Chapter Summary: The only thing we can do is our best.
CW: suicidal ideation.
Rapture, New Year's Eve 1958
Delgado hesitated before the shop window, thinking back on how it had been to have a shop of his own. How hard he'd worked to keep it presentable, how clean he'd kept the floors, how quickly he'd gone out there with a rag and bucket, should the slightest smudge appear on the window. How proud he'd been, to have a place of his own, for the short time it had lasted. He had to assume that this shop owner felt the same. And yet…
Behind the window, there were hypodermic needles on velvet pillows and vials of plasmids presented as though they were bottles of luxury liquor. The sight of them aroused a rage in him that words could not have contained.
"Hey", Louie said, reaching for the pipe in his hands. "If you ain't gonna - whoa!"
He jumped when Delgado let out an eardrum shattering whoop and smashed the shop's window in. The shards of flying glass caught the color of the neon lights as they soared, in the nigh-magical instant before gravity took over. Then time resumed, it seemed, at twice the speed. The alarm from within was screeching loud enough to alert the entire neighborhood and Delgado was suddenly seized with terror at the thought of getting caught here, of all places, after everything they'd been through. The pipe slipped from his sweaty, trembling hands and heedless of the broken glass or the points of the needles he was stuffing in his pockets, he fell upon whatever was closest to him. The others followed suit, stuffing things in their pockets and down their shirts, tearing apart the display like a pack of hyenas devouring an antelope. He almost didn't hear the whirring of the fast-approaching robot.
"Heads up!" Jesenski screamed, once again proving his salt as a lookout.
Delgado hit the deck, his hands over his head. A spray of bullets crashed through what remained of the shop window above him. The thought that the next volley wasn't going to miss flashed across his mind and then-
Nothing - save for the crackle of electricity and the thud of something heavy hitting pavement. And Louie screaming in perfect harmony with the alarm.
"Lou!" he yelled, scrambling to his knees, his head spinning when he sat up too fast. "Are you"-
Louie's arm was covered in blood. Delgado couldn't see his face through the welding mask he'd grabbed some ways back. Before he could get another word out, he shoved Delgado to the side, grabbed the pipe he'd dropped and - his screaming unabated - took off running at the smoking box that had just tried to kill them.
Louie smashed the fallen robot with the pipe over and over again, snapping off the helicopter blades, shattering its lights, denting its metal body as though it were only aluminum foil beneath his blows. There was no way it was getting back up, but still he beat it, his screaming having made the seamless transition from that of pain to rage at some point in the process.
Jesenski watched from a distance, his misshapen face pale, his brow creased with worry and fear. His hand, dangling at his side, was still sparking with electricity. Delgado met his eyes and swore he felt the same thought pass between them.
SportBoost was a hell of a thing. He was glad Louie was on their side.
"He-ey!" Jesenki said, turning off the plasmid with a flick of his wrist and glancing at something over his shoulder. "We gotta amscray, folks. Move! Louie! Snap out of it!"
"Uh...uh?" Louie said, looking at the pipe in his hand as though he'd never seen it in his life.
Delgado paused to help Naledi off the floor. She took his hand, smiled up at him with her crooked lips, then stuck the party blower she'd picked up from a prison guard breakroom in her mouth and blew. The paper tube struck the end of his nose. He made what must have been a funny face and she dashed away, laughing madly.
Delgado laughed just as madly as he charged after her. He whooped and hollered for the sheer joy of hearing his voice echo back at him. He smiled at nothing but the wind in his hair and the feeling of pavement flying beneath his feet.
"Whew!" he said, panting and sweaty as he collapsed onto a metro system bench. When he closed his eyes, he could see spots. "Can't do that again."
He had no idea how she managed it, but Naledi blew what was clearly a worried note at him. It set him chuckling all over again.
A few minutes later, Louie and a harried-looking Jesenski stumbled into the station. Louie had a rumpled shirt hanging over his arm that was marginally less bloody than the one he was wearing. Without a word, he set his pipe aside, sat on the ground, peeled off his old one and began ripping it into strips to bandage his bloodied arm. When he was dressed, his makeshift bandages hidden under his sleeve, it looked as though nothing at all had happened. Besides whatever had put the other bloodstains on the new shirt. With Louie, you got used to not asking.
Delgado consoled himself by steadfastly believing that whatever bastard had gotten on the wrong end of Louie's pipe probably deserved it. From what he'd seen, they were all bastards up here. Could not knowing about the prison possibly absolve them of what they'd built on the back of it? He wasn't sure. Philosophy had never been his strong suit. Besides, he needed to keep his head on more practical things tonight.
"Hey", Naledi said, nudging him with her elbow. "What'd you get?" She'd unzipped the collar of her jumpsuit a few inches and was pulling out what appeared to be an entire foil-wrapped foot long sub.
"Oh! Right..." Delgado said, jumping back to attention.
"Yeah!" Jesenski added, gesturing to the growing pool of supplies on the metro station floor. "Pony up, comrade."
