A/N: This is my first try writing for Bioshock, so I'll most likely have a few factual errors seeing as the games exist in a pretty complicated universe... or universes.
This is sort of a retelling of the events of Bioshock 2, interwoven with scenes in Elizabeth's tower in Columbia. It'll be three chapters plus a short epilogue/conclusion. This is Elizabeth/Eleanor, a rarepair, apparently.
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Present Time
Columbia
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The world ripped apart at her hands, wavering and bending with instability. Elizabeth squared her shoulders and stepped through. She did not look back. There was nothing left for her there.
..
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Eighteen Months Ago
Rapture
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Eleanor's shoulder blades pushed into the wooden headboard as Mother took a seat at the edge of her bed.
"You are so much more than you know, Eleanor." Mother always spoke so drastically, as though even the smallest things meant the difference between how you live or die. But this? Eleanor knew better. "You are not just mine, but the daughter of the people. You are the vessel of the future."
Eleanor's dark hair fell over her face as she glared down at her hands folded in her lap. She had heard the speeches, the sermons over the intercom. None of this was new to her, but deep down, underneath her anger, Eleanor was afraid. It was, after all, an experiment. Eleanor was not blind to what Mother had been attempting with Mr. Alexander. His body could not handle the ADAM injections. He'd gone mad. And that Eleanor herself could survive where he hadn't? Well, that was simply a theory at best. But what choice did she have?
Mother left soon after that, the locking mechanism whirling home with a loud thunk behind her.
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Eleanor stood at the thick glass window looking out onto Rapture. Surely, not the one Mr. Ryan had dreamed of, "No Gods or Kings, Only Men." No, it was now the Rapture of Lamb. It was Mother's dream.
She pressed her hands to the glass, squinting into the dark water, wondering how there was more out there than this splicer-infested underwater hell.
Eleanor stepped away from the glass.
The experiments would begin tomorrow.
..
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Columbia
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Elizabeth could spend her days reading or singing or pulling objects from other worlds entirely. Most of what she found didn't seem to do much of anything once she brought them through. The few things she did recognize still seemed strange and foreign, made from materials she didn't quite recognize.
But still, if she could find enough pieces of the outside world, maybe she could find a way to forget for a moment that she may never step foot outside the tower.
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Elizabeth hummed as she made her way to her library. As bristling as it was to be so confined, she was grateful for the books. Songbird seemed to bring new ones every few weeks. She wanted, more than most things, to ask him where they came from, but their bond did not stretch as far as words.
As she rounded the end of the staircase, a ripple in the air stopped her. She tilted her head a little and blinked a few times, thinking it must have just been her mind. Yes, she opened tears nearly every day, but never in the library. There was too much a risk she might lose control and lose the room, all her books, her stories, her journals.
But this tear was just there. Without precedent.
Elizabeth moved closer, with caution, of course- albeit very little. She glanced around, making sure Songbird was nowhere to be found, then she pulled at the edge just enough to peer through.
..
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Rapture
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Eleanor resisted, shrugging the splicer's hands off of her shoulders. She could feel the ADAM growing, alive inside of her like a cancer. The procedures had just begun recently, yet Eleanor felt half the person she used to be. Surely, this was not what Mother had in mind. Her daughter was not a beacon of hope for the altruistic future of Rapture, she was just diluted and angry and weak. Father would have never let this happen.
The splicer, shuddering a little each time they stopped to turn a corner, shoved her forward. It was clear he had gone quite a while without ADAM. Eleanor was willing to wager a guess that any and all ADAM was to be presented to Mother. She could only imagine what Mother did to those who chose not to give to the cause and future of the Family.
She could resist all she wanted. It was clear Mother was going to get what she wanted in the end. Eleanor could not win this, not on her own. Not without help.
It was then when she began to search for Father.
..
The new Little Sisters were easy enough to befriend. After all, Eleanor had been, for a time, in their shoes. Crawling through vents, riding on the shoulders of a Big Daddy, and following the scent of ADAM were not things easily forgotten, no matter how cheery things seemed through her childish eyes.
Convincing the lot of seven-year-olds to recover pieces of Father's genetic sequence was another feat altogether. It took months. But as time wore on, with the generous help of Brigid Tenenbaum, the Little Sisters managed to find and resurrect, Father, Subject Delta, but neither Tenenbaum nor Eleanor could have possibly anticipated the repercussions of bringing such a creature, so long disconnected from everything, back to life.
..
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Columbia
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Elizabeth moved closer, with caution, of course- albeit very little. She glanced around, making sure Songbird was nowhere to be found, then she pulled at the edge just enough to peer through.
It took a moment for her eyes to adjust, but after the static and distortion faded, she gasped, not in fear, but in awe.
She could see children. Little girls, maybe a dozen of them giggling and whispering around some kind of glowing bluish-green glass column. She couldn't see much else, but there was the faint, yet persistent sound of water dripping and a strange echo as if this… sight was in some kind of tunnel.
