#bookercore

[goldheartedsky]

Arguably the most Bookercore shirt I have ever stumbled upon

[phatburd]

“They say that God watches out for children, drunks, and fools. Simply put, this means I stand a two-thirds better chance for divine intervention in my life than most other people.”

― Lenny Castellaneta, No One's Even Bleeding

[bode-leone]

anyways let's talk about how nicky, who, in his past, advocated for, participated in and funded the genocide of multiple native and endemic peoples in a multi-use, well-shared 'holy land' which is considered the most egregious of sins in his religion (thou shalt not kill and thou shalt not steal). he did all this. he can't get away from this. his husband will never let him forget it because it was partly his people that were being murdered. the history of the holy land literally cannot forget or forgive the blood dripping from his actions from a thousand years ago.

now. let's talk about booker. he gave up his family to man and his pharmaceutical company connections for the sake of, what? finding a cure for immortality? looking at their genes and maybe figuring out how to manufacture medical treatments to stop suffering for other people? and not to mention that he was manipulated from thinking it would only be blood taken from the killing floor before the other kill squad entered. no, we mustn't forget that he did not ask permission before this, however, is that somehow a higher crime than genocide? is coming from a place of existential and psychological despair somehow worse than committing genocide upon innocent lives?

now tell me this: is booker the more deserving of an extremely harsh punishment or nicky, for whom we don't even know if he did get punished for what he partook in? tell me, if this was to occur in modern day, would you look at the actions of booker and nicky in the same realm, let alone galaxy, of punishment? would you punish booker or would you deem it ‘act proven but not criminally responsible’ due to mental health impairment?

[sindirimba]

you're only legally allowed to tag stuff bookercore if you like him. if you don't then it's libel and slander and you'll be fined 120392 million billion dollars

[raedear]

I posted 15,428 times in 2022

800 posts created (5%)

14,628 posts reblogged (95%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@spacegirlsgang

@nonbinary-nicolo

@thedreadpiratematt

I tagged 2,694 of my posts in 2022

#nickycore - 161 posts

#yusufcore - 133 posts

#ask me anything my dudes - 119 posts

#the old guard - 33 posts

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#immortal husbands - 26 posts

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#first line game - 21 posts

Longest Tag: 90 characters

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My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

look at that face. you know it happened and Nicky just accepted that this is his life now.

329 notes - Posted November 2, 2022

#4

if you've ever wondered if a comment you've left on a fic has reached the author in some way or made a difference to them: a well-timed comment there just improved my mood enough that I didn't quit my job in a fit of pique.

Everyone who's ever left me a comment or a nice tag: I love you with my whole heart and I am kissing you full on the mouth.

343 notes - Posted March 24, 2022

#3

good evening lads. how we feeling.

523 notes - Posted June 22, 2022

#2

So @wickedpact posted this and said this:

And then I saw it an hour ago and wrote this in a complete haze. Hope that's okay, pal! If I still like it later I'll maybe post it on ao3.

(I made Nicky a junior doctor and tripled his shift. This isn't a value judgment of nurses, I just forgot the prompt details)

Bone app the teeth:

It's definitely not safe for him to be driving, but it wasn't safe to work a 37 hour shift either, and here Nicky is, fresh off the ward and so tired he thinks he might crack under the weight of it. Not only that, but behind the wheel, so exhausted that the only thing keeping him awake is the blind terror of hurting another person. He's just five minutes away from home though, and the thought of his warm bed keeps him going. If he can ever make it there.

The light is on above the porch when he pulls into the driveway, and it's like the very sight of it gives Nicky's body the permission it's been waiting for to give up. He can feel it, muscle by muscle, his body crumbling into sleep.

He doesn't have his key, but the spare is behind the little decorative panel as always, and the door swings open before he's even fully registered unlocking it.

From there, it's easy. Shoes kicked off at the door, bag dumped to deal with in the morning, scrubs stripped too. He stumbles into the downstairs bathroom to brush his teeth and use the toilet dressed in just his boxers and his undershirt, and resists the siren call of sitting on the edge of the bath as he brushes his teeth. If he does that, there's no chance he'll get back up again.

It's a herculean effort, but in short order Nicky drags his mostly-unconscious self out of the bathroom and up the stairs (with just one detour to check he actually locked the door behind him when he came in).

As always, the bedroom door is slightly ajar because the door handle creaks loudly enough to wake the dead. Nicky brushes past it, not even noticing, too drawn in by the sight of his bed not ten feet away.

