[BioLock]

I down the bottle as fast as I can. It makes my phalanges tingle and my heartbeat pick up.

“Johnny-boy, would you kindly shoot the semtex vest you’re wearing?”

The gun trembles in my hands, I raise it. I want to put it down so badly, to throw it away, to never touch it again. I clench my eyes shut. The gun flies from my hands to the ground with the clack of metal on metal.

“Sherlock Holmes you dirty boy.” Moriarty scolds playfully from the radio. “If my pet won’t finish the job, then I’ll send some friends to do it for me.”

The radio fuzz dies as the sending node turns off. I grab my gun for one last bullet and shoot the radio, then slump to the ground, shaking as the adrenaline leaves my body with the grace of a freight train.

Evanescently, and thank god for it, I am left alone to recover while Sherlock bolts to the other room. In the distance I hear “Girls call your sisters, even the grey ones.” There’s no pause for breath before Sherlock changes the direction of his orders. “Actually, have the grey ones and the daddies meet us at the Silverfish diner.” A weighted pause, “Stay safe, please.” That last word, that ‘please’ sounds so foreign on those thin lips. I see more flashes, these ones tinged grey and blue like a dying bruise. A pool where I shake and I can see the pain in his eyes, a rooftop and a phone call that make me want to vomit, a gunshot wound to the chest and the ambulance isn’t fast enough, a dark room and he’s holding a gun to his throat, he’s sitting on the ground and he’s hurting so bad and he calls me a soldier and I help him up and we march on through the greys and the pain.

Somehow these thoughts pull me off the ground and I find that Sherlock is staring at me undecidedly, but he smothers the expression when he notices I’m noticing it. “Well, let’s be off then, we’ll want to get there before the girls do.”

He starts walking, stiffly, and I follow.

A cramp comes unbidden to my leg and that slows me considerably, but I can still mostly keep up. I consider finding a cane from some corpse to ease my way, but there isn’t anything like that so conveniently located.

Dodging around puddles and downing splicers with uncanny plasmid-wielding ability, Sherlock doesn’t need my help in the slightest to escape. I’m left to pick off whatever trails us or the ones that peek from the shadows.

The Silverfish Diner is a decrepit, moist place with leaks and rubble occupying most of where people would have been– but, really, that description fits the whole of Rapture. We wait out front, picking off all the splicers Jim Moriarty can hope to send with the practiced ease of two men who know a battlefield and how to be soldiers.

Gradually, more and more Little Sisters of all skin tones, hair colors, dispositions, and mutations join us, and we send them to sit in the booths to avoid injury. With the grey ones come Daddies. It feels peculiar to fight with one, as opposed to against. Some of them fall; some of them came to us already falling. There is a lot of crying going on with the grey ones, and those cured try in vain to comfort them.

When a lucid child with blonde hair and hazel eyes crawls from a vent and sprints across the veritable minefield of corpses and gunfire and explosive plasmids, she wastes no time in telling us she is the last of them and Sherlock picks her up very gently in his arms before motioning me to follow him inside the diner’s front door.

It’s my job to turn all the sisters back to normal, and when I asked Sherlock why he wouldn’t help me with it, he said “You’ve got the plasmid for it.” When I parried with a query as to why he didn’t also get the plasmid, he shrugged “If I were capable don’t you think I’d have done this long ago?” None of it makes sense to me, but I’m getting the message behind that cold glare that means I’m probably an idiot, and it feels very aggravating and annoyingly familiar. In between the flashes of bright light signalling the curing of another Little Sister into a human child, I get more flashes of memory.

The damn things are picking up their frequency. In this round I get two nostalgically comfortable chairs, a pile of gold, a housegirl who really needs to be shut up, breathing heavy in an alley after chasing a criminal and god it feels so good I could just grab that stupid man and–

“John.”

That is my name.

The realization strikes me particularly hard as I hear the name over and over in a thousand singular voices: shocked, worried, loving, bemused, proud, upset, angry–

“John?”

“Hm…?” Somewhere in my introspection I’d sank to the floor, my head lolls back and maybe I fainted. The girls look distantly concerned. Sherlock looks perplexedly fascinated.

“We’re going. Are you fine to–… function?”

I get the urge to touch the hand that lays dormant at Sherlock’s side. There’s no reason to do that, so I curb the unnatural impulse, but the urge exists.

“We should tell them.” A new, sweet voice coos from somewhere behind the kitchen door of the diner. And immediately I am on my feet to see what it is, 6 feet of socially awkward science man following.

“Now would be a bad time.” An equally new, equally sweet man’s voice responds thoughtfully.

“Oh, but look at them! They’re distraught! And poor John–”

“What about me?” I demand fervently as I round the corner, but no one is there. Clearly there were voices; I can tell Sherlock heard them from the lack of focus in his eyes detailing an immediate detour into his brain– why can I tell that from just barely glancing over my shoulder? He must be easy to read, I don’t know.

More importantly, there were voices and now there are no bodies to hold the voices. More importantly than any of that is the… indescribable, colorless… rip… in the space where a wall should be.

This space isn’t grey, it isn’t white or black, it just has absolutely no color as it phases in and out of shaky resolution. The edges are like torn paper, as if we’re in a coloring book and someone has torn a hole in the page.

A crack sounds behind us: glass windows are being assaulted. All the girls, and there really is quite a lot of them when they’re all crowded into a tiny kitchen, cram back towards us in an attempt to get away from the assumed splicers. They’re mostly terrified, but also oddly calm. No doubt they’ve seen pinches worse than this one.

“Sherlock.” I request politely. His eyes snap open abruptly and he begins marching through the sea of girls and noise towards the unstable rip in color.

“Well let’s be off, then.” He announces before stepping past me.

“Are you sure about this?”

“Eighty-seven percent… If those odds make you uncomfortable, take it up with our friends outside.”

“And we’re going–…?”

“Not here. And that’s all that matters for the moment.”

And Sherlock Holmes steps through the portal.

Unquestioningly, the girls follow him, and I count them as they pass me. Twenty-nine. Where in God’s name could we safely take twenty-nine eight-year-old girls? I’m the last one left, and I find myself nervous as I reach out with a foot that looks certain of its steps.

“Not so bad, hm?” I hear a voice utter, first indistinctly but clearing up like a radio tuning to a station.

My feet are on solid ground that looks the same and I’m facing a wall with the same texture but I can tell by the new, yellower light filling the room that we’re anywhere but Rapture.