"Hang on, lemme see…" he mumbled, reaching into his pocket. "Fuck!"
He jerked his hand out, sucked the bead of blood off the tip of his finger and tried again with the proper caution due to a pocket full of hypodermic needles.
A train with seaweed caught in its grille pulled into the station while they were divvying up the goods and disgorged a handful of wary looking people. They gave the group a wide berth, but none of them seemed to be in a rush to report their presence to the stationmaster.
"We'll be sittin' ducks for twenty more minutes." Naledi warned in a low voice, eyeing the doors of the train.
"I know." Jesenski whispered. "But not without her."
"And if she don't show?" Louie said huffily, his voice muffled behind his mask.
"Fellas, she's got the map." Delgado argued, with a nervous smile. "She'll make it. Now, are we gonna redistribute that sandwich or what?"
The doors slid shut and the train left the station. Jesenski messily carved up the sandwich with his pocket knife and handed the portions around. It was smushed and a little warmer than Delgado would have liked, but the lettuce was still crisp and the tomatoes, fresh. It tasted all the better for being the first thing he'd eaten in a long time in complete freedom, outside the confines of Persephone.
"Whosh Atlass?" Jesenski said, his mouth still full of sandwich as he pointed at something behind Delgado.
Delgado popped the last bite into his mouth and turned around to see what it was. Behind him was a poster that someone had tried and failed to tear off the wall. The only thing on it was the question WHO IS ATLAS? He'd seen a few of its like during their dash through the city. But there were so many odd things he'd seen tonight that a cryptic poster hardly qualified as a thing worth thinking about. He swallowed and turned back around.
"The hell ya askin' me for?" he said, balling up the wad of foil in his hand and tossing it at Jesenski. It bounced off his head satisfyingly. Louie sniggered.
"A telly show?" Naledi offered, shrugging.
"Eh." Delgado answered. "Makes as much sense as anything."
"Hokay!" Jesenski said, once the sandwich was gone. "I'm counting one EVE hypo for each of us. We've got two med hypos left after Louie didn't"-
Louie grunted ominous from behind the mask he'd lowered the second he'd finished eating.
"Er, made use of one." he finished, diplomatically. "So what I'm thinkin' is - Doc!"
Delgado's glance shot over to the direction he was beaming in and his own expression followed suit.
"Doc!" Jesenski called out under his breath, waving subtly to get her attention. "Over here!"
Lamb caught the hint and looking this way and that, her hand in her bag, she strolled over with far too obvious caution. It was jarring to see her under the full fluorescent lights of the station, so far from the cocoon in which they'd spun their plans. Out here, she seemed smaller, somehow. More vulnerable. More human.
Then again, she wasn't the one who could make their pursuers turn around and go right on back where they'd come from, now was she?
"Take a load off, Doc." Delgado said, hopping to his feet and offering her his seat when she approached. "There's a couple minutes left before we bail."
She shifted her bag to her lap and half-collapsed onto the bench with much less grace than he'd ever seen her display. Delgado smiled as the locket - hanging at last in its rightful place around her neck - caught the lights overhead as she went down.
She was human. Not some distant legend of a leader who only lived in stories or on the other end of a news feed, but flesh and blood. A person who had lost as much as any of them and had labored just as hard to get it back for all of them.
Tonight, they were paying her back for all she'd done.
"Pep bar?" Delgado asked, patting his back pocket to be sure it was still there before pulling it out. "You're...uh, you're looking a little peaky, Doc."
It must have broken in half when he sat on it and the wrapper was torn. He was slightly embarrassed to offer such a sad piece of nourishment to another person, let alone her, who deserved so much better. To his great relief, she smiled at him and took it from his outstretched hand anyway.
"Thank you, Renato." she said, taking her hand out of the bag to rip it open along the tear that was already there.
Delgado leaned against the patch of wall beside her and stuck his hands in his needle-free pockets.
"We'll find her." he said, in what he hoped was a reassuring tone. "You can count on that."
She smiled at him again, her mouth full of pep bar.
"Anyhow, what I was thinkin'", Jesenski continued. "Is that Lamb gets one of the med hypos and we roshambo for the other. All in favor, say"-
"Do we have any ADAM?" Louie cut in, his mask unreadable, but his body language quite clear.
Jesenski gulped on air. A bead of sweat trickled down his forehead and through his scraggly eyebrow.
"Yes, yes, we've got ADAM." he said quickly, pulling a hypo out of the pile and offering it to him. "Here. All yours. But the next one's Delgado's. Got it?"
Louie was already jabbing it into his arm by the time he reached the ultimatum bit and thus, completely ignored the question. A groan of pure bliss escaped from beneath the mask and Delgado glared at him with a hatred surpassing that which he'd felt at the shop window. Snapping himself out of it was almost a physical effort. He closed his eyes for a moment and told himself that there'd be plenty more shop windows to smash before the night was up.
Louie was too preoccupied to bother participating in the contest for the last med hypo. Between the three of them, Naledi won handily. She grinned when her scissors nipped at his paper and Delgado had to admit, he didn't feel too bad about that loss.
