A.D.
Content Warnings: violent nightmares, paranoia
Disclaimer: the following work is fanmade fiction inspired by Bioshock: Infinite. All rights of characters, setting and story reside with the original creators.
“Are you hungry, Little Songbird?” Booker asked. Anna nodded. “I’ll make you something.”
“But first, change your shirt.” She thrusted a chubby little finger at his shirt. Booker checked. Sure enough, a hole had been worn through his elbow again. Anna stood there with her hands on her hips, a miniature echo of Annabelle. He stifled a laugh as he handed the shirt over. Sometimes she was like an old lady in a little girl’s body.
He got started on dinner as Anna began to cut out a patch from her basket of scrap cloth. Her work looked rough, with uneven stitches that quickly came loose again, but he never dared discourage her. The only way to learn was by doing.
“I had a strange dream last night,” Anna said. She matched the patch up with the asymmetrical tear before pressing her needle in.
“Oh?” The pot hissed in a way that told him food was touching hot metal. He quickly stirred it to soothe dinner.
“I was dancing in the clouds.”
“That sounds nice.”
“It was, at first. But then you said it was time to go home and I was disappointed. But as I left to go with you, this giant metal bird flew down from the sky. It snatched me up in its talon and I cried out for you. You tried to reach me, but the bird was too strong.”
Booker paused. Maybe he needed to monitor the books Anna had been reading lately. Clearly they were giving her nightmares. Yet something about the metal bird rang with familiarity. Surely she read it in a book and that’s why he recognized it.
“It took me away. I kept trying to get back to you. I could make these doors out of thin air and they would lead me somewhere else. And I made door after door trying to chase after you, but I never found you again.”
“That sounds scary,” he tried to mask the emotion in his voice. Anna paused, the shirt waterfalling over her lap as her eyes rested unfocused. Booker reminded himself of dinner. He couldn’t afford to burn what little food he was bringing home.
When he did, he would eat the charred bits, and let Anna have the most salvageable parts, but she deserved better. He was working towards providing better. “But it was just a dream.”
“I think I’ve been there before.”
“Maybe you dreamed about it before.”
“Maybe. Is it possible for us to go there?” Anna rested a thimble on her pinky. It was too large for the slender digit and rested atop like a silver hat. Ice ran through his veins. She had that far away old look again, but this time it wasn’t endearing.
He recalled a nightmare he had, shortly after Anna was born and Annabelle had passed. He was standing in a river, surrounded by adult versions of his daughter - his blue eyes in her face, Annabelle’s brunette hair. Together, his daughters held him under the water, even when he struggled for air. And he knew when he inevitably blacked out, he wouldn’t just die, but a knife would cut through time and space, severing away at an infinity of timelines and events into obscurity until only an infinity was left behind. A single name on his lips - Elizabeth.
He dreamed he killed his wife in a paranoid fury. He dreamed his daughter grew up to be a tyrant who brought war to New York City. Sometimes, it was he who was the tyrant, and he both dreamed about killing the tyrant version of himself, and being the tyrant who is killed - head smashing against a pedestal of water.
When he drowned, he woke up in a sweat, for some reason absolutely convinced he had sold his daughter to a strange man. When he rushed to Anna’s room, she was sleeping in her crib. His eye was drawn to her pinky, how odd it looked long and fully formed. Somehow he remembered her to be born with it deformed.
In the days that followed, he kept looking over his shoulder, expecting to be approached by that gentleman from his dreams. He tried to drink away his fears, but the moment he pressed a bottle to his lips, his mind was filled with vivid images of fire burning the flesh off his fingers, leaving nothing but bones behind. And when he slowly came to accept the gentleman wasn’t coming, he realized he needed to resolve his debt on his own, or else Anna would starve.
He wrote off this strange phase as grief twisting his mind. But since that day he was haunted by the idea of an alternate timeline where he really had been approached by a man willing to pay all his debts in exchange for his daughter. Who would he be if he said yes? Who would Anna have been?
“Would you want to go there?” Booker asked.
Anna removed the thimble. “No. I don’t think I would.”
