He was home.
Atlas felt that knowledge settle heavily into his bones. Standing there out there the front door, Rapture at his spine but rendered unimportant as he reveled in the relief that was home.
It was home because this was where his family was. Rapture was hell, but they were salvation. The only thing that mattered above all else, above revolution, above revenge – above himself. No matter what the lunatics in their fish tank said – Rapture could never be what they were. The city a pale imitation of paradise dressed up in marvelous lights could not hold a candle to them.
They were utopia.
With his hand pressed flat against the door Atlas knocked. How strange of him to knock he thought briefly but then just as quickly opened up the door, met with no lock or key and stepped inside. Ah, of course, he knocked to bring his personal welcoming comity running.
"Hey there slugger, where's my hug?" Atlas barely even got the words out before the child had their little arms wrapped around his legs.
He laughed, nearly stumbling back only to find himself at a loss for how small Patrick seemed. He supposed his son would always seem small to him even once he was an adult. A parent's curse and blessing. Still smiling he ruffled his child's hair with a cheeky smile, trying to ignore for a moment how truly young Patrick seemed.
Glancing up Atlas sought out Moira's figure but in looking away from their boy found himself at a loss. This was where home was but it looked nothing like the shelter that his home usually resided in.
The hallway leading to the rest of the room too clean, nicely furnished. No sign of Rapture's strain and cracks that came with the business of being a bottom dweller as opposed to Ryan's inner circle. The lights were warm and steady, not flickering on the verge of blinking out of existence. The air smelt of a freshly supper rather than the mold that began to creep in as Rapture sprung its leaks. Warm, welcoming and safe – not at all the marks of the little shabby rent rooms that Rapture's workmen could find.
No, this was wrong. They'd never had enough money for a place like this. Not in Mercury Suites. Atlas could not have hoped to provide such place for his family until the revolution tipped in their favour and Ryan's tyranny brought to an end. So how was it he stood in such a place now?
Blearily Atlas tired to look down to the child wrapped around his legs, tried to make out Patrick's face but the little mess of blonde curls obscured his sight. When he opened his mouth to call again for Moira the voice he tried to speak with was strangled out.
It mattered not as Moira stepped out into the hallway after her child and a small wave of relief hit Atlas. Moira always knew just what to say to chase away his concerns. She'd have the right words. But as his gaze traveled up from those well memorized hands were they rest, rubbing lower into her apron, to seek out equally familiar eyes – he was met with a blank void.
Jerking back Atlas felt his heart hammer into his chest, a shrill screaming entering his head and growing louder by the second as the faceless woman stepped towards him. Body language not threatening but rendered useless in calming the erratic rise and fall of his chest as he struggled to drag in a full breath again. The static became louder between his ears until Atlas was sure he couldn't have heard his own voice were he to speak.
Down around his legs the child he'd tried to find Patrick's face in looked upwards at him only to be met with that same empty space where his boy should have been. That static only grew louder, the arms around his legs tighter and the void where loved ones faces should be grew darker.
It matched the darkness he'd come from, that emptiness that-
It was death.
Atlas recognised it. Knew it and remembered. The sub, the explosion, the kid's best efforts in vain and Ryan's callous musings as his family burned.
The emptiness only grew larger and Atlas knew what this was. This hell. He'd gotten them killed, he'd gotten the only thing left in this sunken waste land killed because he hadn't put them first.
He'd told his lies, he'd run his revolution – he'd lost sight of the only thing that mattered.
The static became louder, drowned out the words he might have said. Still he tried to scream them, tried to reach out for the woman at the end of the hall, tried to conjure up his son's face in that darkness but there was nothing he could do as the sound grew louder. Thunderous as it drowned all else.
A screaming in his ears that left him deaf to all else, began to push at the insides of his mind until it ached, until it hurt so badly he thought perhaps death had come looking for it's lost soul again.
Then…a radio came blaring to life.
