It was a fixer-upper that was for sure, but at least it was theirs. A decent home for a decent family living off a decent salary. The floors creaked with every step, the sea air drifted inside despite the windows, but it was theirs. The faucets leaked and the shower barely had any warm water but it was theirs. The walls were a dark wood but she brought in color with the drapes and the carpets and her own floral-patterned dresses. Her hair is done up in a bun as she dusts the years off the shelves and he can't help but think how lucky he is.
They had just bought the crib and it brought so much life to that empty room. He stood in the doorway gazing at the lone crib, illuminated by the sun seeping in through the window shades, and he could see the rest of his life in front of him. The sun was just poking over the horizon. Time to go to work. She was asleep in their bed and he was staring at the crib.
"Don't give me any guff this time around." He was saying. "I'm telling ya, this thing's gonna start leaking any second."
"John, you go collect the fish and the crabs, I'll worry about strapping you into the suit, all right?" Another man tells him, a man he knew once, but now he can't even remember the man's name.
He's climbing into the diving suit and it feels like a coffin on the boat. It's only in the water; in that deep and cold place does the suit become him. Only then does the metal bend to his skin and he can walk on the ocean floor down where no man has ever walked before. There it is calm and lonely but he likes it in his own way. Away from the bills and the money problems, from the commotion and chaos of everyone above the water. With the fish and the coral he finds peace in the silence and time to think of the life he's about to lead.
He remembers that day was the first time he'd ever heard of a city called "Rapture," by the whispers of the ship hands. They said they knew friends who were shipping out to build a place called Rapture.
And he thinks to himself his Rapture is home in her arms.
Sometimes the walls leaked, he noticed. It was a city surrounded by water, it made sense for the water to seep in now and again. He was staring up at the corner of the ceiling, watching the water stains seep in. Someone asked him a question; he doesn't remember what it was. They pull at his arm and inject something into his arm and he can't even bring himself to care anymore.
"Do you know what Plasmids they used on you?" Brigid Tenebaum asks.
His eyes flicker away from the water stain and he looks at Tenebaum as though he's seeing her for the first time.
"Jonathan?" She asks.
He looks up at her, knowing at his core that's his name.
"Can you speak? Let me know that you understand me?"
He opens his mouth and takes in a long, hard breath.
"Hello." He says to her.
She smiles. He likes it.
"Hello." She replies. "I'm Brigid Tenebaum."
"Oh. Right. I'm sorry. My memory's not what it used to be."
"That's quite all right. Do you think you could tell me what Plasmids they used with you?"
He thinks and shakes his head slowly. He can feel the Adam thirst coming back, it's in his bones, and he knows it.
"They never told us the names. But. I can. I have fire." He lifts his hands. "I have fire. Lightning. I…have ice. I'm stronger. They made me stronger."
But then his hands slip back down on the table and he stares at Tenebaum that is all he knows. He watches her write all this down and he starts to notice the cramped, white room they're seated in. He knows this is another lab, but he can't help it though, he let's his hope get to him.
"Are you here to save me?" He asks her.
She looks up, hiding shock. He looks at her, pleading with his deep and sunken eyes. Her silence answers him and he looks away.
"I'm sorry." She tells him. "There's no saving you now."
He nods and feels the creaking noise in the deep of his neck. The burning's coming back and he lets go of hope for the last time. His hands start shaking and he can't make them stop. He grips his hands together, grinding together the bone but all they do is shake harder. Tenebaum sees this and reaches for his fists. She puts his hand over his and he can't remember the last time he felt skin so soft and warm. He looks up.
"It's withdrawal. From the Adam." She says.
He keels over himself, holding his hands together. She steps away from her chair and kneels down so that he may see her.
"It's the only thing that makes the pain stop." He tells her. "Then I can sleep. But when I wake up it's happening again. Like an itch in the back of my brain. With a headache that I can't think through."
She stares at him with piercing eyes.
"I can help you with this." She tells him. "That is why you are here."
"More experiments."
