The man was alone in his ward, the incessant beeping of the heart monitor and the sweet birdsong outside his window his only companions. For now. They were coming, he knew it in his gut.
The man was, for all intents and purposes, ancient. His skin was mottled and wrinkled, his hair gone and his once handsome features worn away by time. He was being injected with every drug imaginable just to keep his heart pumping. Despite it all he could feel his heart begin to slow. He knew his time was coming.
The door opened and the man raised his head painfully off his pillow. A woman stood in the doorway. At fifty years old she still looked young, her brown hair only just beginning to grey. He smiled, she had come. Her name was Abigail and she was the first at everything, the first to graduate, the first to marry and now the first to come to him. Her face was sad, her eyes already beginning to well up with tears. She came and knelt beside his bed.
"Hold on, father. The others are coming." she said, her voice soft and quiet just like when she was a child.
No sooner are the words out of her mouth when another woman appeared in the doorway, her hair blonde and tied into a ponytail. Lucy her name was. Her eyes were already red from tears as she came up beside Abigail. She was doing well with a fine husband working as a chef in a restaurant and a fit, young son in university.
Not soon after Lucy came a brunette. Ruth was her name. Her hair was pinned back but still that untameable clump that always covered her right eye hung there defiant to any attempt to tame it. She wasn't prone to tears and even now only a sincere frown crossed her face.
The last two, Diana and Stacy, came together as they always did. As the only biological sisters of his adopted brood they were inseparable. They went to the same schools and colleges, married on the same day and even now worked in the same office. Both had jet black hair and their eyes an emerald green. Now they were all together again since for a long time.
He couldn't speak, his voice abandoned him months ago. But his expression was enough especially for his girls. All of them had lived their lives to the fullest, all had been educated, found their perfect husband and had their families. But they had never forgotten him. While not their biological father he was as good as. This man was their saviour and that was no overstatement. Before he came they were just five of many others wandering a forsaken city. They had 'daddies' there too but that was a stretching of the term slightly. The girls remembered their knights in shining armour protecting them from the city's monsters. But then one day one of the monsters slew their knight. Only when the knights had died however did they learn that this monster wasn't a monster at all. This was their father. He had gone to slay the real monster, wielding the powers of the gods in his hands, while they sat in the care of their mother. But the monster was too powerful even for their father. And so, throwing their own safety to the winds, they came to their father's rescue and drained the monster of his life-force.
That was the deciding moment. Their father could have chosen to take the city and take the world by storm, their lives with it. But instead he took them and together they left the city behind and entered a world of sun and joy.
The man groaned and his girls clustered around him their faces filled with concern. The heart monitor began to beep less frequently now. His vision was blurring. Abigail was the first to reach for his hand. She gripped two fingers. Lucy followed suit holding another two fingers. Ruth reached for his palm, tears now running down her face. Diana and Stacy grabbed his thumb and wrist respectively. The man smiled. They were together. The girls were crying, tears cascading down their cheeks. One by one they kissed his forehead. He wished he could have done the same. Just as his vision faded, he saw his life come before his eyes.
A plane, a crash, a city, ADAM, plasmids, Atlas, Ryan, Tenenbaum, Fontaine, 'Would you kindly', the Daddies and the Little Sisters. His name was Jack, son of Andrew Ryan, founder of Rapture. Engineered by Fontaine, he'd thought he had known his life. His life, his family was all a lie to fill in thirty odd years worth of life when technically he was four years old. But he had made his peace. His family was all here.
Jack exhaled for the last time.