Sasha wasn't happy.
She knew that she should be happy, and that she could be happy, and even that she would be happy, if things were different. But there was no changing the circumstances, and with these circumstances she knew, in every part of her, no good would come.
That morning, she was sitting in the sun-warmed solarium, flipping with disinterest through a women's magazine. Her leg was nagging her, and with her free hand she rubbed the damaged kneecap through her skirt and thick bandages. Even though the atrium was warm and familiar, it felt chilly and lonely to her- far from home, even though she was home.
She sighed, closed the magazine, and with a huff slung it across the room. The paper fluttered like a broken bird before landing in the fountain with a muffled splash. Crossing her arms like a frustrated child, she gave a shrill call for Charles, who since she had arrived had pretended like she didn't exist. He didn't respond, irking her further; her brother didn't care at all about her! She could have fallen into the koi pond and he wouldn't have even noticed.
'Charrrreeellllss! Get your sorry toffet in here, you buffoon!" She screamed, growing very cross. Finally she heard the sound of loud, angry footsteps coming from the main building; Charles was taking his time, of course, as it took him several moments just to get across the parlor to the atrium door. When he opened the door, Sasha had a poisonous look ready to fire at him.
"What could it be, dear sister?" He asked, his voice gruff and twisted with sarcasm. "I can't think of a single thing Princess Sasha could possibly want."
The nerve! Sasha gave him a snarl, and if she could walk she would have smacked him hard, like she had done when they were children. What right did Charles have to treat her like this? After she had been gone for so long and been through so much, the least he owed her was a little decency.
"Hold your tongue." She hissed through her teeth. "You've no reason to act that way."
Charles didn't react. He only asked again: "What do you want, Sasha?"
For once, Sasha wished she still had her trusty Electro-Bolt; that would set her unruly brother straight. He was such a hassle to be around: no respect, no remorse, nothing to show that he had missed her at all. Had he missed her? She didn't even know. Although she didn't want to admit it, she had missed him- she had missed him terribly. The big, blue sea was so quiet and lonely, and it was only worse after the fall. Well... everything was much worse after the fall.
Yes, Sasha remembered. She remembered every minute and every second of her time in Rapture, right down to the moment that Frankenstein, Doctor Tenenbaum, had scooped her up and taken her into her care. It was a terrible burden, and she envied the others, who were too damaged mentally to go without major repair. With large chunks of ADAM infested brain matter corrected, they would not remember a thing, while she had only needed a few switches here and there turned off. Still worse was waking up on the surface world, sane, clean and lucid, only still in a Splicer's wretched body. Hours of painful surgery and Tenenbaum's gene therapy couldn't save her right leg, so she would never be rid of the... thing... the monstrous talon that her right foot had become- it wasn't even that. It had been more like a hoof.
"I'm not saying anything until you apologize, or tell me why you're being so awful to your sister. What on Earth did I do to you, Charles?" She said, turning away from him. She heard Charles make a sharp, frustrated sound.
"You know what, Sasha. You know exactly what." Charles growled. "Let's start with your going off to parts unknown without so much as a goodbye."
"It's too complicated to explain." She said. "I... I fell in love. It was a mistake."
The ugly lie sat heavy on Sasha's chest. She didn't have love in Rapture: that ended when her handsome young beau had destroyed himself with ADAM and liquor, leaving her alone in a world that was collapsing around her ears. While he was cooling in his grave or burning in Hell, which she wasn't sure, she had been very much alive, starving and freezing to death in Pauper's Drop. Every part of her cried out to tell this to Charles, and rub it in his smug little face, but she couldn't.
"Oh, my mistake, princess. All's forgiven now that I know you did this to yourself over a man." Charles huffed.
"You close your smart mouth!" Sasha shouted. "You have no idea what I went through!"
There was a silence. For a few seconds, the siblings just stared at each other hatefully, gathering their thoughts. Sasha didn't know what was going through her brother's head, but at the moment she didn't care. She had forgotten what she had called him in for, and now she wanted him out of her sight.
