—fittingly enough, he thinks—he’s trying to walk underwater. Nerves reconnecting. The clinging lethargy still muddling his thoughts gradually burning away. He doesn’t entirely feel like himself yet, like a child after waking from sleep that’s been too dark and too deep, but the man has recovered enough in the last few moments that the weight of Elizabeth’s frame is negligible. Where she clutches at him, Booker’s shoulder is steady and broad; the base of his neck radiates natural body-heat from under his shirt collar, where her fingers have seized him.
DeWitt’s arms close around her, catching the girl and wrapping around her shoulders. He’s heedless of those delicate spatters of blood on her clothing, and the more benign stains that her bright red lips might leave on him if he pulls her too close. “...Elizabeth...” Booker’s low, mellow voice murmurs disjointedly. He’s looking directly at her face, with his neck craned and his strong chin tilted downward. When Elizabeth’s eyes seek out his, she finds them immediately, staring back at her: the man’s irises a pale yellowish green the hue of French chartreuse. His pupils have gone softly wide, and he looks at her almost without blinking.
Are you real?
Her question startles him softly: like an echo of familiar music. And Booker wonders for a moment, inescapably, whether he’s real or a phantasm; alive or dead; here or elsewhere. Several paces behind the former Pinkerton detective, unnoticed, Rosalind Lutece glances at her brother, who returns the look with a silently arched eyebrow. But Booker, the corner of his mouth curving into a muted smile, says: “Yeah. Yeah. I’m real enough.”
Because even if he shouldn’t be, even if by all rights he should be less than a ghost, an existence that should have been unequivocally unraveled by the universe——he’s here. He can feel the human solidity of her body and his own, Booker’s knuckles aching dully from his attempt to box the Vita-Chamber doors. He can smell the curiously marine scent of Rapture’s air supply, cycled through the ocean-floor city through titanic compression pumps; and closer, the fragrance of the girl in his arms. He can hear the sound of her voice.
Booker DeWitt is a man who understands physical realities, even more than the cerebral abstraction of ‘je pense, donc je suis.’ The touch of the girl’s fingertips on his cheek (his jawline lightly rough with stubble) is enough to convince him that he exists.
“Your hair’s gotten longer,” Booker observes quietly, his gaze drifting slowly from her eyes to the dark waves falling to her shoulders. “And...” His left hand rises upward to carefully hold her right. The skin of his palm is rough, and his fingers are calloused from handling revolvers and pressing guitar strings; but Booker’s touch is exquisitely gentle as he turns Elizabeth’s hand so that he can see the restored little finger. No more of the oddly charming thimble. “...how’d this happen?”
From the half-lit darkness crowded with tables and apparatuses behind Booker, the professorial voice of Robert Lutece: “A quantum superposition.”
Booker, flicking his eyes away for just a moment to glance over his shoulder, though he does not entirely release Elizabeth: “A quantum what?”
There’s the delicately polite noise of Rosalind clearing her throat. “It hardly matters now, Mister DeWitt. We did warn her.”
Robert Lutece: “Repeatedly.”
Elizabeth's fingers follow curious and blind toward the point of that unflinching gaze; a pale hand uncoils from Booker's collar (weakening her stance only slightly, thankfully she's supported by the firm ring of his arms) and drifts downwards; her weapon worn fingertips still recognize the gentle texture of the broach's edge, the curves and dips that shape the dainty bird imprinted on the black smooth face. Her broach, the one Booker had chosen for her, what felt like lifetimes ago. She thought... she thought she'd lost it when--
The memory of the ravenous rev of the Big Daddy's drill fills her with an unnatural, but familiar chill. It's the wicked-sweet sound of her revenge, the anthem of Comstock's --that final Comstock's-- blood cooling on her cheek. It's the backdrop to his death rattle, and hers. The memory doesn't sit well in a mind still waking from it's down demise, and suddenly Elizabeth feels almost to weak to stand. Her fingers leap from their borrowed perch at her treasured returned broach, and clings again at the front of the man's collar. The world spins around her and the only thing keeping her up is Booker.
That whiskey wry smirk finds her, settles her disorientation. His words grant her a kind of comfort that really should have been unatainable when she already knew enough to realize the danger they're in. This is the moment she finally lets herself believe he is real. Crying was of course something left only to little girls, but her sudden gladness is almost overwhelming enough to gloss her eyes.
All that loneliness, erradicated in a perfect moment. By the warmth of his proximity; by the affection so clear in how he touches her. Danger looms on the edge of her mind with its long velvet shadow, demanding attetion-- but damn it she is overwhelmed with-- with something so vast she struggles to name it.
Booker's observation brings a ghost of a smile that had long since vanished those scarlet lips. It's a sweet thing she finds flavored slightly paternal; of all the things to notice, being that... but it flatters her too, that sweetness that Booker only shows for her.
"A lot has happened, since..." there is no real way to divine an appropriate point of reference. How much does this Booker know, she begins to wonder. How much need she tell him? How much did she want him to know? Wrapping her head around the vastness of what she may need explain (what she may find herself confessing) is daunting beyond what she's the patience to endure-- so Elizabeth pushes the notions away, for the moment. Her fingers flex slightly in his careful grasp as she all but basks in every sense that confirms the reality of his company. Her pinky neatly healed... she wonders how much it really means to him, if he grasps the significance. Her skin warms instantly where he touches.
Elizabeth is about to answer Booker herself when the Leteces interrupt, eliminating the option of ignoring them any further. The young woman isn't quite sure how to sit with their interference, here; clearly, they had brought Booker and her back together. They'd also devised her very first murder, so it was difficult to trust them without question. Elizabeth cast the pair of them a thin wary gaze. As always, it is difficult to know just what to make of the 'twins'.
"To spare you the science, Booker, I'll say it plainly; I can't open tears anymore. I can't see the doors. It was the price I had to pay, to... settle my own debt," she speaks grimly, in vague explanation; the details are hard to condensce-- hard to speak out loud, in fact, especially all company considered. Obviously the Leteces know it all, but that doesn't mean she wants to spell it all out in front of them. Too much she thought that Booker would never know of her. Too much she took comfort in her father never having to witness.
She's putting more effort into standing on her own now; one hand still at the broad and firm of his shoulder while the other rests at the swollen wood of a crowded table. Her chipped scarlet nails bite the soft wooden side. Her heels click sharply on the puddle strewn tile as she struggles to get her feet properly under herself.
"The Leteces did warn me," she spars them each another uneasy glance, her expression and oil and water mix of gratitude and mistrust. "I... I had to come back, regardless. None of it should matter now; I did what I had to; Sally is safe."
"Not quite," Rosalind.
"Not necessarily," Robert.
Once upon a time Elizabeth met thier riddles with optimistic curiosity, but she'd seen and spilled a lot of blood since then. She'd lost so much more than patience.
"Can we skip to the part when you explain why you brought us back here? Far as I can remember, the pair of us have no business being in Rapture," Elizabeth breaks her uneasy gaze from the Leteces each to check, once again, that Booker is at her side. She gagues his uneasiness against her own.
"You've no buisness being anywhere, but that is besides the point," Rosalind reports crisply, matter-of-fact. "We're not here to spoon feed you. The pair of you are perfectly capable of finding your way."
"You'll want to start with Brigid Tenenbaum; she will enlighten you to several... unfortunate facts," Robert explains whilst scrawling the name in sprawling letters across one of the dusty boards.
"She's far more invested in explaining her plight than we are," Rosalind added arily. "I imagine she'll do a much better job of it."
Booker DeWitt is many things. It’s a truth Elizabeth said best herself, to a different him: “You can thank my father. He was a man comfortable in a variety of roles.” But the part DeWitt has played longest and most naturally is detective. Sleuthing is coolly rational work; a matter of observation and deduction. Even now, with his thoughts partially fragmented in the aftermath of resurrection—waking to an alien time and place—he’s beginning to piece together bits of the story. He catches glimpses of what’s happening around them, and of what’s happening inside of her. When he catches the restrained way Elizabeth keeps her own emotions in check behind her eyes, Booker’s own soften a little. He’d say something, part his lips to speak, but the girl beats him to the punch: A lot has happened, since...
She’s evasive; she’s terse. Things she doesn’t want me hearing, he thinks, watching the careful way Elizabeth eyes the Luteces. Or things she doesn’t wanna say in front of them. Booker just listens. And then what he tells her is, in that voice that sounds like the slow belly-deep warmth of Kentucky bourbon: “I know all about debts, Elizabeth. You understand that better than anyone. If that’s what you had to do to settle yours, I know you had a good reason.” As if things are just that simple. As if he’s willing to accept the girl’s cautious reticence unconditionally, without question. Booker’s hand gently releases her right as she makes an attempt to take a step in those formidable-looking heels, and he murmurs, “Easy now.”
She mentions the names Sally and Rapture, and why do they sound so damn familiar? Like words he’s heard in a dream once. “Rapture,” he echoes. “We were here before. This is where—the Songbird——” Where Elizabeth transported the two of them and the Songbird, after the gargantuan flying creature destroyed Monument Island’s Siphon. This is where the ocean floor crushed Elizabeth’s jailer and protector under two-hundred atmospheres of pressure, and Booker remembers in painful detail how she’d looked at that moment, turned away with her palms pressed to the glass. DeWitt cuts himself off darkly, watching Robert Lutece scrawl a third name in chalk, this last one wholly unfamiliar: Brigid Tenenbaum. Then:
“——Hold it.”