There was a rumbling on the tracks by the time they had finished packing up. In the midst of the hustle to appear as presentable as a pack of pipe-wielding convicts can be, Jesenski tugged Delgado to the side.
"Here." he said, covertly pressing another hypo into the palm of his hand. "It's a spare Electro Bolt. I was gonna pass it along to a chum back in the basement, but...it's yours now. Fair?"
"Huh." Delgado said, glancing at the cartoony lightning bolts on the label before tucking it into his pocket. "Always did want to try that."
Another memory surfaced at the mention of the name, but by the time the train rolled into the station, he'd put it out of his head.
*.*.*
The train window was covered with handprints and greasy smears, but the distant riot of light from the ritzier parts of the city shone through regardless. Delgado stared out through the depths, his body swaying gently with the motion of the train, his mind alive with imaginings of the parties that must be going on out there tonight.
He smiled to himself at the thought that no matter how grand the venue or pricey the hors d'oeuvres, none of it likely compared to the shindig currently erupting in the deepest depths of Persephone. He hoped the kitchen wouldn't be too thoroughly destroyed by the time they got back.
Part of him regretted missing it. Didn't he deserve a little celebration after all those months of plotting and planning and eaten notes that gave him indigestion like he wouldn't believe? Sure he did. But he also understood that that was the exact reason why it had to be tonight. Who'd notice one little girl snatched out from under their noses when all eyes were on the clock? With any luck, no one.
His one true regret was that they'd missed out on offing the Big Man himself. The takeover of Persephone had been coordinated to coincide with his end of the year inspection. Security always turned tighter than normal when he was around, but all that had meant was that the ones outside the Know had less of a reason to see it coming.
Surprisingly - or so he would have thought a year ago - it had been a largely nonviolent affair. There was nothing simpler for Lamb than getting people on her side. Grimes, a good chunk of the medical staff, the most dissatisfied among the guards and most astonishing of all, Weir himself - all of them had fallen under her sway and taken up their positions when she gave the order.
There had been pockets of resistance here and there, but the most significant fight had been between an attack squad high on smuggled EVE and long-smouldering rage, against Sinclair's honor guard. It was his goddamn freakish bodyguard that had ruined the whole thing. That creature had damn near killed a couple of their number before Louie cracked its helmet like a pinata. Or so he'd been bragging for days. The other ones present had insisted it was more of a group effort.
Delgado wasn't able to verify that one way or another. He'd been hot on Sinclair's heels while it was happening, hurling ball after ball of mind control mucus at the moving target of his back. He'd never wanted to kill anyone so badly in his life. For all his squeamishness, he would've taken the broken half of a pair of scissors in his pocket to his throat himself and enjoyed it.
But Sinclair had dodged. Or maybe it was his aim that was the matter. The things he remembered with greatest clarity was the feeling of his fist on the train window as it pulled out of the prison station and the hoarseness in his throat that had endured long after he'd stopped shouting at it.
But the last thing he'd seen - the thing that stuck in his memory strongest of all - was the smile on Sinclair's face through the window of the engineer's compartment. It had been practically beatific. Utterly devoid of malice or regret. When he closed his eyes, he saw it still. There was a cryptic bastard if ever he'd seen one.
He wished Harold could've been there to see it. But he'd long ago made it a point to not dwell on impossible wishes.
Carefully, he slid his hand into his pocket and touched the Electro Bolt hypo. He did a quick once-over of the occupants of the car.
There was no one in here but the ones he'd come with. Louie appeared to be napping. At least - he was stretched out on a bench, his legs splayed in the aisle and his chest rising and falling with the gentle rhythm characteristic of sleep. It was difficult to tell whether his eyes were actually closed behind his mask without going over there and looking down his eyehole, but it was a safe enough bet to say they were.
Naledi and Jesenski were deep in conversation. Jesenski was doing most of the talking. Every so often bits of what he was saying reached Delgado's ears over the sound of the wheels on the track. He was repeating the word "equity" quite a bit. Naledi was nodding incessantly at him, a big smile on her face. A surge of jealousy rose in Delgado at this, but he tamped it down as fast as it had come. Louie notwithstanding, it wasn't the time for ridiculous divisions to spring up between them. Besides, she could talk to whoever she damn well pleased. If they were ever to build a more just society, he had to move past such notions of ownership.
Lamb's back was to him. She clung to a pole and stood there stiffly, staring through the window to the car in front of them in silence, her other hand tight on the strap of her bag. He tried to think of something he could possibly say to her to help. If there was anything that could be said. All his mind dredged up was static. He supposed there wasn't much more he could do to put her at ease short of placing her daughter in her arms himself.
Relatively certain that no one was watching him, he pulled the hypo from his pocket, hooked his elbow around his own pole and jabbed the needle into the most conveniently placed existent needle-mark on his wrist. He suppressed the sound in his throat when a surge of electricity tingled from the roots of his hair to the tips of his toes. When the feeling had subsided, he examined the play of energy beneath his skin, thinking it strangely beautiful. Then, with a thought, he made it go away.
