Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended.
Author's Notes: I didn't feel quite satisfied with the ending of Bioshock, so I had my first turn at a game-based fanfiction, for one of the first games I've ever felt impelled to play through to the finish. I know that it could be better, but I'm still quite proud of this one. Posted in 2008, in the City of Rapture LJ comm (.)
Dolls
Julie Ryan sat dejectedly in the hallway and kicked her legs up and down on the floor. Her shoes bounced on the linoleum with dull thwacking sounds, and she did her best to ignore the deep murmur of voices that was the principal telling Jack about what had happened.
She was in trouble. Not Nathan, who had been taken away in the arms of a nice lady in a white dress. Oh, no. Not him, the shithead, who had spat on Masha's arm at lunch, and then tipped his mashed potato all over her head. He wasn't in any trouble at all. But she, Julie was.
Which was stupid. One young boy derides and bullies all six of them for the whole month they're at school, picking on Masha specifically for one whole week. Seven days of psychological trauma, seven whole days! She was having nightmares, and Masha had never had nightmares before. She had always been fine, even after everything.
And it wasn't as if Julie was stupid. She didn't stab Nathan with a dirty spoon, or a fork, or anything. And she didn't stab him in the eye, or face, even. Just stuck a knife into his arm. Sliced it across, so that it would hurt enough to make him back off.
She'd even wiped her chicken off of it first, so that there wasn't anything to infect him. She'd been practical, thoughtful, and, given the terrors Masha had quite generous and merciful.
He only had a scratch, even if it bled a little. But the lunch lady scolded her, ranted about shots and dirty fucking kids, and dragged her by the hair to the principal's office. Poor Masha stood there forlornly watching, mouth open as if to protest. Julie would be worried, but she saw Jasmine walking over, as she was dragged out of the doorway, so she knew Masha was in good hands.
The heavy mumbling talk had stopped, and Julie heard the door open. Felt footsteps beside her, and looked across the lino at Jack's shoe.
"Julie, get up please. And take my hand?"
She did.
"Thank you, kindly. If you'll excuse us, Mr. Nash, I think that I'll take Julie home now. I'd like to have a talk with her."
Mr. Nash galumphed like a frog, making a growling sort of bubble with his throat, almost like clearing it, but forced and fake. He looked down at her from above his nose, scrutinising her like a slug.
"Indeed," He drawled, before he turned and re-entered his office.
Jack let her lead him out of the school, but when they stopped near the bus stop, he hmmed and ehhmed for a few moments before decisively striding away down the street.
"Jack? Wait up!"
When she caught up with him, he seemed to be looking around for something.
"Come on, Mr.B," She joked. Maybe he'd forgiven her already?
"Oh, you come on, 'Mr. B'. The name's Ryan, and don't forget it. It was around here somewhere? Oh, there, that house, with the green roof-tiles."
They approached it. as they got closer, it looked like one of those houses converted into a doctor's surgery, or dentistry. She shuddered at the thought of an examination table. The cold bench under the bare skin of her arms...
"It is, if you were wondering, a hospital. A very small one, but a hospital nontheless. It's where people take or donate broken and bruised little girls, to be fixed up."
"What? No way! No way am I going in there!"
Julie wanted to run away. She wanted to kick him in the shins. He was supposed to know, supposed to understand. How dare he betray her trust, how dare he be so thoughtless?
"Ah, fuck, I'm sorry. Julie, Julie, dearest..."
He caught her up in his arms, though she protested, and held her tight until she felt a coldness seep away from her. She hadn't even noticed it, but she'd grown icy cold inside. Jack's arms warmed her up from the outside in, melting away at the overpowering sense of wrongness.
"I didn't mean like that. It was a bit of a joke, see?"
He placed her down again, but then caught her hand tightly in his own.
"It's a... a doll hospital?"
She turned up to him, for confirmation. Surely enterprising adults wouldn't dedicate an entire hospital to broken toys?