Booker’s jaw is set dangerously tense. As he gently disengages himself from Elizabeth, taking a pace toward the Luteces, the residual electric glow cast from the Vita-Chamber makes his stare momentarily shine aquamarine. Under the heels of his shoes, what used to be a glass test-tube (broken now) crunches unintentionally. Glass grit like diamonds grinding into the laboratory annex’s tiled floor.
“I don’t exactly know everything that’s goin’ on. I don’t know if there’s a damn thing I can ever do to really pay my debts—but I sure as hell know she’s paid hers.” Booker scarred right hand raises to point in Elizabeth’s direction as Booker continues staring at the red-haired pair, who gaze composedly back with near-unreadable expressions. Patiently, with all the time in the world. “She can’t make tears; and if she came out of that chamber thing like me, that means she’s already died once. If I had to make a wager, I’d bet that had to do with this Sally girl too.” She’s died twice; but DeWitt has no way of knowing that.
“So what the hell else needs to happen to balance the ledger?”
The Lutece twins (Robert still holding the stick of chalk with familiar ease between his fingers) glance at each other briefly. It’s Rosalind who speaks first, brushing the front of her long skirt smooth with her calm hands. “Mister DeWitt. This is no longer a matter of debt. However, if you still feel burdened by your past actions toward your Anna, that’s entirely your own business.”
“Likewise,” Robert continues, his precise voice reverberating subtly off the high ceiling as the man addresses Elizabeth, “your actions have made it possible for the child to survive in one of several possible worlds. Without your actions...”
“...she would have perished in all of them,” Rosalind finishes. “We’ve explained it before.”
“Apparently we may need to repeat ourselves,” observes Robert dryly. Then: “Lives, lived, will live.”
Rosalind: “Dies, died, will die. It’s all relative. A Sally who lives in one Rapture, dies in another. Do you intend to save her in all of them? It isn’t possible.”
“Though understandable,” conjectures Robert.
“But not possible,” the woman reiterates, a little more sharply.
“Be that as it may,” Robert mentions, “you’ve an opportunity to save a single Sally in this single world. This is a reality that should not exist. But certain rules can be bent...”
Rosalind: “While others can be broken. This isn’t a matter of debt.”
Robert: “It’s simply a matter of choice. Save the girl?”
“—Or flee the city?” Rosalind counters.
“Either way,” Robert Lutece says, returning to his original point, walking past the blackboard bearing the Belarusian doctor’s name, “you’ll require Tenenbaum’s assistance. And we do suggest you hurry. Though concerning proper names, there is one more thing before you go.”
“We’re no longer quite certain what to call you,” explains Rosalind, her keen, languid blue eyes trained on Elizabeth with a strange sort of expectation. “Shall it be ‘Miss Comstock’?”
“Or shall we call you ‘Miss DeWitt’?”
Elizabeth can feel the depth and tone of Booker's-- this Booker's care for her; it's plain in the way he speaks, in the way he defends her as naturally as breathing. Like he's hers, right from the riverbed. Unfortunate, unforgiving circumstance has turned the young woman more easily towards pessimism, and it seems far too foolish to believe that the pair of them could just fall back together, regardless of all the things they'd (--she'd) done. She'd killed him, and though the memory was not hers, she'd seen it all when the doors were open to her. She could recall the chill of the river, and the frantic panicked beat of Booker's heart as it thrashed against asphyxiation. Not her memory... but hers, all the same. Through another set of eyes and hands, that were also hers, and yet not. Guilt was a useless heavy thing but the damn DeWitts seemed to have an affinity for it.
When something like a smile struggles to find her lips, it feels strange and forgotten. His gentle assurance tastes almost-- almost like a kind of forgiveness she'd yet to fathom she needed, somewhere in the deep and dark of her. The understanding, the empathy is so finely tuned to her pain that Elizabeth finds herself thinking that he must know-- he must understand. Hints of a long ago apology she never had the luxury to extend chill her gaze like slickness on ice. She did what she had to, and for that she was not sorry. But she'd not the strength to end Booker herself, she--
She simply cared for him too much. Perhaps that was the source of that sorrowful gaze. The shadows betwixt the erratic sparks color her shadows dark against the pale of her face. For a moment Elizabeth looks worn down, and so bone-tired.
"I'm fine," an admittance not so hard edged; gentle and frail only (so the young woman allows herself to think) in he state of post-resurrection. It had been far and long since she'd had a shoulder to lean on. It was almost a little disorientating. She had depended on Booker's protection so fiercely in their first days together, and her time alone in Rapture had only refined, redefined the shape and tone of her need for him. She could shoot her own guns and wield her own plasmids, but what she desired from the man was something deeper than that. Something under the skin. Now, as Elizabeth fumbles with it, it is just as maddening impossible to name.
"That's right," she confirms quiet and grim at the mention of Songbird; it's becoming clear just how much Booker knows, and Elizabeth feels the memory (or memories from different perspectives, depending on how deeply she delves into this remembrance) of his river-side finale weigh on her. It was his price, but that did not mean she enjoyed taking the tole. She's capable of standing when Booker carefully removed himself, and the gut-deep chill of Rapture rushes in where his body had kept her warm. How had she never realized how cold this place is?
The young woman's attention returns to the pair of aloof scientists as they begin to offer further explanation. At this point, the mechanics of cross reality shenanigans are fairly second nature to her, despite her mere flesh and blood, so Elizabeth is keen on the uptake.
"Then... what I saw, before, when I died-- the man with the chain tattoo, saving the little sisters... you're telling me that was just one possible reality?" rhetorical; it's a bitter pill, certainly. A whole lot of effort and one big fat price tag was steep for only possibly saving Sally, but Elizabeth can't scrape together nearly enough selfishness to regret it. Sally was her responsibility-- and if she is somehow still and danger, Elizabeth knows already that she has to help her. There is no choice for her. She can't stand the thought of leaving her to die in this awful city, when... when someone was trying to save her, and she'd zero qualms of taking full bloody advantage.
She wants to ask more of the difficult to decipher duo; did the man with the chain tattoo fail to make it to Rapture? Was he killed? Or is something more insidious nature? She find herself instantly doubting the twin's interest in providing an informative lecture... Maybe this Tenenbaum would be more willingly informative. Though she's reasons not to trust the Letece's entirely, they've noting else to go on. Her plush dark lips press into a thin line as her gaze turns back to Booker. What does he want to do? Keep her safe, she would wager... but the safe thing is not always the right; Elizabeth knew he understood that, as well.
Already, the ominous nature of the crumbling, drowning city is clawing for attention. The whispering of countless leaks fills the spaces between the distant, distorted echoes of far off, rambling splicers. The smell of gas and chemical fires arbitrarily interrupt the scent of brine. Somewhere not comfortably far off, a rattle of gunshots accompany a frenzied maniac laugh. A sound between a roar and a groan that's as deep as the ocean above them spreads through the air like a tangible warning; indistinct machines rev, and just for show, a shark feeds viciously upon a bloated corpse floating just outside the window into the deep.
The question was something unexpected; though Elizabeth is wary, she supposes an answer would do little harm. It was a small curtsey she was capable of, especially considering she wouldn't have been there to answer if not for the scientist's interference. Briefly, the young woman recalls her time crawling through through Andrew Ryan's impromptu prison-- more so the lonely conversations she'd had with 'Booker'.
"Us DeWitts" she'd said once without thinking. It had felt like a better fit, all things considered-- and she certainly felt more affection for the man before her than the man who kept her jailed. It was a natural easy decision that she'd not even realized she'd made.
"I should think it's obvious that Comstock no longer suits," she said crisply, coolly, dry. "I've been a DeWitt for much longer than that bastard would approve, but thankfully, his opinion no longer bares relevance," her distrust of them sets up a terse professionalism in her tone and speak. Her disdain was more Comstock-bound, only distrust and wariness reserved for 'the twins'. They had helped. They had hurt. They were damn near impossible to predict, and Elizabeth found herself more firmly agreeing with Booker's long ago assessment of 'they seem to be out of their minds.'
The dangers of Rapture bite the edges of her senses-- pulled thin between the Leteces, Booker, and trying to accommodate an unnatural restart. Her stance is impressively steady as she takes a few steps, parting some distance between the other three as she approaches a rumbled mass in the corner. A man-- most likely, though the severe facial mutations make it difficult to tell. The corpse was clutching an impressively shined revolver, making somber sense of the congealing bullet wound at the back of his head. The white bloodied coat implied scientist, once.
There was a time Elizabeth would look at the dead with bright tangible sorrow. 'Look at this one; do you think he wanted any part of this?' she'd once felt so much for those lost. Now, twas only the corner of her scarlet mouth that gave a slight twitch of distaste as she dug her sharp black heel into the flesh of the dead man's arm. Her eyes had taken up a steeliness Booker might find familiar, somehow. The fingers were stiff from death, but with a bit of pulling, and with her foot planted, the gun came free. Elizabeth spun the chamber, checking for bullets.
