"Show ‘em the back’a yer feckin’ hand, lass." He chuckled darkly as the pneumo departed, a handful of grenades and a half-filled box of anti-personnel rounds shooting off through the tube system, ready to shred a pack of splicers to ribbons if employed well. "Couple’a oil slicks up ahead as well - light ‘em up, if y’can time it."

"You're a regular saint," Jackie said. She reloaded her pistol and tucked all but one grenade into her satchel. The last she rolled around in her palm, testing the weight. She had already spotted the oil slicks and the crowd of splicers behind them. She hollered, drawing the figures near.  With one careful throw of her arm, the oil lit up, along with her enemies. "How's that for the back of my hand?" she asked the radio. 

Eleventh Hour

"Now we have t’get out o’ here," he said, shaking the moisture from his eyes. It wouldn’t do for him to think of her like that. So long as he stayed Atlas, she was his. He had to remain focused, keep it together.  “‘till be easier, now that we’re together,” he said, stepping down from the desk and offering his arm. “No more radio static gettin’ in th’way of things,” Once they got to the bathysphere— once they’d gotten away from this miserable rocks— then he could take care of her.  He’d revealed himself too early. He was lucky he even got this second chance. He had to make good use of it. 

“You’re right,” she agreed. She took the offered arm to balance herself in her hop down from the desk. Her boots ploshed into the water beneath and sprayed muddy droplets across her ankles.

“Well, ah,”

Atlas was much taller than her when they stood side by side. She liked that, she supposed. It fit her imagination of him. Whether he’d be any good at hiding from splicers, ducking into shadows and avoiding detection until the last moment, that much remained to be seen.  

“You were headed somewhere,” she said, looking at the leather suitcase he had left open. It was filled with clothes and papers. She had interrupted the packing. “Where is it you wanted to get to? I can help us reach it.”

Space: The Final Free Market

"An’ jus’ what would ye prefer I call ye?" Atlas responded with a snap. So what if he was using a code name? Names only meant what the person behind them did after all. And even though he’d been the one to give her hers, the little terms of endearment made her even more his.  "All ye need t’know is that my name is Atlas, and I mean t’keep you alive."  If he’d said it once, he’d said it a thousand times.  "Now did y’find th’shuttle yet?" The one he had in mind might not be fully functional, assuming the colonists hadn’t destroyed it but, with a little work on both their parts— who knows, they might be out of here before sundown. He shivered, looking out the window at the barren red landscape. 

"I’ll need ye t’repair th’pedways— me suit’s gone t’shite," He added. "Are ye any good at weldin’?" Of course she was. If he was going to get to her, and ultimately to the shuttle, he’d need a way to travel between the stations without exposing himself to the harsh atmosphere. 

She winced, and paused in her jog down the hall to lower volume on her headset. 

"I-It was only a question. I'm sorry," she said. "I like that you call me girlie. I've never had a nickname. Just--" she huffed. "Nevermind." 

The silence in the pedway as she continued toward Apollo's Keep almost inspired more fear than the shrieks from colonists would have. It presented a rather serious question: why did none of them come here? Was the damage to the building that extensive? She opened a pouch on her belt and withdrew a handheld air monitor. Sure enough, it the oxygen levels had lowered in the past ten minutes, while the carbon dioxide had increased. She might be nearing a breach in the hull of the station. Pressing a button at her neck, she allowed a helmet to envelope her head. Just to be safe. 

One left, a right, another right. Around a corner, a small, dimly lit docking bay appeared before her. One shuttle remained inside. 

"I'm here," she messaged Atlas, and looked around the room. One corner held a work station with plenty of tools for repairs. "I'm a deft hand at welding, sir. There's plenty here to help me. Just tell me which route you need access to." 

     "Alright, girlie - get low an’ listen up, we’ve hit a snag. There’s a whole pack of Ryan’s splicers ‘round the next few corners, an’ I don’t fancy yer chances. Get t’the next pneumo - I’m sendin’ ye some o’the heavy stuff."

"Yes, please and thank you," the girl said. She crouched against a wall and lifted her head up to wear the sky would be, breathing a grateful sigh. The man was some kind of angel. She couldn't wait to shake his hand. 

 "If you have any of those frag grenades left, I can make them count." 

                                         Verse: Life on Mars

Space: The Final Free Market

Her hand had gently pressed into the window as Atlas spoke. She removed it slowly, one finger at a time, and breathed in deep. The ground outside was red powder, tightly tamped down like rouge in a woman's compact. The warm hue was right, somehow. Familiar. She tried to remember Earth. 

"Proceeding through the turnabout," Jackie spoke with her hand on her suit. 

She put her back to the window and kept moving. The radar swept the hall in front of her and came up empty. A clear path to Apollo's Keep. 

