Disclaimer – I own no rights to the Bioshock universe and the related trademarks.
A/N – Sorry it's been so long since the last chapter. I didn't mean to drop a huge cliffhanger and keep everyone waiting for nearly three months. In fact, I was so happy about all the reviews for the last chapter that I wanted to get the next chapter out earlier than usual. But then someone stole my laptop (with my copy of the PC version of "Bioshock" still in the disk drive, in fact). So that caused quite the delay. Now I've got a new one, and I'm ready to get back to business.
shadowelf144- Jack just has the worst luck, doesn't he?
TheBleachDoctor – Thanks for your review, as usual.
CaliforniaStop – I'm really glad you enjoyed that last chapter. I had such great source material to work with that most of the reason I wanted to write this fanfic was so I could write my version of the scene in Andrew Ryan's office.
Miss Roth – I admit I took some huge liberties with Ryan and his nationality, but I did it to accommodate the "casting" of the only actor I could imagine filling Ryan's role. (My casting choices for both Ryan and Atlas are dictated by my being a huge James Bond fan.)
All your questions will be answered in this next chapter.
Oh Danny Boy/The pipes the pipes are calling . . .
"Atlas?" Jack said.
"Atlas," the sing-song lilt repeated. "Someone carryin' the weight o' the entire world on his shoulders. I like the image. It's a nice . . . metaphor."
The man on the other side of the room turned around. He was handsome, in a weathered sort of way. He was middle-aged, with a receding hairline, gray at the temples, but he had well-chiseled features, a square jaw and taunt cheeks that were only starting to show signs of age. He had a mousy brown movie star mustache over his upper lip. He was wearing an outfit exactly like the one Sander Cohen's men had dressed Jack in earlier, but in much better condition.
The sing-song Irish lilt disappeared. In its place was a slow Bronx rumble.
"Ain't no Atlas, kid. Never was."
And Jack immediately knew exactly who he was speaking with.
"Frank Fontaine."
"Bingo, kid!" the man who had been calling himself Atlas said, heartily clapping his hands. "Always knew you was bright."
Jack turned towards the sound of entering footsteps. Touch, Evelyn, and Twitch were circling around him.
Evelyn walked to Fontaine's side and put an arm around his shoulder.
"Oh, me poor wife Myra and me wee baby Patrick!" Fontaine said, reverting to the exaggerated Irish accent. Then he spat out a derisive chuckle. "Maybe we should get a real family, baby. They play well with suckers."
He and Evelyn kissed each other deeply, then they turned to Jack, who felt numb everywhere, except for his jaw, which was hanging oddly below its usual place.
"He really is the most obligin' gentleman I've ever been round with," Evelyn said, turning towards Jack, her brown eyes shining. "'Course, that might have somethin' to do with the way he was genetically conditioned to bark like my little lap dog every time I said 'would you kindly.'"
"Like I says, I can tell you's a bright kid," Fontaine said. "But you're in shock right now, so you're havin' trouble puttin' it all together. Let's help you out. Now, where do we start?" He clapped his hands together again. "I know! There once was a man named Frank Fontaine, who exemplified all of the principles Andrew Ryan claimed he stood for. He looked out for himself, gave the people what they wanted, did whatever it took to make some scratch. But Ryan felt threatened by him, so he claimed this man was undermining his authority. And it was decided that . . ."
He took a deep breath.
"Frank Fontaine had to die," Touch said.
"So Security Chief Sullivan and his constables raided Neptune's Bounty," Evelyn said.
"But it wasn't Sullivan that fired the shot at Mr. Fontaine," Twitch said. "It was one of the constables who happened to be on Mr. Fontaine's payroll."
"But Sullivan was just arrogant enough to have everyone believe he was the one who took down Fontaine," the man in the center of the room said. "And just stupid enough to believe it himself."
"But the crooked constable," Twitch continued. "He shot right at Mr. Fontaine's head . . ."