He felt somewhat better now. That shitty little headache that'd been behind his eyes for days was gone and he wasn't quite so upset at Naledi paying attention to someone other than him.
A drunk couple and a family of three climbed on at the next stop. The couple giggled on each other's shoulders, paying little attention to anyone outside their comfortable bubble. But the family eyed him like a rabid dog that was liable to pounce on their child at any second. When he looked back, he saw that Jesenski had pulled his mask over his face and that him and Naledi had fallen silent.
For the first time since he'd entered the Penthouse, he wished he'd grabbed something to cover his face with too. It wouldn't help, of course. He would still be what he was beneath it. Odds were he'd get even more stares strolling through Fort Frolic with a hockey mask like Jesenski's. But...if they didn't see what was beneath it, if they didn't know...it felt better, somehow.
He rested his eyes as the train chugged along so he wouldn't see them staring at him.
*.*.*
The bathysphere ride was a bit easier than the train had been. It was cramped with all five of them crammed inside and Louie's pipe had nowhere to go except Delgado's ribcage, but within its confines, they could talk freely. They could exist apart from the prying eyes that accused them with every glance. For a few minutes at least, the atmosphere was easy. Celebratory, even. There was talk of raiding a liquor shop on the way back, once they were done and both Lambs were safely on their way.
The one thing the bathysphere was indeed too small for was spreading out the map and making a definite plan. A few elegantly dressed bypassers at the bathysphere depot gave them the side eye when they got out, but Delgado resolutely ignored them and kept on heading towards a quieter spot than the one they were in.
As the one in the lead, he was the first to sight the body. He stopped in his tracks, words failing him. Naledi was halfway through chiding him for having stopped when she fell silent too.
She'd been a woman in an evening gown of pale gold fabric and satin opera gloves. Her skirt was splayed like the plumage of a downed bird. Her arms were akimbo, as though she hadn't even tried to catch herself as she fell. Whatever had happened, it must have been fast. The still-wet pool of blood around her head that seemed so much bigger than what should have fit in her small body certainly seemed to say so.
"Ah...Louie." Jesenski said, his tone conversational, his every word carefully chosen. "When you went off to the little boys' room back there, you didn't…possibly...happen to"-
"Do I look like I got a firearm, smartass?" Louie hissed, nudging the woman's head with his pipe to reveal the bullet hole in her brow and then roughly letting it fall back down. "The hell do you take me for? The fuck is wrong with you?"
He grabbed Jesenski by the front of his shirt.
"Hey, look", Jesenski said, a tremor creeping into his voice. "I didn't mean"-
"You find yourself a stiff and the first thing that pops into that dumbass dome of yours"-
Naledi looked at Delgado, her expression tight and made a motion with her head towards the two of them. Delgado made a pained face in return and lifted up the ball that had already formed in his hand.
"Calm yourselves." Lamb said, stepping between them and gently prying them apart, her eyes hidden behind the glint of light on her glasses. "Nobody is at fault. Nobody needs come to harm over this. This…"
She gestured to the corpse.
"Is the fruit of a flawed experiment ruined by its own hand. Do not allow yourselves to be dragged down alongside it. We are better than that. We must be better than that. Now, may we continue on our way before the ruling class does assign us guilt?"
Louie hung his head. Jesenski nodded sheepishly. Naledi and Delgado let out a collective sigh of relief. Delgado had already sucked the ball back into his hand before Lamb even turned around.
In the next hall over, there was no one, living or dead. It was silent but for the drip of water in the distance and the faint notes of music spilling out from the party down the hall.
Lamb knelt on the cold marble floor and smoothed the wrinkles out of her precious map. The four of them leaned in close as they studied it.
Delgado frowned, a sinking feeling in his stomach as he considered the sheer complexity that lay behind Rapture's walls. A wall was a wall, or so he'd gone on believing for most of his life. But that never had been true, had it? The map was a maze of air vents, trash chutes and maintenance tunnels. There was an even more mind boggling tangle of passages labeled "Gatherer's Vents." Every single system overlapped with one another in some way. Where one ended, another was already halfway through. He imagined his curious boys clambering through such a maze at that age and cringed.
One part of the building had been circled in red grease pencil where, presumably, Lamb's inside man had told her to search. It narrowed things down but gave him little comfort. There were still so many uncomfortably tiny holes for a child to hide in.
"So…" Jesenski said, sitting up straighter, his face stern. "I'm thinkin'...we stick together. I'm not digging the idea of covering that much less ground. But..."
Louie grunted his displeasure.
"But if there's a Protector, it's gonna take all of us and I ain't up to risking it."
"Right." Delgado agreed, nodding his head wearily.
"Agreed." Naledi added.
"And...Doc," Jesenski went on, turning to her. "You good with hanging back a-ways? Staying in earshot, I mean, but not gettin' so close you risk the thing takin' a shine to you. You're probably aching to get a glimpse of your little girl, but…"
Lamb put her hand on top of his and gave him that faint, beneficent smile of hers.
