bakerstreet | Pic prompts (Reverse/text friendly)

Bartenders, in Booker's opinion, were some of the most trust worthy people. Probably not trust worthy enough to talk about immortality and murder for fire around but he didn't mind their company.

A table in the back was better. Booker studied the other people in the bar once he sat down curious if they were cops or not. It seemed a bad idea for them to meet in a cop bar but who knew. Marcus might pick somewhere he was comfortable.

"Just doing some research," he explained, assuming that Marcus was asking about the job he hired Booker for. "Waiting for a right moment."

If Marcus wanted to be comfortable, a cop bar was the last place he wanted be. Even not counting their illegal topics, Marcus wouldn't want to be in bar where people at work might bump into him, even across town as he was. He didn't want rumors circling back, and he didn't want to be tempted into becoming attached.

No, the dive was as far from any cops and familiar people he knew, and was just a place that he went to sometimes if he just didn't want to be so alone.

"Tell me if you need more information or something to draw them out." Normally Marcus wouldn't have offered, but nothing about this case was normal anymore. To be honest, he didn't even care about the target at this point, and what if another drug lord was still out there. It all became an excuse to see the immortal again, someone who he may get close to. Someone who understood.

"No, I can handle that part." Booker simply hadn't been focused on the job. He was still trying to process Macus' existence. It had rocked his view of the world and immortality. "Suddenly doubting my abilities?"

He raised an eyebrow as he sipped at his drink. It would be unexpected if Marcus suddenly doubted him because of what he'd seen. He should be more trust worthy. They had a shared problem.

"Is there a timeline? I'm not aware of?" Was that the whole reason Marcus called this meeting? Booker would be annoyed if that was the case.

"What? No." Marcus shook his head. Booker's line of thought was right, knowing what he knew, Marcus was only more reassured, not less. But he wasn't about to explain that he was drawn by this. "Just offering, I have the resources."

If Booker found his view changed, it completely turned Marcus' upside down. This was his attempt to find out more. Why another, why now after thousands of years? He had thought about it a lot over the past few days, and while he didn't think Booker knew the answers, he thought getting to know the man more might tell Marcus something.

"No hurry... besides getting the bastard off the streets so the next guy who comes along thinks twice before peddling at schools."

"I've done more with less." Somewhat true given Booker's past but the more usually happened because he was with more people. He had the others to fill in the gaps. They weren't around now but Booker still trusted he could handle a drug dealer.

Besides, the asshole preyed on children. There was nothing that pissed Booker off more than someone hurting children.

"So, you called this meeting because you wanted to chat?" The pieces weren't hard to put together given Marcus' behavior the last time they met. Booker still felt a little twist of guilt for meeting another immortal while exiled but that was his problem to deal with.

"Of course," Marcus agreed, backing off as not to seem like he was insulting or insinuating the other man wasn't capable. The last thing he wanted was to offend the ego of the younger immortal.

But did he want to chat? Not necessarily over specific topics. He wanted to know everything there was to know about the one who called himself Booker, but that didn't have to start with full length conversation.

Marcus raised his glass of whiskey, his ice more than half melted now. "Or just wanted to call you out for a drink." Cause it beats sitting home alone, or even sitting at a bar alone. "Could happen another time if you've got other plans tonight... If you're not going to burn this phone too."

Booker shifted a little in his seat, somewhat uneasy that Marcus hadn't really given him a straight answer. There had to be another reason besides checking on the job or wanting to drink with someone. Marcus had people all around him at work. He could get a drink with them.

"Do you speak French?" Booker knew the language wasn't that common in the US. It was practically everywhere in Canada but here in Chicago they should be relatively safe to speak in another language and talk openly.

"Si vous le pouvez, nous pouvons parler plus ouvertement." The language flowed from Booker much easier than English. His accent was harder to detect these days but it was still there. "Et vous pouvez poser les questions que vous voulez."

Marcus gave the man a considering look. A Frenchman? He would have preferred a dead language for secrecy, but Booker was likely too young to know any. French will have to do.

"Then it is fortunate we're not meeting in New Orleans," he replied in the flowing language. He spoke it fluently like most of the major languages that were of use in modern days, youth his usage was a slight bit more ancient, like it was from an older era that he last used it.

"You're right, I have many questions. How you came to be. You mentioned dreams... And another immortal. I do not know what you are comfortable in answering. You are the first I have met... " And Marcus was to the brim with curiosity.

Very, painfully French at times no matter how many years he spent away from his home. Booker could tell Marcus wasn't a native speaker but he had learned the language well. It made sense considering his age. Andy could speak everything fluently as well.

"I was hung for desertion. Napoleon was starving us for his war with Russia and I had enough." There was still some bitterness there. Booker never wanted to fight for that bastard in the first place. He certainly wasn't willing to starve to death for him. "I woke up in a mass grave I think an hour or so later? I thought they had screwed up the hanging. But no, my neck snapped and healed."