Fontaine pantomimed the gun with his fingers, pulled the imaginary trigger, jerked his arm up and laughed.
"With a blank bullet. I dived back into one of the fishing streams . . ."
"And kept swimming," Evelyn picked up. "After all, who knew Fontaine Fisheries better than Fontaine himself?"
"So Fontaine stayed hidden in the underwater tunnels until Sullivan gave up on finding the body and declared him dead. Then it was time for me to die. And be reborn . . . as Atlas."
"Atlas," Evelyn repeated proudly. "Defender of the working class, champion of the people of Rapture."
"Evelyn coached me with the accent, and soon I was makin' grand speeches across Pauper's Drop, putting ADAM into the hands of those who couldn't afford Ryan's brand, building my own personal army of saps."
"Just like on the surface, huh, boss?" Twitch said. "But down here, it was that much easier."
"So it built to a civil war, my army of whack-jobs against Ryan's for total control of Rapture. Until we put each other into a stalemate, him holed up in Hepheastus, me holed up in Olympus Heights, each surrounded by spliced-up armies of nutcases. And that's where you come in."
He put a hand on Jack's shoulder, and Jack jumped back as if the palm had teeth chomping at his shoulder.
"You are Ryan's son."
Jack wanted to steel himself, wanted to not react, but a gasp escaped his lips. Fontaine smiled, taking obvious pleasure in how upset Jack was.
"Son's not quite the right word. Twitch, what's the word I'm looking for?"
"I'd use the term 'clone,'" Twitch said.
"That's right," Fontaine said, his eyes intensely focused on Jack as he circled around him. "I put Rapture's two greatest science whizzes, Tennebaum and Suchong, on my payroll. They're the ones that discovered ADAM, and I figured, if they could make a man who could shoot fire out of the palm of his hand, it would be no problem for them to make a brand new human being from scratch."
"All they needed was pieces of Andrew Ryan," Touch said. "Pieces of hair, flakes of skin . . ."
"An' there was no shortage of those in Rapture," Evelyn added.
"I had you made to order, kid," Fontaine said.
It couldn't be true! It couldn't! But at the same time he thought that, Jack remembered the eerily familiar voice he had heard in the Ryan Industries tower. "Has been two days and already resembles a perfectly healthy boy of five or six years. Should reach target maturity within one week."
"You were my Ace in the hole," Fontaine continued. "Designed for only one purpose: to be the ultimate assassin. A regular killin' machine."
Jack's hand flexed as if twisting around the butt of a gun, and he remembered the way a gun had instantly felt like it belonged in his hand, the way time had seemed to slow down when he was shooting at the splicers in the garden of Arcadia, and the way he was able to pick his shots with ease in Fort Frolic.
"You see, Ryan had put the entire city on security lockdown when Mr. Fontaine started bringing reinforcements from the surface," Twitch explained. "He had everything tuned to his own genetics, so he was the only one who could decide who could come and go in the bathyspheres, who could pass through the gates of Hephaestus . . ."
"Who could be rejuvenated when nearly dead from a quick nap in a Vita-Chamber," Evelyn added, and Jack remembered the way Cohen and his disciples had studied him with fascination when he arouse from the strange glass tube outside Cohen's theater.
"Managed to send you off in a mini-sub before Ryan started the lock-down," Fontaine said. "I needed someone who was genetically identical to Ryan to have free run of Rapture after everything else went to hell. And when the time came, I lured you right back here. You were my secret weapon."
"Of course," Touch said, "a weapon's no good unless you can be sure you're in complete control of it."
"All it took to make sure you stayed on the right path was one phrase," Fontaine said. "One phrase Tennebaum and Suchong imprinted on you that would force you to obey whatever was said when you heard it."
"Just three little words," Evelyn said, stepping so close to Jack he could feel her warm breath on his face.
"But that can't be right," Jack said. "No, that's not right. I have parents. I was born on a farm."
Fontaine tapped a finger against his graying temple.