"I have faith in you."
She turned to the rest of the group.
"All of you. I trust that you will care for my child as I would, in my absence. And I thank you again for your...sacrifice. For your generosity. It…"
Something changed in her eyes, though the expression on her face remained serene.
"It is a quality I had begun to fear extinct from the human species. That ones such as you still exist...it means more to me than I am able to express. Thank you, all of you."
Jesenski cleared his throat. Louie grunted pleasantly. Naledi wiped away a tear. All Delgado could do was smile back at Lamb.
"Well…" he said, standing up and stretching his back. "We ain't getting any younger, are we?"
*.*.*
She ran right into their arms. It was like a miracle.
For a moment that felt like it lasted far longer than that, the four of them stood there, open-mouthed in a loose circle around her in the emptiness of the hallway, some singer's crooning from the soiree above providing a soundtrack that no one had asked for. It was like looking at the picture in Lamb's locket through a warped lens. The colors were off, there was a wrongness about the way the light hit her eyes, but even so, it was her. It was undoubtedly her. She stared back at them, her forehead wrinkling with confusion, her placid expression on the verge of turning into one of disappointment.
Delgado took a step forward, hardly daring to breathe. His first impulse was to take it slow, to refrain from startling her, to sweet-talk his way into her confidence, if possible. No need to resort to violence right off the bat.
Then his eyes darted to the oversized syringe in her hand and his stomach clenched with a hunger deeper than that for food.
After, he told himself firmly. After we're away and the threat's long gone. Just a little longer until-
Louie lunged.
The girl let loose an ear-splitting scream.
"Get the ADAM!" Louie bellowed, making a clumsy swipe for the syringe.
It all crumbled to dust in an instant - the hope that they could make something better, that there could ever be a society not ruled by the strongest fist or the greediest hand, that they would ever be free of the need to use violence.
He heard Naledi coo "Come with us, little girl!" and his memory went blank.
When he came to, the syringe was in his hand and the girl was on the ground, looking up at him with watery eyes.
"I'm…" he said softly, looking at the syringe and then back at her, "Sor"-
A CRASH rocked the ground beneath his feet, coupled with a crunchy squelch that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He tore his eyes away from the girl to see-
That Jesenski was gone as though he had never been there, crushed to pulp beneath the foot of the creature that had leaped from the staircase above, his unfired gun still clenched in his motionless hand.
The Protector stood atop his body, its visor glowing with a pale red light.
He hated Louie. He hated himself. He hated how this place constantly put him and all the people he cared about in situations that no one should have to endure.
But the most visceral, immediate, symbol-of-everything-that-is-wrong-with-this-city target of his hate was that thing. That, he could do something about. That, he could teach the meaning of pain.
"You want some, big guy?" he taunted, as he jabbed his arm with the syringe and pushed the plunger, "You wanna dance, buddy?"
It spun its drill like it wanted to go and lurched forward.
The syringe fell from Delgado's hand. An unnatural calm overtook him as the ADAM circulated through his blood. He stood his ground, Louie and Naledi standing firm behind him.
For Jesenski, he thought. For Lamb. For Harold. For every single thing this goddamn place takes.
"Then fucking DANCENOW, his brain screamed to his frozen body, NOW, BEFORE-
Naledi dashed in front of him, pipe in hand, her teeth bared.
It bashed her away as though she were nothing. Her scream was cut off abruptly as she hit the floor.
For a moment, Delgado was hiding behind that barricade again, paralyzed with fear. Powerless to stop it from happening again.
"Get out of here, freak!" he screamed, uselessly, as it crashed into him with the force of a rail car, knocking him to the ground.
It loomed over him like a mountain, nothing at all in the featureless face of its helmet. He heard the whirr of its drill and-
The impact of it shook the floor beneath him as he rolled, narrowly avoiding the same fate as Louie. He remembered that he wasn't powerless. Not this time.
The ball was in his hand faster than thought.
He looked the thing in its foggy visor and flung it with all his might.
*.*.*
The adrenaline was fading fast. Delgado's body was somehow both unbearably heavy and light enough that the slightest gust of climate-controlled air from the nearest vent would blow him away like a dandelion puff. The creature loomed, motionless above him, its drill inches above his chest. Its visor glowed a cool, placid green.
"Move it." he ordered the thing, waving his hand in a shooing motion. He grimaced when the movement sent a jolt of pain stabbing down his side.
To his immense relief, it backed up a step and lowered its drill. Gritting his teeth as he fought through what was in all likelihood at least one broken rib, he hauled himself to his feet and staggered over to where Naledi had fallen.
"Nal"- he cried out, before the other half of her name died in his throat.
Her eyes were as glassy as a porcelain doll's. Her neck was bent in a direction that the necks of living people probably didn't bend. No one would have needed a mirror to see that she wasn't breathing. The spare med hypo, unused, poked out of her left breast pocket.
