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The barnacles that had attached themselves to his knee plates were destroyed with a crunch, his considerable weight dropping onto them and extinguishing their lives in a single moment. There was not an inkling of concern for them, or for the people that, upon seeing him, ran screaming from the sandy beach, or those who aimed devices he didn't know the name of in his direction, offering no harm but keeping him in their range. The sun began to heat him immediately, more than it had while he had been in the shallows approaching the shore, but he paid it no mind. His senses were instead subsumed by dread.
He would fail. He had failed. All of the time he had spent walking the ocean floor was wasted because now, his suit was beginning to leak. Water was creeping in between the rivets of his helmet and while he had patched it in the past, he had no more rivets, and no sea life was attaching itself to the seam quickly enough to save him. Through all of the makeshift patches that he had made with water-swollen and fumbling hands, he had clung to the hope that if he just collected enough, if he returned with the net bag he had made from sunken fishing net filled to overflowing, she would return to him. She would accept him again instead of clinging to her sleep.
Now, though - now, with his failure, with his suit leaking, with his uncertainty of just how to get back to where he belonged...
She would never come back.
Breathing heavy, he didn't acknowledge the arrival of people in uniforms, vehicles painted black. Even upon seeing guns aimed carefully at him, he felt no rage. Why rage when he was doomed to death?
His interest was only piqued when he saw something terribly familiar. Something that sparked hope in him. Like him. A man like him, encased in metal, though his was finished in red and gold instead of the dull blacks, browns, and bronzes of a place far in the past.
He tried to speak, but his voice was hoarse from disuse, and even his usual tone was ruined by the gravel of time. There were clicks of weapons, barrels aimed more carefully at him, but only the metal man stepped forward. For a moment, he thought he saw a figure at the man's side - a small, barefoot figure - and the brightness of the sun melted away into a dim blue haze.
Hallways stretched before him, interrupted here and there by tubes of thick, braced glass, signposts here and there that he never paid mind to. He had only one purpose and that purpose was to follow the precious girl that led him, the center of his being. People edged around them, avoiding bumping him or her -- or at least, the smart ones did. The stupid, the greedy - they were the ones he batted aside with his drill as if they were nothing.
Those days, the happy days, all blended together. It seemed that he noticed how time changed things but only in a distant way. How the 'normal' population began to ebb, replaced by the deformed and desperate, and how often their blood streaked down his weapon, how often he found himself having to use the plasmids that ran through his veins to protect the precious jewel he'd been charged with keeping alive.
How joyous those days had been, when he could lift her in his arms and see the green glimmer at the edges of his vision, tinting her happy smile, how she would caress his helmet and tell him in her always-cheerful voice, "You'll always take care of me, won't you, Daddy?" And every time, he would nod and touch his helmet to her forehead for her to give one of her childish kisses.
He knew she liked strawberry candies more than licorice, but chocolates were best of all. He knew she loved to sing, and he could always count on her singing to the angels she gathered from. She loved to watch him fight and cheered for him while she perched on the platform specially designed just for her on his back. Once, she presented him with a bow she tied to the brace of his drill with a scavenged and dirty ribbon that somehow matched her dress. She had carefully tied it in place, agonising on how the loops fell for twenty minutes, and he had gladly stood still for every little rearrangement.
She was his, and he would move heaven and earth to see her safe.
The halls of Rapture had slowly emptied through that span of time he could put no name to. Areas that had once been brightly lit and shining had become dull and dirty with puddles of water where saltwater had collected from slow, unrepaired leaks.
In the places that were still bright, people gasped and ran from him as he followed his beautiful little charge along the path dictated by the scents only she could detect. He didn't give it a second thought. All that mattered was her. She was the real light at the bottom of the ocean. Yet, like so many other lights in Rapture, his light went out.
They had to have planned it, he thought afterward. They had to have thought the tactic through. She was gathering from one of her angels, singing to the still form as ever, when they came. As ever, the protective rage boiled in him and erupted in the sound of his drill's engine and a roar from his own throat.
He fought them, striking left and right, relishing the sound of breaking bone and the splatter of blood. They ran and he pursued them, his footsteps shaking the metal plates that made up the floor, and as he drew his arm back to strike, he heard a sharp shriek, a cry of, "Daddy!" and what passed for his blood ran cold.
He tossed a wave of frost at the fleeing degenerates and turned to run. Back to her, back to the girl that he prized above all else. He found her - and she was laying still, splayed awkwardly beside the angel that she had found. Around her were figures drinking greedily from her collection, cackling their success. One crouched over her, a blade held in one claw-like hand, poised at her stomach.
