#bookercore

He thinks when Jean-Pierre died, the last of his own will to continue going went with him. The howling, screaming boy, who is a man, who never reached the age Booker did when he first died before the ravages of cancer chewed him up and spit him out, doesn’t live half a week after Booker walked out of that ward. Booker walked and walked out until he found himself in a tavern and the burn of liquor tears itself down his throat and then instantly disappears and this is where it begins. If he can feel the burning sensation of alcohol healing just as quickly as it got there, he is still cursed to live on the plane of existence in a mockery of hell (or maybe purgatory? who’s to say he’s not swinging on that hangman’s noose in the freezing cold still, his clothes stolen from his back and his tongue thick in his mouth) as everything he ever loved disappeared into the ground.

They wait for him like he’s their missing horseman. The horseman of death, he laughs as he climbs on the grey they have for him. And there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him, he murmurs and moves away from the newly dug grave of his son, the lingering graves of his wife and other children. His life, his legacy, it all comes back to the dirt.

Fast forward nearly two hundred years and he is still the same, just meaner and more self absorbed. He’s been left to marinate and simmer but they forgot to turn the stove off. He’s not calm or peaceful like Joe or Nick, nor does he believe in the cause like Andy. He just is: bitter and mean and he looks in the mirror and sees Jean-Pierre looking back, lank blond hair in place of black curls. He brought this loneliness on himself but he can’t stop himself railing against it, scoffing at them. Dear Nicky and Joe, tell me more about how you know what I go through now, tell me more about how the grief you almost went through is like a fire through your veins, how maybe now you’ll understand the last two hundred years. Love, Booker.

He drinks himself to death more than once, again, in the same streets of Paris like a freak mockery, round and round he goes, he’s forever coming back to this god forsaken land mourning something. He tries therapy because he figures why the fuck not, he’s tried everything else in the nearly three hundred years he’s been alive and the man asks him, what’s brought you to me today, Sebastien? And Booker, the dumb fuck that he is, buys in full wager and says all my children are dead and there’s not a single moment that goes by that I cannot forget they existed, like people want me to. It makes me do terrible, terrible things. Makes me mean, makes me snap my teeth like a dog that’s been beat.

The psychologist writes all this down on his little tablet and then looks at him, dead in the eye.

Losing a child is a terrible thing, Sebastien, and like all terrible things it can make us terrible, too.

He leans forward in his chair, elbows on his knees.

I think it’s more than that, doc, I think there’s something wrong with me, genuinely. It feels like nothing can ever be right, that I can never do anything right.

Sebastien, every person is capable of terrible things. Things just happen and there’s no rhyme or reason to it, but if you can take yourself back from thinking you are locked in a cycle, that you don’t have to do these terrible things, even just once, you are good. Nothing will ever bring your children back but neither can being a victim to your own innate need to hit back. You say you don’t have the spark to do good but what are you reacting against when you are like this? It’s an injustice, isn’t it?

that he also sees the very appearance of immortality as a punishment for something he's done, perhaps even for the way he couldn't save his Jean-Pierre.

"During severe and ongoing trauma, victims may undergo a process of internalization at the body-image level. Not only do they accept that they are getting what they deserve, they also internalize the notion that they are unworthy and even responsible for what is happening to them."

and in the end, it all comes back to the method in which andy becomes a definitive figure in the view of booker. we know she's changed since quynh was thrown into the sea, as seen by the marked difference in the english flashbacks, so it's understandable that there would be changes in the way that she relates to booker who's had no experience of her before this horrifying trauma. easier to be harsher and more stoic, less open and more emotionally internalised, but the unrelenting strain of existence for andy had likely translated into an added layer of stress to everyone if she tried to deal with it through my military excursions.

"In severe and ongoing trauma, the perpetrator has full and total control over the victim. This control goes beyond the physical reality: In a deeper sense, the perpetrator gains controls over the victim’s mind: “the perpetrator becomes the most powerful person in the life of the victim, and the psychology of victim is shaped over time by the actions and beliefs of the perpetrator”."

This all is, not to say that andy did anything wrong towards booker but more the intricacies and pitfalls of psychology and psychological traumatology. however, there is all the more reasoning seen in the movie to suggest that the single year off only occurred due to andy being unable to cope any longer which allows for a possible suggestion that the life they lived gravitating around war and conflict which is a common experience of dissociative PTSD/C-PTSD.