weathertop | darling it's better down where it's wetter

Sinclair pushes himself up to a sitting position as soon as he regains his balance.

"Find some cigarettes too," he calls after him, but Jack is gone before he has a chance to do much else. He shakes his head and gets to work bandaging himself up while Jack is out of eyesight.

Jack's quest for coffee is thorough, and attended to with the same devoted attention as he would give making a bomb or bringing a forest back to life. Which is to say he gets distracted a lot and does a fair bit of poking around completely irrelevant places, but he always follows the yellow arrow back to the job at hand.

And besides, the poking around pays off. More on that story later.

For now, let's return to Sinclair.

Sinclair, and a distant murmur. A clank or two, far away and high.

If he listens, we're sure he'll be delighted to hear the triumphant muttering of a woman somewhere up there in the shadowy ceiling.

There's not much to be done about the blood still on his pants, but at least now with a bandage in place Sinclair can keep from adding to it.

He pulls his belt tight and--

...what was that.

He freezes, listening hard.

Clink clank, clink clink, clank

"Amaaaaziiing graaaace..."

Sinclair reaches for his gun, listening as the woman breaks into a sob, unable to carry her tune. She sounds pathetic, utterly broken, mournful to the point of wrenching the slightest smack of pity from Sinclair.

But he knows that sound.

He looks up to the ceiling, scanning every visible inch. There's nothing, despite the clinking drawing nearer.

He pulls the gun from its holster and cocks it, praying again that it's still functional after being totally submerged in water for several minutes.

Clink clink, clink clank

And then it stops.

"Is that you?"

Shit.

He scans the ceiling a little faster, but by the time he spots her she's already dropped to her feet.

"I'll break you!" she shouts, throwing a hook that chips into the wall beside his head.

He aims as she runs at him, aims...aims...aiming...

In seconds she's in front of him, nearly on top of him, screaming that he's a traitor and she takes a swing at him but POP

The impact of a bullet in her forehead sends her spilling back onto the tile, finally quiet.

Now if Sinclair can just control his damn heart rate, jesus christ.

His heart rate will probably not be helped by a bang of air, and a projectile whizzing past him at a ridiculous speed.

The splicer is still falling, and her hair's disturbed by the wind from it; that's how close and abrupt the thing is. It hits a far wall and explodes in a shower of brown liquid which smells strongly of coffee, because it is coffee.

Jack follows it, running.

Just in time to save the day!

"Are you okay?" he asks, slowing to a stop in front of Sinclair. Is that blood on his trouser leg -- no, that was already there. There's a second coffee flask in Jack's one hand, and now there's a gun in the other as he looks around for any more danger.

The reverb in his voice is still faintly there, but it's gone down a lot in a weirdly short amount of time. He feels less awesome, but more together. Which, in this situation, is probably a bit more useful.

...And he feels a bit of an idiot for leaving a wounded man with shitty aim alone like that.

Sinclair jumps as shards of plastic scatter on the floor beside him, but once he identifies it as a coffee Jack thoughtfully flung at him, he relaxes back against the wall.

"I'm alright," he says, breathing a little hard. "You get those cigarettes?" Because jesus god could he ever use one right about now.

In answer, Jack swaps the gun for a nearly-full pack of Oxford Club. Once he's put the coffee down he even proffers his other hand alongside them, pilot light burning. It's like having your own personal butler and lighter-on-legs!

He's still keeping his head up and eyes sharp for splicers, but they seem to be in the clear for now. So his eyes fall on the crawler. That... huh, that was a surprisingly good shot, considering. He is sort of proud on Sinclair's behalf there.

Plucking a smoke from the box, Sinclair mumbles a thanks at Jack and lights it, breathing deep.

"Gimme a minute, son," he says. "We can go back and try to get upstairs again." But for now...just let him calm his nerves. He takes a long drag and holds it in, exhaling slowly. It's not like he saw his life just flash before his eyes or anything.

Jack, who is feeling a little bit bad about the whole surprise levitation thing, gives Sinclair a moment to rest. He leans back against the wall and steals a cigarette for himself.

"That was a good shot," he offers.

That counts as an apology, right? Right.

Sinclair lets out another puff of smoke and looks over at the body. Right in the forehead. That's really not bad at all.

"I s'pose it was," he laughs, though his voice is still slightly shaky. "Guess you're rubbing off on me, kid."

He smiles faintly at that.

Then he rests the back of his head against the cold wall, and tries to decide whether to tell Sinclair what he found. If he does, they're probably staying the night. He's not sure if he still hates that idea.

The bad thing about ADAM making you feel awesome is that when it starts to wear off, it always leaves him feeling even more weird and tired than before.

Of course, nine out of ten doctors recommend you treat your plasmid blues by kneeling down, cigarette between your teeth, and start going through a dead crawler's pockets. If nine out of those ten doctors are Jack Ryan, anyway.

Hey, a creme cake!

It's probably never going not be darkly amusing watching Jack plunder dead splicers. And watching Jack turn her pockets inside out helps give Sinclair something to focus on other than the fact that he was probably seconds away from a brutal death just a minute ago.

His cigarette burns down to the butt and he flicks it away, severely tempted to go for another one. But Jack is probably waiting for him to get up and moving again, so after another second of collecting himself, he balances himself on the wall and stands.

"Ready to try it again?"

"I, uh... found the cigarettes in an office," says Jack, apropos of nothing said out loud. His tone suggests an incredibly generous offer.

You see, between coming down and being a jerk he's moooore or less kinda he guesses ready to throw Sinclair a bone.

Or, in this case, a bedroom.