Atlas kicked upright, a sudden flurry of panicked motion as he had fallen into a light slumber without even realising it - only dragged back to consciousness with a sharp jolt as the familiar sound stuck him. Unused to hearing it from the other end.
Momentarily dazed Atlas pressed a hand to his head trying to slot all his thoughts and memories back in place both short and long term. He had only just managed to recall his run through the laboratory set up from a big daddy when the radio that had first jarred him back into the waking world made another sound.
This time language, a woman's calm and steely voice filtering through the fuzz of the shortwave radio's static.
"I recognize that vessel, and you...if there were ever a man who cheated death it would be you. Remarkable, this would mark the second time I have seen a dead man return long after his life had ended." The voice was slow, deliberate and in a way somehow more grating that Alex's shrill screaming.
Similarly, Atlas felt he knew this one also.
"Listen carefully, Rapture is now in my care, and you are a relic of her former days in ruin. Your return…presents a potential risk to the common good, one I'm afraid I cannot abide by. However, I do find myself at a loss for how you've come to be here now."
Atlas had just mustered the energy and will to right himself, feeling about as lively as death freshly warmed over with all the coherency of a morning drunk and none of the buzz that came with a bottle before hand. In short life was a cruel bitch.
Still the voice over the radio spoke, not needing his input. Atlas knew her sort, loved the sound of their own voice. Not because it was particularly nice but simply because they believed their own voice the only one with anything remotely interesting to say.
Funnily enough these voices all tended to say exactly the same things.
Groggily Atlas's gaze flicked to the radio fastened to the other side of the sphere. It felt like a lifetime ago he was the voice blaring out of Jack's radio, instructing him to grab what was supposedly the lifeline they both needed. Jack's way out, Atlas's way to his family. Hadn't that turned out just marvelously thus far?
Now the voice that came from the static was not that of a friend's and Atlas's mind finally put a name to the voice. "And you'd be…Lamb." He grit out, head still arching horribly as he vaguely tried to put memories to the name.
Sophia Lamb, a con-woman that bought into her own con – yeah he knew her. The nutjob had ended up on Ryan's shit list even faster than Atlas had.
This endeared her none to Atlas.
In the past there'd been a momentary spark of hope or admiration for the woman that stood up so readily and spoke Ryan into a corner. But that had been rapidly diminished by…something.
Atlas tried to pinpoint what it was. Perhaps it was her cultish approach to everything she touched, maybe the way she wiggled her way into people's minds in a way not unlike Ryan – or perhaps it was simply a little matter of how unlikeably pinched her face was in the center, as though all parts of her person were trying to find their way to a central point.
Not that the crow like woman seemed aware of how little her audience thought of her. "Eight years since the Atlas era ended, how have you returned now?" A pause, a thoughtful silence that Atlas did not fill with his own voice and then quieter still. "This…this bears consideration."
Bears consideration? Consideration?
Atlas practically leapt upright at the words, no more caring for Lamb's musing than he had Ryan's propaganda. "What do ya mean, eight years?" He demanded, snatching up the radio in a moment of thoughtless panic. Where he needed a response there was a beat of silence, prompting Atlas to squeeze the radio and shout. "Answer me, lady!"
"All that energy and not the slightest inclination of where to direct it. You are quite the lost soul, Atlas. Once that vessel has found itself a dwelling to break I shall certainly have some men help guide you through that confusion."
At this Atlas let out a sharp scoff, the sound void of any humour as he snarled back at the faceless woman. Correcting her terminology. "You mean to kill me."
Without so much as a hint of humanity Lamb responded in an agreeable tone. "Death is an eternal solution. You'll find your suffering ends along with it."
Atlas knew he was not a particularly cool-headed man, knew himself to have become far less patient since picking up the Atlas routine. But in that moment he wished dearly that he had the composure that Jack or even that loose screw Tenenbaum seemed able to keep no matter the stress of a moment. Because the second Lamb's disinterested words finished Atlas was growling threats into his side of the radio. "Right lady." He hissed hatefully. "Once I'm done with Ryan I'm going to deal with you. Wherever you're hauled up in Rapture I'm going to find you and drag you out of it. One way or another this city is getting rid of nutjobs like you. Even if I have to vent every single fucking one of you into the ocean myself!"
