Rapture was finished.
Sander Cohen wasn't exactly sure when he had first figured it out, but he was certain enough that he had known for quite some time. Perhaps even before the Civil War, when everything had been as beautiful and perfect as Andrew Ryan had wanted. Maybe he had known from the very start, when he had stepped out of the bathysphere that first time and glanced up in wonderment at the Utopia Ryan had built.
Yes, he decided, he had known from the very beginning that Rapture was going down. And now, here he was, his intuition proven right as he watched buildings crumbling, and splicers dying. Sander thought he had grown to hate Ryan, he was so sure that he'd be nothing short of thrilled to see his old friend fall, but... there was nothing, just a vague sense of emptiness in the pit of his stomach, a numb kind of denial.
His hands trembling, Sander reached into his torn jacket, pulling out a crumpled slip of paper. His bright eyes searched the writing frantically, as though looking for something that might help him figure out what he should do with himself. It was the requiem he had started to write, the one he had begun in anticipation of Ryan's death. His fingers shook, struggling to keep a firm grip. He couldn't read, couldn't even understand the messy scrawl.
Nothing seemed to make sense.
Andrew Ryan was dead, as was Rapture. A whole fuck-load of other people were dead too. Sander thought back to Fort Frolic and his little moth, who had reminded him so much of Andrew when he had been younger. He wondered if Jackie boy had figured anything out yet, or if he was even still alive. A part of him-the part that was still vaguely human-hoped that he was safe.
He stuffed the sheet of paper back into his jacket and decided that he needed to do something with himself before he went-
-A strained chuckle-
-crazier than he already was.
Turning away from the swinging corpses of the innocent men and women in Apollo Square, Sander decided that the first thing he needed to do was find out whether or not Jack was dead. If he was dead, Sander would be back at square one, bumbling around like a lost lunatic. If, however, Jack was alive, then maybe he could help somehow. Sander didn't hate Ryan, as much as he really wished that he did, and he knew that Ryan didn't hate Jack, so that gave him a purpose. He was responsible for his old friends' death, he had sent Jack to him, knowing what would happen.
He needed to do something, he had to find a way to redeem himself.
For the first time in a long while, Sander felt as though he were seeing clearly. There was no chance in hell of bringing Rapture back from her watery grave, the damage was already too immense, and the splicers, well, they were determined to destroy everything in sight. Jack, he would probably be sinking as fast as the city itself, but there was still hope, Sander was sure of it.
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Jack frowned, his hands clutching tightly at his chest when he felt a searing pain shoot through his heart. "Fuck..." he hissed, his voice coming out weak and breathless. The static from the radio fizzled out and Atlas-no, it wasn't Atlas, he reminded himself-Fontaine was gone, leaving only silence and the occasional drip-drip of a leaky ceiling.
He was lucky that Tenenbaum was helping him. He knew she was only doing so because he had helped her 'little ones'. He highly doubted that she actually gave a shit about him, and was probably helping out of some effort to repay some sort of debt she figured she had. Still, he'd be pretty fucked without her, and for that he was extremely grateful.
One of the little sisters was playing around up ahead, but she stopped momentarily to look over at Jack as he struggled to right himself; aftershocks of whatever Fontaine had done stabbing through his chest again and again. The pain eventually ebbed away into a dull ache and Jack was able to move steadily forward. The little girl watched him go by, an odd smile on her dirtied face. Jack wondered if his pain somehow amused her; the thought pissed him off somewhat and he threw her a glare, which had her fleeing back down the hall.
Around the corner, Jack was startled when a group of splicers started screaming and cussing. He saw that one of the party was actually attacking himself, stabbing into his own arm as he shrieked on about 'there's semen everywhere!' Jack might have found this highly amusing if he had heard it under different circumstances, but quite frankly, the savageness of the self-mutilation was really quite frightening.
The splicers eventually moved on, sprinting off down some corridor when one of them called out about ADAM. Jack breathed a sigh of relief and pressed on. He had tackled his fair share of the messed up fuckers on many occasions, but his current vulnerability placed the stakes against him, and he didn't quite feel like dying just yet.
As he walked, he found his thoughts roaming back to Andrew Ryan... an entirely different kind of pain stabbed at his heart as he recalled how he had been forced to murder the man, how Atlas had been nothing but a façade... He tried to think back to his life on the farm with his parents, but then he remembered that all of that had been a lie; his childhood hadn't been filled with the smell of the countryside, or the excitement of a good home-cooked meal courtesy of a loving mother. His 'childhood' had been spent in a cold lab, being conditioned to bark at the right words.
Suddenly furious, Jack smashed his fist into a nearby wall, grunting as the pain shook his entire forearm. He was just a dog, a very stupid dog that was able to perform clever tricks at the right commands. He hit the wall again, harder this time, his knuckles crunching and beginning to bleed.
"Fuckin' asshole..." he spat. "All of 'em, fuckin' liars!"
At the sudden din of violent cursing and screaming, Jack hurried away from the oncoming splicers. He rounded a corner and found himself standing in a large, open area. The first thing he noticed was the vast amount of photographs pasted to the walls, he squinted closely at them, his stomach churning when he realised that it was a kind of memorial. He turned around, his dark eyes falling heavily upon the stage ahead of him.
Jack held back a disgusted groan when he found himself staring at the hanging bodies of the people he recalled hearing about in one of Diane McClintock's audio diaries. The public executions had been one of the main reasons that she had turned against Ryan, if he remembered correctly. Looking at the lifeless face of a boy who couldn't have been more than seventeen years old, he felt his guilt over what had happened in Ryan's office dissipate considerably.
Andrew Ryan was a murdering scumbag.