DeWitt, indeed.
"Booker, here," she calmly called, awaiting his attention before tossing the hand cannon. There was one unusual addition. "Keep your eyes peeled, I need a weapon, too."
She looked to the Leteces then, something uncertain in her expression.
"... I don't think I'll ever understand you two," she glanced between them; the cooler firmer sister, the kinder gentler brother. The same, and yet not. She found a tiny dry scrap of ammusment at the abstract 'family resemblence'. Booker and Her. Robert and Rosalind. Just like old times. "But thank you, for this."
“No need to thank us, Miss DeWitt,” Robert Lutece answers, as he cants his head—speaking that name as if she’d never had another. In the dark, submarine darkness of this dilapidated room, the two Lutece siblings are both immediate (undeniably physical, irrefutably tangible) and yet strangely distant. Halfway between here and elsewhere. In their neat attire, with blackboards as their backdrop, they present the impression of schoolteachers in the most morbid classroom imaginable. “After all...”
“...if it weren’t for our work on the Trans-Dimensional Device,” Rosalind continues, “neither of you would have faced such hardships.” The woman’s footsteps in her old-fashioned heeled boots (tap, tap, tap) are light and well-balanced as she approaches her male counterpart. Rosalind gazes up at him with her level blue eyes, inspecting a trace of chalk dust marking the shoulder of Robert’s olive suit jacket. “Don’t misunderstand me,” she says coolly. “I have absolutely no regrets. However, there is the matter of... responsibility. I’m sure the two of you understand.” Rosalind’s slim fingers rise to gently brush her twin’s shoulder clean, and she inspects her work with a critical eye before murmuring to the other Lutece (with a curious sort of intimacy, as if Booker and Elizabeth aren’t even there): “Funny. I could have sworn she would have picked ‘Comstock’. Human beings are creatures of habit. They find comfort in the familiar.”
“People develop new habits,” Robert argues mildly. “Adapt, and the new becomes familiar.”
“Mmh,” she answers noncommittally, though the inflection of that brief non-word suggests she (reluctantly) concedes the point. Together, the two Luteces turn and begin walking toward the single usable exit—an open door leading from the small, ruined laboratory and into what in the unsteady light seems a long corridor or tunnel. On the opposite side of the room, a second door labeled AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY has been barricaded using several of the heavy lab tables, overturned and stacked atop each other. Although that blocked door could be cleared, doing so would take a considerable amount of effort and time. And if the muffled, distant noises of gunshots a moment ago (silent now) are to be believed, Booker and Elizabeth can ill afford to remain in a poorly-defended location too long.
The Luteces stop briefly at the threshold of the door, and Rosalind glances over her shoulder to offer one last piece of advice: “Do be careful. The Vita-Chambers won’t work a second time.”
“Not on either of you, anyway,” Robert amends, and as if to answer him, the prototype Vita-Chamber’s electrical field offers one final surge. There’s a sickening stink of scorched insulation as the power cables snaking along the floor to the base of the the pod-like chamber begin to fail—rubber melting, the energy current stuttering violently. From one side of the machine, a crackle of electricity sprays dangerously wide, throwing a blinding flash and a weird scent like ozone after a lightning strike. Booker is reminded vaguely of thunderstorms in the Midwest, and the way you can find trees blasted straight down the middle in their aftermath. He raises his left forearm reflexively to shield his eyes from the light. Then the Vita-Chamber emits a low, faltering mechanical whine before going completely still and dark.
“Shit. Elizabeth—Elizabeth, you alright?” Lowering his arm, he turns his eyes toward the last place he saw her, blinking back the afterimages burned temporarily across his vision. It doesn’t surprise him (not anymore) that the Luteces have entirely vanished, though in their absence (and with the resurrection machine gone dead silent) Booker has become increasingly aware of the foreign undersea cold that Elizabeth had noted only moments earlier. There’s a lonely metronome-steady drip, drip, drip nearby where an overhead pipe has cracked—the plumbing corroded by neglect and the constant effects of sea salt. The very building in which they find themselves groans massively in the Atlantic current, creaking and settling much as a gargantuan farmhouse would in the middle of the night. He’s certain that what he’d heard a minute ago was the sharp report of a small-caliber handgun, fired sporadically: the rhythm of a mad panic. There’s a corpse crumpled in the corner (the ADAM-induced disfigurements hidden from Booker by the awkward angle of the man’s head), and the dead man’s gun feels cold, heavy, and oddly familiar in his hand.
Familiar like the way she’d called (“Booker, here”) and he’d reached effortlessly to catch the weighty break-action revolver. The girl’s got one hell of an arm. He breathes out silently through his nostrils when he’s sure that the electrical discharge from the Vita-Chamber has left her unharmed, and takes a moment to flip the hand cannon’s cylinder open to inspect the remaining bullets, just as she had. Three, he counts grimly: but there might have been none. Sliding the weapon into the holster harnessed under his arm, Booker looks at her for a moment; his green eyes are unreadable for several beats, and then he says: “Looks like you know your way around a gun these days.” Booker’s voice is pitched low, strangely nuanced and heavy. Sober. “I don’t know whether to be unhappy or impressed. But I’ll see what I can find.” There’s that quirk of a smile at the corner of his mouth again.
He isn’t certain they have the luxury of reflection, either. There are several smears of blood on the floor; and not all of them appear to belong to the dead man in the lab coat. He’s picking up the traces now: the fragments of a story, theorizing how they might fit together. A number of spent brass bullet casings are scattered across the floor, and he can just barely see (in the dull light provided by the few candescent bulbs; it’s considerably darker now that the Vita-Chamber has shut down) the spots where several stray bullets have bitten into the doorframe beside the now-barricaded door.
“And it looks like you know your way around this ‘Rapture’ too,” he says. “I’m gonna need you to explain to me what the hell is going on when we find somewhere to hole up for a bit. Feels like Columbia all over again. But, Elizabeth—Christ.” For a moment it’s all forgotten: the laboratory’s mingled smell of blood and gunpowder, the reverberations of the underwater city that seem to shake him to the bone, the disjointed sound of someone rambling to themselves in the middle distance. “Are you really alright with this? With me? I didn’t realize... I didn’t know.”
There’s that guilt. It creeps into his voice with an old familiar ache like a broken bone that’s healed over wrong. Booker’s gaze is locked straight on her, and his scarred hand is half-raised as if he’d reach for Elizabeth’s face. Suspended, arrested in mid-motion. “It was my fault. All of it. I didn’t make the choices that Comstock made. I never let anyone forgive my guilt, like he did,” he says, thinking of a preacher-man in that wild Dakota country. “And I never forgave myself. I never will. But Comstock——he was me. Can you still put your life in my hands, Elizabeth?”
In the end, it comes down to a single question:
“Do you still trust me?”
Elizabeth has of course considered this; the very top track of her downward spiral was unknowingly laid by Letece (as much as many others) in the creation of their machine; the woman couldn't be more correct in her statement. Scraps and secrets left on crackling Voxophones suggested hints of motive-- Elizabeth had listened with Booker to more than one of the Letece's recordings. In the moment the young woman watches the ginger haired scientist fuss with her brother's suit, she finds herself recalling one recording in particular.
They had to whisper to each other, once, through their vast impossible separation. That is what Rosalind's recorded voice had explained; they had wanted so badly just to see each other, to occupy the same space and breathe the same air. The Letece device was built, in some small but vitally significant way, to unite the Letece siblings; at least, it was a cornerstone of their own determination.
Simply, they wanted to be with each other; Elizabeth had never thought of it in quite that light until that very moment. It wasn't a difficult sentiment to understand, either. It didn't make her trust them... but it made the Leteces just a little more human to the youngest DeWitt.
Her only expression of the strange new light she found on on the siblings was a long stock-taking look to the pair of them, immediately cut when the Vita-Chamber began to revolt. Her own arm comes to shield her eyes when the light seeps red through her clenched lids. Spots float across her vision as the flickering light wanes and the darkness sinks down from the high ceilings. The shadows are thick and inky when she opens up those sky blues, and peers squinting through the deeper dim.
"I'm alright Booker," she picks out the shape of him in the muddy light, standing with the urge to be close to him only because she could. Things need doing, like they always did... but damn it all, the last time she had 'seen' him, he was only a voice in her head. Not even real. He's here, she keeps reminding himself. "It's going to take more than some flashing lights to give me any trouble," the dryness of her smile and tone would probably feel familiar.
She finds his eyes as her own struggle to see through the ocean scented dim. She holds his gaze easily, naturally; her own with all tenderness confined behind a splintered, half-held guard that was not for Booker, but for the world at large. Hers were the eyes of one who had seen too much death; haunted almost by the blood they had witnessed. In looking at Booker, however... something tarnished but bright gleams weakly under the age that grimes her gaze.
"It wasn't like I up and took lessons," she remarks, a dark pencilled brow floating up the powder pale of her forehead, the very corner of her mouth curling. "I had to learn on my feet, but I had plenty of time to watch how you got things done." As Robert had so aptly explained, she had adapted. Elizabeth could even feel the power of her Plasmids still written into the very essence of her, accessible with the right concentration. Good... they would need everything they could, if Rapture was anything like how she remembered.