The heaviness winning out after all, Delgado fell to his knees beside her, his bottom lip trembling. It felt like the whole world was rushing past at dizzying speed and here he was, a boulder on the streambed of time, unable to free himself from this single, endless moment.
The spell was broken when movement caught the corner of his eye. He sucked in his breath when he saw that Lamb's girl hadn't run for the hills after what he'd done to her. Her forehead creased with worry, she crept closer to her blood-soaked monster, reaching out to it with her tiny, off-color hand. She was making that face he'd seen lost children make in a grocery store when they were on the verge of figuring out that the strange woman they'd followed wasn't their mother after all.
Lamb peeked out of her hiding place. Delgado almost cried at seeing somebody still standing, at the realization that all of it hadn't been for nothing. Her eyes darted to her daughter, then to the creature standing over her.
"It's...alright." Delgado called out, in a tone devoid of conviction, the words on his tongue as heavy as the flesh on his bones. He closed his eyes and silently beamed another command into whatever passed for that thing's skull. "Do whatever the hell you wanna do to it. It'll listen to you. I don't..."
He glanced down at Naledi's empty eyes once more.
"...give a fuck." he finished softly.
Lamb stepped into the light. For a moment, she stood at the top of the stairs, regarding the creature with that distant look of pity she reserved for the inmates who were too far gone to help. Then her expression went cold, her back stiffened and she marched down the stairs with an imperiousness befitting a queen.
"There we are." she said crisply, reaching out for her daughter, "He's perfectly safe now."
The girl made a move to get away from her. With more roughness than was perhaps necessary, she snatched her by the back of her dress and dragged her behind her. The girl looked at her with real fright, her eyes darting frantically between mother and protector, whatever precarious balance of impulses that were knocking around in her brain now thoroughly confused.
As though I'm one to talk about roughness, Delgado thought glumly.
Lamb gave the creature a hard look.
"This is not your daughter." she intoned, her voice like the edge of a knife. "Do you understand?"
He had to admit, when he'd told her to "do whatever the hell you want to do with it", "have a conversation" had not been among the options he thought that entailed.
Whispering an apology to Naledi, he pulled the hypo out of her pocket and jabbed it into his own leg. The relief was immediate. He closed his eyes and took a breath that didn't hurt quite as much as the last.
"Her name" Lamb went on faintly, from the edge of his perception, "is Eleanor and she…"
He opened his eyes and closed Naledi's by way of thanks. It was the only thing he could do. They'd have to leave her and the others behind if they were going to make it out of here before security rolled in. He felt a twinge of guilt at the thought of three more abandoned bodies in the hall, left to be trod upon by the uncaring party guests after the clock struck midnight.
"Now, kneel, please." Lamb said, her cool voice cutting into his thoughts.
Delgado perked up. The bizarre dressing-down appeared to be reaching an end. He mentally prepared himself to pack it up and get a move on. His mind flashed back to the route they'd taken to get here as he tried to chart out the safest way to the bathysphere depot. Perhaps it'd be better if they hiked to the next building over. Less chance of running into someone who'd seen them walking the halls earlier. Though all of it hinged on how much of a fuss the girl-
The floor shook beneath him and the thoughts were knocked from his head when the creature fell, as though its legs had been kicked from under it.
Jesus, Delgado thought.
The sound that Jesenski had made under its foot played through his head again and he immediately tried to purge it from memory.
"Remove your helmet." Lamb ordered, her tone unchanging.
Delgado watched with rapt attention. He'd seen what a dead one looked like once Louie had his way with it, but a living one? It was bound to be fascinating. There weren't a whole lot of folks around who could say they'd seen that. It was a cold consolation prize for everything else that'd gone wrong, but if anything at all could be scavenged from the wreck, he'd take it.
The creature undid the fastenings that held its canvas and metal facade together, its sausage-like fingers moving with a delicacy that they didn't look capable of. Air hissed from within when it released and a cloud of mist rose from the neck of the suit. The helmet fell from its hands with a dull thunk. Delgado squinted, impatient to peer through the mist before it dissipated.
When it did, he breathed in sharply.
There was a rushing in his ears that blocked out all other sounds.
Now, he saw Lamb mouth, as she reached into her bag. Take the pistol.
No, he argued with himself. No, no, no, no, no.
Place it against your head, her lips said.
It wasn't possible. There was nothing - nothing human about that face except -
The eyes.
He knew those eyes. He could not have forgotten them if he tried. And how he had tried.
His grip on the creature's mind was weakening. He could feel it fighting him, see its hand shaking as it strained against Lamb's order.
What if…he thought idly. What if I let it go?
Would it shoot her? Would it shoot him? Oh, if anyone deserved to be shot it was definitely, absolutely-
The sound of the shot echoed within the empty walls, mixing with the scream of a desperate child.
The creature slumped to the ground. The pressure in his mind dissipated like the mist that had spilled out of its helmet.