The creme cake vanishes whole into his mouth while he waits for an answer.

...Sinclair's not immediately sure what to take from that. He looks at Jack like he's crazy for a few seconds before speaking.

"I'm sure whoever left them there isn't going to miss them," he says. Because obviously Jack's statement was some sort of confession, now all of a sudden he's feeling bad about pillaging Rapture.

Wow yeah, for sure, if there's one thing he's going to regret it's all this free booze and cake.

He replaces the cigarette -- which leapt for dear life into his hand to make way for the cake -- into his mouth, and speaks around it.

"'S got a mattress in it."

Hardly stained and everything.

"So I thought... if you still wanna sleep...?"

He gives Sinclair what can only be described as an 'am I doing this right?' kind of look. In Jack's experience, helping people has usually been on the business end of a mental trigger, or involved something he didn't mind doing anyway, or maybe he was kinda browbeaten into it, but anyway the point is that he's not used to this whole choosing to make a sacrifice business.

But, like, well, you know. Sinclair's leg will just get worse if he strains it and that'd be crap for both of them in the long run, yeah, that's probably the reason he's doing this.

Oh, mattress. That sounds...so much better than anything he could have hoped to sleep on, trekking random deteriorating parts of this city.

But he contains the desire to instantly take Jack up on his oh-so generous offer. Now that the option is real and in front of him, it's not exactly suspicion that he feels, but a couple flags go up out of sheer mental habit.

Sleeping is, well. Letting your guard down in the worst way. And for everything that's happened to them in the past day or so...it's only been a day or so. As much as he would like to and feels like he can trust Jack, passing out and assuming Jack's going to keep attackers at bay, stick around for hours on end...probably unwise. After all, if Jack has any sort of ulterior motive, waiting until Sinclair's asleep would be the perfect plan to put it in motion. Or he might just decide to leave without him.

It's just being rational, it always pays to reevaluate your situation from a business standpoint. That feeling is not a preemptive sense of betrayal at the thought, it's only sensible caution.

But Jack needs him in order to get upstairs. Sinclair's supposed to be telekinesised up and then throw Jack a rope. He can't progress without him. Right?

"Thought you wanted to keep moving? We don't have to stop on my account," he says, trying not to watch Jack too closely. If Jack doesn't have any ulterior motives, Sinclair coming off as suspicious could just as easily form a rift. And that seems equally as unwise.

Jack, who hadn't even thought that the offer might be suspicious, takes Sinclair's answer to mean he doesn't want to go nap right now.

He relaxes a little, unconsciously, and nods. That's a bit of a relief, to be honest. He was offering it, but he wasn't exactly looking forward to hours of potential monotonous guard duty. Now he won't have to worry about it, they can go and get stuff done and he can shake off the post-harvest malaise with a clear conscience.

"Okay," he says agreeably.

"I'm ready to try it again, mister Sinclair."

His voice, by the way, is normal again. By ADAM standards that timeframe is like drinking two bottles of whiskey and getting ten seconds of double vision.

...hey wait a minute

Well that answers that. And sometimes in business, a little backpedaling is necessary.

"A mattress, you say?"

...Oh. Maybe his conscience isn't getting off scot-free after all.

"And ham," he admits.

Not that that was one of the reasons he took so long. No way. He'd swear it on the lives of your pick of his fathers.

So I suppose if I pick his Kansas dad, that might be the most accurate one to swear on.

"You're looking a little worse for the wear yourself, son, I think some rest could do us both some good," Sinclair says. "Why don't we pack it in for a couple hours and then try again once we've gotten some energy back?"

"One of us'll have to stay up and look for splicers," he points out.

Glumly. Because it'll be him.

"You're a light sleeper," Sinclair says, already making his way towards the hallway Jack came from. "Either way, I'm sure you could do with some down time. It's been a long day." And that mattress is ever so sweetly calling his name.

Oh god he's so not getting out of this.

Forgetting that it was technically his idea, or at least his choice to bring it up again, Jack trails reluctantly after Sinclair like a kid at the supermarket.

...I have no idea why Sinclair is leading the way when Jack's the one who knows where the office is.

"It's down there," he offers without a lot of enthusiasm. "In the eye shop. On the left. Past the rubble on fire."

He's listening for the mattress, if you'd stop complaining maybe you could hear it. It sounds like Augustuuuuuuus...I'm so soft and springy, let me lull you gently to sleeeeep....

Sinclair glances over the door signs, but the eye shop is marked well enough with a rather large poster that reads EYEGLASSES above a picture of just that. The door is already ajar so Sinclair pushes it open and steps inside.

She's more beautiful than he imagined, just give him a second to wipe this tear from his eye.

In no time at all, Sinclair is stretching out on it contentedly, yawning. He's taken enough abuse for one day, there was really no need to pass up a luxury like this.

Maybe you should lay off the drugs, pal, that mattress isn't talking. The court questions your ability to responsibly raise this three-year-old.

The three year old grumbles, loots a tin of ham from the cash register, and carries it over to a security camera he hacked earlier. There he squats down and eats the whole thing sulkily.

He certainly has no intention of going to sleep.

The both of them are behind cover, invisible from the street, and the security camera is watching, but this sort of thing never turns out well. The only place he's slept without splicer interruption in the last few days was Sinclair's place.

Just call him Jack 'Dedicated Watchman' Ryan, yes sir.

Uh huh.

Well whatever happens with Jack, Sinclair is out like a light in a matter of minutes. It's darker in this office than it is in his apartment, and although there's a part of him that can't rest when there's any potential of things going wrong, his sleep is deep enough. And much needed. If anyone listens, they might even detect a quiet snoring.

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