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"Listen. You're going to find a gap. You're going to come out. We'll have two weeks of decompression. And you can force me to listen to Simple Minds on repeat if ye like." "You have to sing all the la-la-las this time." "I promise. Go on. I'll see you at the bell in a minute. Don't you forget about me, yeah?"
Still Wakes the Deep: Siren's Rest, 2025
Rob x Mhairi
|7th May 1988|
The Pressure We Keep
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply Category: F/M Fandom: Still Wakes the Deep (Video Game) Relationship: Mhairi Brodie/Rob (Still Wakes the Deep) Characters: Mhairi Brodie, Rob (Still Wakes the Deep) Additional Tags: Canon Compliant, Sharing a Bed, First Kiss, Getting Together
Summary: Rob brings a barley alive Mhairi back to the decompression chamber. As Mhairi recovers over the two week decompression, new, yet somehow old feelings arise.
Read on AO3 or continue below.
I'm all about Rob and Mhairi living out their days, very much alive post Siren's Rest. But I was thinking about the "bad" ending where you don't let go of Brodie, where Mhairi dies.
Could you imagine the guilt that would haunt Rob?
First, even before you make the choice (let go or don't let go), Rob is already actively swimming towards Mhairi. While Mhairi's near death and hallucinating, Rob finds her and makes the mad dash for her as you can hear him reach her in both endings. Unlike the "good" ending, you can hear Rob pleading with her to stay with him as Mhairi is still alive, barely, but alive. Whereas in the "bad" ending you just hear him get to her, then nothing since Mhairi has already drowned in reality. He was so close.
Second, if Rob just put his foot down a little harder, probably making Mhairi angry/heartbroken at him, at least she'd still be alive since their mission would have ended after she got back to the diving bell (after she saw the flare fall, revealing more of the wreckage).
Third, if Rob just tried a little harder at finding a way into the wreckage after he called off the remaining mission when Mhairi gets caught in another cave in, things again proving far too dangerous to keep going.
Rob feeling like he completely failed Mhairi in so many ways, guilt-ridden, constantly questioning what could he have done different to prevent her death, how he should have been faster at finding her and getting her out.
From our player perspective, Rob had no encounters with the Siren, as he questions "What?" to Mhairi when she says "There's something in [here]..." so when he finds her in the end, he has no idea Mhairi is under the influence of a powerful creature causing her to hallucinate her long-dead father, let alone so overcome with her own grief and loss that she can't let go of him.
Principal Narrative Designer of Siren's Rest Sagar Beroshi was very kind to answer some questions regarding Rob and Hans while also giving some nice insight to Rob/Mhairi on my SWTD Discord server.
Question 1: Rob is my favorite character from the entire series, so my questions were mostly about him: his family: mom, dad, siblings?
Sagar:
Rob's two parents worked in the petrochemical industry as academics (geoscientists), so he had access to a pretty well-off upbringing. No siblings, just him. That sometimes added a bit of pressure.
But Rob's anchor was a love of nature and ecology that was all his, all an outcome of the stark beauty he saw all around him: especially in the North Sea. He loves his parents and is grateful for his upbringing, but that very love of the natural world left him feeling cold about the more clinical, intellectual, and extractive career path his parents had chosen. Rob wanted to be out communing with the world, in a productive, joyful way.
Growing up, Rob showed serious promise as a swimmer. His parents encouraged him heavily in this area, pressing him into competition after competition. He even made it to Olympic qualifiers for the LA Olympics. But he had a conversation with someone just ahead of the race, one of those random conversations that stuck with him, the phrases turning over and over in his head. He didn't make it to LA itself.
But he had been through a real revelation. He loved swimming, but it all felt so random and meaningless to just try to go faster and faster. What was the point? What happened to swimming for the joy of it, for exploration, to appreciate nature?
When he came back, he decided to break with the pressure he felt from his parents. He moved across the country, to the west coast of Scotland (I can't actually remember the town he settled in, have to check my notes) and began a career as a wreck diver in the Firth of Forth. The east side of Scotland and the North Sea was his original love , but for him it was too associated with his childhood and his sadness at the extractive industries that fueled its economy.
The Firth of Forth has perhaps the very deepest waters in the British isles, and Rob made a name for himself as an explorer and, eventually, saturation diver of focus, precision, and curiosity. He spent years here, making a name for himself and getting to know people in the industry.
Hans got to know him in this context, and Hans knew that the very thing that drew him to Mhairi's mission would likely draw Rob too. It did. Not only would Mhairi's mission let him do his work in a greater wreck than he'd ever seen, and not only was it a rare sat dive operation in the North Sea that wasn't on behalf of an oil company, but it was a chance to go back to the place that gave him a love of nature in the first place, the North Sea, and do some good there. It felt like a match made in heaven.
Rob was nervous when he got ready to do his interview with Mhairi. He wasn't sure what she'd be like and wanted to make a good impression. He wanted the job almost a bit too much.
Well. I think we all know that that interview went swimmingly.
Sadly, it wasn't so easy to put a lot of that backstory into the actual game. But you get a hint of it here and there when Rob has a line where he really wants to know what sort of fish Mhairi can see, or lines where she defers to his longer experience as a sat diver (even though she's leading this expedition), and so on.
I think in the open exploration bit early on you can crawl into an office cube off in the distance that's wedged into the seafloor, see some weird formation, and a discussion can ensue about the fact that coral is unexpected in this area. I can't recall but Rob might say something else in there that references his backstory in there too.
About Rob and Mhairi and their relationship:
Sagar:
Well, we definitely tried to leave a little undercurrent (hah!) of possibility in there about their relationship… Mhairi is very preoccupied over the course of the story, but she so obviously can't do any of this completely alone. She's gathered people around her to believe in her.
And I think it's absolutely reasonable to imagine just how far that camaraderie might have gone and what it could turn into. It is actually something I talked a lot about with Lorn and Lois. That these characters might have come to trust each other so closely that after all this is over, they might start to hope for a closer relationship to blossom… The actors used the idea of that future possibility as a way to fuel their vocal performance. So you're definitely detecting something that's there.
But these are your characters as much as mine: whatever you see in them and wherever you can imagine them going is totally valid.
Question 2: Does Hans have kids and grandchildren?
Sagar:
Hans has a big expansive, loving family. So to be precise, yes, kids and grandchildren both. I didn't name them or define them in extensive detail.
Rob - NSFW Alphabet
Rob x some Mhairi || Minors DNI
AN: I figured I'd give this a shot and have a little fun. I adore Rob. He's become my favorite SWTD character.
Robairi/SWTD Discord Server
Shippers of Robairi (Rob/Mhairi Brodie). Fans of Still Wakes the Deep and it's DLC Siren's Rest. | 5 members
I made a Robairi Discord server. I made it mainly for me for stuff I'd probably never post to Tumblr or get around to actually writing a fic for. But I know I'm not the only one who ships Rob and Mhairi, so if anyone is interested, feel free to join. ♡
Everyone give me a show of hands who ships Mhairi and rob
Because I have something to show when I’m doing having a mental breakdown down over it