"Yes. But you will receive all the Adam you need, and you will be able to gather more."
He laughs at her and shakes his head.
"That stuff's killing me."
"It's killing Rapture. So we must save it."
"We?"
To this she nods.
"You're about to become the soldier Rapture needs."
He shakes his head.
"I couldn't join the army. Flat feet."
They took him away then, to a bedroom with no windows, but he could see the water stains in the corner of the ceilings. They strapped his arms and legs to the bed, something he was more than familiar with. They started an IV in his arm and he felt the cold relaxation of the drug. It was beginning to feel so insincere. The nurses huddled around him attaching wires to his ribs and chest. Then one came and brushed the hair out of his eyes, where it fell off his head and onto her hands. He saw the fearful look in her eyes but he paid no attention. They punched wires into his scalp and he couldn't even feel it.
He was staring at the water stains when she crept into his view and held his shaking hands.
"Now we begin." She tells him. "Long this process will be."
"You've done this before, then." He says. "What happened to the other guys?"
She stares and he smiles at her. He lifts his hand with the triangle on it.
"Delta. I'm your fourth man."
Then he laughs at the fear in her face.
"It's all right. You wouldn't be the first person to kill me." He lays his head back down. "I was dead the moment I came here."
She waits a moment before lifting a familiar red needle into his view. His eyes widen and he knows what it is, he can practically smell it.
"Adam." She says and punches it into his veins.
The headache stops, his bones stop aching and his skin stops burning. And for a beautiful moment he remembers the sun and her face and he remembers what he used to feel like. His eyes shut and his body shivers as his genes relax and begin to heal. Tenebaum looks on a moment longer before turning and leaving the room, he doesn't even notice.
Suchong is there waiting for her on the other side of the one-way glass.
"Alexander's prepping one of the girls, should be ready when we're done here." Suchong told her.
She looked through the glass to see the thin figure of Johnny Topside squirm in the sheets of his hospital bed and against his restraints. He smiled from ear to ear and she felt sick to her stomach. The monitors beeped on, measuring heart rate, blood pressure, and the electrical pulses of his brain.
"You talk to this one good." Suchong says. "Loved that bit about becoming a soldier earlier." He laughs.
"They started shooting people in Apollo Square. Fort Frolic's been locked up by that actor." Tenebaum said.
"Crazy people running around for stupid reasons. Ryan and Fontaine will kill each other, watch."
"We can't let it get that bad. That's why we're here."
"You shouldn't care so much. You know they're all prisoners."
"Aren't we all?"
In a fever dream he didn't notice all the tubes filling with some sort of dark red liquid, he didn't notice the machines coming to life, he didn't notice how terribly quiet the room became. They knew he could shoot lightning from his hands but a genetic map revealed that he was not immune to electricity. Suddenly a large television screen lit up to life near the ceiling. The room darkened and he opened his eyes to the blinding white light. Then slowly an image began to appear.
The surface. Sun. Flowers. Trees. People.
A little girl.
Then it fades to the streets of Rapture.
And an electrical shock shoots through his head down to his toes causing him to seizure.
The images would shift again. Back to the girl and the sun. Far from the bottom of the ocean. Far from the war.
Then the shocks would return with the images of the bloody streets.
He doesn't know how long this continued. And like all things he had experienced in that terrible city, he even got used to this. The Adam in his blood healed what wounds he was receiving, his DNA, already in constant shift, tried to adapt. Eventually the pain dulled, the shocks were expected, he did not fight this. He knew if this would not kill him, something else would. And he wondered briefly as he stared at the image of the girl and the sun, would he care?
When this process had finished they filled his veins with Adam and Plasmids. He laid there, partly conscious, they told him it would be risky to put him on anesthesia, but the Adam helped with the pain. Suchong opened him up and moved around his organs, working alongside the Plasmids, which he could feel had begun to rearrange his insides. Strange, in that dream-like state, feeling such a thing. He could hear voices but couldn't make out the words. He could feel their needles and their blades, he saw the blood on the floor, but it all felt so far away, like it wasn't his body they were opening up, but someone else's. He remembers they moved his head to the side and in the corner of the room he saw the figure of Brigid Tenebaum.