The girl screamed unabatedly, tears streaming down her face, her tiny fists beating at her mother as she tried to break free of her embrace. When she sank her teeth into Lamb's arm, Lamb made no reaction but to hold her closer. Her face was stony, her expression, unreadable.
The world was spinning and Delgado was falling endlessly down a hole that had no bottom. He struggled to his feet and staggered backwards, the only thought in his head that he could hold to Run, run, run.
His back hit wall. The music played on, not so much as skipping a beat. Voices murmured curiously above him.
"...hell was that?" one of them asked.
"Goddamn splicers…"
"Francis get back here, it's not - eugh!"
Delgado crashed into that one as he tore through the crowd at the top of the stairs. For a moment their eyes locked, the partygoer's wide and frightened through the holes of her feathered mask. Then he was bolting across blood-colored carpet, sucking in greedy mouthfuls of hazy air, eliciting cries of annoyance and dismay as he barreled through the people unlucky enough to be standing in his way.
A man grunted when he knocked into his glass of champagne with his shoulder. The liquid splashed down his shirt and fizzed on his skin. The glass rolled under his foot and nearly sent him falling on his face.
He hardly took notice of any of it.
When he found the door, he stumbled through it and didn't look back.
Rapture, 1968
What had once been a man lay in an alley as nameless as him, his tongue too shriveled to cry out for water, his legs as useless as the busted bulb in the streetlight he'd been staring up at for days. Had it been days? Had to have been. The artificial indoor twilight never changed, but surely he wouldn't be dreaming of how good one rusty drop of condensation would taste if it fell between his lips, had he only been lying here for hours.
It had been a careless slip on his part. He remembered that much. An empty can had rolled beneath his foot and down he'd gone. Or…
No, the wood of that balcony had been rotten. He could see it crumbling under his feet in his mind's eye as clear as day. An accident he'd been far too hungry to see coming.
But that didn't feel quite right either. Was he...had he been pushed? It felt slightly better to think that he'd been done in by an actively malicious force rather than clumsiness and blind chance. As though he were more important, somehow. That goddamn houdini...it'd been him. Had to be. Always popping off where he shouldn't be popping. He hoped he got a nice strain of salmonella from his bean stash.
It was all academic anyway. It didn't matter why or how he'd ended up in the one goddamn bone dry alleyway in the city with a dearth of feeling in his legs and far too much of it in his head. There was no one to help. No one who would help, even if they were within groaning distance. He was alone. He couldn't remember what it felt like to not be alone. Even when he was with people, he'd always been alone.
The only constant was thirst. Water - he could hear it flowing just outside his range of sight. When he turned his head, a puddle of it shimmered into existence just beyond his reach. He'd tried to scooch himself toward it at first, but whenever he gained an inch, it had backed up one inch further. Now, he was too tired to try. He suspected that had he the strength, it would still elude him.
And then there was the thirst that was deeper. Madder. The one that twisted his every thought, action and desire, whose want invaded his dreams every time he closed his eyes.
Even now, he thought bitterly, he'd have ADAM before water.
It hurt less to be asleep than it did to be awake.
He closed his eyes, pushed all other thoughts out of his mind and tried to remember what stars looked like.
*.*.*
It was the humming that woke him. Childish. Tuneless. Grating on nerves he didn't realize could be grated upon.
A yellow-eyed girl with a distant smile on her lips was peering down at him when he opened his eyes. The monster in him lunged forward, grabbed her by the throat, expertly slit her belly open with his pocket knife, reached in and...
It wasn't real. He blinked the last of the sleep out of his eyes and the realization that the body he was caged in was too weak to move settled into his bones like an old, familiar ache. He made do with laying there, silently fuming as she drew close enough to touch, but as far away as the moon as far as he was concerned in a practical sense.
He grimaced when she jabbed his belly with her syringe. It wasn't as painful as it was profoundly uncomfortable. He kept his silence as she wiggled it around inside him, having trouble getting through the layer of tumor that wrapped around his midsection. There was a lot of it to go through, after all. He couldn't remember a time when he'd been without it. Or a year he'd spent not watching it grow.
She gave it up and pulled the needle free. He let out the breath he'd been holding.
He wasn't prepared when she abruptly stabbed it straight through a shallower spot of the tumor and deep into his abdomen.
He whined softly, the sound barely loud enough to make it out of his throat. The girl jerked backwards, an expression of absolute terror contorting her childish features into something terrible, if only for the briefest of moments.
Then it shifted back to that vague, meaningless smile. She turned away as though nothing at all had happened and carried on, humming that infernal song at the exact point she'd left off.
The ground trembled beneath him as her protector followed close behind. He turned his head to catch a glimpse of its iron-shod feet passing by.
Despite knowing damn well that the vast majority of them were sensible enough to leave you be if you hadn't laid a hand on their girl, he felt a twinge of fear. All those times he'd tangled with the things, all the ones he'd had a hand in killing over the years - he hoped against hope that they didn't know, somehow. Did they feel such things as vengeance or kinship? He had no desire to find out.
His heart stopped when the creature did. The toes of its boots turned to face him.