"Mother always said you'd end up wrong." Charles said. His eyes were narrow. "She told Father that she was ashamed of how spoilt you'd grown up to be. After you left, she was sure that you'd end up penniless and on the streets within a year, thinking you could have made it on your own."
Sasha's face reddened, and she fought the urge to raise up on her shaky legs and actually strike Charles. She did handle herself. In Rapture, her shrewdness and intelligence had fueled the business she and her new husband had started on their first day in the shining junk heap. It wasn't her fault that Ryan Industries bought them out, turning their labor and personnel firm into a front for illegal Plasmid testing. While he was out spending their savings on the same Plasmids that had put them out of business, she had been doing her best to keep the right to their flat.
She turned her wheelchair around, and refused to speak further. Eventually, Charles snorted loudly and stomped off, slamming the door to the solarium behind him.
He had no idea how much it hurt her. As soon as he was gone, his sister was in tears.
In Rapture, she had been normal. Everyone was in the same position: trying to survive and stay sane enough to form coherent thoughts. Now, here on the surface, she was totally alone. Not one hand reached out to take hers, and some even tried to strike her back down. Despite weeks of painful surgery and therapy, she was still the same ugly Splicer she had been then, and that made her a puzzle piece trapped in the wrong box. Everyone around her was a different shape, a different color, a different type. How merciful it would be to have her mind stripped of those horrible memories.
Sasha D'Angelique was not happy on the surface. Even though she had been delivered from Hell itself, she found herself longing to return.
###
"Oh Sasha! You haven't changed a bit since you left! You know, I was just talking about you to Marsha Wells last week..."
The voice of Marigold Arnold went on and on, chattering like a cuckoo about things Sasha hadn't even thought about once in the last twenty years: dinner parties, fundraisers, grandchildren-mundane, wonderful things that she could no longer relate to. Her old friend might as well have been talking about astrophysics.
"That's nice, Mari." Sasha said quietly. Her reply thrilled the younger woman even more, and she started in on another long, breathless string of babble. Not once had she asked about where her friend had been for the past two decades.
Marigold was a good person. Sasha didn't resent her for moving on, as she had always been distracted with all of her... distractions. Bored with the life of a socialite, Marigold busied herself with organizing all of the community's activities: block parties and the Fourth of July, fun things for other idle people looking for occupation to enjoy. Sasha wondered if Marigold herself ever enjoyed these things.
"When Charles told me you had run off, all those years ago, I had been shocked, truly shocked, Sasha." Mari went on. Now that she was acknowledging her disappearance, Sasha realized she had nothing to tell her. She couldn't say that she had been in a secret underwater city for twenty years and was a drug-razed shell of her former self! The book club would simply die.
"I was surprised too, Mari." Sasha said. "You don't count on these things happening."
She heard Mari gasp, spraying static into the phone. "Oh, why do you do these things, Sasha? You've always been the quiet one, always standing in the corner, making those kinds of remarks. Now you vanish to some jungle nation God-knows-where for twenty years and you're still about as outgoing as a hermit crab!"
"Well, I guess the jungle didn't do much for me." Sasha replied.
After enduring a few more tense minutes avoiding her old friend's questions, Sasha made a move to end their talk. Not before, however, Mari snuck in an invitation to her candlelight dinner party.
"We'll have a great time." She said. Her voice was between innocent excitement and frighteningly gleeful curiosity. "And bring Charles. You two both need to get out of the house more."
Mari knows, Sasha thought, that when she says 'we'll have a great time,' she means, 'if you don't come, I'll let slip a rumor about how you ran off to a faraway nation with a stranger,' which, admittedly, wasn't far from the truth.
"You know I'll be there, Mari."
The phone clicked as Mari hung up the phone, and Sasha was alone again.
Sighing, she put down the handset. For a few moments, she stared at her reflection in her vanity mirror. Against the finery of her bedroom, from the dark plush curtains to the shimmering jewelry still left on the end table from the day she left, her face was that much more hideous. For all she had been through to get home, the surgeries, Tenenbaum's "cure," all that useless therapy, she still saw the same awful creature in the mirror. Her plasticine nose and sunken eyes were that of a filthy Splicer pretending to be a human being.