The crazy broad was entirely unfazed by his threats. "Extraordinary." Lamb murmured dryly, as though Atlas were some oddity she had trapped in a glass bowl and was in the process of jabbing at with a needle, just to see which pitch he'd wail at. "You truly don't have the slightest inkling to the absurd nature your current situation."
Then as though she were about to impart from great kindness onto him Lamb's voice returned its focus as she directed Atlas rather than simply musing on his existence to herself. "Allow me to disillusion you some, voice of the people. Your time ended eight years at the same moment Ryan's heart stopped beating."
In that moment Atlas was sure he felt his own follow suit.
A second of silence followed as Atlas failed to comprehend what had been said. The words all made sense but in that order, carrying with it that implication, they meant nothing to him. "…what?" He whispered, the quiet breath of disbelief lost under the calm strength of Lamb's words.
"As I stated previously, you are but a relic of a great moment of failure. An unwanted memento from Rapture's depravities. Ryan no longer controls this city; it has been in my care since his passing and you unheard from in that time. It would be best if you returned quietly to your unmarked grave."
And like that she left him.
The radio fizzled out and wound down, leaving Atlas to the quiet of the sphere and the roaring behind his own ears that he could only assume was his mind trying to do the same after failing to process what had just been placed onto it.
But for as little as he seemed to understand, Atlas couldn't seem to stop his head from spinning. Everything and nothing all at once flying through his mind, the only pieces of comprehensible thought he could pluck from the chaos inside of his skull a simple set of repeating, unrelenting thoughts.
Eight years. Ryan is dead. What happened? Where's the kid? Where's the kid? Where is his kid?
Over and over again until Atlas could not more keep his footing as he could a coherent thought process. Stumbling Atlas's hand snapped out to catch his balance against the glass screen between him and the depths of the ocean that the sphere so serenely passed through. It took a few deep, desperate gulps of air before Atlas was able to break through the string of frantic, barely intelligible thoughts with a simple one of his own.
Breathe. Focus, you are alive.
All else would follow.
Blearily Atlas lifted his head once the urge to vomit had gradually settled to a dull possibility in his gut as opposed to an nearing inevitability as bile burned at the back of his throat. For a moment the best he could manage was pressing it against the cool, smooth surface of the glass as he continued to suck in those careful breaths.
He was no use to anyone, least of all himself, half out of his mind. Atlas would adapt, he always did. He only needed a moment to find his bearings. Rapture did have a nasty habit of making chameleons of them all. Unfortunately most of their facades were unpleasant things, Atlas at least took some solace in thinking he'd tried to craft his own with the intent to do some good.
It had never surpassed being a mere intent it would seem.
Finally feeling calm enough to think straight Atlas began to push himself back away from the glass plane. The reflective surface only catching his eye by chance, however it held his stare long enough for Atlas to make sense of the shapes in the glass.
There in the hazy reflection Atlas saw his own image just as anyone should. However, there was a strange disconnect the moment he recognised those features as his own. It was his face but not in the way he remembered it.
Reaching up Atlas brushed his fingers across his cheek, the him in the mirror mimicked the action and under the pads of his calloused fingers Atlas found the flesh he felt matched the image in the stained glass. Where there should have been the scratch of his stubble, instead he met with something smooth, an upraised patch of flesh. Delicately his fingers traced it, watching his double following the motion. Down and down they followed the same path. They traced the pattern of scars he didn't recognise.
Slashed across his face was the worst of the marks but it seemed no part of his face had been entirely spared the scars. Across the right of his face his skin was torn, ragged, as though it had been shredded and desperately tried to seal itself back together. The efforts leaving his skin littered with stretched skin and discoloured patches of flesh.
With muted dread Atlas followed the marks down further, pressing in against his throat to find it worse than his face. With each passing moment it became worse.