He doesn't remember coming into this room. He thinks quickly, have I been in this room before. And he thinks quickly, I forget these days, have I been in this room before. He looked up to the corner of the ceiling and found no water stains and he felt comfort in his heart that was confirmation to him that he had not been there before. Then he thinks back and can't seem to recall how he came to be in that room.
He moves slightly off the floor, his back is swore so he knows he's been lying there for some time. He moves his arms, seeing open IV tubes sticking out from his wrists. He stands and stretches, his bones creaking as he does so. He feels cold suddenly and touches the top of his head; his hair's been shaved off. He lifts his shirt; remember the surgery to find long lines of stitches across his sides. He wonders for a moment why he feels no pain.
Then he sees her.
A little girl, like the one from the television, standing in the opposite corner. She is sickly looking, and her eyes seem to glow. But she stands there, looking so afraid. He stands still, not daring to move. She takes a step back, hitting the corner walls. She frowns and turns away from him.
He gets on one knee.
"Hello." He says to her.
She looks away.
"My name is…"
He trails off, a word appears in his head but he can't remember how to make their sound. She looks at him, expecting him to finish. He sees the word in his mind's eye and knows that's his name.
"My name is…John?"
She looks at him, confused.
"Are you…Are you all right? Are you hurt?"
She slowly shakes her head.
He sits down in his corner, staring at her.
"Do you have a name?"
She nods.
"What is it?"
"Eleanor."
She speaks so quietly.
"That's a beautiful name, Eleanor." He tells her. "Now, are you sure you're all right? The Doctors haven't harmed you?"
She shakes her head.
"You can tell me."
She shakes her head.
"Have they hurt you?" She asks.
"They've got me a little roughed up."
He smiles, and this makes her smile.
He can't believe what he's seeing. A little girl, here, in those laboratories. It was one thing to experiment on prisoners, on grown men and women, but the thing before him was just a child. There was no excuse; there was no war terrible enough to warrant this. She may not have admitted to being hurt but it was clear as day they had done something to her. The longer he sat there staring at her the more he grew enraged. That all this time he'd been spliced and experimented on, it wasn't enough. He had suffered all this time and it wasn't enough for the powers that be. They still had to resort to experimenting on children. He had given up hope for his own good, he had accepted the fact that he was going to die this way. He had lived his life, he was at peace with that. How could Rapture expect the same sacrifice from a child?
He felt a surge of pain inside his skull then. Like someone was stabbing his eyeball from inside his brain. He lurched and held his head, trying to keep it all in one peace.
Eleanor watched him for a moment before slowly walking over to him. He tries to hold the pain back, he tries to hide it, desperately not wanting to frighten her. But the stabbing worsens and it feels like his skull is splitting open. And she marches on towards him, fearless, like a the little soldier he was so sure they were forcing her to be. Just like him. He holds out his arm to her, he tries to stop her.
But she touches his hand, taking it into her own, and the pain is instantly gone.
He gasps at how cold she feels and how she takes away all that pain. He looks at her and she's tracing the triangle on the top of his hand. Suddenly, right after the pain, a calmness washes over him. He suddenly feels warm and relaxed, like everything was going to be okay, everything was going to be like this moment from now on. He stared at the little girl, holding his hand, and he remembers what this feels like. It feels like being loved.
That's when he decided he wasn't going to let this continue. It was easy for him to lay down and die alone. But he wasn't going to stand by and let them kill a little girl as well. He knew in his heart, he'd kill the whole world if he had to in order to save her from this place. He'd get her out of there. Together they'd escape the doctors and all their experiments.
And somewhere, far from that lonely white room, Suchong and Tenebaum watched on television sets.
"Pheromone implants seem to be working." Suchong notes. "Though he's having a much stronger reaction than she is. Ah, well. Nothing can be perfect."