darling it's better down where it's wetter

[did_unkindly]

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

Comments

[did_unkindly]

Guilt is one of the things there, along with its opposite. Jack's seen and done stuff recently that would take even a well-adjusted adult more than a day or so to come to grips with.

"That's not a yes or a no!"

Do not pass go, do not collect $200 worth of bushes to beat around.

[modestman]

Sinclair shakes his head again, a little surprised by Jack's outburst. "No," he says, frowning. "Didn't see a damn thing. Heard about it pretty quick, but I never saw it myself."

And even if he had, he's not too sure what difference it would make. So the kid buried a golf club in his own father's skull. Worse has happened, and it's not as if there's not an entire trail of bodies in his wake.

[did_unkindly]

Jack nearly asks if he heard it from someone who saw it, but that line of questioning could go on forever and he just... doesn't want to think about it. He doesn't want to think about this any more.

He just nods to show he's understood and then glares at the floor, concentrates on the splicers' screams and on trying not to be freaked out by them.

[modestman]

It's something reversed for Sinclair, as the screams are something he can shrug off without too much effort, but the longer they stand there the more unnerving it becomes.

"Well," he says after another moment. "I don't know about you, but I could use that drink right about now. Shall we?"

[did_unkindly]

"Okay," says Jack. Anything to avoid standing in this spot for even longer.

Where Sinclair walks, he follows, looking warily in the direction of any noises but not reacting quite as dramatically as he did at that first corridor.

[modestman]

The walk to Sinclair's office is not too much farther from where they were, and once he shuts the door behind them, there's not a sound that leaks through. He motions for Jack to have a seat at the chair opposite him at his desk and goes directly for a cabinet.

"What'll it be, chief? Was I right about whiskey?" He pulls two glasses and a bottle down, fills the bottom of one glass for himself.

[did_unkindly]

"Okay," says Jack, secretly grateful for keeping Booze Hound in his genetic inventory. It means he doesn't have to weigh up the pros and cons of health gain and EVE loss.

...He watches the pouring with mild interest, since he's seen plenty of whiskey in the bottle but he's never seen how you're supposed to serve it.

[modestman]

Sinclair fills the bottom of the second glass and sets it down in front of Jack, taking his seat in front of him. It's worth it, after all that, to take a sip or two before getting back into conversation, but eventually Sinclair leans back and looks at Jack again.

"So what's on the itinerary for you now, kid? Planning on taking up residence in the burgeoning city of Rapture?" It would have been something of a trick question, but knowing now that Jack has full access to the bathyspheres...he does wonder why he bothers staying.

[did_unkindly]

"No," says Jack, quite firmly, as he picks up his glass.

"I'm going back... up there. Out of here."

Just as soon as he finds a submarine that works, or a bathysphere that'll do more than left, right, select your station and wait for arrival. Guess which station is never an option on those things? Clue: it's a lighthouse.

He gazes for a moment at the glass in his hand, just to make sure that he's not swallowing something awful, but it's actually clearer and richer in colour than the stuff he's been finding around. Back it goes, then.

Yes, the whole finger at once. Without even coughing. Sinclair is going to have to teach Jack some things about moderated drinking for pleasure.

[modestman]

Sinclair watches Jack down his entire glass and supresses a laugh, getting up to bring the whole bottle over and place it in front of Jack with an implied "help yourself".

"Can't say I blame you," he says, returning to his own glass. "I'd high tail it out of here myself, if I could. How're you planning on getting back to the surface?"

[did_unkindly]

Jack pours a little of the whiskey very carefully into his glass. He doesn't drink it yet, though; his EVE level's reasonable and he's not got any injuries worth speaking of.

"I don't know," he admits. He's still not sure what Sinclair's after, especially now it turns out he worked with Andrew Ryan, but beyond staying alert he doesn't know what he can do about that.

"If I can't find a submarine that works, I'll try to hack a bathysphere."

Wow, that was a lot of syllables all at once. His fake-memory momma would be proud.

[modestman]

It's the alcohol man, I told you it would make conversation easier. Sinclair knows what he's doing.

"Not a bad idea," he nods. "Any plans for what to do when you get back? I'm sure you could do better than working as a fireman."

