can't believe this is happening

[aynrando]

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[largefather]

[His sweater was white when he boarded that plane. He remembers - or he thought he remembered - that his mother presented it to him the day before, folded and warm from the dryer. She pinched his cheek and told him how much she was going to miss him, but it was a comfortable goodbye. His father clasped him on the shoulder the day of, looked him in the eye and told him he was going to do great things. He felt pride swell in his chest unlike anything he'd ever known.

His sweater is all sorts of different shades of red, torn beyond what he can fix. It was his own blood, at first, before he'd gotten a hang of shooting splicers. Then it was theirs. Wading through the waters of cracking Rapture walls washed some of it away, but there was always another instance that stained it again, like when he doesn't wipe his hand after brushing the wall his real mother died in or now... now.

He's still holding the base of the club he beat Andrew Ryan with. The key has been placed below the grand model of the city, and he thought, in his kind daze, that this was one of this great things he was meant to do. But now, coming down, he only feels shame and anger twisting itself into a knot that he's probably going to need years to unravel. Longer than he's lived - how long has he lived? His mind is swimming with questions, but they're being asked of a blank canvas.

No one misses Jack Ryan. No one's waiting for him to come home. The only one alive now that truly knows him, somehow, is over the radio, and though the fact he's been using that damn phrase... he hopes there's something redeemable in that. Otherwise, he might as well just drown. So, before Atlas can speak, he raises his voice. Just above a mumble, defeated:]

Atlas? That is your name, right, Atlas?