No longer running for his life blindly in the dark Atlas had nothing but time to see what his eyes had failed to notice earlier. Slowly he pulled his collar aside, staring as his reflection did the same and revealed larger scars beneath. Had no part of his body been spared?
The large deformities lashed across his collar and down to his chest, he could no longer apply the word 'scar' to these vein like blemishes.
Mutation. It could only be called a mutation.
Too numb to register panic immediately Atlas's mind raced through images of splicers and he wondered for a split second if they had seen the beginnings of their eventual nightmarish figures in ways like this. Had they seen these deformities and been more starved for ADAM than they'd been for life? Had they been able to stare at their ugliness outside and find it no more off putting than the ugliness within?
Atlas couldn't say he empathized. "What the fuck happened to me?" He murmured, voice shaky and not at all the image of a revolutionary hero. But really the hero had been a façade to begin with hadn't it?
Maybe at the start he meant it, maybe he'd naively believed he could fight for them and not dirty his hands just as much as Ryan in the process.
He still smelt the smoke.
Gradually his eyes turned down to his hands, trailing up his arms and finding they too were not spared the horrors. Smaller, more difficult to notice without directly seeking them out, but sure enough the marks were there too. Stretching down towards his fingertips and growing thicker the further up his arm he looked.
Discoloured. Atlas found this strange.
He'd seen plenty of scars in his lifetime, some Rapture earned and some natural. The sort copped from an adventure gone wrong or a pub brawl becoming a little too violent. They varied, gouges in flesh, upraised pale lumps of flesh and simple faded slashes across the body – but the things he looked at now were nothing like those natural, life given marks. They were solid, large and bronze. Nothing about the sight natural, everything about it so clearly a Rapture given scar.
What had happened to him?
"Kid…" Atlas pressed a hand to his face, teeth grit as he tried to remember anything. Tried to conjure up some comfort that could come from simply knowing.
But there was nothing. Just a flash of blue and nothing following it, barely even anything preceding it.
Whatever had happened in the blank spaced of his memory, whatever had caused these disfigurements – could that have done something to Jack as well?
Exhaustion that he could never quite escape came creeping back in, seeping back into his bones until Atlas was left slumped against the glass. Wishing again that he had more control, wishing he had more time, better decisions – wishing for anything that might undo all the mistakes weighing on his shoulders.
Rapture was not a city of breaks however. Atlas was given only a few seconds to allow these newest confusions to sink in before the city dragged him back in.
It brought him back in with a sudden crack followed by the wailing of the sphere's mechanics and Atlas's legs being pulled out from under him as the vessel tipped off course and threw him along with it.
Cursing Atlas slammed hard against the side of the bathysphere's inner wall, not fortunate enough to be cushioned by Fontaine's overly luxurious interior as he struck nearer to the ceiling than the lounges. Thoughts of monstrous deformities, missing years and forgotten moments were abruptly shoved from Atlas's mind as he instead grappled with a more familiar thought.
Survive.
Once his body hit the ground again, the sphere still doing its damndest to upheave its occupant and throw him a second time as it rocked violently from side to side.
No longer an unsuspecting ragdoll, Atlas reached out the moment he was able to do so, grabbing hold of the controls with one hand and jamming his feet against the wall to balance in the same moment. The sphere remained tipped at this odd angle as he struggled to see what the little gem that had saved him back in Fontaine's labe could do besides potter along through the ocean.
Outside the vessel the thing that had originally caused it to tremor so violently and lead Atlas to mistake the cause for a projectile of some kind, shifted. What had struck him was no explosive or failure of the sphere's navigation system that left them rammed against a rock surface of the seabed terrain. No, what had hit them and thrown the entire bathysphere off its course not only clung to the outside of the structure but continued to move after the initial impact.
Confused for the split second it took to realise that the thing was not only moving but knowingly crawling along the outside of the bathysphere, Atlas was momentarily at a loss. Thoughts of Alex's gelatinous mass springing to mind with a cold shiver down his spine that sent the revolutionary grappling for the controls.
