remember that the original poster can see your tags so tagging something with “don’t reblog from OP! [complete misunderstanding of a past interaction because can’t read good]”
You know what fucks the most with me about Booker’s first death and how much more it hurts? Is that he died hanged as a deserter - and we know from the comics that he hung there for 3 whole days while the army was camping nearby. 3 days in the Russian cold, with his body probably stripped of wool and all the remaining clothing that the other soldiers couldn’t use (at the beginning of the Russian campaign it was warm and nice, so the soldiers discarded their clothing thinking they wouldn’t need it, which meant that the soldiers would loot dead bodies for more clothing to stay warm the further into Russia and Winter they got).
So, Booker’s practically naked (he’s not in the comics), dying over and over again for 3 whole days in the Russian cold, probably shivering as hell and unable to do anything but to prove to the others that he is indeed dead: hang there and pretend.
But you know who else got hung and couldn’t prove or pretend that they were dead?
Andromache and Quynh. Andromache and Quynh who have been alive and tried to die for MILLENIA couldn’t pretend they were dead while hanging at the end of a rope, but Booker, on his first death, apparently managed to do just that while freezing all over again, possibly dreaming of the rest of the Old Guard at the same time and wondering what the fuck is going on.
Now, I know there’s a different between a crowd of people going “these two women are being hung as witches, let’s make sure they’re dead” and starving, freezing soldiers who just want to go home after killing the deserters they caught while on the retreat from a disastrous military campaign, but I can’t help but think about exactly Booker made his first descent into immortality the very same way that got Andromache and Quynh sentenced as witches.
Did they talk about it? Did Andy dream of Booker, hanging off the noose of a make-do scaffold in ice cold Winter, and get flashbacks to this specific moment in time when her and Quynh were “executed”?
ANYWAYS, I just feel like this makes Booker’s first death even more excruciating to think about.
