#esp his belief that everyone else is the idiot in his family oml

[dialux]

Oh man I just finished your Booker fic and it’s making me feel so many things, its so good!!! Also Booker having nightmares post-Quynh around the others after not having any for like a century? Oof

!!! That’s the good shit there, nonny! Top tier angst!! Sleep deprivation!!! All the things that make for the best stories!!!!

He startles awake, heart racing.

The details of the dream is already fading, but the after-effects are a fucking bitch and a half to manage: Booker’s wide awake, and jumpy enough to probably break the neck of the idiot that’s sneaking up behind him-

“It’s just me.”

“No just about it,” grumbles Booker, but his voice is thankfully low enough that the other three don’t wake. “Why’re you awake?”

“I don’t sleep well,” says Andy carelessly.

Booker swipes a hand over his eyes and gets up. Stumbles to the kitchen. He feels like such shit, and it’s almost beyond him not to dial into the shipping company and just… re-direct some of the downers to the shores of sunny Lima. Blitz out his locus coeruleus with enough norepinephrine that even his swift healing takes about four hours to fix it. Add another two hours of passing in and out of non-REM and Booker can claim to a proper six hours of sleep: it’s enough to survive. With the alcohol numbing him further, he can stretch that sleep out to eight hours on the really, really bad nights.

Absent the drugs, though, he needs other things to focus on. Their bodies can function on less sleep- the same way they can survive on less food- and Booker’s been experimenting with that for the past couple weeks.

It is not, as Joe’s told him multiple times, going well.

“Doesn’t mean you have to be the same.”

Booker pours out the coffee, mixes it with concentrate of yaupon holly, and then adds a shit-ton of sugar to the brew. Andy watches him with dark eyes, but he doesn’t offer it to her; the last thing they all need is a jumped-up six thousand year old warrior high on the strongest caffeine that Booker can, legally, get his hands on.

“What was the dream about?”

“Fuck if I know,” says Booker, and hisses out through his teeth as he drains half the cup. Christ but it tastes terrible, too bitter and too sweet in equal measure. Still, the trembling ache in his shoulders, tight about his ears, softens. “You know how it is. It’s not like I’ve got a paucity of nightmares. None of us do.”

“You’re the one waking up in the middle of the night.”

“And you’re the one not sleeping.”

“I’m used to it, though,” says Andy. 

Booker rolls his eyes. “Dream diaries don’t work. Talking about them doesn’t help. I have tried to literally rewire my brain and it isn’t happening. Turns out that being depressed and missing your family when you die makes it impossible for you to feel anything else.”

Andy rolls her eyes. “Just because you automatically accept the most depressing possible theory doesn’t mean that it’s the correct one, Book.”

“If I could go back in time,” Booker tells her, “I would seduce Nile’s mother and ensure that she remained heartbroken over the handsome French baker who disappeared into the clouds and therefore could not marry Nile’s father.”

“I assume there’s a point to that,” says Andy dryly.

“I liked you a hell of a lot better when you weren’t this fucking optimistic is the point,” says Booker. “And I know that it’s all Nile’s fucking influence. So.”

“So,” says Nile, grinning at him from the bedroom she’s just walked out of, “if I don’t exist, you’d be happier?”

“Your mother doesn’t know what she missed out on,” says Booker, and drains the rest of the brew.

…

A bridge of gold and laughter. A bridge as silver as his wife’s grey hair. A bridge, shining as a gun in broad daylight-

Booker wakes, gasping.

Coffee. Holly. Bitterness down his gullet. 

It’s not really new any longer, is it?

…

He takes a knife to the gut, and then sees another soldier sneaking up behind Andy. There’s no time; he’s still barely standing, much less able to voice a proper warning. Instead, Booker lets the intestines he’s clutching inside spill out in a dark, bloody slither. Stumbles. The soldier slips on the sudden viscera: Booker’s yanking his guts back into his own body, mouth open in a silent scream because it really, really hurts.

He wakes up, gasping.

…

He drowns, and drowns, and drowns.

He wakes up, gasping.

...

“Right,” says Nile. “You need help, Booker.”

“Fuck off,” says Booker. 

