#tenengrace

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The thing about Brigid Tenenbaum and Grace Holloway that I find especially interesting is the ways knowledge fits into both their arcs.

Tenenbaum being at the center of the ADAM project means that she knows all the gory details of how gatherers/protectors are made and what the process does to a person’s body. At the same time though, the horror of what she’s done by allowing her research into the hands of people like Ryan, Fontaine, and Lamb (as well as her own self-loathing for being the source of all that suffering) don’t fully dawn on her until it’s too late to do much besides mitigate the damage already done. And then in Bioshock 2, when she returns to Rapture hoping to develop a cure for ADAM sickness and rescue the little sisters from Lamb, there’s a whole decade of new research she has only limited knowledge of. She needs the thinker’s computational abilities to aid her research because as intelligent as she is, solving this problem (of her own invention) wouldn’t be possible for her to do alone before she died. She knows so much and yet due to the nature of the society she lived in and the miracle she discovered, there will always be something new she doesn’t know.

And then there’s Grace. She had no part to play in creating the Little Sisters or Big Daddies, so she doesn’t fully know why their existence is such a tragedy, but if her misguided hatred of Delta for Eleanor becoming a little sister is anything to go off of, she knows something. She knows on some level how wrong it is, but because of her faith in Lamb she’s still willing to accept that the little sisters wandering around rapture are children of the family. That even if he turns them human again, subject delta is stealing these girls from their rightful family, and she remains ignorant of the truth until it quite literally comes looking for her. If she lives, she survives with the knowledge that Lamb was wrong about this, so what else might she be wrong about? And her last words in canon are her saying she needs answers from Lamb about what the truth really is. Grace doesn’t know the exact science of how ADAM works, but somewhere deep in her heart she knows more of the awful truth than Lamb wants her to know, and that knowledge is what drives a wedge between her and the family

And I just think that’s a really cool parallel. Tenenbaum understands the evil she’s created better than anyone but even she has to make peace with how there will always be so much more she doesn’t know; Grace doesn’t understand the reality of what she’s been enabling all these years and has to come to terms with the fact that she knew all along.

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More Grace headcanons:

About 50 years old when Bioshock 2 took place, and was a teenager during the Great Depression

Was an only child growing up, which is why she wanted a large family when she came to Rapture

Taught herself musical theory, composition/arrangement, multiple styles of vocal music, and how to play several instruments (including piano, guitar, violin, flute, saxophone, and clarinet)

A big fan of Bessie Smith, Billie Holliday, and Ella Fitzgerald. She did a lot of covers of their songs during her career

Agnostic but always loved going to church both for the music and for the friends she had there

Enjoyed a bit of success when she first arrived in Rapture, but she was never rich or famous by any means

Bill Macdonough and Anna Culpepper were her highest-profile fans. Bill recommended her to perform at some events for Rapture’s upper class before she was blacklisted (which shocked Cohen) and Anna collaborated with her on several occasions (which had Cohen coping seething malding)

James was a navy veteran who came to rapture as an engineer and fell head over heels for her. His faceclaim is James Edwards

He taught her Morse code trying to impress her. She snuck a Morse code “I love you” into his favourite song on a date once and he got so flustered he almost spilled his beer

James encouraged Grace to perform some of her original compositions protesting the bad living conditions under Ryan. She was so scared after he disappeared that she completely quit writing her own music for years

Grace and James were seriously discussing marriage when Ryan had him arrested. He had a ring picked out and everything

Only really fell in with the family after James disappeared. Lamb didn’t reach out directly until she was at her most vulnerable

Used to be good friends with Anna Culpepper due to their shared involvement in Rapture’s music scene despite Cohen’s hatred for them, but was pressured to cut off the relationship after Anna disapproved of Grace’s involvement in the family

Also knew Jasmine in passing due to their shared friend and performing arts backgrounds. They were on good terms, but Jasmine’s ties to Ryan and Grace’s ties to Lamb meant that they never ended up getting closer when they had the chance

Sometimes though, she’ll look at Jack and see him bite the inside of his cheek in a way that’s inexplicably familiar and wish she’d spent enough time with Jasmine to remember if she’s right about that quirk coming from her

Grace is the one who taught Eleanor to play the piano and read sheet music

Tried to quit smoking for Eleanor, but fell back into the habit when she was kidnapped. Quits again for the girls though

Because she does end up taking care of the rescued little sisters in every bs2 thing I create. If Sinclair is the Atlas to Delta’s Jack, then Grace is this game’s Tenenbaum

She and Sinclair absolutely hate each other, but when they’re both on the radio with Delta their styles of shit-talking are a surprisingly devastating combo

Grace and Tenenbaum first meet over the radio but eventually become extremely close when they bond over their guilt and shared mission to rescue the little sisters from Rapture

She knows some things, like that gatherers/protectors exist, that there’s something called a big sister in Rapture, and that little sisters are starting to roam around the city again, but she doesn’t know the how or the why and that’s a very deliberate choice on Lamb’s part

Grace is low key the glue holding the rapture family together by the end

Yeah Sofia is their leader and horrifically effective at keeping her flock under her thumb, however she’s usually too busy Omelas-ing Eleanor, being unethical, or monologuing to be very involved in their everyday lives.