[did_unkindly]

And just like that, he looks morose again. NICE GOING AUGUSTUS.

"I don't know."

To be fair, he bucks himself up again, since he's not completely incapable of self-awareness. But it's still... well. Heavy stuff.

"First I'll get there. Then I'll work something out. That's... what I do, I think."

[modestman]

"I suppose you could do that," Sinclair muses into his glass. "A tad messy though, don't you think? Going back up there with no plan, nothing but the shirt on your back and a story no one's gonna believe."

He throws it out there, it's undeniably a hook. Jack wants to ignore it, face the issues as they come along, but there's no harm in offering him a glimpse of what he may or may not be up against.

[did_unkindly]

Well thanks for laying it all out in front of him like that. Really.

"I don't have much of a choice."

Still a slave, then, says a treacherous part of his brain.

...You know what, he is going to knock back that drink now.

[modestman]

"There's always a choice, son," Sinclair smiles. He watches Jack down another glass, which he notices is poured a little more full than the first one he gave him.

He has ideas for himself, slowly forming ideas that come together a little more every time Jack tells him something. If he can piece it together well enough to explain, this could be a very successful relationship.

[did_unkindly]

"You sound like Ryan," grumbles Jack into his glass.

[modestman]

"Well, I'm positively injured," Sinclair laughs with a hand to his chest, feigning an actual wound. "Andrew Ryan might have been an insufferable, overconfident son of a bitch, but he wasn't always wrong."

[did_unkindly]

Jack is not very happy with this answer.

"What's the other choice, then? Stay here?"

Because he has one thing to say to that idea: it has a thousand syllables, the first 999 being "ha" and the final one being "no".

[modestman]

Sinclair shrugs and reaches to pour himself another glass. "I suppose technically that's one of them, but that wasn't what I had in mind. Rapture's a damn mess, I'm sure you've noticed, and I reckon we're on our last leg down here. I'm not too keen on staying any longer than I have to." He stops to take an intentionally timed sip, waiting to see if Jack is starting to catch on.

[did_unkindly]

A little yellow lightbulb pings into life over Jack's head.

By god, I think he's got it.

"...So that's what you're after?"

That's. Actually nice to know, you know, to have an idea of where Sinclair's coming from on this whole thing. Jack doesn't know why he couldn't have just said that from the beginning, but from the people he's met down here, he supposes that being straightforward isn't good for business. (And in a petulant way, that makes him like straightforward things even more.)

[modestman]

Ah, there it is. Sinclair can actually visually detect the moment Jack catches on. His expression opens up a little and he appears to relax some; clearly he anticipated something much more sinister. Fortunately sinister has never really been Sinclair's game. And as far as straightforwardness goes, he's a man of opportunity. Jack could have been useful for any number of things, but as it happens he's most useful for what Sinclair is most interested in.

"What I'm after is making it out of this city before it crashes down around us," he says. "And I'm not talking about empty handed either. Trust me, you don't want to get up there and end up as broke as most of the folks down here. I'm sure you know that."

[did_unkindly]

Well, nobody ever accused Jack of being a closed book. For a moment, his pages read: mild confusion.

"Would Rapture dollars* work up there?"

*this tag brought to you by John Shirley

[modestman]

This time Sinclair actually does laugh, although truthfully Jack's apparent naiveté regarding certain things is starting to tug at Sinclair's suspicious side.

"Well we're not about to try and make a break for the surface with bags full of money, if that's what you're getting at." Not literally, anyway. "I don't know if you've noticed, sport, but Rapture's just brimming with intellectual property that, up there, doesn't belong to anyone. Just a handful of that stuff is worth more than anything you'd be able to scrape up in the rest of your lifetime on your own."

[did_unkindly]

That makes Jack feel like kind of a dumbass, but he keeps at it, because this is really quite interesting. The rest of his life is something he knows he'll have to face, sooner or later, once he's out of danger and there's nothing left to react against. He likes the idea of doing that with money and stuff a good bit more than he does the idea of doing it without.

...But because he's starting to feel like kind of a dumbass, instead of just asking, he nods and tries to guess.

"Property you've got to be smart to invent, right?"

jack no