The howl that he let loose shook the glass in its frame. Already, his vision had been tinted red but now the red blazed like fire. He fought, he struck, he watched gouts of blood pour over his drill, watched flesh sizzle under the power of his flames, watched uncontrollable spasms under arcs of electricity. Bodies bounced to the ceiling, bones shattering when they landed only to be pinned under benches and lockers and rubble that he tossed with little more than a gesture.
He took their heads, each of them, and left a grisly wake as he walked back to the laboratory where his equipment was maintained, his gory prizes in one hand, the too-still form of his little girl cradled in the other.
Men and women in white coats swarmed to him and, at first, he struggled, but a crumb of memory stopped him. If anyone could help her, it was these people. If anyone could help him, it was them. He gave her over with a low moan and let himself be led away to a workroom where they tended him, and where they carefully locked the door behind them when they left.
Again, time blended, but this time in agony. He screamed for her, he pounded on the door, but it stayed closed against him, penning him in. She was out there. He knew she was out there, but he had let her down. He had let her be hurt, he had let her sleep, and now she was leaving him. She didn't want him anymore, and it tore at him.
He seized his opportunity when it came, pushing his way through the door like a bull, bent on finding her, bent on making her his again. He pushed past the white coats, none of them being a match for him, and he started his search. Every hallway, every room, his vision flickering between yellow and red.
Where there was a child, he knelt, looked into their face, but each screamed and ran or was yanked away from him by an adult. More than once, he saw the others with their girls as if nothing had happened and he wailed his lament. There was a vague awareness of injury but he only stopped when he spotted it.
A confection of pink and white, surrounded by bows and two statuettes, each a shape, a mockery of the girl he had lost. He fell to his knees with a moan before something came over him that he could never have anticipated.
He wept.
He was found there by men with guns, others in lab coats. Something was jabbed into the injection port on his chest and the world slowly went dim as they dragged him along the ground. They hadn't had to do that. His willpower had drained away with his tears.
For days, he knelt in the small cell they had put him in and he offered no fight. What did he have to fight for? His light, his purpose, didn't want him anymore. She would have come to him by now. She would have found him, assured him with her sweet, soft voice, given him one of her fond kisses.
There had to be a way to bring her to his side again. There had to be a way to convince her that he was worthy. And slowly, through those dim times, an idea formed. He knew, had heard, that the substance the girls all gathered was from a creature of the depths. He could survive those depths. He could bring it to her and make up for what she had lost in the attack. He could bring her all she ever wanted.
The plan took up all of his thoughts without so much as a pause to consider the consequences. His drill bit into the metal wall of his cell as, behind him, he heard screaming. They didn't matter, those he left behind. He stepped through the wall and into the ocean as the ocean rushed into the rooms where he had been held, and he walked.
There were others outside. Others like him, others that were simply walking. Others that had died. He walked past them all, picking up the slippery creatures that he found. He would find enough. He would find them all. He would find enough to bring her back to his side.
Seamounts. Chasms. He used sponges to rebuild his filters, ate fish he speared with his drill. He no longer used his plasmids and, after a time, even his drill went into torpor, unable to be used except as a heavy weapon, impeded by the water's resistance. He climbed beaches at times to afford himself a few repairs, but always he descended again for the sake of his bounty if nothing else. They needed water to survive. He needed them to win her back.
The time had been a blur. There had been places the sunlight didn't reach and others where the water was as warm as a bath. He had been ignored by sharks, wandered over by octopi, and had become the home of barnacles and anemone. His metals had been slowly eroded and now, like Rapture before him, there was a saltwater puddle against his skin, given by a slow, unrepaired leak.
The other Big Daddy before him, all red and gold - he seemed weak. He seemed easy to defeat, or he would have if his drill was operable. If his guns hadn't rusted from long exposure to the depths. The figure was pulled back by one of the black-suited men, proving to be a young boy. Useless. His vision flickered back to yellow from the orange tint it had taken.
The other's viewports. They were white. Blue, perhaps. Not yellow. Not red. Then there would be no fight, he decided. But there was a gleam of the same clear shade in the palm of his hand, a palm that was extended toward him.
He lifted his own hand, pulling against his EVE, showing a blossom of fire, an arc of electricity, a shimmer of frost, before he fell to his hands as well as his knees.
She would never take him back. He had failed her.
The world began to dim and he heard, muffled by his helmet, "Theta. Right there on the glove, see? The Greek symbol. Theta."
That was right, he thought. That was him. He was Theta.
There was the muted crunch of sand under the other's feet and a voice - sympathetic, not afraid, as he'd once been so used to, but sympathetic - murmuring, "What the hell did they do to you?" But then his world was dark and he moaned, aware, then, only of his failure.
He would never see her again. His light. His sweet girl who loved strawberry candy and sang to angels. Maybe she at least had a better Daddy now.
The sand gave under his weight. His heart still beat, but slowly as he dreamed of bare feet on vivid tile and a voice he hadn't heard in years.