booker/elizabeth - open to others - afternoon
Elizabeth hadn’t slept in a couple of days. All this talk about people having vivid nightmares, and now some of them not waking and some of them waking up as monsters...that was cause for alarm. So she’d pretty much holed herself up in the library, tearing through every book she could find on the subject matter and keeping sleep at bay with mountains of coffee and cigarettes.
It was exhausting, reading page after page until her eyes hurt, the dark circles under them all the darker as time went on. She took very short breaks, to close her eyes for a second or to refill her coffee cup. Her brief conversation with Booker over the network only made her work harder, stubbornness rearing its head long enough to solidify her determination. She had no intention of dying again, not at all, but she didn’t want him thinking she wasn’t serious about helping these people.
At this point, she had climbed to the top of the ladder, perched on the top with a small pile of books on her lap, one open in her hand, and a lone half-finished cigarette hanging precariously between her lips. She didn’t look up when Booker walked in, her eyes still locked on the page in front of her.
“This ladder doesn’t like being moved,” she said around the cigarette. “I need the book on that shelf--” still not looking up, she pointed to the bookcase across the aisle from where she sat “--about Native American spirituality. And anything you can add to the subject would be helpful, too.”
After a long and silent moment, she abruptly tore her eyes away from the pages and looked at him with wide eyes, almost as if she realised something crucial.
“Thank you,” she said, sounding relieved. She understood what it meant, the gravity of what she was asking him to do. She hadn’t forgotten about his participation at Wounded Knee, or what it had done to him. “There weren’t a lot of books on this subject in my tower, oddly enough.”