Would appreciate some feedback. c:
Also, I don't own Bioshock and don't intend to financially profit from this.
Ocean moaned through the walls in Point Prometheus. It steamed through broken pipes and froze over hidden corners where half-formed creatures and catatonic splicers huddled. It dripped from the dank ceiling over people moving about in their jobs, some in coats, some purposeful. The floor in the Little Wonders Educational Facility was littered with playing blocks and potato chips, and experiments had to be put down in Optimized Eugenics before the unfinished telekinesis plasmid tore open another unfortunate intern. The long, low wail of a Big Daddy echoed off the blood strewn hallways, mingling with the sound of screaming.
Jack tilted his soft, fuzzy head back and tasted the air. His mouth felt thick. They'd been running tests on him all day with the promise of one of those cakes wrapped in a crinkly wrapper he liked so much if he sat still and did as he was told. No food until they finished, no water. There were even still electrodes taped to his skull, an emergency calling them away and leaving him there, legs kicking weakly against the table where he sat and arms uselessly folded in his lap. Alone and uncomfortably exposed save for a pair of briefs, absently running his fat fingers over countless injection sites. He was bored, surrounded by accustomed stimuli and not allowed to move.
His ears swiveled eagerly to the sound of naked feet slapping on the corridor his room looked out to, and he was only partially taken by surprise when a little figure smacked against the glass.
It was one of the…'little sisters' from the orphanage that they were always talking about, hiding around termite chewed beds with flea-bitten sheets and playing hide and seek. He saw them sometimes. But never this close, before.
The small girl, with her thin, stubby limbs and ruined dress, curled against the window, blocking out some of Jack's light. Her form started to tremble, heave, and the sound of her faint, high sobbing came through the plastic glass.
His body was heavy. Muscles had started to show under his skin where there hadn't been any three days before; bones stretched and lengthened him. There wasn't any way to creep over the two feet to knock and get her attention. But he hated the sight of her there, disrupting the empty, dusty echo of his mind. The area around him was largely bare, nothing he could toss. He tilted his head off to the side of his squashed neck and thought, while she continued to cry.
He twisted a little and grazed his arm around the cold metal of the desk, and brushed against a small chart. It would have to do. With no small effort, he palmed the sheet and crumpled it into a small ball. Her ears were sharp, and she twitched in a hyper energetic movement that only someone so small could have been capable of to the small thud the chart made against the glass.
When he waved, her mouth opened slightly in astonishment. Tear streaks left dark lines over her dirt covered cheeks, straight from the corners of her big grey eyes. Her thin hair trailed over her shoulders and slowly swayed with her hiccups as she squinted and peered into where he sat.
Not sure what else to do, Jack peeled up his lips with his fingers and stuck out his tongue, staring hard down at his nose. The motion almost exhausted his energy, but he kept himself still until his shoulders ached and started trembling. Eventually the hiccupping stopped, and he let himself fall to see a smile cracking over her face. It was an expression he had never seen before, but it did something in his stomach that made him smile too.
Then another child in bloodstained clothes with her hair in clumps let out a warrior's scream, and they both darted away from the misshapen boy behind the glass.
Jack could still hear the ocean outside the walls, even through the hazy throbbing of his battered brain. The IV stung, and his head felt hard. Little bits of damp fur still clung to his fingers, and he was already forgetting where it had come from, or why he had the chill of tears on his cheeks. The room was so dark that several times he considered that he could be unconscious, if it weren't for the dim ache in his muscles that kept him up.
Papa Suchong had said that if he stayed still while the new tonics were taking effect, he would give him…something. The reward was lost in the haze of his emptying mind, but he knew he wanted it.
It was probably best to relax while he could. Tomorrow they would probably make him clean up the training room. The bald man had shouted at him to let loose, and when he'd drowned the place in carnage Jack had been shouted at for doing exactly what he'd been instructed.
He twitched his fingers at the memory.
Would he be different after this? Every time they shot him full of injections his body changed. Last time he grew hair on his skull, the bangs slightly curling over his forehead and tickling his skin. Before that the fat had caved away from his cheeks, and his hearing sharpened until he spent an hour curled up on the floor with his hands over his ears. He'd learned to adjust to the screams and the roar of water through broken pipes since, but if he'd had a choice he would have sat out on that particular upgrade.
The thought almost spurred him, but he was too lethargic now to care. Faded images flipped through his brain at random, like it was another 'cognitive test' for him to run five times an hour, of people he didn't know but thought he might like to.
Was the reward a teddy bear? He remembered something soft and furry…
In his daze the slap of bare feet on a stained floor was familiar and completely unwelcome. A small fist pounded away at the glass window overlooking the Optimized Eugenics corridor; his window, his off-limits window. A low growl gurgled in his throat, a little, dark figure in the blurry corners of his eyes with a yellow glow on its face. Just a Sister, hacking away at his migraine.
But he'd never seen one this close and decided the interruption would be okay.
Slowly, he tilted his aching head until he could glance her way without straining his bloodshot eyes. There were streaks all over her unwashed face, and whenever she wiped her sallow arm over the blood there she made more.
She was novel, and he lay there while she bit her lips, smeared her grubby palms against the glass and looked at him. She was uncanny, and when she looked at him it was as though he was the most interesting thing in the whole world—small as their world was. But Jack had long since lost interest in himself, and didn't quite understand that minute smirk that crinkled her face.
Maybe she found the expression he made under the dull pain and lethargy to be amusingly dour. The girl slapped her slug-like tongue against the glass and turned her pale, swollen yellow eyes inward. Her face seemed to freeze this way while he stared unblinking, until gradually a small, withered smile made its way onto his haggard face at the ridiculous sight. She pulled back and started giggling at him, teeth in perfect little white rows. She made him retch, but he hummed and tapped a finger or two as a sort of wave.
He felt like the lump of gelatinous flesh and blood in the closed off plasmid testing room, every movement a bit of a struggle. Her energy as she did a little hop skip to get a better view of him made him a bit envious, and he pulled the corners of his mouth and his eyebrows into a glare like he'd seen the woman in the labcoat with tobacco stains on her teeth do whenever one of the "little ones" tried to ask her to read them a story. But the one outside his window just continued to smile at him and he felt like a freak.
Right then his bones shook with the dull clomping of leaden underwater boots and a low whale call. She turned in that hyper-energetic way that children, smaller human beings than him, were themselves only capable of. And he was completely forgotten.
The little girl skipped away in a filthy blue smock, hugging a pink teddy bear up to her neck and singing a tune about angels and sweets.