"Another door, another lighthouse, another city. I'll explain everything I know, but... there's limits. No more cosmic knowledge, remember?"
She quiets to listen to the rest of what Booker needs to tell her; a deep sorrow settles around her like the closing of great dark wings; she seems small and shadowed beneath it. There is so much she doesn't want to tell him-- so much she doesn't want to hear herself say-- but this. This is one of her secrets that she feels float up willingly; maybe twas the telling that could ease him.
"Booker, there's something you need to know," her voice manages both serious and soft, her gaze glinting like sunlight on Arctic ice through the watery artificial light. "I came back here to help a girl, but when I did... it cost me. When I had no one at all, and I was alone in this place... it was your voice that kept me going." Her pale fingers with their chipped scarlet polish brush hesitantly to the hand Booker left suspended. It's a careful moment, quiet and uncertain. Without a thought she draws his hand to her cheek, closing her eyes at the feel of his skin against her own.
"You... guided me. Everything I needed to remember to survive was told to me in your voice. I know it was nothing more than my mind trying to reconcile everything I'd seen-- but it was you, Booker. It was you that kept me going."
All at once her senses crowd; she's full of the smells and textures and sounds of him for a moment before she realizes she's thrown her arms around him, and is hugging him tight.
"I trust you Booker. I trust you completely. There is no one else in this world I would rather have with me, okay?" she attempts a smile for him, an expression almost forgotten, as she presses his hand a little more firmly against her cheek. "So, as difficult as I know is, please don't be so hard on yourself. You already did what you had to, to make sure Comstock would never hurt me. You tore down a city to protect me. You laid at the bottom of the riverbed. You have no reason to feel guilty, any more."
[*] Booker Dewitt
dewitt_investigations(electric.alchemy@gmail.com)
[*]Elizabeth Dewitt
repaythedebt(jessa.rollo@yahoo.ca)
[*] Robert/Rosalind Letece (NPC)
shared.
What: a reunion.
Where: Rapture and beyond.
When: Roughly set during the events of Bioshock.
Rating: Varied; TBA
Status: On-going
Playlist:
• "Somewhere Beyond the Sea" - the Bobby Darrin cover
• "Enjoy the Silence" - the Tori Amos cover
• Damien Rice-- "Cold Water"
• Stone Sour-- "Through Glass"
• Akira Yamaoka-- "Hell Frozen Rain"
Living and dying. Everything ends and begins with water.
At first, the man isn’t completely certain whether he’s being held below the water’s surface by the grip of a stern-faced preacher, or by the many hands of a daughter he never raised. Anna DeWitt. Elizabeth Comstock. The False Shepherd knows the rough Where and When—the Dakota Territory, 1874—but not the Which, and he disjointedly wonders: Is Witting trying to save me? Or is Anna trying to kill me? He isn’t sure whether it matters, but he can see the murky distortion of river water swimming across his eyes, and he knows that when he opens his mouth to scream, it’ll be a cold wet blackness drowning his lungs——
——except that in the end, Booker DeWitt manages a strangled yell, inhaling gulps of recycled air. It stinks of damp and rust. His hands press against a cold surface like thick glass; and the space around him feels tightly claustrophobic, making him think of a coffin. Did they drop me in the river? he wonders, and begins striking what he presumes to be the casket’s transparent top with the heels of his palms. But the lid fails to budge; and as his panic mounts, the man brings his now-balled fists crashing into that unyielding surface. He’ll crack the coffin open, he thinks, even if that means that the water on the other side will begin to rush in. After a few hard blows, his knuckles already ache—a low throb like the scars carved into the back of his right hand. AD.
“Let me out, goddamn it!”
“You mustn’t shout, Mister DeWitt,” advises a woman’s voice, muffled from the other side of the glass.
A second speaker, this one male, continues: “If you do, they’ll hear you. In the state you’re in, I’d wager you’d die rather quickly.”
The woman again: “And dying would be completely counter to purpose.”
Both are cultured voices, their enunciation crisp and intelligent. Arched. Similar cadences, and a matching European inflection. They’re voices he’s heard before; and as that sense of familiarity washes over him, some of Booker DeWitt’s disorientation subsides. He’s standing upright (he slowly realizes) in a small cell or chamber, rather than a casket. When the paired glass doors unexpectedly part (their machinery whirring softly), they admit inward a faint odor of salt and brine. It’s not a river, he thinks. It’s an ocean. DeWitt’s sharp green eyes take it all in then——because what he’d initially thought were the sluggish waters of a Dakota river preparing to drown him is in fact the unimaginable weight of the deep North Atlantic.
The sea is held back by a glass retaining wall that stretches from floor to ceiling, a mere ten meters from the open door of the cell. And it’s only now that he’s aware of the crackling noise of an electric current all around him, akin to the hum of a street lamp—and each raw pop of electricity sends gleams of light though the ill-lit room in which DeWitt finds himself, the irregular sparks reflecting fitfully off the surface of the ocean. In this half darkness with its dancing shadows, DeWitt can now see them. He rasps, encompassing both the man and the woman with a single word: “Lutece.”
“Correct,” he says.
Robert Lutece, with his distant blue stare and aristocratic face. Everything about the red-haired man (including the tailored, pale-olive suit) speaks of his attention to detail. Lutece’s eyes flick briefly to his left, where Rosalind stands with hands folded before her. The woman is decidedly smaller than her supposed twin, and pretty in a severe sort of way that compliments her brother’s features. Both Luteces maintain impassive, indecipherably neutral expressions as they watch Booker DeWitt attempt a careful step forward. His lead knee begins to buckle, and the detective’s left hand reaches out to steady himself against the side of the metallic cell’s frame.
“Tell... Tell me. What... the hell is this?”
“That’s a vague question,” Rosalind observes, though her tone isn’t entirely unkind. “You might ask something more concrete, like Where am I? Or What year is it?”
“Or,” offers Robert, “Why am I here? But one thing at a time.”
Rosalind takes a half-step forward, though her hands remained clasped, and she makes no movement to offer DeWitt direct assistance as he carefully rights himself again, and takes a tentative but successful step out of the cell, and into the room itself. “You’ve just exited what the locals call a ‘Vita-Chamber’. Vita, of course, being the Latin word for life. It’s a STAGE-1 Prototype model. A few side effects are to be expected. Disorientation. Temporary weakness.” She pauses, as if considering her words. Then: “It was the most we could do.”
“It was also the least we could do,” Robert says.
“...Vita-Chamber?” DeWitt echoes, turning his head instinctively to survey the room. The tall ceilings are almost entirely lost in darkness, and the luminescent bulbs suspended down from above cast only a wan, yellowish light. Half burnt out. Three sides of the room—directly in front of DeWitt, and to the left and right—are dominated by the glass walls that seem more like enormous windows looking over a dark oceanscape. Tall silhouettes rise in the middle distance, their shapes suggesting buildings like submerged skyscrapers, their windows and neon signs lit sporadically and recalling an undersea Manhattan at midnight. Within, on this side of the glass, the room is dominated by what Booker can only assume is scientific equipment piled on tables (some of them partially collapsed), and faded diagrams written on wheel-mounted chalkboards. The electrical current Booker had previously noticed appears to be emitted from the Vita-Chamber itself, its sparks dissipating into the air around the chamber like an electrostatic corona.
“The Vita-Chamber’s chief purpose, Mister DeWitt,” says Robert Lutece, “is to revive the dead.”
Rosalind: “Do you remember?” Do you remember dying?
“I... died,” DeWitt murmurs, stumbling forward and away from the Vita-Chamber, catching himself on one of the tables arranged about the room. The two words are more statement than question, but the far-off sound of his voice makes it clear that the man finds it difficult to accept the reality of the situation. The vertigo hits him then, a disorientation deeper and sicker than the his awakening inside the Vita-Chamber moments ago. A world-tilting loss of balance that makes him dig his fingers into the edge of the wooden table, until his calloused fingertips have gone white. There’s the faint taste of copper in his mouth, the smell of it in his nostrils.
“So,” he manages. “Let’s say you’re right. I died. What now?”
The sound of Rosalind’s shoes (both utilitarian and feminine, with a low heel) tap lightly against the tiled floor as she approaches. “Your memories will reorient themselves shortly. A little confusion is unavoidable at first. But for now...”
“...For now, Mister DeWitt,” says Robert Lutece, who Booker notices is suddenly standing in front of a control console situated near the Vita-Chamber machine, “We have one more temporal stowaway joining us. Then the two of you can decide what happens next.”
“The two of us...”
“That’s right,” says Rosalind, and the air is suddenly filled with a rush of static when the pitch of the Vita-Chamber’s constant mechanical whine intensifies. As the doors of the chamber slide shut, the arcs jumping like miniature spikes of lightning coalesce in the machine’s center, within the empty cell. Robert’s long-fingered hands spider deftly across the controls, and on an inescapable instinct, Booker moves closer to the Vita-Chamber’s doors. The brightness grows, blinding like liquid plasma, finally forcing him to look away.