A hand went to the bald spot on the back of her head, then traced a long, puffy scar that went from her left ear to the corner of her mouth. She remembered the man who gave her that scar; his smirk as he pulled his knife out of the waistband of his trousers and slid it across... and the whole time, he smiled.
So many horrible, twisted memories floated to the surface as she stared into her own light blue eyes in the mirror. The scorched face and single burning eye of a zip gun wielding maniac, the groaning of metal as a building collapsed, the smell of rotting flesh and pure suffering in Apollo Square, and the sounds of Splicers breaking into her flat, desperate for ADAM... and that man.
That cold-eyed, stiff walking man with the clear features and the calm expression-an expression that didn't falter even as he plowed through wave after wave of her people. A one-man army in a warm cream sweater that looked like it was knitted by his mother murdered hundreds of aggressive and innocent Splicers alike. Once, she had seen him shoot a young woman in the head while she sat prone, hugging a ball of dirty blankets to her chest screaming that it was her child.
Don't kill my baby. Please, please, don't kill my baby.
She put her head down on the counter. The pain in her deformed leg was intense, but she barely noticed it. Her whole life in Rapture was finally crashing back on top of her, the meager protection of the surface world's safety and sanity snapping like a high wire string. Down, down she fell into a black pool of fear and despair, almost feeling the drop in her stomach, as a trembling fit overtook her.
She didn't cry. As she was accustomed, she held in her tears by biting hard on her tongue; in Rapture, a crying woman is a vulnerable target too good to resist. That's how she got that scar.
Taking in a deep breath, she straightened. With purposeful hands, she took up her dusty old tubes of makeup and feverishly splattered it onto her wrinkled, cracked face. A fistful of powder made her pale as a ghost, while blush made her into a ghoulish clown. Her pace grew more panicked as she scribbled around her eyes and smeared on lipstick with trembling fingers. Finished, she stared, panting and breathless at her work. Her mental stability began to crumble as she locked eyes with the creature behind the cold wall of glass, and the only thing that caught her, stopped her, was remembering the night she had first lost sight of her mind.
It had been after a party. Her memory of it was dim and hazy, but she remembered humiliation. She remembered looking into a mirror and seeing this exact same hideous clown.
Sanity came back slowly. When Sasha realized what she had done, she could only shake her head and let out the breath she had been holding. Taking up her crutches, she hobbled into the bathroom to wash off her face. Fifteen minutes later, she returned with a towel draped over her shoulder.
She turned off the light and hauled herself into bed. Muted moonlight played across the room through the open window, casting onto the towel draped over that heinous mirror.
It would never be removed.
###
That night, Sasha had a dream.
Shadows spilled like ink over a gray, dusty garden. The ground was dry and cracked, and the trees stretched their knobby fingers to the white sun.
Sasha remembered this garden from her youth.
There was still a rusty swing set among the weeds, and even a tea table made of metal painted white (now chipping) sat between two overgrown willows. She was in England, at the house where she had been born. Built by hand by her French father and his friends from the Great War, the house should look new, but it doesn't. The paint is peeling, the roof is caving in, and every window is boarded up; it doesn't even really look like the house she remembered- now it was more like the house Charles lived in now, where she was staying, and the haunted house from the first film she had seen with her husband Sydney.
Suddenly the scenery shifted. In the hazy ether of dreaming, Sasha seemed to be staggering drunkenly through a slideshow of strange scenes: a sunlight forest, a hallway in Rapture, her room at Charles's house, and other places she had never been. Shadows, black as midnight, stalked her through the mist. They had burning red eyes and lanky limbs, and dressed in the strange clothes of surface people.
The last scene was a stage. A cool blue light filtered through tall windows; the chamber was in Rapture. Sasha didn't know where she was in the room- maybe somewhere on the floor in front of the stage, which reared up imposingly before her: its floor seemed to be miles above her.
A wicked black shape formed on the stage.
"What are you doing here?"
"How was the play? I heard about-"
"I love you, too."