"All your favorite memories are just pretty stories I had old Mother Goose tattoo in that skull of yours. Sent you to the surface. Had an old friend of mine that owed me a few favors give you a job at his car lot. Knew you'd need dough to keep you fed, keep you healthy for when I needed you. Of course, didn't plan on you using all that dough to buy smack, but, hey, you only got so much control of a kid after he leaves the nest."
Jack ran a hand over the old familiar needle pricks on his arm, and as he did, he wondered how many were caused by EVE hypos.
"You were a time bomb, just waiting to go off. All I needed was someone to escort you, make sure you got from the welcome center to Ryan's office in one piece."
"The whole time you thought you were gaining our trust," Twitch said, "we were really gaining yours."
Fontaine ran a hand down Evelyn's slinky figure.
"You know, Evelyn auditioned for Cohen's plays, but he always told her she could never be a convincing actress."
"Guess I showed him," Evelyn said, winking teasingly at Jack.
"What about Wilkins and Professor Langford?" Jack asked. "Were they in on it too?"
"No," Evelyn said. "They were just a couple o' stray dogs started followin' us around. We weren't worried too much about ol' Peach. Just a harmless drunk that managed to stagger his way on to the right end o' a Big Daddy's drill. But Professor Langford, she was dangerous. She was smart."
"She had to go get her research from the laboratory in Arcadia," Twitch said. "Unfortunately, there were other scientists that rented facilities in that building."
"Includin' Tennebaum and Suchong," Evelyn said. "We couldn't risk her stumblin' onto their research and warnin' you about it."
Jack remembered Professor Langford's last attempt at a warning, dying scrawling "Would you kindly?" in blood on a glass panel as blood ran from a gash in her throat.
"You killed her?"
"Not me," Evelyn replied. "That would be sis'."
And Jack had the chilling mental image of Teagan, with her ever-present youthful smile, crawling through a vent in Arcadia, still smiling as she snuck through the shadows behind Professor Langford and ran a blade across her neck, only to appear standing next to an open vent the next time Jack saw her.
"She died. Don't flatter yourself thinkin' it was really for you," Evelyn said.
"For what then?"
"For Rapture."
"It was the best plan we had," Fontaine said, standing over a chess board and brushing a piece off. "Pawns had to be sacrificed."
Jack remembered Giuseppe, playing along, pretending he heard voices coming from the sub in the smuggler's hideout, only to be killed in the explosion when Ryan's splicers attacked.
"It woulda worked, too," Fontaine said. "You woulda killed Ryan, just like I had you made for, if he hadn't gotten wise to the whole 'would you kindly' trick."
"And when you started gettin' suspicious," Evelyn said, "all it took was a little kiss."
Jack clenched his fists and stared at her.
"It was more than just a kiss."
"There's no need for hard feelin's," Fontaine said, holding out his hand towards Jack. "You did even better than I expected. You outlived half my crew, and that's impressive. The surface ain't seen nothin' like we got down here. We stand to make a fortune. Now that Ryan's dead, you and I could be partners, and together, we could be runnin' Rapture tits to toes."
In response, Jack pulled his revolver and waived it in Fontaine's face. As he did, he heard safeties unleashed as Twitch, Touch, and Evelyn all pointed their guns at the back of his head.
"There's no need for all that," Fontaine said. "We're civilized people here. Let's just talk this out like adults. Now, Jackie, would you kindly go get stepped on by a Big Daddy?"
All four of them burst into laughter as Jack's arm fell limply to his side. His knees shot up, moving him across the room step by step as if his legs were living things trying to carry him away. The laughter echoed in his ears as he stepped through Fontaine's window and continued walking as soon as his feet hit the ground.
He walked until Fontaine's apartment was completely out of sight. And he would have kept walking if it weren't for two arms that wrapped around his waist.
"I got ya," Sullivan said. "Now get down here so I can put these cuffs on ya."
A/N - To be continued . . .