"Yeah, a hospital for dolls. It's run by a retiree and her daughter, who comes over once a week. People bring dolls that they love very much, and pay a lot to have them fixed. Collectors bring their antiques. And others, well, the woman goes out when she has no patients, she walks the streets and finds broken and bent dolls who have been left behind.
"She picks them up, and brings them in here. She warms them up, and fixes their clothing, and then puts them in a bed to sleep, and wait, until the person that they are meant for comes along."
"Oh."
It sounded weird, but also very reassuring. So she nodded, kicked her toe against the sign, and strode purposefully up to the door, dragging Jack behind her by the hand.
Almost as if she'd been waiting for them to arrive, a lovely old woman, older than anyone Julie had seen in the months since she'd been out of the bathysphere, opened the door and smiled widely. Jack couldn't smile like that. Nobody could, that Julie had ever met. It was so wide, she thought, that perhaps it was a smile that could stretch all the way around, into the blind spot at the back of your head.
A smile that could wrap all around a person.
They walked inside, and there were patients lined up in beds, tiny beds. Some had bags beside them. They were tucked in, with blankets. With toys.
The woman led them even deeper, out the back. There was a desk with piles and piles of boxes, numbered with a thick black pen. The woman sighed, and sat down at a table.
"Jack said over the phone that he might bring someone here soon. Ah, I'm sorry about the mess here. I wish I had enough money to put them all in beds, but I only have so much, so the beds are reserved for the inpatients, the ones with incomes and families. Our resident patients have to reside in their humble boxes, even the healthy ones."
"You mean," Julie asked, resting her chin on the edge of the table, staring at the boxes, "That none of these dolls have a home?"
"No, none of my girls back here have anyone to love them. Nobody to hold them during storms, when they get scared, and nobody to wash their faces when the get dirty. Just me, when I have the time."
"That's so sad. It must feel awful, not to have a mother. To just sit in dark corners and watch everyone else go home with happy smiles..."
Jack nodded solemnly. "It must be, mustn't it?"
The lady then brightened, and smiled again.
"Why, I've got an idea, Jack, and Julie, why don't you two take home some of these poor orphans? You've got other sisters, don't you, Julie? Would they be able, do you think, to find some room for a few lonely and damaged girls like mine? You can still see the cracks in some of them, though they've been pasted back together. It can take years of love to fix injuries like these.
"Could you help me, would you?"
Julie placed a hand calmly on the woman's knee, and looked up into her weary, sad, beautiful eyes.
"Of course I would. We all could, couldn't we Jack? We have room, in our house. Jack got us a nice old house, with big rooms. We could make a bed for each of them, and learn to sew things together, and make them clothing. And we could take them places, I bet they've never seen anything like the things we've seen, have they?"
"Of course, of course, yes," Jack said. Julie heard something warm in his voice, again warmer than anything she'd heard him say before.
"But," He added, and she felt her gut twist as she waited for the conditions, "but, since everyone else is still in school, I'll need you to find the right dolls for each girl."
"Oh." That seemed easy enough. Way too easy. "Alright. Why don't you and the lady do grownup things, and I'll meet the orphans."
She nodded decisively, and sat down on the floor. The woman brought down the boxes of the healed dolls and set them to her left in careful piles. Then she and Jack left the room, and Julie was alone with them.
It was hard to chose, at first. There were so many faces, so many scars and cracked faces. Fingertips of these tiny china dolls, glued back together so that they resembled splicers, almost. Their flesh bumpy and full of tiny, fragile dirt-brown lines.
She chose her own last. First of all, she chose, or rather found, the one for Masha. Sweet, gentle Masha. This doll was broken in a hundred different ways, and her hair had mostly fallen out. Julie placed that doll to her right, in her box. She placed the next doll, whose face lacked something recognisable, on the table again, closing the lid.
She felt a little bad, but if they could only have one each to care for, Julie really had to chose the right ones.