Suddenly, the glass column began to brighten. The little girls started laughing and cheering louder.
"Mr. Bubbles is waking up!"
Elizabeth beamed. While strange to her, it was certainly something to see. This must have been a very special tear.
Something big shifted in the column, a bright green light slowly clicked on, a concentration of lit circles.
"Mr. Bubbles! Don't be a slowpoke! Angels don't wait for slowpokes."
The green light seemed to shift down towards the girls, who at this point seemed to be climbing over each other to be the first to the tank. But just as one of the girls placed her hand on the glass, the lights flashed red. A loud roar-like noise shook the ground, and the column exploded, water and glass shooting everywhere.
The little girls screamed and scattered, running from… that thing, that robot as it charged after them ruthlessly.
"No, Daddy! Mr. Bubbles, stop!"
The drill on its arm started to whirl. Elizabeth felt her blood boiling, roaring in her veins like, do something. Save them!
Elizabeth ripped the tear open with all her strength and stepped inside.
..
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Rapture: Eleanor
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It didn't take long for Mother to catch onto her plan. Eleanor had expected as much, she just didn't think such a transgression would cause Mother to very suddenly accelerate her treatments.
It was now very rare she had an unwatched moment to contact the Little Sisters or Father. She closed her eyes and tried to concentrate over the chaos of the ADAM infesting her.
"Father? Can you hear me?"
Nothing followed. She tried the Little Sisters instead, thinking they hadn't yet finished reviving Father.
"Are you almost finished?"
The response shot Eleanor to her feet.
"Father? What are you doing?! No! No, Father, don't hurt them! Don't you touch them!"
She felt dizzy. As if her body was not her own. She lost her footing, falling out of consciousness to the blood-curdling screams of her Little Sisters.
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Rapture: Elizabeth
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The force of the tear being opened knocked the monster off its feet, the little girl it had been cornering scrambled away and disappeared into a sort of hole in the wall.
The tear started to close behind her as she ran for the girls. "Go!" she shouted over the now deafening sound of dripping water, "Follow her!"
The girls wasted no time getting out of there as the monster struggled to get back up.
Enraged at losing its prey, the monster charged at Elizabeth full-force, drill spinning faster than anything she had ever seen in her life. Yet she remained unafraid. The tear rippled beside her, slowly closing. A world where he never existed. Surely, Songbird could dispose of this… creature. Mind made up, she reopened the tear, and it swallowed the monster whole.
She stumbled backward, falling into a shallow puddle of water. A quick swipe over the sting in her cheek revealed a red smear. Minor compared to the fate waiting for her at the end of the drill.
"Hey, Miss!" a small voice called from the hole in the wall on the other side of the room.
Elizabeth stood, "What was that thing?"
A little head poked out of the vent, "Mr. Bubbles… Big Daddy. He was grumpy. Angels don't like grumpy Daddies."
"A Big Daddy? You mean there's more of them?"
The girl nodded, yellow, pupil-less eyes glowing eerily. "Uh-huh. Mr. Bubbles always saves me."
Elizabeth wasn't getting it, but the girl seemed happy enough despite the near death experience. "My name's Elizabeth."
The girl giggled and pointed to something shiny in the mess of glass from the column. Elizabeth bent to pick it up, but when she turned back, the girl was gone.
"Hello? What is this thing? What am I supposed to-"
The box seemed to come to life in her hands, "Father!"
Elizabeth nearly dropped the radio. The voice was faint, but there all the same. It was another girl, but older than the others. Closer to herself, even.
"Father, STOP!"
"Hello?"
"Fath- Wait, who are you? Where is my father?!"
"That thing was your father?" There was a pause so long, Elizabeth almost gave up waiting.
"No, I suppose not. At one time maybe, but… he's gone now."
The girl sounded sad in much the same way Elizabeth understood too well. She felt a pang of guilt for banishing the girl's father to a world where Songbird would kill him without a thought. But he was a monster, what was she supposed to do?
"I'm Elizabeth," she tried.
"Tell me, Miss Elizabeth. The girls, are they safe? Did he hurt them?"
With the tear closed, she would have to find another one to get back home- that is, if there even was another one. She rounded a corner, startled as a large door lifted at her approach and revealed a long glass tunnel."No, they're fine. They went through a hole in the wall…" Her jaw dropped as it clicked in place where they could possibly be. "Just what is this place? We're… underwater? An underwater city!"
"This is Rapture… Or, what's left of it, rather."
She pressed her hands to the cool glass. "It's beautiful! I'll bet Paris has nothing on this."
The radio crackled, "You can't possibly think that."
Another door opened for Elizabeth, revealing what looked like an empty restaurant. She heard a faint whirring sound, not like a drill but-
Suddenly, she was bathed in red light as an alarm blared from every direction. The room seemed to leap to life.