He needed to make anchorage, now.
Logic would have told him that the thing that struck them was too small to be Alex's grotesque visage but logic had nothing to do with the guttural fear that man experienced in the deep when met with something more well equipped to traverse the terrain. This was not his domain but the thing that continued to scuttle along the outer shell of the small pocket of safety he had, belonged out here in the deep. For the briefest moment Atlas looked away form the controls he frantically tried to pull into the closest possible port, to again meet with the glass shield between him and the rest of the watery grave beyond.
This time met not with his own unfamiliar face, but instead with something he knew a little better. Rapture's monsters.
Sickly pale flesh was the only thing his mind was able to properly register in that momentary glance. Perhaps it was not the limited time between looking and tearing his eyes away to the controls again, but rather Atlas's refusal to allow the sight of the thing's face to pervade his mind. For all the memories he could no longer access, he refused to retain the sight of the thing's cavernous maw that spilt up the entirety of its face, taking the space where human features should have been.
For Atlas did not for a single second refute this thing had once been human. Its identifying features long since gone, replaced with the elongated limbs and rippling flesh that flowed through the water, ragged ribbons of flesh that may have served some purpose under the sea but to the human eye only served to horrify.
He had seen it and somehow the thing beyond his sanctuary must have seen him. With no visible eyes it must have known there was something to kill inside of the machine it had latched itself to and Atlas knew now that the violent shakes and jerks of the bathysphere were the creatures hooks tearing at the metal shell and pulling it in different directions as it scuttled along the surface. It looked for weaknesses, sought out the way to unwrap the vessel so as to get to the flesh inside. It may have very well been whatever was left of the human inside that lead the creature to know it could get inside if it only found the weakest point.
Even if it could not get to him with its own claws, the creature would likely be just as satisfied with the knowledge he'd drown if the structure sprung a leak. Just to know he was dead.
That, Atlas thought somewhere behind the panic and desperate attempts to pull the sphere back onto some semblance of a course, was likely also attributable to the human left rotting inside the monster.
Having been thrown so far off course Atlas could only barely catch sight of Rapture's lights from the furthermost corner of the viewing screen. But they were still there and growing nearer, he needed only to keep the vessel from being pulled any further off course. The thing still had legs so perhaps there'd be a whole other set of problems once he reached the security of the city – but at least Atlas would have an opening to shoot the creature on his own turf rather than drown in it's domain.
The creature was silent. The underwater world not as chaotic in sound as the land was, but the hiss and scrape of metal as it continued to try and crawl its way inside left nothing to the imagination. The whole sphere shuddered again as the thing rammed itself against the surface, frustrated that its claws had not yet been able to penetrate the surface despite its best efforts.
It was this that caused Atlas to recall the first time he'd seen Jack. Spoken to him across the radio once that spider bitch had failed to get to him. The collective breath of relief they'd both breathed before beginning the long haul together. This thought was somehow a comfort. If the spider splicer couldn't rip its way into Jack's vessel then perhaps Atlas's own would hold against this thing in the water.
Just as Atlas allowed himself to believe as such the most horrendous grating sound tore through the bathysphere followed by a warning alarm wailing. Not so lucky then.
"For fuck sak- alright! Alright! You want to play it like that?" Atlas shouted over the alarms at the creature that surely could no more here him than it could have understood his words. But Atlas had reached a point of desperation that made him almost as spiteful as it did manic.
The beastie wanted to slug it out? Fine by him – one way or another one of them was kicking the bucket tonight. He had the entire sphere under his direct control, courtesy of Fontaine's every effort to fuck Ryan over, and he was just dying to take it for a spine.
No sooner than that borderline suicidal thought occurred to him Atlas wrenched the controls directly to his left, following the last clear place he could pin the creature at and took the whole vessel careening off out of the Rapture lit path.