"So, Apollo. Hestia. Atlas," Jackie said. It was rare that she had enough solitude to speak to him without alerting someone. 

"Is that-- may I ask, have I been calling you by a code name?" she turned another corner, always checking for colonists. "Is that why you've been sticking with 'girlie' ? No real names on the airway?" 

Space: The Final Free Market

Atlas looked out over the red terrain, feeling more trapped than ever before. Why had he ever come to this terraformed hellscape? He thought he’d have been able to actually make something from this? A bitter laugh escaped his lips and he wet them with whiskey, glaring daggers at the radio. She was his only way out, his only chance at survival.  The daughter of his enemy.  The last shuttles had quit working years ago, but he knew there was one left in Ryan’s office. All he had to do was talk the girl there and they were home free. Home. He had started to think he’d never see planet earth again, except as another star in this god-forsaken sky.  "Jackie?" he called over the radio. "How’re ye holdin’ up?" His only chance, he reminded himself. His last. 

A green button on the breast of Jacqueline’s suit lit up. The voice piped down a thin antenna and into the headphone hooked around her left ear. She wrinkled her nose and twisted a knob on the set, lowering the volume. The transmission ended, and the green bulb dimmed back down. She held her finger on an orange button beside it.

“I, ah—“ the girl paused and checked a small radar, bound to her wrist like a watch. There were no blips of activity; no colonists nearby.

“I’m doing fine, sir,” she said. Mylar boots squeaked on the tile as she stopped at a gallery window set between two pathways. In the dust outside, she could see hulking biodomes, miles-long connecting tubes and high towers of glass and metal. They sprouted up amid the plains of Mars, impossible but present. Hours of travel by foot and somewhere in all that, at least one man was listening to her reply.

"How's things on your end?"   

Eleventh Hour

"No, I can’t," he said quietly, the accent less comical than it tended to be. He liked to keep the Atlas figure lighthearted and smiling. Play more on charm than on drama. But here… he could tell that she needed him to hurt with her. He never for a moment paused to think that maybe the emotion was honest. "T’all started out like y’said," he started, his voice halting. He let his body relax, warm shoulders pressing against hers, one of his large hands slipping down to settle over her own. "We bough’ y’from yer father’s mistress. They said ye’d be a good tool. I didn’ even start to think of ye as a person ‘til—- well, ‘tis hard to see a girl and not think of her as one." He shrugged, clearly avoiding her gaze.  "In th’end, I had t’give in and let them use ye like that. E’en though t’seemed like I was selling my own— my own—" The accent slipped in hoarseness and, for a moment, he was very much Frank Fontaine again. But not any Fontaine he’d ever played. He swallowed, blinking away tears. He was a good actor, incredible. He should have been on stage. 

She watched his hand slip over hers and let out a small sigh. That felt nice. He was warm and right beside her; they might have been a pair of old friends catching up after a long time apart. 

"You were in charge," Jackie said. "You could have told them to stop, I think."

The point had to be made, but there was no real conviction in her voice. Atlas hadn't known her then. He hadn't understood she was a real person. Maybe it had taken this much for him to learn it.

"We're both alive, though," she offered. There were no echoes or dripping pipes here in the small, lamplit room. The muffled quiet and his warmth were putting her at peace. She rested the side of her head against his shoulder, continuing to stare at the old painting. His shirt was dry and course. The picture was yellowing at the corners in its frame. She could have fallen asleep this way.

"What now?"

                          тнeѕe people wιll lιвerαтe тнeмѕelveѕ                                         нσϻε | гυlεs | λsκ

fontaine and jack more like

Eleventh Hour

  A hug. How quaint. He’d planned to do a lot more than that when they met but, well, she’d managed to make that a little hard for him. Not to worry, though, the hunt was so much more delicious than the kill. And he so loved playing Atlas.  "Skinnier?" He said, feigning offense. He palmed his hips, looking at her forlornly. "An’ here I’d thought I’d managed t’keep a good figure…" he said, unable to stop the grin from his face. "So, blonder, skinnier…. anything else y’were expectin’? Wings, perhaps?" He was kidding with her to try and keep her off scent. Didn’t want her to remember that she also expected him to be bald.  "What-all did Ms Tenenbaum tell ye?" He asked, frowning at her. "Not tha’ she’d ever tell a lie, a good woman like that, she jus’ mighta gotten a few bits wrong." He wanted to make sure that it was him that she trusted, not Tenenbaum. He had to have her wholly again, to know that she’d do anything for him. Especially if they were going to get out of here.  "For example, Fontaine," he made sure to put the name in quotes, "wasn’t t’only one responsible for yer existence." He pulled himself up to sit on top of a table, pushing a few knickknacks off to fall in the water. Leaning against the wall, he nodded to the seat next to him.