Broken snips of sound blipped into the dream, fading in and out of the buzzing chaos around her. The black shape was drawing itself up, getting larger and larger. The dream became more vague and confused as the shadow swelled, and more black fog formed around Sasha and the stage.
"ALL YOUR FACES ARE MELTED!"
A horrendous roar broke through the black haze, and eight piercing lights cut through the darkness.
Blinking and gasping, Sasha woke up with a start. Sunlight was shining through the windows, warming her face, and the sounds of activity came up from the lower levels. For a few seconds, Sasha didn't know where she was. Rapture? Father's house in the country?
Then she heard Charles's voice. He was shouting, cursing someone for spilling something. Charles rarely cursed, as Father had always struck him when he did-he only spoiled his tongue when he had been drinking. Sasha didn't know how to feel when she realized she had driven her brother back to the bottle; pride, anger and remorse conflicted.
Dressing was slow and painful, as was limping down the stairs, made worse by her ill sleep. When she got to the first floor, Charles was waiting for her. His face was bitter and cross, his hair and clothes rumpled. As they stared each other down, Sasha bit her tongue not to comment on the smell of alcohol clinging to him.
"I fired Elsie." He said casually. "Asking questions. Can't have that, can we, sister?"
Elsie was a servant that had been in the service of the D'Angeliques since Sasha and Charles were children. She had read them to sleep and walked them to school, bandaged their scraped knees and mended their clothes, everything they needed while their parents were away. The older woman had a lilting accent and was thin as a sapling; the children often called her Mary Poppins.
"How could you do that?" Sasha shouted at him. "Have you gone totally mad, Charles?"
"She wanted to know where you'd been all this time." Charles said, his voice slow and calm. "Wouldn't accept the story you gave me about running off with a man to Africa and getting some jungle rotting disease."
"That's the truth." Sasha said. Her voice wavered, and her stomach dropped when she thought she saw Charles's eyes widen a bit. He mellowed, though, too sick from drink to see through the lie.
Snorting, Charles turned and stomped off like an angry child, slamming the door to the library behind him. What was his problem?
"Fool." Sasha spat. Gathering her crutches underneath her, she hobbled off to the other end of the house, wanting to be as far away from her idiot brother as she possibly could. She schemed through the long, tortuous walk: perhaps she could catch Elsie before she left and convince her to stay-they could talk it out-but it felt dangerous. Somehow, she was afraid she would accidentally reveal her secret to her trusted nanny.
In the breakfast nook, their other servant Clarence was making coffee. He moved slowly about the task, silently, just as Sasha remembered him. In a chair by the table, Elsie sat, staring into the whorls and grains of the antique surface for the last time.
"Elsie..." Sasha started. Her voice died away when the old woman barely moved at her name. Her eyes stayed locked in the grooves of the table.
"She doesn't want to talk." Clarence said. The normally quiet man sounded harsh. "Mr. D'Angelique made sure of that."
"Charles is being a spoiled child." Sasha said. Sitting, she placed a pockmarked hand on Elsie's, trying to shake out some sort of response; Elsie tensed, but stayed silent.
The moment stretched. Finally, after a minute, Elsie looked Sasha in the eyes.
"Something very strange is happening in this house, Miss Sasha." She said. "Your return has stirred up some old dust."
"I know." Sasha said, stuttering. Elsie had that sharp look in her eye that she had given them as children when they were telling a lie. Now there wasn't that sparkle of humor: only fear, anger and confusion.
Should she tell her? Of course not! Tenenbaum had told her little else except do not ever tell. As the only one who remembered Rapture, it was on her and her alone to protect Rapture's secret. Why? The stern, reprimanding look on Elsie's face made her think that it all wasn't worth it, and the truth had to come out. So what if the world finds out about Rapture? How could it hurt anything? Right now, her secret was hurting everyone around her.
It was almost painful to look the woman who had raised her in the stead of her self-indulgent mother in the eyes and lie to her.
"Sir tells me that you suffered from a rotting fever in the Congo." Elsie said, crossing her arms. "I don't want to be disrespectful, Miss Sasha, but I've found it hard to palate."