And this is how she’ll find him. Booker DeWitt—once upon a time, the False Shepherd and the White Injun. A man roughly six-foot-one, with a lean but powerfully-muscled build. Startlingly intent green eyes. A practiced monster who even moments after resurrecting like Lazarus smells inescapably of cigarettes, gunpowder, and blood. Angular, strong features gently creased by anger; worry; and most of all, by the ghost of a twenty-year guilt. He’s still slightly out of sync with time, dressed in his navy waistcoat and an archaic bright red ascot tie: 1912 rather than 1959. But most immediate of all will be the sound of his voice, fighting to reach her through the glass as he realizes what's happening. As he realizes Who.
“Jesus Christ—Elizabeth—Elizabeth!”
For a few dazzling moments before her curtains closed, Elizabeth could once again see all of the doors. The many lighthouses sprawling across the eternal ocean, poised at a perfect molten sunset. She saw the man on the plane, and how he would engineer her murderer's demise. More importantly, she saw Sally, safe and somehow cured of her sick affliction.
She was safe... Elizabeth almost felt she could rest simply in knowing that. After all, everyone she loved was dead. What real reason did she have? She could feel the seams of her mind struggle to hold, and if it only took her life to pay her debt, then--
Then so be it.
The how of the sudden visions might of concerned her, but with only precious moments left, she spent them instead sitting quietly and comfortably with her relief, and little sister Sally. Her scarlet lips lifted into a soft sort of smile she'd not shown since what felt like several lifetimes.
In her last moments, Elizabeth finally understood her own intentions, guiding her (in that heart aching voice) from the very beginning. It was the only way. The only way to save her. Thankfully, Sally made her last moments something tender, gently painting over the savagery of Atlas' beating with her small soft hearted company.
Elizabeth left peacefully, hoping the other side would be less lonesome.
That was supposed to be the end of the reel-- and yet, the show played on. Elizabeth stands at the lip of the stairs descending into the ocean's unforgiving cold waters, gazing upon infinite lighthouses scattered towards an endless horizon.
The sky suddenly swells the color of blood. Thunder threatens under its breath. Elizabeth loses her breath in a sudden attack of vertigo and ataxia; she clutches the stone rail as they pray together upon her, running through her mind and leaving it disrupted tatters.
Too many doors, too much at once. White burns out her vision and between the searing flashes, she sees him again. She sees the man with the chain tattoo on his wrist, ripping into poor defenseless Sally and--
No, no! It wasn't supposed to happen this way! Elizabeth needed to bring the man so he could save her, this-- this was all wrong! Visions of Sally's small doll-like corpse and the slick sick slug writhing in that merciless hand press the white from her eyes, and all at once she is back at the steps, gazing down at the wave licked pavement as small bright spots of blood begin to spatter the gray.
She's bleeding-- in her visions and in the flesh, a thick dark line snaking around her mouth, creeping down towards to jaw.
In her mind, little sister Sally stands beside her, silent and too forlorn for tears.
'I'm sorry... I'm so sorry, Sally... I never meant-- I never meant to hurt you. I thought I saved you. What can I do,? Tell me, what can I do to make it right?" a frightening rawness lurks just beneath the cold sternness the woman had learned to adapt.
Little girls cried, and she was one no longer; but her eyes sting, and she rips her gaze away and throws it to the deep dark ocean. From the depth bubbles rise. Bathospheres begin to bob up at the distant docks, and from them... Splicers. Splicers more twisted and grotesque than she'd ever seen in her brief and bloody stint at the bottom of the ocean. A deep dread twists in Elizabeth's gut like a knife-- her eyes dart back to Sally, who winds a tiny hand into the night black of her skirt.
"Help us, big sister. Please?" her voice keeps a deeper darker distortion tucked, like a secret, under the sweet innocence of her plea.
Elizabeth's eyes snap open, pupils like pin-pricks in ice. Her senses are severely disorientated and nothing makes any rational sense-- but a voice. She knows it instantly, without a sliver of hesitation.
Booker. How many times would the sound of his call bring her out of darkness? Karmically correct, she dizzily supposes, not ready to trust the authenticity of it just yet. It wouldn't be the first time her mind used something familiar (or even, desperately yearned for) to band-aid a crackling mental state, and after what she had just seen, well. Her mind did not jump start on an optimistic set.
The more she listens, the more she needs to be proven wrong. Her bare bones need for him kick starts as a basic essential function of her mind. If there is even a half chance that she is really hearing him...
Elizabeth pulls herself from her half-conscious state like coming up from deep waters. She pushes to make sense of all the rumbled, seemingly random stimulation. She seems to be slumped inside some kind of glass container with metal sides. Her days under Doctor Petifog and his equally as detestable partner gave her a predisposition to panic under such conditions, but as her mind starts to make sense of things again, she begins to realize just what she is seeing.
Booker. Just beyond the glass.
Consciousness comes with the remnants of the skull splitting headache that often accompanies those pesky little nose bleeds, but that is one of the last things on Elizabeth's mind. Her limbs feel almost as if severely asleep as she attempts to piolet them. She manages to push herself into leaning against the apparently (though not honestly) seamless glass in front of her.
There are likely things about the woman that Booker will recognizes, but there are vast and likely concerning differences. Her clothes are bold dark and sharp, Rapture-esque and womanly in ways that blended with the local's sensibilities (and, perhaps, matched the darkness of her intentions at the time she took them) and clashed with Columbia's less severe, more humble clothing. The skin-hugging blouse. The fishnet stockings. The sharp black heels. And, perhaps as a gift from spacetime, the elegant black and white bird pin nested in the center of her collar's blood rose colored tie. A few blood spatters pepper her clothing, her shirt slightly askew. The sky blue of her eyes seems haunted by something, but they begin to light little by little as her senses clear.
"Booker... Booker!" her fingers ghost the glass, deftly searching for seams. It matters little because the next moment, the doors open with a sterile sigh and there goes the only thing poor Elizabeth was leaning on. The feeling of suddenly being at gravity's mercy made her weakened stomach flip, and with a tight sharp inhale she flails to grasp something to keep herself up.
One pale lithe hand grasps tightly where Booker's neck meets his shoulder, tightly grasping fabric. The warm gentle press of her kisses his chest as she braces for balance. The blue of her eyes would not leave the green of his. She searches his gaze.
She is rapidly running out of will to doubt that this really is--
"Are you real?" a moment reincarnated, a question from a woman rather than a girl. When her hand floats out on the temptation to brush his cheek, there is no thimble, no shortened pinky. Only scarlet nails and and a faint suggestion of menthol. She is hardly reined in her senses enough to notice anything beyond him-- Rapture is peripheral but somewhat familiar at this point. She hasn't even noticed the Letetces. Nothing else in that moment really matters.
For a long, surreal moment, Booker DeWitt experiences another spell of vertigo. Dreams, memories, the present: their boundaries blur.
Once, after crossing the threshold of a door that stood at the center of his life—at the core of everything he’d ever done wrong and done right—Booker had turned to face an Elizabeth with neither the emblem of a bird nor a cage on her throat. Knee-deep in baptismal water, Booker DeWitt had realized the girl before him then (her pretty lace choker strangely blank) had not been his Elizabeth. The man’s vivid green eyes are locked now on that godsend, the black-and-white pendant.
I just can’t decide, she’d told him once, holding out two open jewelry boxes: the bird or the cage. He recognizes the bird. And however much different the young woman is from the girl he’d known, he recognizes her too. He’d made that choice for her.
As the Vita-Chamber’s doors slide apart and pitch the unbalanced Elizabeth forward, he moves to intercept her. The motion of his limbs feels weighted, as if—fittingly enough, he thinks—he’s trying to walk underwater. Nerves reconnecting. The clinging lethargy still muddling his thoughts gradually burning away. He doesn’t entirely feel like himself yet, like a child after waking from sleep that’s been too dark and too deep, but the man has recovered enough in the last few moments that the weight of Elizabeth’s frame is negligible. Where she clutches at him, Booker’s shoulder is steady and broad; the base of his neck radiates natural body-heat from under his shirt collar, where her fingers have seized him.
DeWitt’s arms close around her, catching the girl and wrapping around her shoulders. He’s heedless of those delicate spatters of blood on her clothing, and the more benign stains that her bright red lips might leave on him if he pulls her too close. “...Elizabeth...” Booker’s low, mellow voice murmurs disjointedly. He’s looking directly at her face, with his neck craned and his strong chin tilted downward. When Elizabeth’s eyes seek out his, she finds them immediately, staring back at her: the man’s irises a pale yellowish green the hue of French chartreuse. His pupils have gone softly wide, and he looks at her almost without blinking.
Are you real?
Her question startles him softly: like an echo of familiar music. And Booker wonders for a moment, inescapably, whether he’s real or a phantasm; alive or dead; here or elsewhere. Several paces behind the former Pinkerton detective, unnoticed, Rosalind Lutece glances at her brother, who returns the look with a silently arched eyebrow. But Booker, the corner of his mouth curving into a muted smile, says: “Yeah. Yeah. I’m real enough.”
Because even if he shouldn’t be, even if by all rights he should be less than a ghost, an existence that should have been unequivocally unraveled by the universe——he’s here. He can feel the human solidity of her body and his own, Booker’s knuckles aching dully from his attempt to box the Vita-Chamber doors. He can smell the curiously marine scent of Rapture’s air supply, cycled through the ocean-floor city through titanic compression pumps; and closer, the fragrance of the girl in his arms. He can hear the sound of her voice.