It's not a graceful landing. Even a belly flop would have more dignity. Nicky shoves his way into the bed like a battering ram, and by the time he lands on the mattress he has the duvet up around his nose and Joe's arm wrapped tightly around him. Used to him, Joe just bundles him up against his chest and carries on sleeping.

Nicky's snoring before his head hits the pillow.

—

'Nicky.'

Nicky grumbles and grinds his nose against Joe's chest. No matter what time it is, it's too early. Especially on the heels of such a long shift. Unless the house is on fire, he's not waking up.

'Nicky, you need to wake up.'

'No—' Nicky whines, dragging it out. Joe smells like fresh linens and sleep, and he's so warm. Why would Nicky ever want to—oh no. Oh, oh no.

Nicky wakes up completely, the realisation of where he is and what he's done slipping down his spine like a block of ice, freezing him as it goes.

Joe's on his back with Nicky's head on his chest, and Nicky is so embarrassed he thinks he might actually burst into flames.

Very slowly, very carefully, all the time wishing he was dreaming, Nicky raises his head to meet Joe's eyes.

Joe's bleary, confused, beautiful eyes.

'I am so sorry,' says Nicky slowly when the silence stretches on too long. 'I-I don't. I'm sorry.'

Joe's hands are on the small of his back, which is the only thing stopping Nicky from leaping out of the bed.

'When did you get here?' asks Joe, raspy with sleep. He's always looked like a surprised puppy first thing in the morning. Nicky's chest hurts.

'I don't know,' answers Nicky, honestly. 'I don't even remember coming here.'

'Nicky,' says Joe, in that way he always did when this happened before, Nicky, exhausted on the heels of some too-long shift, doing something that's normal when you're well-rested and dangerous when you're not. Like driving. Or cooking. Or accidentally turning up at your ex-boyfriend's house, a full week after you broke up with him.

Nicky shrugs, awkward and humiliated, and sits up completely. Joe's hands are slow to slip off his back.

'I'm sorry,' he says again. Joe sits up too, slouching against the headboard and looking at Nicky like he's a puzzle to be solved. 'I was just…tired. And I wanted to go home. I wasn't thinking.'

'Your flat is ten minutes closer to the hospital than here,' Joe says, even and clear. Nicky cringes.

'Yes,' he says, slowly, feeling out where he can possibly go from here to explain why he broke into his ex-boyfriend's house sometime in the night and got into bed with him. 'That is…I…well.'

See the full post

534 notes - Posted April 23, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

569 notes - Posted February 4, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

[winterequinoxx]

Booker

[peri-helia]

[captain-grammar]

blorbocore  bookercore

[goldheartedsky]

Absolutely SCREAMING at the Bookercore vibes of this legitimate article

[oldguardhc]

Do you guys have any song recommendations for joexnicky? I need to fill my immortal husbands playlist but all my songs are bookercore. Any genre is fine.

[bode-leone]

revelation

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?

The clock, frozen for two hundred years, begins to tick on his life.

[winterequinoxx]

[bode-leone]

It’s so lucky, this living forever all at once. When you turn on the lights, you’re inconsolably glad. You could stop this whenever, but why?

— Kaveh Akbar, from "Portrait of the Alcoholic with Relapse Fantasy"

[bode-leone]

sometimes booker has trouble sleeping alone during the exile. he’s able to sleep but the comfort and restorative nature of the sleep isn’t there. he’s so used to reaching out in his sleep to touch andy or nicky or joe, to have some physical reminder that he’s not alone, that its absence is like a hole cut forth in him that never gets filled, no matter how many people he picks up or pays for the pleasure of their physical company. it’s enough to make him weep great tears of repentance for what he’s done, but the century looks unfathomably long and insurmountable.

[bode-leone]

does booker love too much or not enough? does he love too much in one direction that it causes deficits in other areas? i don't think he can let go of jean-pierre and the trauma of watching him die, thinking if he did let go, he'd stopped loving him. turns out devoting yourself to the memory of a dead person leaves you deadened also. he drinks to quell the pain of love and to pretend everything is fine

[bode-leone]

coming to the terrible, awful conclusion reading this stuff about C-PTSD that booker may subconsciously view andy and joe and nicky as victimisers in the sense that she's the one leading the group that continues to push him into war and conflict (traumatisation) and joe and nicky are her leads and despite it all still see them in an immensely positive light and as family.

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.

**EDIT: quotes taken from: Ataria Y. (2018) The Destructive Nature of Complex PTSD. In: Body Disownership in Complex Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. Palgrave Macmillan, New York.