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

darling it's better down where it's wetter

It's been a day, it's been a day, it's been a whole damn day -- as near as it's possible to tell in this soggy excuse for a city. It's been a day since he killed Fontaine. And Jack is no closer to getting out. He's still down here. He did everything he was supposed to do and he's still down here.

All he's found is locked-down bathyspheres. Broken submarines. Even the goddamn boats are out of service. Where's Tenenbaum? Where's his fucking rescue?

Jack stares about into the greenish gloom, checks the ammo in his pistol, and then kicks and yanks off the rusting panel of a vending machine. His hands are soon full of little wires and pipes. A few seconds later, he straightens up with a grunt, and the machine gives him a tidy discount on a couple glowing hypos of EVE.

With his visit extended indefinitely, he's begun to wonder how many of them are left.

Now arbitrarily divided into chapters!
Part One: A Scene at the Rapture Adoption Agency ~or~ You Found [Pot of Ham]!
Part Two: Come On-A My House, I'm Gonna Give-A You Candy ~or~ Sinclair? More Like Sin Pantalones!
Part Three: Dream Sequences are a Fresh New Concept in Fiction ~or~ It's My Existential Trauma and I'll Cry if I Want To
Part Four: Southern Education Jokes ~or~ Engineer, Engifar, Engiwherever You Are ~or~ The Grave Escape
Part Five: Golfing Accident Memoirs ~or~ Mom... Dad... I'm Immortal ~or~ How To Make Friends And Immolate People
Part Six: Is It A Pie? Is It A Plane?? ~or~ Two's Company, Three's a Row
Part Seven: Escort Missions! In Rapture! Council's In An Uproar ~or~ Bioshock: Cheesecake Edition
Part Eight: Bread, Milk, BATTLE! ~or~ Pleasant Conversations, How They Bore Me
Part Nine: Choices, Schmoices ~or~ Baby's First Moral Philosophy ~or~ Go Away I Want To Take A Damn Bath
Part Ten: A Man Snoozes; A Slave Delays ~or~ The Four Second Rule Applies To Drugs
Part Eleven: A Hearty Meal ~or~ Skeletons In The-- That's Not A Closet
Part Twelve: We All Live in a Secret Submarine ~or~ Plasmids: Not Even Once
Part Thirteen: Paging Dr Tenenbaum To Surgery ~or~ Bribery And Deduction
Part Fourteen: The Prodigal Son Returns

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"Sure," Sinclair says, turning his head a bit as he passes the neatly folded stack of clothes through the doorway.

...It's probably better not to ask questions at this point.

Jack slowly closes his left eye as a string of bubbles drips down over it.

He is, at least, keeping his shame behind the door.

"Thanks," he says, accepts the clothes, and disappears again. The sounds of splashing resume. They're even joined by whistling, in brief spurts, after a while. Who knew bathing could be fun!

Once he's clean -- cleaner than he's felt in days -- he finds there's still a lot of bubbles left. On the floor, largely, but also in the tub. What's a curious boy to do?

Well, if you're Jack, you start throwing bubbles into the air and then seeing how many you can pop with bees before they float to the ground.

(If he concentrates, the answer is: a lot!)

Sinclair tries his best to ignore the concerning noises coming from the bathroom. Whatever damage is done is most likely nothing that can't be cleaned up or repaired. He just has to remember that. It's aaaall okay.

Meanwhile, he digs through his refrigerator for something he assumes Jack will like. Which. Could really be anything. Jack eats food, and he doesn't appear to discriminate.

In the end, Sinclair decides to boil a pot of water for noodles and cut up some pre-cooked chicken to put in it. It's little more effort than he puts into anything he makes just for himself, but it is still a little more effort.

With any kind of luck, Jack will be done getting clean by the time it's ready. If he's not, he'll have to eat it cold. Sinclair's not going to wait on him.

Eventually, Jack stops trying to set fire to the water and lets it swirl down the drain. He watches it go, still impressed that the plumbing out here is holding up. It's almost like a glimpse of Rapture in its heyday. Kind of.

He stays in the bathroom a little while longer. Does some loose, easy stretches as he dries. It's amazing how much lighter he feels without the layers of blood and soot and grime and grease, salt and dirt and slime. He no longer smells like a garbage can was murdered by a skunk. It's so long since he washed for real, and his nose was so deadened by the Daddy stink, that he'd stopped noticing -- but now it's obvious by its absence.

Jack even borrows Sinclair's razor, and trims away stubble that's trying to turn into an ugly beard. You know, grown up stuff. He only cuts himself shaving twice.

And then the food starts to call to him.

You think the bath was screaming? You ain't heard nothing yet.