She let out a little giggle, covering her eyes with one hand to hide her amusement.

“No, I mean,” she shook her head, smiling. “I mean, you're muscular. I thought you’d be, I don’t know, lanky.” Jackie could feel the tension slipping away as she returned his grin. Hearing his voice again, the one that had carried her through so many trials, was making all her fears slide off like water. Should she be worried about that? He hadn’t tried to hurt her, and there’d certainly been opportunities by now. 

A pair of molding books and a bare mannequin head plopped into the water at Atlas’ feet. Following his lead, Jackie lifted herself onto the tabletop alongside him. She pressed her back against the peeling wall. The table wasn’t very long, and their shoulders nestled against each other. 

“I solved a few things on my own, as you might imagine,” Jackie said. “Tenenbaum told me that I was designed by Suchong to be controlled. She said that Fontaine was the person who paid for that. That Fontaine was the person I was made to be controlled by,” she stared across the small room at a faded painting of a tropical island. Her voice had become somber. “You can’t deny that you did, you know.” 

  "You’re more’n welcome t’look. Just quit makin’ the funny faces."

"I was just trying to make you laugh, is all. You've been sounding kinda worried." 

Kink survey: bold your kinks, cross out turn offs.

Eleventh Hour

He tried not to audibly sigh. It had been a gamble that she wouldn’t just kill him. If their roles had been reversed, he’d have done it. But she somehow hadn’t inherited her father’s disinterest in other people, no, she was compassionate.  He smiled at her. So much the easier.  When her hands reached out for him, he gritted his teeth. He’d had enough minor scrapes to know that this rather major one was going to hurt like a bitch. Should have given the girl more medical training, he thought, the fraulein was right. She stitched the wound together, much to his muffled chagrin, and gave him a dose of ADAM. He hadn’t had ADAM before. He’d been avoiding it, thinking he was better than it but now…. it really was miraculous.  He could feel his skin stretching back together. It might not be happening quite like it felt but…. now he was starting to regret keeping clean for so long. Especially while…. He shook himself, looking up at her. “How d’I look, lass?”

“Like the belle of the ball," Jackie said. It was honesty couched in humor; one little scar didn't do much to hide his good looks."You're different than what I expected. I guessed you’d be tall, but I thought you’d be skinnier.” 

She packaged the remaining supplies back into the kit and clicked the lid shut. There was a messy row of sutures down Atlas’s right temple, but the ADAM had helped. 

“I-“ she stuffed the medkit back into her bag, keeping her glances at him short. “I thought I might hug you, when we met, but—” the clasp on the satchel locked back into place.

“You’ll forgive me if I can’t right now. Brigid told me a lot. Even if Frank Fontaine was an act, he’s still responsible for, well,” she swept an arm across the expanse of her body— for my whole existence, it meant. 

A hot kind of tension was still tying knots in her stomach. She suspected it had something to do with the way she had interrupted his attentions. Meeting his gaze for too long made it worse. 

“If we could just talk,” she said, “and you could tell me your story, maybe then…”

Eleventh Hour

  Fontaine sat back abruptly, pushed away by her hands. He was confused. His smile faded a little bit and he pressed fingers to his temple, still bleeding pretty badly, actually. He was surprised she noticed it with his head  under her skirt like that but…. well, fuck, she was right.  "I…" he said, blinking at his sudden movement. Maybe he was hurt a lot more than he thought he was. He looked up at her, making sure there was something like fear in his face. He had to look more vulnerable than he was, or she would kill him and have done with it. He was handsome, he knew it, and he used that now, fluttering his eyelashes as he tilted to one side, just before catching himself.  "D’ye have a medkit?" he asked, trying to distract her from the fact that she had given him the injury and she could finish the job at any time. He didn’t glance at the wrench, an inch or so underwater. Just a look and she might remember. He started tilting again, this time in earnest. “….Jackie?”

Jackie blinked rapidly. It was a new experience to hear him say her name from warm and right beside her, without the crackle of the radio.

“I do,” she nodded. Slung across her body by a faded leather strap was a bag she had found on a mannequin in a broken display window. It was large enough to fit the necessities; ammunition, a pack of cigarettes, whatever food she could scrounge and a couple of medical aid kits. She pulled one out and set it down on the table beside her. A look back at him, and she bit her lip. Even with how good the kisses had felt, she’d been unable to ignore the blood he had inadvertently trailed up her leg. 

“Come up here,” she said, “I can patch that up.” 

She flicked the medkit open and took out antiseptic, gauze, medical tape, and a little packet of ointment that had ADAM in it. You realize you’re covering your own work, part of her warned. She ignored it. The child in her still hated blood, wanted to heal everyone. And the part of her that had clung to Atlas like a safety net— that was still very, uncomfortably warm in places that his hands had only just left— was willing to hear him out.