And that was how he realized he was immortal. That night he had dreamed of Andy and Nicky and Joe and Quyhn. All a cluster and he thought he was insane. It had been rather hellish.

"Must be hard." Marcus couldn't actually sympathize. It had been so long since his early days that he could barely recall a time when he didn't only curse his immortality.

"Do you have the mark?" He asked instead, moving onto something more crucial to the immortality bit. And since this was likely going to be a case of 'I'll show you if you show me', Marcus took the initiative to pull up his t-shirt sleeve to show the mark of Cain. It was a circular scar, upraised, that was the source of his suffering.

It was the only mark that was on him still. Any other scars, even from before the mark had been perfectly healed when his body rebuilt itself from the many times it was destroyed.

"Mark from when I was hung? No. I have no scars anymore." Booker had no idea what Marcus was talking about. He didn't have any scars anymore. Since he woke up from death his body simply didn't get marks.

He really hated the sensation of regrowing teeth. That was probably the worst one.

Booker had cursed his immortality very shortly after learning what it was and its limitations. He wasn't going to pour that grief on Marcus because he was a stranger.

"No... The sign of the curse." The infamous mark of Cain as according to the Bible. Marcus didn't believe much from that book, but at least that much was correct. He got the mark when he was cursed shortly after killing Abel, and it had been with him ever since. He fully believed it was the source of his immortality.

He let his sleeve down and settled back. "I believe on good authority that this is the source of my problems. It could be different for you, I do not know."

Marcus didn't know what Booker had gone through, but he knew he had tried ending his curse since the bronze age. He had almost given up until Booker came into his life.

Their immortality clearly didn't come from the same source. Booker had no mark. While he thought his immortality was a curse because of his own misery no one had actually cursed him. At least, no one that he knew.

Marcus was something else. Ancient and marked but something that wanted him immortal for some reason. Marcus had said God but Booker was skeptical that entity existed no matter what Joe and Nicky said.

"I think we are very different beings." It would explain why Marcus never dreamed of them and why they never dreamed of him. It actually explained a great deal though Booker was not reassured that something else out there doled out immortality. "I have no mark and no curse. And my immortality will eventually stop."

He simply didn't know when.

That last thing Booker said was such a curved ball that it looked like it completed blindsided the older immortal. "What?" he asked, dropping out of their French as he tried to process the words.

"You know this? How? ...That other, Quyhn? They *died*?"

Marcus sat back heavily in his chair, realizing that perhaps Booker was right, they were different. Maybe the initial curse did change, or something else caused Booker's predicament. But whatever it was, apparently, it was going to stop for Booker. Marcus wanted to hope that this meant his would too, but if the nature of it changed, then maybe what was true for the younger immortal wouldn't be true for him.

He looked like someone killed his best friend as he finished the rest of his watered whiskey in one gulp.

"No, she's not dead but another did die. After some time our wounds don't heal anymore. I have uncertain immortality." Booker called it that early on when he finally joined Andy and the others. They were immortal for the time being and there was no telling when it would end. Every time he went down Booker didn't know if he would get up.

Apparently, that wasn't the case with Marcus. Booker instantly pitied him. True immortality had to drive a person insane. There was no way to spend centuries losing everything over and over again and not lose your mind.

"Seems to take awhile though. A few thousand years from what I know." Booker shrugged a shoulder. If there was something else that triggered the end of it he didn't know. He wouldn't know until his stopped but since he was only two hundred he figured he had a lot more time left.

A finite amount of years. If only that was true. But it wasn't for him, Marcus knew, because being the very 0first immortal, wouldn't he have gotten his turn already if it was?

But the way he looked at Booker was different now, there was a touch of envy, and more importantly, reserved. Like he wasn't sure anymore if this man was a good investment of his time, because unlike him, Booker was going to die one day. But the longing was definitely still there, because a companion for thousands of years, even one who may disappear, that was definitely still more than he had before.

"So there could be others." He was trying to be hopeful. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if he could find others. They would still die, but each was long lived.

For once Marcus wasn't hiding anything from his expressions, he couldn't. These thoughts and feelings were coming too quickly and wildly to not be anything but open in his expression.

The distance Marcus left between them was obvious to Booker. He could see the other man draw back. His eventually mortality clearly didn't sit well with Marcus. Maybe he had never thought about his own death or that he could die. Maybe he couldn't given they were different beasts.

""Who knows?" Booker still wouldn't offer up information about the others especially now that Marcus had shown his interest was only in finding someone like him and not someone like Booker. His friendship seemed to be conditional.

Booker sipped at his whiskey and gave Marcus a minute to absorb all he had learned about him. It was strange to see another immortal take it in and turn it over in his mind. "There might not be another like you, though. Nothing that lives, lives forever."

"Then maybe I'm no longer alive." Marcus definitely felt dead enough inside to mean the words. He hadn't been living for a very long time. Someone once told him surviving wasn't living, and he had been surviving for so long that it wasn't really living. He hadn't had something to live for for a long while now.