Booker DeWitt is a man who understands physical realities, even more than the cerebral abstraction of ‘je pense, donc je suis.’ The touch of the girl’s fingertips on his cheek (his jawline lightly rough with stubble) is enough to convince him that he exists.
“Your hair’s gotten longer,” Booker observes quietly, his gaze drifting slowly from her eyes to the dark waves falling to her shoulders. “And...” His left hand rises upward to carefully hold her right. The skin of his palm is rough, and his fingers are calloused from handling revolvers and pressing guitar strings; but Booker’s touch is exquisitely gentle as he turns Elizabeth’s hand so that he can see the restored little finger. No more of the oddly charming thimble. “...how’d this happen?”
From the half-lit darkness crowded with tables and apparatuses behind Booker, the professorial voice of Robert Lutece: “A quantum superposition.”
Booker, flicking his eyes away for just a moment to glance over his shoulder, though he does not entirely release Elizabeth: “A quantum what?”
There’s the delicately polite noise of Rosalind clearing her throat. “It hardly matters now, Mister DeWitt. We did warn her.”
Robert Lutece: “Repeatedly.”
Elizabeth's fingers follow curious and blind toward the point of that unflinching gaze; a pale hand uncoils from Booker's collar (weakening her stance only slightly, thankfully she's supported by the firm ring of his arms) and drifts downwards; her weapon worn fingertips still recognize the gentle texture of the broach's edge, the curves and dips that shape the dainty bird imprinted on the black smooth face. Her broach, the one Booker had chosen for her, what felt like lifetimes ago. She thought... she thought she'd lost it when--
The memory of the ravenous rev of the Big Daddy's drill fills her with an unnatural, but familiar chill. It's the wicked-sweet sound of her revenge, the anthem of Comstock's --that final Comstock's-- blood cooling on her cheek. It's the backdrop to his death rattle, and hers. The memory doesn't sit well in a mind still waking from it's down demise, and suddenly Elizabeth feels almost to weak to stand. Her fingers leap from their borrowed perch at her treasured returned broach, and clings again at the front of the man's collar. The world spins around her and the only thing keeping her up is Booker.
That whiskey wry smirk finds her, settles her disorientation. His words grant her a kind of comfort that really should have been unatainable when she already knew enough to realize the danger they're in. This is the moment she finally lets herself believe he is real. Crying was of course something left only to little girls, but her sudden gladness is almost overwhelming enough to gloss her eyes.
All that loneliness, erradicated in a perfect moment. By the warmth of his proximity; by the affection so clear in how he touches her. Danger looms on the edge of her mind with its long velvet shadow, demanding attetion-- but damn it she is overwhelmed with-- with something so vast she struggles to name it.
Booker's observation brings a ghost of a smile that had long since vanished those scarlet lips. It's a sweet thing she finds flavored slightly paternal; of all the things to notice, being that... but it flatters her too, that sweetness that Booker only shows for her.
"A lot has happened, since..." there is no real way to divine an appropriate point of reference. How much does this Booker know, she begins to wonder. How much need she tell him? How much did she want him to know? Wrapping her head around the vastness of what she may need explain (what she may find herself confessing) is daunting beyond what she's the patience to endure-- so Elizabeth pushes the notions away, for the moment. Her fingers flex slightly in his careful grasp as she all but basks in every sense that confirms the reality of his company. Her pinky neatly healed... she wonders how much it really means to him, if he grasps the significance. Her skin warms instantly where he touches.
Elizabeth is about to answer Booker herself when the Leteces interrupt, eliminating the option of ignoring them any further. The young woman isn't quite sure how to sit with their interference, here; clearly, they had brought Booker and her back together. They'd also devised her very first murder, so it was difficult to trust them without question. Elizabeth cast the pair of them a thin wary gaze. As always, it is difficult to know just what to make of the 'twins'.
"To spare you the science, Booker, I'll say it plainly; I can't open tears anymore. I can't see the doors. It was the price I had to pay, to... settle my own debt," she speaks grimly, in vague explanation; the details are hard to condensce-- hard to speak out loud, in fact, especially all company considered. Obviously the Leteces know it all, but that doesn't mean she wants to spell it all out in front of them. Too much she thought that Booker would never know of her. Too much she took comfort in her father never having to witness.
She's putting more effort into standing on her own now; one hand still at the broad and firm of his shoulder while the other rests at the swollen wood of a crowded table. Her chipped scarlet nails bite the soft wooden side. Her heels click sharply on the puddle strewn tile as she struggles to get her feet properly under herself.
"The Leteces did warn me," she spars them each another uneasy glance, her expression and oil and water mix of gratitude and mistrust. "I... I had to come back, regardless. None of it should matter now; I did what I had to; Sally is safe."
"Not quite," Rosalind.
"Not necessarily," Robert.
Once upon a time Elizabeth met thier riddles with optimistic curiosity, but she'd seen and spilled a lot of blood since then. She'd lost so much more than patience.
"Can we skip to the part when you explain why you brought us back here? Far as I can remember, the pair of us have no business being in Rapture," Elizabeth breaks her uneasy gaze from the Leteces each to check, once again, that Booker is at her side. She gagues his uneasiness against her own.
"You've no buisness being anywhere, but that is besides the point," Rosalind reports crisply, matter-of-fact. "We're not here to spoon feed you. The pair of you are perfectly capable of finding your way."
"You'll want to start with Brigid Tenenbaum; she will enlighten you to several... unfortunate facts," Robert explains whilst scrawling the name in sprawling letters across one of the dusty boards.
"She's far more invested in explaining her plight than we are," Rosalind added arily. "I imagine she'll do a much better job of it."
Booker DeWitt is many things. It’s a truth Elizabeth said best herself, to a different him: “You can thank my father. He was a man comfortable in a variety of roles.” But the part DeWitt has played longest and most naturally is detective. Sleuthing is coolly rational work; a matter of observation and deduction. Even now, with his thoughts partially fragmented in the aftermath of resurrection—waking to an alien time and place—he’s beginning to piece together bits of the story. He catches glimpses of what’s happening around them, and of what’s happening inside of her. When he catches the restrained way Elizabeth keeps her own emotions in check behind her eyes, Booker’s own soften a little. He’d say something, part his lips to speak, but the girl beats him to the punch: A lot has happened, since...
She’s evasive; she’s terse. Things she doesn’t want me hearing, he thinks, watching the careful way Elizabeth eyes the Luteces. Or things she doesn’t wanna say in front of them. Booker just listens. And then what he tells her is, in that voice that sounds like the slow belly-deep warmth of Kentucky bourbon: “I know all about debts, Elizabeth. You understand that better than anyone. If that’s what you had to do to settle yours, I know you had a good reason.” As if things are just that simple. As if he’s willing to accept the girl’s cautious reticence unconditionally, without question. Booker’s hand gently releases her right as she makes an attempt to take a step in those formidable-looking heels, and he murmurs, “Easy now.”
She mentions the names Sally and Rapture, and why do they sound so damn familiar? Like words he’s heard in a dream once. “Rapture,” he echoes. “We were here before. This is where—the Songbird——” Where Elizabeth transported the two of them and the Songbird, after the gargantuan flying creature destroyed Monument Island’s Siphon. This is where the ocean floor crushed Elizabeth’s jailer and protector under two-hundred atmospheres of pressure, and Booker remembers in painful detail how she’d looked at that moment, turned away with her palms pressed to the glass. DeWitt cuts himself off darkly, watching Robert Lutece scrawl a third name in chalk, this last one wholly unfamiliar: Brigid Tenenbaum. Then:
“——Hold it.”
Booker’s jaw is set dangerously tense. As he gently disengages himself from Elizabeth, taking a pace toward the Luteces, the residual electric glow cast from the Vita-Chamber makes his stare momentarily shine aquamarine. Under the heels of his shoes, what used to be a glass test-tube (broken now) crunches unintentionally. Glass grit like diamonds grinding into the laboratory annex’s tiled floor.
“I don’t exactly know everything that’s goin’ on. I don’t know if there’s a damn thing I can ever do to really pay my debts—but I sure as hell know she’s paid hers.” Booker scarred right hand raises to point in Elizabeth’s direction as Booker continues staring at the red-haired pair, who gaze composedly back with near-unreadable expressions. Patiently, with all the time in the world. “She can’t make tears; and if she came out of that chamber thing like me, that means she’s already died once. If I had to make a wager, I’d bet that had to do with this Sally girl too.” She’s died twice; but DeWitt has no way of knowing that.
“So what the hell else needs to happen to balance the ledger?”
The Lutece twins (Robert still holding the stick of chalk with familiar ease between his fingers) glance at each other briefly. It’s Rosalind who speaks first, brushing the front of her long skirt smooth with her calm hands. “Mister DeWitt. This is no longer a matter of debt. However, if you still feel burdened by your past actions toward your Anna, that’s entirely your own business.”
“Likewise,” Robert continues, his precise voice reverberating subtly off the high ceiling as the man addresses Elizabeth, “your actions have made it possible for the child to survive in one of several possible worlds. Without your actions...”