The air grew tense. Sasha bit hard on her lip; either she was going to break down and tell Elsie everything or she was going to explode. Those shadowy creatures whispered: if she told, she would be thought mad. Charles would have her put in an institution. She'd spend the rest of her life being poked and examined, her hideous parts drawn out and photographed by beady eyed flour beetles with long white coats and rough, rude hands.
"Let's go somewhere else." She blurted out. "A-and... I need to talk to you."
"Fine then, Miss Sasha." Elsie said. She turned to Clarence, and with a nod of his head he left the room. Looking back to Sasha, she said, "So you're saying that what you told Sir wasn't true?"
A trembling went up Sasha's twisted legs. The moment was coming too fast, faster than she could handle. She wasn't ready to tell someone yet; the wounds were too fresh, the horror to near. If she told anyone about Rapture, she feared it would rear up out of the Earth and swallow her up again.
"I have some things to say." She whimpered. Without another word, Elsie nodded and stood, taking Sasha's knobby hand and giving it a squeeze. For a moment, it felt like everything would be alright.
They left the breakfast nook, and Elsie said quietly that they could go to the quiet private park at the edge of the neighborhood. No one was ever there on Monday morning, and the peace and familiarity of the green was better than the tension of the D'Angelique manor. Shouldering on their coats, the two women started to leave.
"We're leaving." Sasha called out as they passed the double doors to the library. No response. Sighing, she pushed open the left heavy oak door and saw Charles sitting in with his feet up on the antique coffee table.
He was reading his newspaper, trying to ignore them; a huge red headline was splashed across the front page: NIGHT OF TERROR: String of Brutal Murders Shakes Chicago.
"Oh go on." He snorted. "See if I stop you from leaving my house."
Glaring, Sasha turned and slammed the door behind her.
For her charge's benefit, Elsie drove the car the short distance down the road to the park. All the way, she cast sideways glances at Sasha, watching her steely face as she stared darkly out the passenger window. She couldn't see the turmoil beneath the placid surface, but her instincts told her that the young woman was deeply, deeply troubled.
When they arrived at the park, clouds had started to gather. By the time they crossed the little stone bridge over the drainage trench, the morning sun was invisible behind thick gray clouds. As they sat down on the same bench overlooking the duck pond Sasha and her brother played around as children, one or two drops of rain had fallen.
A single white swan glided across the quivering water, and a one-legged duck hobbled along, a reminder of how toxic the pristine water had become over the years. Otherwise, they were totally alone.
"Well, Elsie, where do you want me to start?" Sasha asked. Her insides clenched when she realized how close she was to having to confess.
"At the beginning, I suppose." Elsie sighed. "Why did you leave us, Miss Sasha?"
Staring at her feet, Sasha waited almost a minute before responding. She was so afraid, but she had to get this heavy, slimy thing off her chest.
"I did go after a man." She started. "But it wasn't the only reason. I was invited to go."
"Go where?"
The confession grew larger and hotter in her throat, like a burning coal. Now that she started, there was no way she could stop.
"I was following Sydney Abraham. You remember him. I followed him to a city in Iceland."
"Iceland? Surely you're not serious." Elsie said, incredulous. Her look of skepticism faded when she saw tears falling down Sasha's face.
"Below Iceland." Sasha said, her voice nearly a whisper.
The rest of the story came out in a rush of sob-cracked, stumbling nonsense. She sounded completely mad as she recounted her life in Rapture, only starting with the city being underwater. She spoke faster and faster, becoming less articulate, less coherent, as she spoke of the thrill of electricity running through her veins, and the sheer terror of standing in the gaze of a Big Daddy. Elsie had a look on her face between fear, worry and horror: her eyes were wide, and her mouth was just barely open. Very slowly, her hand had gone to her chin, and terror was growing on her face.
"I remember the cold the most." Sasha choked near the end of her speech. "Being cold, and not having enough meat on my bones to keep warm."
"I had extra fingers."
"I wore the same ragged clothes for years."
"Sometimes, I wouldn't eat for days and days. I-I- I ate cockroaches when I was starving."