Marcus had to process this and he badly wanted another drink. Waving for the server, he ordered another double shot of the whiskey, and whatever Booker wanted if he was finished with his.

"It's... a lot to take in," he admitted, waiting for the drink to arrive before he took a swig and let it burn down his throat. "I just want it all to end, you know? Watching it all turn to dust over and over... Then I thought there's you... but you're saying you'll someday go too."

Dramatic but fair. If Marcus truly couldn't die then, well, Booker felt bad for him. To live forever was really not living at all. Although, they had crossed paths. It was possibly Marcus could just keep meeting semi-immortal after semi-immortal.

"Someday. I'm too young for it to be soon but eventually it'll be my time." Booker felt he was living better than before. In his exile he hoped he had dragged himself out of the pit he was in before. Well, sort of climbing up.

Still, he felt a bit guilty ruining Marcus hopes and dreams. "You'll find another. We're out there. Just a matter of looking."

Turns out the discovery was a mixed bag then, sour grapes, not any solid solution to his cursed loneliness, but a possibility of semi-stability. Booker was still someone who could understand, truly understand, even though he didn't share the same eternity. A few thousand years was still a long time.

But it took him six thousand to meet one, who knew when the other would come about. But knowing they were out there... it was a start.

"Wouldn't wish this on anyone anyway," Marcus admitted, starting to accept the news. It got better when they went down with the alcohol.

"I think I'm going to get drunk here tonight," he announced in English since there was nothing more about immortality he wanted to talk about for now. It was more than he wanted already. "You're welcome to join me."

"You know, I used to do that a lot too. Trying to, uh, cut back these days." Booker wasn't exactly sober but he didn't drink himself numb every single day like before. He was trying to avoid getting drunk. "Someone once told me I was doing a shit job of living and I'm working on it."

He still loved and admired Andy a great deal and he missed his family every fucking day of his life. Booker spent a lot of time drunk before he sorted his shit out. Only a few more decades before he saw them all again.

"Good luck with it." Booker would sit and finish his drink and then maybe be sad in his safe house for awhile. He understood Marcus' loneliness all too well but he wasn't Nicky with wise words of comfort or Joe with his optimism. He was an ass and a bastard. The best he could do was drink a little bit.

"Haven't in a while. Hangovers in the mornings are a bitch," Marcus admitted as he mulled over his drink. But their conversation tonight, that was reason enough to want to indulge a little. Maybe it was blind self pity, but he felt like he earned it.

"What's there to live for? It's the the same... in a never ending cycle." He gave Booker a look and had enough sense left to not say more. It wasn't his fault that Marcus was stuck, and Marcus didn't actually want to pull him down with him. The guy was trying to live his life, probably not the best idea to here a depressed old guy like him ranting on about the futility of living it.

So Marcus swallowed his words along with the rest of his whiskey and thought if he should just buy the whole bottle for when they next came by for a refill. "Go on, you don't have to stay." As much as he would like Booker's company, he himself wasn't going to be a great one right now.

"I don't get them." The upside of healing as quickly as he did Booker always felt fine in the morning. It took a great deal of alcohol to get drunk and stronger the better but he never suffered the consequences.

"The point... is to do good while you can do it," he said with a little shrug. "Who knows what long reaching effects there are to it? Maybe you save the guy who cures cancer. Or kill the man that would be the next Hitler. Is it enough some days? No."

Booker hated his existence most of the time, especially without his family around but he kept going. He had to live better otherwise... well, that was really it. He didn't know what else there was. It would be drinking and fighting and misery like before.

Though, to be honest, he was fairly miserable most of the time. "But it's something."

Marcus wasn't going to get into it, but since Booker hadn't left and he was still joining the conversation, the lieutenant took it as an invitation to continue.

"To do good," Marcus repeated the other immortal's words. "I've put away murderers, drug lords, gangbanging bastards..." Marcus worked police, had for quite a while now in between stints of other things. And there was the reach of his alter ego, to cover what the law couldn't.

He shook his head. "Doesn't feel like there's a point to any of it. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust... eventually that's all they are, good, bad... anyday someone could start World War 3 and it'll wipe everyone out." Wasn't that a recurring nightmare of his, to wake up one day in a wasteland with no life, no survivors, not a single person left around him but himself. That more than any past traumatic attempts to kill himself plagued his real fear.

"I can't give you hope," Booker said before he sipped his drink. "You have to find that for yourself. I can only tell you that's what keeps me going most days. Try and do good otherwise, what's the point?"

Marcus had forever. He had real immortality. Booker had his uncertain immortality. There was only so long he could do good and hopefully, it would be enough to make the world better in some small way.

"I'm hoping I see the end of cancer, honestly." He smiled sadly thinking back to Jean-Pierre as he always did. "If I can live long enough to see that it'll have been worth it."

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