“...she would have perished in all of them,” Rosalind finishes. “We’ve explained it before.”
“Apparently we may need to repeat ourselves,” observes Robert dryly. Then: “Lives, lived, will live.”
Rosalind: “Dies, died, will die. It’s all relative. A Sally who lives in one Rapture, dies in another. Do you intend to save her in all of them? It isn’t possible.”
“Though understandable,” conjectures Robert.
“But not possible,” the woman reiterates, a little more sharply.
“Be that as it may,” Robert mentions, “you’ve an opportunity to save a single Sally in this single world. This is a reality that should not exist. But certain rules can be bent...”
Rosalind: “While others can be broken. This isn’t a matter of debt.”
Robert: “It’s simply a matter of choice. Save the girl?”
“—Or flee the city?” Rosalind counters.
“Either way,” Robert Lutece says, returning to his original point, walking past the blackboard bearing the Belarusian doctor’s name, “you’ll require Tenenbaum’s assistance. And we do suggest you hurry. Though concerning proper names, there is one more thing before you go.”
“We’re no longer quite certain what to call you,” explains Rosalind, her keen, languid blue eyes trained on Elizabeth with a strange sort of expectation. “Shall it be ‘Miss Comstock’?”
“Or shall we call you ‘Miss DeWitt’?”
Elizabeth can feel the depth and tone of Booker's-- this Booker's care for her; it's plain in the way he speaks, in the way he defends her as naturally as breathing. Like he's hers, right from the riverbed. Unfortunate, unforgiving circumstance has turned the young woman more easily towards pessimism, and it seems far too foolish to believe that the pair of them could just fall back together, regardless of all the things they'd (--she'd) done. She'd killed him, and though the memory was not hers, she'd seen it all when the doors were open to her. She could recall the chill of the river, and the frantic panicked beat of Booker's heart as it thrashed against asphyxiation. Not her memory... but hers, all the same. Through another set of eyes and hands, that were also hers, and yet not. Guilt was a useless heavy thing but the damn DeWitts seemed to have an affinity for it.
When something like a smile struggles to find her lips, it feels strange and forgotten. His gentle assurance tastes almost-- almost like a kind of forgiveness she'd yet to fathom she needed, somewhere in the deep and dark of her. The understanding, the empathy is so finely tuned to her pain that Elizabeth finds herself thinking that he must know-- he must understand. Hints of a long ago apology she never had the luxury to extend chill her gaze like slickness on ice. She did what she had to, and for that she was not sorry. But she'd not the strength to end Booker herself, she--
She simply cared for him too much. Perhaps that was the source of that sorrowful gaze. The shadows betwixt the erratic sparks color her shadows dark against the pale of her face. For a moment Elizabeth looks worn down, and so bone-tired.
"I'm fine," an admittance not so hard edged; gentle and frail only (so the young woman allows herself to think) in he state of post-resurrection. It had been far and long since she'd had a shoulder to lean on. It was almost a little disorientating. She had depended on Booker's protection so fiercely in their first days together, and her time alone in Rapture had only refined, redefined the shape and tone of her need for him. She could shoot her own guns and wield her own plasmids, but what she desired from the man was something deeper than that. Something under the skin. Now, as Elizabeth fumbles with it, it is just as maddening impossible to name.
"That's right," she confirms quiet and grim at the mention of Songbird; it's becoming clear just how much Booker knows, and Elizabeth feels the memory (or memories from different perspectives, depending on how deeply she delves into this remembrance) of his river-side finale weigh on her. It was his price, but that did not mean she enjoyed taking the tole. She's capable of standing when Booker carefully removed himself, and the gut-deep chill of Rapture rushes in where his body had kept her warm. How had she never realized how cold this place is?
The young woman's attention returns to the pair of aloof scientists as they begin to offer further explanation. At this point, the mechanics of cross reality shenanigans are fairly second nature to her, despite her mere flesh and blood, so Elizabeth is keen on the uptake.
"Then... what I saw, before, when I died-- the man with the chain tattoo, saving the little sisters... you're telling me that was just one possible reality?" rhetorical; it's a bitter pill, certainly. A whole lot of effort and one big fat price tag was steep for only possibly saving Sally, but Elizabeth can't scrape together nearly enough selfishness to regret it. Sally was her responsibility-- and if she is somehow still and danger, Elizabeth knows already that she has to help her. There is no choice for her. She can't stand the thought of leaving her to die in this awful city, when... when someone was trying to save her, and she'd zero qualms of taking full bloody advantage.
She wants to ask more of the difficult to decipher duo; did the man with the chain tattoo fail to make it to Rapture? Was he killed? Or is something more insidious nature? She find herself instantly doubting the twin's interest in providing an informative lecture... Maybe this Tenenbaum would be more willingly informative. Though she's reasons not to trust the Letece's entirely, they've noting else to go on. Her plush dark lips press into a thin line as her gaze turns back to Booker. What does he want to do? Keep her safe, she would wager... but the safe thing is not always the right; Elizabeth knew he understood that, as well.
Already, the ominous nature of the crumbling, drowning city is clawing for attention. The whispering of countless leaks fills the spaces between the distant, distorted echoes of far off, rambling splicers. The smell of gas and chemical fires arbitrarily interrupt the scent of brine. Somewhere not comfortably far off, a rattle of gunshots accompany a frenzied maniac laugh. A sound between a roar and a groan that's as deep as the ocean above them spreads through the air like a tangible warning; indistinct machines rev, and just for show, a shark feeds viciously upon a bloated corpse floating just outside the window into the deep.
The question was something unexpected; though Elizabeth is wary, she supposes an answer would do little harm. It was a small curtsey she was capable of, especially considering she wouldn't have been there to answer if not for the scientist's interference. Briefly, the young woman recalls her time crawling through through Andrew Ryan's impromptu prison-- more so the lonely conversations she'd had with 'Booker'.
"Us DeWitts" she'd said once without thinking. It had felt like a better fit, all things considered-- and she certainly felt more affection for the man before her than the man who kept her jailed. It was a natural easy decision that she'd not even realized she'd made.
"I should think it's obvious that Comstock no longer suits," she said crisply, coolly, dry. "I've been a DeWitt for much longer than that bastard would approve, but thankfully, his opinion no longer bares relevance," her distrust of them sets up a terse professionalism in her tone and speak. Her disdain was more Comstock-bound, only distrust and wariness reserved for 'the twins'. They had helped. They had hurt. They were damn near impossible to predict, and Elizabeth found herself more firmly agreeing with Booker's long ago assessment of 'they seem to be out of their minds.'
The dangers of Rapture bite the edges of her senses-- pulled thin between the Leteces, Booker, and trying to accommodate an unnatural restart. Her stance is impressively steady as she takes a few steps, parting some distance between the other three as she approaches a rumbled mass in the corner. A man-- most likely, though the severe facial mutations make it difficult to tell. The corpse was clutching an impressively shined revolver, making somber sense of the congealing bullet wound at the back of his head. The white bloodied coat implied scientist, once.
There was a time Elizabeth would look at the dead with bright tangible sorrow. 'Look at this one; do you think he wanted any part of this?' she'd once felt so much for those lost. Now, twas only the corner of her scarlet mouth that gave a slight twitch of distaste as she dug her sharp black heel into the flesh of the dead man's arm. Her eyes had taken up a steeliness Booker might find familiar, somehow. The fingers were stiff from death, but with a bit of pulling, and with her foot planted, the gun came free. Elizabeth spun the chamber, checking for bullets.
DeWitt, indeed.
"Booker, here," she calmly called, awaiting his attention before tossing the hand cannon. There was one unusual addition. "Keep your eyes peeled, I need a weapon, too."
She looked to the Leteces then, something uncertain in her expression.
"... I don't think I'll ever understand you two," she glanced between them; the cooler firmer sister, the kinder gentler brother. The same, and yet not. She found a tiny dry scrap of ammusment at the abstract 'family resemblence'. Booker and Her. Robert and Rosalind. Just like old times. "But thank you, for this."
“No need to thank us, Miss DeWitt,” Robert Lutece answers, as he cants his head—speaking that name as if she’d never had another. In the dark, submarine darkness of this dilapidated room, the two Lutece siblings are both immediate (undeniably physical, irrefutably tangible) and yet strangely distant. Halfway between here and elsewhere. In their neat attire, with blackboards as their backdrop, they present the impression of schoolteachers in the most morbid classroom imaginable. “After all...”
“...if it weren’t for our work on the Trans-Dimensional Device,” Rosalind continues, “neither of you would have faced such hardships.” The woman’s footsteps in her old-fashioned heeled boots (tap, tap, tap) are light and well-balanced as she approaches her male counterpart. Rosalind gazes up at him with her level blue eyes, inspecting a trace of chalk dust marking the shoulder of Robert’s olive suit jacket. “Don’t misunderstand me,” she says coolly. “I have absolutely no regrets. However, there is the matter of... responsibility. I’m sure the two of you understand.” Rosalind’s slim fingers rise to gently brush her twin’s shoulder clean, and she inspects her work with a critical eye before murmuring to the other Lutece (with a curious sort of intimacy, as if Booker and Elizabeth aren’t even there): “Funny. I could have sworn she would have picked ‘Comstock’. Human beings are creatures of habit. They find comfort in the familiar.”