Like magic, Jack appears in the kitchen just as dinner is coming off the burners. His hair's still wet, and his face rather pink, as if it's forgotten what colour it was meant to be under all that dirt. The shirt's a little tight around his shoulders, and the trousers end at mid-calf, giving him a weird, overgrown look -- but they're comfy and clean, and that's more than he usually asks for.

Without a shapeless jumper in the way, he fills out the shirt pretty well. Maybe he's not a fireman but he'd fit in well on a firemen's charity calendar. It's okay to stare, Sinclair.

Another thing of note: the undershirt and shortish trousers make his scars more easy to see. And there are a lot of scars. His arm isn't the only place to be burned: there's shiny skin on both his legs, the hair that's visible patchy and weird from poorly-repaired follicles. His body is a noughts and crosses board played by slicing hooks and puncturing bullets. And there's his throat, of course, the mass of scar tissue that goes down further than Sinclair might have expected. Wounds upon wounds: sawn open for a new voicebox, torn open to get it out, sewn shut with clumsy applications of health kits and raw ADAM. He's lucky he can still speak at all.

This rippling mass of scars and muscle is smiling hopefully at the chicken noodles.

"It smells good."

Sinclair can hear Jack's eager footsteps approaching and laughs to himself. Of course the kid would never be late for food. Of course.

He pulls down a couple bowls into which he dumps the strained noodles and the cut up chicken and turns around to set them on the table.

"Dinner is-- served..."

He recovers his sentence well enough. After all, he's had a fair amount of practice at keeping his composure throughout startling situations. So it's really only a hiccup in his words and maybe a slight lessening of his grin.

And he might have laughed at the way these clothes fit Jack, were it not for all of the obvious abuse he's taken. Too obvious. And god, all of it looks incredibly painful. The one that spans his throat...Sinclair probably doesn't want to know. But he still wonders.

All of this wondering occurs over the span of perhaps a single second. He places the bowls across from one another on the kitchen table and returns for silverware before finally taking a seat.

"It's not much," he says, "but it's something hot."

Man, if you think that's bad you should see him with the shirt off.

Jack -- you may be shocked to hear this, but he's not really thought about how all these scars and stuff look. It's maybe occurred to him once or twice, a 'wow these things are piling up' here and an 'oh god my throat that was my favourite throat' there, but coming out of the bathroom it wasn't at the forefront of his mind.

So he notices the slip but doesn't really get it. And then Sinclair carries on, and Jack's faintly relieved, although it seems he's done something wrong again.

It's cold out here in the kitchen. At least it is compared to the warm fog misting the window in the bathroom. So he remembers what Sinclair said about a robe, and ducks back in there while the cutlery comes out, emerging for a second time in the crimsonest and fluffiest robe Sinclair owns.

Man, it's so cosy he could go to sleep in it.

He sits down at the table, bits of chicken already magically reaching his mouth via his fingers before he's even seated and holding his fork. Mmmm hot. Mmmmmmeat.

"This is really good," he says with his mouth full.

Sinclair hides his laugh in a forkful of noodles.

"I'm glad you like it," he says once he's finished the first bite. Jack's bowl is already at least a quarter down.

The robe covers a lot, but it still doesn't hide his throat and Sinclair can see the damage in his peripheral vision. It looks like scars on top of scars, skin stretched in different directions, overhealed and angry red. He hopes vaguely that whatever made those scars killed him quickly.

And maybe he could ask. But no, that would probably be rude. Rude like chewing with your mouth open and talking with your mouth full.

Jack's chicken noodles barely touch the sides. The last time he ate something hot or put-together was on the plane, and you know what they say about aeroplane food.

He picks up on absolutely no subtle hints from the other narration about the quality of his table manners.

"I like chicken," he says. With his mouth full.

The food's already taken care of the minor cuts on his chin, and done so with a lot more panache than any number of stale pep bars.

"I can see that," Sinclair says, amused. And he starts to add that he'll keep it in mind for future reference, even gets as far as opening his mouth and starting a vowel but...with any kind of luck, this will be their last meal in Rapture. He's not about to jinx that.

Well you're going to have to put up something, Sinclair. Jack's waiting for the continuation of that syllable, looking at you expectantly with a noodle hanging out of his mouth.

Que?

There's no getting out of anything with this guy.

"...When we get topside, you can have it as often as you like," he says instead. A little more hopeful, it'll do.

That prompts a glad little smile, though he's not sure why Sinclair would've hesitated to say it.

Jack chews in silence for a number of seconds.

Then, cautiously: "...did I do something wrong?"

Sinclair looks at Jack, mildly surprised by his question.

"Not at all, son," he says, shaking his head. "Why?"

He looks relieved already at the answer, but still chews his lip for a little while, trying to put together an explanation. It's surprisingly tricky -- he's not used to having to order his thoughts and voice them usefully -- and it's tempting to give up and say nothing. But -- speaking for yourself is supposed to be what being an adult is about, right? What being a human person is about.