Jack sat at the woman's kitchen table, nursing a mug of hot tea between his hands. Alice, the lovely old girl, had agreed as soon as he'd explained things on the phone. He hadn't mentioned Rapture, or the nature of their trauma, only that the girls were not his own, and that their parents were dead. That they'd suffered similar trauma, and that he hadn't been able to leave any behind. He'd come into an amount of money, as he explained, quite unexpectedly. A large house. So he'd wanted to do some good, at least.
She bought it, like the school had. Like the council worker had. With no birth certificates, he'd had to spend a while getting his girls legal identities, but even that had been surprisingly easy.
Jack felt guilty, sometimes. He felt manipulative, as if he was carrying the mark of Fontaine, Ryan and Rapture so deeply within himself that he would never be redeemable. That he would inherit all of the terror and madness that had steeped through their souls.
He felt, daily, that he was unworthy, unfit to raise the sisters. But if not him, then who? Who could be a legally of-age person, to feed them, and ease their way through life?
"Penny for your thoughts," Alice spoke up as she stood, sighing. She took the plate that they had used for biscuits when Julie came out for a break, and began washing dishes in the sink.
"Just wool gathering, really."
"Ah, well that's good. You don't have enough time to drift in that head of yours, with six of them and no wife."
"Mm."
Jack leant back until his shoulders were warmed by the sunlight from the kitchen window, and drank his tea.
When Julie sat back, at last, amongst the piles of boxes, and went to find the woman and Jack, she realised that the house was empty. Nobody around. She felt her heart pound for a moment, because she had never felt safe, being alone. But then she saw the clock, and realised that it was about three o'clock. That they were probably down the road at the school, picking up her sisters.
Then, she began to enjoy herself. She'd never really ever been alone, just herself. Not even in the crawlspaces of Rapture. Always someone to hide from, or help, or be saved by. And up here, always someone else in the bathroom. Someone else looking for the exact same bag of crisps at the exact same time.
Someone else walking home. Someone, even in the middle of the night. Someone reading or sitting up and making sure that the living room was warm and bright in case of nightmares.
It felt very different, knowing that she was alone in a house. The floorboards seemed to creak more loudly. She could hear all sorts of strange things, like birds, when she hadn't noticed them before. She could feel almost every tiny draft and breeze in the hallway tap gently against her skin.
The air felt loaded with tension, and electricity. It felt thinner and cooler and crisper than any air she had ever tasted.
It made her feel antsy, as if it was wrong. She had to be moving, now. Doing something other than just being alone. So Julie retrieved, one by one, the dolls, placing them in the living room. Someone, probably the woman, had set the coffee table and end tables with plates of small sandwiches and cups of lemonade.
When they came in, everyone walked almost straightaway to the right doll. Bridgette to the one whom, naked, had a small brown stain over her heart, on her cloth body. Diane to a dark-skinned doll, hands and feet and face contrasting with the white body, a small crack extending across her face.
Anna picked up a doll with soft, silky, bob-cut hair. Masha to her doll, who was now nestled in her box beside a red curly wig.
And Julie sat down, beside her sisters, with her own clasped in her arms. Broken hands and feet, glued back together piece by piece. Someone had discarded her, because she had fallen into irrecognisable pieces, but the woman, and now Julie, loved her. Even if she was just held together with glue, and even if she wasn't the right shape, or the same sort of perfect pure pretty that new dolls were. Even though she didn't know her name yet, Julie loved her.
When they left, the woman handed Jack a small, new bottle of glue. She smiled, patted him on the shoulder, and whispered "For picking up the little pieces that fall off, and pulling the cracks together. Not that it will help literally, but sometimes we need a reminder of exactly what we've achieved, and will keep achieving, over and over again, for their entire lives."
Julie didn't understand, but she knew that if they knew she'd heard, she'd get in trouble. Children weren't allowed to understand things that adults did, she'd learnt, outside of Rapture. Not that it mattered, because now she had someone to take care of. Someone called... Ellie. Yes, Ellie. This was Ellie in her arms.
"And if you're a very good girl, I'll let you play with your sisters." She told Ellie, "But you have to be quiet all the way home. There are a lot of dangerous people who could smash someone like you to pieces without thinking, in this world."