A Different Lighthouse

Chapter 9

Armitage did not stow his shotgun again as he brought up the rear of their group, following Ben and Blue back toward Langford's offices. Blue was, for once, walking on her own, her tiny hand held tightly in Ben's. The other clutched her syringe, pointed outward like a weapon, and Armitage could see her eyes darting toward every shadow, could see her shoulders hunching up toward her ears with every drip of water that echoed around them. 

If she weren't a horrid, ADAM collecting Frankenstein's monster masquerading as a little girl with a pretty dress and a big bow in her hair, Armitage would feel sorry for her.  She certainly had Ben fooled, that was for sure, as did Phasma. But Armitage had seen enough shit to know better. Seen the posters from pleading parents looking for their little girls, seen the numbers of the Little Sisters steadily growing as quickly as kids were disappearing. He'd seen the grotesque makeup Phasma had painted on their little faces to mask the deathly gray skin and sallow eyes from Rapture's delicate public. 

With each passing day, Armitage wondered what exactly they were trying to fucking save anymore.

Things had almost been good, once. In the very beginning... Sure, Armitage was poor and Irish and queer. Things had been alright, though.  He was away from his father. He had an apartment, a job at the docks, a... something with the city's top surgeon. Wasn't exactly a relationship. Was more like Dameron had been a bit obsessed with him, and Armitage had been a bit attention starved and lonely in a new city, drowning underneath the rest of the  world. 

Still. It had been good enough.

And then it wasn't, one day. One day Armitage came to see Dameron to find him high as a kite, spliced up just like he'd always said he wouldn't. More days came and went, and little girls began to disappear. More days, and Big Daddies began to roam the halls, more days still and they stopped trying to avoid Rapture's citizens. Little girls were always by their side, holding their giant hands or perched on their towering shoulders, their faces painted all the same and their eyes soulless and empty.  

Then, down went the economy. Armitage lost his job, as did most of his friends. The only ones still managing to keep their heads above water were the rich folk, and that was because they were Ryan's fucking puppets. When money got tight, poor folk started turning to selling ADAM off the market, then when that wasn't making money, they turned to just using up their own supply to numb the pain of existing. The slums started filling up with corpses, some murdered and some overdosed and some just sick of living in a world that was so different than the old one, and yet the damn same all at once.  

It had come pretty naturally when Armitage started helping out around his neighborhood in the slums, doing shopping for old folks, repairs on apartments, trash and corpse clean up. A few weeks went by, and he had a sort of crew, a gaggle of able-bodied people that weren't content to just sit in their bedrooms and splice their brains out until shit got better by magic. They didn't fix anything, not really, but they kept up the morale enough to stay pissed off. Being pissed off was the only thing saving them from jumping off a balcony and splattering their insides all over Ryan's fancy marble floors. 

The first time Armitage met Snoke, his stomach nearly fell out his ass. It wasn't so much a meeting as Armitage being cornered on his way home from the bar, more than a bit tipsy and angry with the world, the last of what cash he had to his name that he hadn't spent on booze shoved in a crumpled ball in his pocket. Snoke had been flanked by a couple of guards, his mustache perfectly waxed and his suit stained but clean and unwrinkled. He oozed power, and pride, things Armitage hadn't known in his life up until then. But he had been...different. He ran the orphanage, after all, and the poorhouse and the department store. And the way he talked about Rapture, it reminded Armitage of himself. Snoke was frustrated, and angry, and he wanted to save the city before it was torn apart by greed and the very basest of human indecency. And he wanted Armitage to be the face of it all.  Armitage knew how to handle a weapon, and he was well-known in the parts of Rapture that didn't see the sun. Not well-known in the way that came with power, but with trust and seniority.