Disclaimer: Bioshock isn't mine. Which is a shame because that would be awesome. Foster is mine.
Also I don't own the gramaphone, cigarettes or elevators.
My first fic. One day I'll look back on this and probably cry. But right now I love it.
Let us Ascend
Chapter One - Hope
So many people. That was the first thing, the press of grimy, crowded bodies that pushed against the senses before the noise. Not surprising, the noise was an omnipresent force in Rapture now, shouting, gunshots, screaming. Always, always screaming, wherever you went. But so many people in one place... The streets were always so empty, for all the noise, but here the people were so crowded that every movement pushed against skin and cheap fabrics.
May Foster saw the crowd before the elevator was even halfway down. When the glistening doors slid open she didn't even bother stepping out. She gripped her bag strap a little tighter, though. If nothing else, Rapture was paradise to opportunists, snatching a purse to the backdrop of a city descending into hell for the sake of a few bucks and a half-empty pack of cigarettes? Naturally. All part of the Great Chain.
The family she'd shared the too-small space with hesitated just a moment before pushing past her and into the throng. Within a second they could barely be distinguished from the rest of the throbbing, swearing mass. Another second and they were gone. May could almost understand their hope in the face of such odds; one of the three children had been a little girl of around seven.
But it was a hope she could not share. If nothing else, she was a realist. It was a well-honed skill for a woman who's income came from her own work, especially since that work did not involve removing any clothing at any point. Until she'd run out of money to spend on models and had to resort to a mirror and try not to catch her own eye. May was an artist, not of blood and cells like so many others here these days, but of paint and canvas.
She'd never been very good, but that didn't matter now. Before her was a melting pot of class, born rich, born poor, made-it-big and lost-it-all. Money wasn't important any more. Just survival.
And surviving was fast becoming a luxury none could afford.
For just one brief moment, she contemplated joining the crowd. Perhaps she would be one of the lucky ones... Perhaps (and the guilt in the thought did not sting as much as it might once have) she would survive while the rest of these people died. Safely floating away in the bathysphere she'd once come in on. She'd looked with awe unbelieving on Rapture that day. It was nothing compared to what she'd feel to see the sky again.
But the thought evaporated under the heat of innumerable desperate bodies. There would be no "lucky ones". Everyone before her, everyone she knew, the whole goddamned city, was going to die.
She was going to die. There was no way out.
There was no way out.
There was no way out.
And she was going to die.
She delicately tapped the golden button. The door slid shut and she resisted the urge to think of how the bars made her feel trapped, imprisoned in a sinking cage even as the elevator ascended.