If there was a word to describe the flurry of scratching from beyond the internal space of the sphere – it was panic. Panic with an equal level of confusion as the easy prey suddenly jerked off course and the creature was forced to reevaluate the situation. It clearly did not do so speedily enough however as Atlas, monster and all met with the unyielding force of a seabed rock face.
More alarms went screaming. Atlas's brain rattled within his own skull as the whole sphere shook violently under the force with which they'd struck the solid surface. But most importantly, the creature outside wailed. It could make sound. It was a terrible, bone chilling sound. Atlas had heard whale calls, one tended to catch the odd deep sea creature's low whining calls that were mimicked very closely by the big daddies – but this was entirely different. The treble and wailing quality the same but the pitch and reverberations entirely different, too loud. Deafeningly so in terms of the underwater world. Atlas was sure every creature on the ocean floor had heard its shrieking.
And there was blood. Black as it wafted through the water and filled the limited view Atlas had. It bled and Atlas sneered.
The sphere too was screaming at him, protesting the abuse to its mechanics and no doubt only hanging on by a thin thread, but it had not yet sprung a leak and when Atlas pulled the controls testingly in the opposite direction it followed. Sluggishly and damaged, but still it moved to his command.
He wasn't dead yet. Unfortunately neither was the monster.
Atlas could feel its weight against the controls, felt how it still clung and clawed at the transport but no longer seemed able to slam against the sphere at it as it had before. Still it bleed and wailed. The sound while disarming, causing the hairs on his neck to stand on end, was comforting in a way. It was injured and a small vicious part of Atlas took nothing but satisfaction in that fact.
Then its clawing began anew. Weaker than before but more feral and determined. Fueled by hurt and anger rather than the unspoken malevolence of all splicers. He almost empathized with it, after all he too wanted it dead just as badly. To say it was personal now an understatement.
Atlas did not think he could risk another hit like that. The sphere was barely sticking together as was. He had no choice but to try and make it to the city and hope the thing grew too weak from its wounds to do any real damage.
But as he'd already decided long before, hope was just not in his nature.
Even as the sphere fell back into the line of Rapture's lights and the city grew tall overhead the closer they got, Atlas expected any moment to feel the patter of water on his head. Expecting any second to be the moment the creature found the weakness it sought after.
"Come on…come on." Atlas hissed under his breath, passing between the first constructions of Rapture. So close to safety it felt all the crueler that he didn't truly believe he'd make it.
Then, for the first time in living memory, Rapture provided. The black blood that wafted out in a steady stream behind the sphere and the wounded beast must have smelt just the same as any other creature's blood.
Once in the water, it attracted sharks.
Atlas saw it. A sudden shot of grey through the water, a violent and short-lived struggle and then more black. The shark had taken one lethal strike to the wounded creature and with little to no care torn it apart. It had struck the creature from the bottom, always the one you couldn't see that took that killing bite out of your hide.
The last Atlas saw of his would be killer was part of its pale fleshy arm hanging out of the shark's jaws as it leisurely swam by, looping back past the sphere as it returned to the carcass of the kill.
It amused Atlas in a morbid sort of way that he'd seen the thing's death while it had failed to even notice until it was too late. And as the victor took to devouring it's spoils, Atlas was left panting and dazed on the bathysphere floor as slowly Rapture's, for once welcoming walls, came up to greet him home.
Just once he'd like Rapture to cut him some slack and allow him a small breather. But between the horror that had been Alex's new form, the monsters that infected the sea around their city as much as within it and this Lamb woman unloading onto him all manner of pleasantries – a break didn't seem to be on the table.
Wearily Atlas dragged in a shuddering breath, closed his eyes and tried to think of home. Tried to think of Moira and Patrick but with the memory of his nightmare still fresh on his mind he could no more take comfort in that than he could the brazen scars stretching across his arms.
All the while the broken sphere managed to make port, stilling as Rapture swallowed them back up. "Home sweet home." Atlas muttered bitterly under his breath. He couldn't say he missed it.
Another second taken to breathe and then finally Atlas was standing. No rest for the weary.