He’s on mile twenty-one of a marathon-esque circuit, and his body’s pretty much hitting the wall; he does not want to talk about his issues right now. Joe and Nicky have gotten tired enough of his grumpiness to escape to the city for the day, and Andy’s off on one of her personal missions that nobody knows any details about.

Booker hasn’t slept in about forty-one hours, and it’s not getting better.

It’s why he left the house and went on this run! It’s why he’s trying to drive his body into- well, not an early grave, but a grave nevertheless!

Booker regrets many things in life. Introducing Copley to Nile ranks high among them, especially after the little shit went and learned how to hack phones from a fucking CIA agent.

“I’m telling you this because you aren’t going to listen to anyone else,” says Nile. “And this seemed like a good time to make sure you listened. Look, Booker, there are things out there- therapists- courses, if you aren’t going to talk to anyone. You really, really-”

Booker rips out his headphones, takes the little molten sun that feels rather like something has ruptured in his chest, and pushes the energy into his legs. 

He sprints the rest of the way home. 

He’s pretty sure he’s ripped one of the muscles in his thighs with it, and the agony of that is enough for him to focus on something else apart from Nile. Who does not look impressed.

“You need help,” she says quietly, when he finally stops clutching at his own thigh and drops back into the mud and mulch of the garden.

Booker laughs. He laughs, and keeps on laughing, and only manages to stop by rolling over and suffocating himself in the roots of a fucking- plant. 

Probably a Cycus aculeata, which means that either Booker’s in the wrong hemisphere or Andy’s been introducing invasive species again because she misses her fucking girlfriend too much.

“Yeah,” he says, and sits up, already planning the lecture and the following plant-removal that he’ll have to do. Then he sees Nile’s face, and Booker pauses, reviewing what he’s just agreed to. “No,” he says. “I mean. Yes, I need help. That’s, like, the fucking- understatement of the century. Past two centuries. But. I’m not getting help from anyone else.”

Nile folds her arms over her chest. With the sun streaming right behind her, she looks like a goddess come to life: haloed, beautiful, the slightest bit unreal.

“That’s fine,” she says. “I’ll just ask Joe to become a therapist.”

“Sure,” snorts Booker. “And I’ll ask Andy to become a pacifist.”

Nile points a finger at him. “Don’t be mean.”

“Ask Nicky,” Booker advises her. “I mean, I don’t think you’ll get anywhere, but. You’re less likely to be laughed out of the room.” At her questioning look, he elaborates: “Idiot was a priest, back in the day. And, you know, all those people- well, priests were as close as you’d get to therapists before all of this psychology stuff came about.”

“Right,” says Nile warily. “So why do you think I’ll be laughed at? Nicky sounds like he’s good for the job.”

Booker stares at her. “What did the man do, the second he had a chance to leave?”

“Er. Leave?”

“He went on a fucking Crusade,” says Booker. “He killed people. He- well, you know, did the whole invader thing. Liked it, too. He only really stopped because he decided he liked Joe more, and Joe was, like, I’m not going to let you kill my people for fun anymore, and they worked out their excess energy by fucking in sand, because both of them are absolute idiots.”

Nile blinks at him. “So. Not a therapist.”

Booker grins at her, and knows it’s more of a baring of his teeth than anything comforting. “I guess your best bet is Andy, then.”

“I cannot believe I’m going to have to get a degree in fucking therapy because of you,” hisses Nile.

“I thank you for your sacrifice,” says Booker, and pats her on the shoulder gingerly.

He gets an armful of a furiously emotional Nile a moment later, hugging him so tight around the neck it feels like a throttling. Then she backs away, and goes into the house, leaving Booker in leaves and mulch and a burgeoning headache.

Fucking invasive species, he thinks, and wishes he’d never studied botany. Really. If he was just like Nicky and purposely uneducated in all the ecological implications, he could ignore it. But Booker had to go and study plants and try to synthesize his own compounds and get tangled up in ecology legislation in the 1980s, and so he knows, goddammit, and he’ll have to face Andy’s hangdog expression tonight when he serves up roasted cycad beside whatever Joe’s preparing for dinner.

Fuck my life, he thinks, but it isn’t half so sour as it might have been just a month earlier. Fuck my life, he thinks, and heads back into the house, whistling the whole goddamn way.