“People develop new habits,” Robert argues mildly. “Adapt, and the new becomes familiar.”
“Mmh,” she answers noncommittally, though the inflection of that brief non-word suggests she (reluctantly) concedes the point. Together, the two Luteces turn and begin walking toward the single usable exit—an open door leading from the small, ruined laboratory and into what in the unsteady light seems a long corridor or tunnel. On the opposite side of the room, a second door labeled AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY has been barricaded using several of the heavy lab tables, overturned and stacked atop each other. Although that blocked door could be cleared, doing so would take a considerable amount of effort and time. And if the muffled, distant noises of gunshots a moment ago (silent now) are to be believed, Booker and Elizabeth can ill afford to remain in a poorly-defended location too long.
The Luteces stop briefly at the threshold of the door, and Rosalind glances over her shoulder to offer one last piece of advice: “Do be careful. The Vita-Chambers won’t work a second time.”
“Not on either of you, anyway,” Robert amends, and as if to answer him, the prototype Vita-Chamber’s electrical field offers one final surge. There’s a sickening stink of scorched insulation as the power cables snaking along the floor to the base of the the pod-like chamber begin to fail—rubber melting, the energy current stuttering violently. From one side of the machine, a crackle of electricity sprays dangerously wide, throwing a blinding flash and a weird scent like ozone after a lightning strike. Booker is reminded vaguely of thunderstorms in the Midwest, and the way you can find trees blasted straight down the middle in their aftermath. He raises his left forearm reflexively to shield his eyes from the light. Then the Vita-Chamber emits a low, faltering mechanical whine before going completely still and dark.
“Shit. Elizabeth—Elizabeth, you alright?” Lowering his arm, he turns his eyes toward the last place he saw her, blinking back the afterimages burned temporarily across his vision. It doesn’t surprise him (not anymore) that the Luteces have entirely vanished, though in their absence (and with the resurrection machine gone dead silent) Booker has become increasingly aware of the foreign undersea cold that Elizabeth had noted only moments earlier. There’s a lonely metronome-steady drip, drip, drip nearby where an overhead pipe has cracked—the plumbing corroded by neglect and the constant effects of sea salt. The very building in which they find themselves groans massively in the Atlantic current, creaking and settling much as a gargantuan farmhouse would in the middle of the night. He’s certain that what he’d heard a minute ago was the sharp report of a small-caliber handgun, fired sporadically: the rhythm of a mad panic. There’s a corpse crumpled in the corner (the ADAM-induced disfigurements hidden from Booker by the awkward angle of the man’s head), and the dead man’s gun feels cold, heavy, and oddly familiar in his hand.
Familiar like the way she’d called (“Booker, here”) and he’d reached effortlessly to catch the weighty break-action revolver. The girl’s got one hell of an arm. He breathes out silently through his nostrils when he’s sure that the electrical discharge from the Vita-Chamber has left her unharmed, and takes a moment to flip the hand cannon’s cylinder open to inspect the remaining bullets, just as she had. Three, he counts grimly: but there might have been none. Sliding the weapon into the holster harnessed under his arm, Booker looks at her for a moment; his green eyes are unreadable for several beats, and then he says: “Looks like you know your way around a gun these days.” Booker’s voice is pitched low, strangely nuanced and heavy. Sober. “I don’t know whether to be unhappy or impressed. But I’ll see what I can find.” There’s that quirk of a smile at the corner of his mouth again.
He isn’t certain they have the luxury of reflection, either. There are several smears of blood on the floor; and not all of them appear to belong to the dead man in the lab coat. He’s picking up the traces now: the fragments of a story, theorizing how they might fit together. A number of spent brass bullet casings are scattered across the floor, and he can just barely see (in the dull light provided by the few candescent bulbs; it’s considerably darker now that the Vita-Chamber has shut down) the spots where several stray bullets have bitten into the doorframe beside the now-barricaded door.
“And it looks like you know your way around this ‘Rapture’ too,” he says. “I’m gonna need you to explain to me what the hell is going on when we find somewhere to hole up for a bit. Feels like Columbia all over again. But, Elizabeth—Christ.” For a moment it’s all forgotten: the laboratory’s mingled smell of blood and gunpowder, the reverberations of the underwater city that seem to shake him to the bone, the disjointed sound of someone rambling to themselves in the middle distance. “Are you really alright with this? With me? I didn’t realize... I didn’t know.”
There’s that guilt. It creeps into his voice with an old familiar ache like a broken bone that’s healed over wrong. Booker’s gaze is locked straight on her, and his scarred hand is half-raised as if he’d reach for Elizabeth’s face. Suspended, arrested in mid-motion. “It was my fault. All of it. I didn’t make the choices that Comstock made. I never let anyone forgive my guilt, like he did,” he says, thinking of a preacher-man in that wild Dakota country. “And I never forgave myself. I never will. But Comstock——he was me. Can you still put your life in my hands, Elizabeth?”
In the end, it comes down to a single question:
“Do you still trust me?”
Elizabeth has of course considered this; the very top track of her downward spiral was unknowingly laid by Letece (as much as many others) in the creation of their machine; the woman couldn't be more correct in her statement. Scraps and secrets left on crackling Voxophones suggested hints of motive-- Elizabeth had listened with Booker to more than one of the Letece's recordings. In the moment the young woman watches the ginger haired scientist fuss with her brother's suit, she finds herself recalling one recording in particular.
They had to whisper to each other, once, through their vast impossible separation. That is what Rosalind's recorded voice had explained; they had wanted so badly just to see each other, to occupy the same space and breathe the same air. The Letece device was built, in some small but vitally significant way, to unite the Letece siblings; at least, it was a cornerstone of their own determination.
Simply, they wanted to be with each other; Elizabeth had never thought of it in quite that light until that very moment. It wasn't a difficult sentiment to understand, either. It didn't make her trust them... but it made the Leteces just a little more human to the youngest DeWitt.
Her only expression of the strange new light she found on on the siblings was a long stock-taking look to the pair of them, immediately cut when the Vita-Chamber began to revolt. Her own arm comes to shield her eyes when the light seeps red through her clenched lids. Spots float across her vision as the flickering light wanes and the darkness sinks down from the high ceilings. The shadows are thick and inky when she opens up those sky blues, and peers squinting through the deeper dim.
"I'm alright Booker," she picks out the shape of him in the muddy light, standing with the urge to be close to him only because she could. Things need doing, like they always did... but damn it all, the last time she had 'seen' him, he was only a voice in her head. Not even real. He's here, she keeps reminding himself. "It's going to take more than some flashing lights to give me any trouble," the dryness of her smile and tone would probably feel familiar.
She finds his eyes as her own struggle to see through the ocean scented dim. She holds his gaze easily, naturally; her own with all tenderness confined behind a splintered, half-held guard that was not for Booker, but for the world at large. Hers were the eyes of one who had seen too much death; haunted almost by the blood they had witnessed. In looking at Booker, however... something tarnished but bright gleams weakly under the age that grimes her gaze.
"It wasn't like I up and took lessons," she remarks, a dark pencilled brow floating up the powder pale of her forehead, the very corner of her mouth curling. "I had to learn on my feet, but I had plenty of time to watch how you got things done." As Robert had so aptly explained, she had adapted. Elizabeth could even feel the power of her Plasmids still written into the very essence of her, accessible with the right concentration. Good... they would need everything they could, if Rapture was anything like how she remembered.
"Another door, another lighthouse, another city. I'll explain everything I know, but... there's limits. No more cosmic knowledge, remember?"
She quiets to listen to the rest of what Booker needs to tell her; a deep sorrow settles around her like the closing of great dark wings; she seems small and shadowed beneath it. There is so much she doesn't want to tell him-- so much she doesn't want to hear herself say-- but this. This is one of her secrets that she feels float up willingly; maybe twas the telling that could ease him.
"Booker, there's something you need to know," her voice manages both serious and soft, her gaze glinting like sunlight on Arctic ice through the watery artificial light. "I came back here to help a girl, but when I did... it cost me. When I had no one at all, and I was alone in this place... it was your voice that kept me going." Her pale fingers with their chipped scarlet polish brush hesitantly to the hand Booker left suspended. It's a careful moment, quiet and uncertain. Without a thought she draws his hand to her cheek, closing her eyes at the feel of his skin against her own.
"You... guided me. Everything I needed to remember to survive was told to me in your voice. I know it was nothing more than my mind trying to reconcile everything I'd seen-- but it was you, Booker. It was you that kept me going."
All at once her senses crowd; she's full of the smells and textures and sounds of him for a moment before she realizes she's thrown her arms around him, and is hugging him tight.
"I trust you Booker. I trust you completely. There is no one else in this world I would rather have with me, okay?" she attempts a smile for him, an expression almost forgotten, as she presses his hand a little more firmly against her cheek. "So, as difficult as I know is, please don't be so hard on yourself. You already did what you had to, to make sure Comstock would never hurt me. You tore down a city to protect me. You laid at the bottom of the riverbed. You have no reason to feel guilty, any more."