"No! You've triggered an alarm! Get out of there!" the voice was frantic, "Elizabeth, RUN!"
..
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Rapture: Eleanor
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Eleanor leaned heavily against the wall, trusting it to hold her up as she tried her best to guide Elizabeth to safety, or at the very least a clear place.
"Use your Plasmids until I can find you something."
"My what?"
To be in Rapture now of all times without a drop of ADAM in your system… Miss Elizabeth was surely going to die if Eleanor didn't do something.
"Never mind, there- there should be a Bot Shut-Off around the corner… Yes, right there. Pull the lever."
Eleanor could hear Elizabeth panting on the other end of the line. "Maybe next time a little warning. I'm not from around here if you couldn't tell."
Eleanor sunk to the floor, drained from trying to locate Elizabeth so fervently, "Where did you come from?"
"It… It's a long story, but I-"
"You need to get out of here, it's not safe."
Elizabeth huffed and mumbled something that sounded a lot like: "I'll say."
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Rapture: Elizabeth
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She stuck to the damp walls as she crept along, trusting the voice in the radio to guide her. This place, Rapture, as it were, seemed to be a hollow shell of what it must have once been. It was beyond anything Elizabeth had ever read about, dreamed about, but the more she saw of it, the more urgent it became that she find a tear, a way back to her tower, back to Columbia, the flying city.
As eroded as the place was becoming, thanks to all the water damage, she still noticed the place seemed to be littered with advertisements. Everything from a masquerade ball dated nearly ten years ago to something called Electro Bolt.
"What is this ADAM I keep hearing about?"
The radio wavered in and out of frequency. "They say it is the canvas of genetic modification. It changes you, allows for… alterations. It was, among other things, what truly separated us from the world above."
"Is that what you believe?"
"I- it doesn't matter. But Miss Elizabeth, please, stay away from it. It will… complicate your departure."
Elizabeth clutched the radio to her side as she peered around the corner. "Alright, if you say so, Miss…"
"Eleanor. You can call me, Eleanor."
"Alright, Eleanor. Now, how do you propose I get out of here?"
..
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Rapture: Eleanor
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She had managed to guide Elizabeth to a bathysphere but was at a loss of where to return her to. Her head throbbed from the act of staying with the girl for so long, keeping her from Mother, being her invisible eyes and ears, her Scout.
"How did you get here, Eleanor?"
"I've been here all my life."
"Have you been outside? You know, on the surface?"
Eleanor could help but smile at how ridiculous a thought that was. Elizabeth, in all her strange cheerfulness, couldn't possibly understand what it would take to get out of this place.
"No, I haven't."
"Well, maybe you will someday."
Now she could barely see Elizabeth. A thin haze was beginning to block her out, but she could just make out the random destination Elizabeth had chosen in her panic trying to escape the splicers chasing after her. They were arriving at the metro station.
Elizabeth gasped, "Right there."
"What?"
"A tear… My way back!"
"What is a tear?"
Elizabeth made some kind of dismissive gesture. "It's a doorway. A way out. A way back to Columbia."
Eleanor tried to see what Elizabeth could see, but it just seemed to be a normal train station, "Columbia? I don't-"
The air seemed to shimmer like heat waves and Elizabeth grasped something and ripped it open. It was as if in the middle of nothing, she had opened a curtain into another room. A small room with an easel and some paints and a half-finished picture of the Eiffel Tower.
"What… what is that? What have you done?"
"It's a tear, see? My way back." Elizabeth took one step inside, but paused, looking at the radio in her hands. "What about you? It's safe there. I'm sure I could keep it open long enough. You could leave this place, too. I hear Columbia is just beautiful."
Eleanor sunk to the floor searching for a way to tell Elizabeth just how impossible all of this truly was.
"I can't… Father was my last chance. I am as much trapped here as you are not."
"But-"
"Go, Elizabeth. Before they find you. Don't worry about me. I will… I'll be alright. Get to safety."
"Hang on a second, El-"
Eleanor used what was left of her strength to push Elizabeth into the tear, to this Columbia, to safety. And the moment the girl passed through, the tear sealed violently behind her.
..
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Columbia
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Elizabeth fell to the floor in her dining room. The rug was a different color, but the rest was unmistakable. She scrambled to her feet, spinning around to jump back through the tear and demand to know why Eleanor was trapped, who she was, why she couldn't escape, but the tear was gone, Rapture and Eleanor with it.
She huffed out a sigh and glanced at her painting in the corner of the room. Of course, she was taken back to a version of Columbia where she had not yet finished it. She took another step closer to it, nearly ending up on the floor once again as her foot caught on something.
The radio skittered across the floor. Damn thing, like so many others, probably had no chance of working here in Columbia. Her only tie to Rapture, to Eleanor, severed. Something in that stung worse than the cut on her cheek.
She picked it up and dusted it off. "Eleanor? Are you there?"
There was no response.
That certainly would not do.