But Grace is sharing the drudgery in a way that Lamb doesn’t; drinking the same watery booze, walking on the same rotting floorboards, and commiserating about all the things she’d do to convince her younger self not to come here if she had the chance, yet she still thinks this all leads to something greater, and that attitude works wonders for convincing others to quiet down their discontent and fall into step beside her.

If Simon Wales got pissed at Lamb that would be surprising but not completely unexpected: he’s running a fanatical utopian cult within a fanatical utopian cult, so of course he’d go rogue over some minor ideological schism. If Grace went rogue? It’d be a lot harder for Lamb to convince her followers that it was all for no good reason

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An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Traditional post-exam Grace Holloway Yuri fic

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please PLEASE share the tenegrace headcanons i need to hear more

YES I LOVE YAPPING ABT TENENGRACE I HAVE SO MANY THOUGHTS ABOUT THEM.

Okay here we go:

Grace and Brigid work together to look after the rescued little sisters in Rapture. This is just canon now as far as I’m concerned

Post-Rapture, they also combine their efforts to reunite the girls with their families. The others try to help where they can, but there’s a very real sense of “this is partially my fault so I have to do this” in how they go about their mission

Speaking of, they’re both consumed by their guilt: Grace for being complacent when the family started creating new sisters and leaving Eleanor with Lamb for all those years, Brigid for her role in discovering ADAM and kickstarting the worst of Rapture’s crimes.

While both decide to pour their efforts into atoning by looking after the girls rather than think too hard about their own feelings; Grace’s way of doing so leans a little more self-destructive than Brigid because of her time in the family negatively affecting her self worth. It takes her a minute to accept that the girls genuinely love her and aren’t just clinging to her because she’s the only guardian they have

Brigid had kind of gotten her head around that idea thanks to the time she spent living with Jack and his daughters, but the first time one of the girls from BS2 era Rapture called her mama Tenenbaum she definitely felt something in her eye

They don’t agree on how to approach every problem. Brigid wants to advise the girls about the dangers they’ll face in Rapture specifically because those are so unique (and so much more dangerous) compared to what they’d see in the normal world, while Grace tries to tread a little lighter because she worries that teaching the girls to think about danger the Rapture way will make returning to their lives at home even more distressing

Another point of disconnect is how they view splicers. Grace spent ten years living with people in different stages of ADAM poisoning, and was fighting on the same side as them until very recently, so she tends to have more sympathy for the splicers still in rapture. Tenenbaum has mostly encountered them while defending or rescuing the girls, and has a more pessimistic view of their role in the whole affair as a result

Grace is “Aunt Gracie” to everyone, while Brigid is “Mama Tenenbaum”, and later, when the girls get out of Rapture “Auntie Brigid” to match Grace

They were always on good terms with each other, but there were no major shifts in their dynamic until well after they escape rapture. The idea of hashing out their romantic drama while finding families and organizing reunions just never crossed their minds because neither woman stops working long enough to consider personal feelings until the girls are home.

There’s no dramatic confession or big passionate kiss to mark the start of their relationship. Once the girls are settled, they just sort of… slip into place beside each other like they’ve been married for years because they’re comfortable in each other’s company

But they’re fine not drawing too much attention to their relationship, because Brigid’s never liked PDA in the first place and Grace has a decade of Family-related self worth issues to work through. They’ll leave being adventurous to Eleanor for now

It’s not a picture perfect healthy romance, but Tenenbaum’s ex is Frank “Bald Freak” Fontaine and one of the last people Grace let herself be vulnerable around was a cult leader who believed personal identity was for troglodytes, so any hang-ups they have to work on together are a massive upgrade as far as fulfilling relationships are concerned

They get invited to events like birthday parties, b’nei mitzvahs, confirmations, and eventually weddings and rest assured they go to every single one. Yes they’re travelling to the other side of the country so they can watch a 24 year old woman graduate from college. But have you considered that that’s their baby and they’re so proud of her <3

There are family dinners with the girls, Jack, and his daughters. These happen less and less often as everyone gets older and has their own lives to plan around, but there’s at least one every year

Date night is sitting in the two armchairs they put beside each other and reading after everyone else has gone to bed. If they’re really feeling adventurous, they’ll read beside each other on the couch

While she works, Brigid will sometimes hum songs she picked up from Grace

When the girls are all adults, they give Grace and Brigid matching jewelry which one of Jack’s daughters designed and made herself as a token of thanks for everything the two did for them when they were young. Grace gets hers as a necklace, Brigid isn’t a jewelry person so she gets hers as a pin. They almost never take them off

That pendant and brooch are basically their unofficial wedding rings. A gift from their girls commemorating the time that set them on their current path and led to their meeting is so significant to their life together that trying to commemorate it any other way would be redundant.

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An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Several years before Subject Delta's return to Rapture, someone else plots the Family's downfall. In the present, Grace and Brigid come up with a plan, and the girls reveal a dangerous secret from Eleanor.

Chapter 4 of Aunt Gracie's Girls!