After a long fifteen minutes, she finished her story with waking up from surgery on the surface. She had her eyes pinched shut, but she could feel Elsie's stare on her like a laser. Ashamed and afraid, she just wanted to curl up in a ball and die.
A bird called. Thunder rumbled in the distance. The rest of the world kept spinning while Sasha's lifelong friend took in what she had told her; even though her eyes were closed, she could imagine the look of horror and disbelief on Elsie's face. Imagine if the person you had known since they were a baby told you that they had been... there? To Atlantis and back through the fires of Hell, and came back- Wrong.
"Oh, Sasha." Elsie said. "Oh sweet little sparrow."
Sasha flinched. She hadn't been called that in years; it never got past her that she was the only brunette in the family.
"You know I don't have much longer here." Elsie went on. "Your brother fired me."
"He can't do that without my permission." Sasha snarled, glaring at the ground.
"He wants you declared incompetent." Elsie said. "I overheard him talking on the phone to Doctor Marril. I burst in on him, and he started in on this awful tirade. Said I would be out on the street by tomorrow."
"That's why I needed to ask you about your story. Charles said you had gone mad..."
Elsie's voice trailed off. She clenched her hands, and looked at Sasha as if she could answer all of her questions. Sasha looked back, confused; after how real it had been for her, how tangible Rapture was in her very skin, she couldn't understand that Elsie didn't even begin to believe her.
"Let's go back." Elsie said, taking Sasha's hand. Wordlessly, they left the beaten playground by the duck pond as they found it, and they would never return.
###
Charles was waiting for them when they returned. He was leaning in the doorway as they pulled up in the car, and although it was strange, it was apparent that he was sober as a saint. Those cold blue eyes were focused, and his stance was solid. While Sasha scrambled to get herself and her crutches out of the car, Elsie was already halfway to Charles with a grim look on her wrinkled face.
"Told you." Charles hissed through his teeth. Elsie looked ready to smack him.
"We need to talk." She told him. Still standing out on the driveway, Sasha felt like they didn't see her.
"Too late." Charles smirked. "I want you out of here. You've overstayed your welcome."
"Your parents' final wishes were for me to take care of you and your sister, Charles." Elsie snapped. "I have a say in what happens."
Huffing, Charles turned and went back into the house. Elsie followed him, berating him on his immaturity and the gravity of their situation while Sasha could only stand there and be in pain. What they were saying confused her: Elsie would yell about Sasha's best interest while Charles would balk that she was insane and that he had said she was insane from the beginning. The two of them didn't seem to notice Sasha at all, or that she was close to tears.
They both thought she was mad.
"We'll settle this inside." Elsie said coldly. Charles nodded slowly, and disappeared into the house.
Elsie stamped her foot in frustration, slamming an open palm on the plaster wall of the facade. Still she didn't even turn to Sasha.
"It's going to rain." She said out loud. After a moment, she went inside the house herself.
Sasha followed, hobbling awkwardly over the steps and struggling with the latch. Inside, she could hear Charles and Elsie screaming at each other in the next room, their words garbled by the echo of the cold, unapolstered marble walls. But she knew what they were discussing: she could pick out the words hospital, doctors, madwoman, and insane. Charles's voice would crack, and Sasha could hear him sobbing between his words. Elsie quieted, comforting him, and then he would lash out again. This went on and on until Sasha could no longer bear it.
Slowly, she managed to get herself up the stairs. She went to her room, but she could still hear the argument through the thin floor. Sitting on her bed, she could do nothing but put her hands over her ears and wish for the noise to stop. She realized in a series of increasingly terrible revelations that she was no longer in control of her own fate. Elsie and Charles were possessed by the most wicked of demons: concern, and the belief that they knew what was best for someone else.
Once again, she refused to cry. If they heard her crying, they would only shake their heads and worry some more.
Eventually, everything went quiet. That could only mean one of two things:
One, Elsie had left, probably threatened.
Or two, the two of them had come to an agreement.
As much as she loved Elsie, she hoped for the latter. She prayed and cried out for the second. As there was only one compromise they could possibly come to:
Charles wanted her out of the house, and Elsie wanted her to get help.
She was headed straight for the asylum.