He closed his eyes and played dead. It didn't require much acting. But still, it stayed rooted to its spot, the sound of its breathing raspy and inhuman. He could feel its gaze on him, lingering for what felt like hours.
What was it doing? Why couldn't it just leave him alone? He'd only given the girl a little scare, the stupid thing. And that was more her fault than his.
The thought that it might be kinder to end it on the tip of the creature's drill drifted, unbidden, through his mind. His imagination seized on the idea, conjuring gruesome images of every good-for-nothing he'd ever seen disemboweled for making the wrong move at the wrong time. If that was how it was going to be, fine. If the goddamn thing had it in its head to finish him off, he was ready for it.
Do it, you fuck. he thought, opening his eyes and twisting his chapped lips into a sneer. Finish the food on your plate. Don't you want to, tough guy? Or ain't you got the…
The toes of its boots turned away.
"No…" he croaked out, summoning all his strength to make a feeble grab at its retreating heels.
Its footsteps became a steady thump in the distance. He listened to it stomp through other alleyways, to the chatter of the girl guiding it along. When the noises faded away completely, he felt more alone than he'd thought it was possible to be.
He couldn't breathe. His chest was wracked with dry, heaving sobs. He was trembling all over. There was pain in having been so close to death and having it slip through his fingers. What was worse was the relief that it hadn't happened.
Coward, he thought to himself. Can't even face your own death with dignity, can you?
Stop it, a calmer voice argued back. You know that isn't true, dad.
Dad? he echoed, grasping at the edge of a memory that was almost clear.
What did you teach me to do when I'm afraid? it asked, from inside his head.
To…, he thought, digging through decades of fog. To find the beauty in the situation.
Right.
He felt a hand slip into his own.
It's going to be alright, dad.
Slowly, he steadied his breathing and released the tension that was holding him rigid.
He looked at the streetlight and the blank darkness of the ceiling above it for one last time.
When he closed his eyes, he saw stars stretching out in all directions.
Notes:
I originally started writing CBDR in the summer of 2017. At the time, I was incredibly burned out - not from writing, but from a number of other factors. It came out in my work, my relationships and quiet time. I found myself behaving in ways that I did not recognize and could not control. This story is very much based on that period of my life and was written as a sort of dissection of why and how things were allowed to get that bad. It was difficult at times to go back to the mindset I was in when I first plotted it out, but I'm glad that I've finally put it to rest.
And I still think it's hilarious that my idea for the short story conclusion amounted to "Y'know what? We're going to therapy." Keep an eye out for 'Making Up Leeway', an upcoming short story set after 'Delta's Heart', if you haven't read that yet!
Trivia:
- Delgado's theme song is Mumford and Son's 'Ditmas.' Devon's is Alan Walker's 'Faded.' I listened to them a lot while I was first writing the final chapters.
- In 1939, the height requirement for joining the U.S. Navy was five feet, though it was taken off the books once the war was underway. The average height for an American male born in 1920-ish was 5'6". Devon's 5'1" (like me! =D). Ken is closer to six feet. Yes, they do look adorable standing next to each other.
- Ken's last name comes from the Polish word for fox. Tryggvi means 'trustworthy'. Einar Herjólfsson is partially named after Bjarni Herjólfsson, who is believed to be the first European who sighted North America, but never got to set foot in it. Delgado's first name means 'reborn' and his last name is 'the thin man.' Devon's name begins with De, has five letters and a nebulous meaning of 'protector' which I was unable to verify outside of baby naming sites, but oh well, that's what it is now.
- The number of the hotel room Devon stays in is the publication date of the first game. His prisoner identification number is the publication date of the second game. Delgado's identification number is the date of New Year's Eve, 1958.
- Part of Delgado's crew in the epilogue are Bioshock 2 multiplayer characters. I kind of wanted to add Louie's obsession with Knuckles into the story, but I just couldn't find a good spot to add it in that wouldn't disrupt the flow of the end.
- There's a strong case for Devon being autistic and for a time, I considered making it canon (focusing so hard on a pet project that he doesn't really notice or care that there's people outside his door who can fling lightning around and missing the cues that would have warned him that Navarro was up to no good? dude). But between growing up with a parental figure who didn't take much notice of him and it being just as possible to read him differently, I decided against it. Read him however feels right to you!
- A while back, I got a comment on Delta's Heart in which the commenter referred to Devon as Devon rather than Delta. Now, because I'd plotted out CBDR before writing Delta's Heart, but finished Delta's Heart first, I wrote it to be a standalone story meant to be understandable without knowing what led up to it. So, I kept Devon's character purposefully vague and fully expected that readers would project their own Deltas onto him. I used his actual name once in the entire story. When this comment unexpectedly validated his existence as a human being with an identity outside that of the one that had been thrust on him, I was shocked by how happy that made me. So I turned around and put that energy back into CBDR, in the scenes in which Devon feels happiness at being referred to by his right name. Thanks, commenter! And thanks, everyone, for reading!