So he soldiers on.

"You... stammered, before," he offers. "As well?"

It makes sense in his head.

"Huh, did I?" Sinclair says, turning his attention back to his noodles. Jack is long done, but Sinclair's still got just under half of his left.

"When?" he asks through a forkful.

oh god this part of the talk is still happening

how do you words oh god he wasn't programmed for this

"Uh... when I... in the kitchen."

Jack has singlehandedly ruined the dinner conversation, hasn't he.

"I can't say I remember it," Sinclair says, shrugging with his mouth. "It's been a long day, sport. I'm sure I'm just tired."

It's not the best dinner conversation, but somehow asking Jack about his multitude of scars seems like worse. At least this is recoverable.

Believe it or not, Jack would not mind talking about his scars. Sure they're painful memories but not painful in the same way as Tenenbaum, as Fontaine. Only the throat one might be going too far, and that's only if Sinclair really pried.

Of course Sinclair can't read this narration so that whole paragraph is superfluous really.

Jack nods, glad to drop the subject. "Sorry, mister Sinclair."

Even if Sinclair could read the narration, he's not really sure what exactly he would ask. The one that makes him wonder the most is Jack's throat, so if Jack doesn't want to talk about that then this is a conversation better not had.

"No need to apologize, son, it's been a long day for both of us."

He stands to clear the table, offering Jack a friendly smile.

The day didn't start all that long ago, but somehow Jack can't find it in himself to argue.

He chills at the kitchen table, wraps the robe around himself. Fresh from the bath, his skin just dry and his hair clean, it's cosy. And the robe's got just enough give that he can get it around his chin and kind of snuggle into it. It's a bit like...

Well, like being hugged. Someone let him remember being hugged, apparently. Only this is more vivid -- the difference between seeing a picture of something and holding it in your hands -- and that could just be how old memories work, or it could be he's fucked up, he doesn't know. He can't really ask, at least not ask Sinclair.

Anyway, it feels nice is what he's trying to get at.

It suits him too, although the sleeves on the robe are a little too short. He looks happy, which isn't something Sinclair thinks he's seen on Jack since they met. Sick joy at tearing down their attackers, perhaps, but not real happiness.

He allows himself a small smile as he turns around to wash their dishes.

"Why don't you go relax, chief? You had a rough night, if you want to catch a cat nap you're welcome to the mattress in there." You know. Since he hogged it all last night.

"I'm not sleepy," he says, making toddlers everywhere proud.

"But I'm gonna go on the couch."

Because -- no offense to your dining set, Sinclair -- it's a mite bit more comfortable to curl up on. And he'd like to be closer to the door -- the 'keep watch for splicers ALL THE TIME' instinct is a hard one to shake.

He's not even unarmed. Believe it or not, he has a damper, soapier wrench stuck right there into the band of his pyjama bottoms.

Sinclair shrugs, "Suit yourself," and goes back to the dishes.

Come to think of it, he can't remember the last time he had a guest in his place. Which is probably why he doesn't have anything to accommodate one. Or maybe it's the other way around. At this point he can't think of anyone he would want to have over anyway. It used to be that he could go other places when he wanted a little company, but there isn't really much company to be had anymore.

He makes a mental note to keep his house topside better stocked for guests than his apartment down here. Just in case.

Besides his wrench, all the weaponry Jack has at this apartment is stashed untidily around the living room. He gathers them all around himself and retreats to the couch, which is far more comfortable than it has any right to be. No more perching on wet splintery wood or cold stone for Jack, no sir. He's living the high life right now.

For a while he's content to check and reload the guns, and clean them a bit on the sleeve of his borrowed robe. (Sorry mister Sinclair. It should wash off?) The ambient noise of the lounge becomes the peaceful clicking of metal and sliding of lead. After a little while he's doing it horizontal, head on his arm, cosily watching the light reflect off the barrel of his shotgun. Jack's free arm's curled around his wrench like it's a teddy bear.

Sinclair better not laugh, because he's totally fallen asleep again.

Oh, Sinclair will laugh. But quietly, because Jack is a precious angel when he's dead asleep.

He dries the bowls and turns them upside down to dry, wandering back into the living room.

"Hey, kid, I was thinking--" he begins, but.

So much for not being sleepy. Cue the quiet laughter, along with some head shaking and walking away.

Somebody needs to buy that guy a real teddy bear, he's going to wake up and shoot himself in the face one day. That'll be a rude awakening.

For now, Sinclair decides to occupy himself reading a book in an arm chair in his room. It's not very often he finds time to read anymore; even now he forces down the reflexive feeling that he's wasting time. He has things he needs to do, if they ever want to get out of Rapture he needs to keep moving.
But Jack needs his rest, and Sinclair can't leave without him. There's nothing for it, so he may as well make the most of it.

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