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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Almost went for that joke. Almost.

"Alright chief, following you."

And he's definitely glad to be getting out of this room, although the image of Ryan on that empty post makes it somewhat more tolerable. Still, death makes him a little uncomfortable, especially knowing the corpses in question most likely still had their sanity intact.

It stopped bothering Jack so much after maybe the hundredth sprawling corpse. Everything dies here, all the time.

Through the archway is a long, red-lit and flooded room, the smell of putrid Big Daddy mixing pleasantly with the smell of putrifying Big Daddy. There's the corpse of one about halfway down, under a leak. It's been there for a long-ass time, but that hasn't stopped the three splicers who are making a game attempt to loot it.

Jack blocks the archway with his arm, so that Sinclair won't go in the water, and throws Electrobolt. Submerged up to their knees, the splicers only have a chance to scream and collapse. If they aren't dead when their heads go under the water, then they are soon after. This all happens without any particular emotional reaction from Jack besides impatience.

Don't worry, Sinclair had no intentions of sharing the water with splicers. But he appreciates Jack's effort to keep him safe all the same.

Watching the scene before him, he fondly recalls that time he completely intentionally shot a vending machine to electrocute a splicer standing in a puddle before him. He's not gonna boast or anything but that was pretty clever. Much more creative than just shooting him point blank. Where's the fun in that?

They wait for the jumping sparks to settle down before they continue, but oh man. Sinclair's come across sacks of horse manure that smell better than this Big Daddy. There aren't many places in Rapture anymore that don't smell like death, but come on.

He holds his breath, rushing a little to exit on the other side of the room, possibly making it out before Jack does if Jack is not in a hurry as well.

Somewhere Tenenbaum starts laughing behind her hand and doesn't even know why.

Jack strides steadily through the water the same way he strides steadily across ground and through trees and, hell, probably the way he'd stride through raw sewage if he had to. Through the door is a landing that looks onto a lot of mysterious bubbling tubes; Jack takes a left and continues leading the way down. The walls here are built around jutting rock, or even hewn straight out of it, as if the earth itself is fighting the sea for mastery of Rapture.

This feels safer. This is more neutral ground, moving away from Central Control.

Maybe it feels safer to Jack, but it makes Sinclair just a tad nervous to not be able to hear anything at all over all the machinery in here. It's not so loud that he couldn't hear Jack speaking right next to him, but as far as splicers in the distance go...

On the other hand, this is a place he remembers. It's hard to forget a sight like this, something like witnessing your own open heart surgery. All the tubes and pulses you don't really understand, you just know that this is what keeps you going. He came down here before Persephone started undergoing construction, a couple mechanics showed him around at his request. He needed to know how much he would be relying on the rest of Rapture for his own needs. Obviously the less, the better.

Jack has a hand to his temple, pushing down like he's trying to snuff out his own thoughts. The ones that bounce around in your skull, kicking and screaming until you figure out how to silence them or you take too long and they get bored. The latter is considerably less pleasant.

And really, ignoring what's going on here any longer is not going to solve anything. Quite possibly, it can only make things worse. And Jack strikes him as the type who might be too proud to just say something.

"You ought to stop and find yourself a sea slug, son. You're lookin' a little pale."

"I'd rather find a way out," he says dully. Between the things in his head and the splicers no doubt in the area, Jack doesn't have a lot of attention left for conversation.

And he doesn't need ADAM to keep going, you know, give him a little credit. Sure it helps, and at certain points it's been all he had to look forward to other than gory revenge, but that doesn't make him a splicer, just a ~~child~~ ~~kid~~ ~~boy~~ man dealing with a lot of shit. He's pretty sure his face was completely normal last time he looked in a mirror, thanks so very kindly.

...He's not sure when his internal monologues got this spiteful.

He's just in a bad mood from getting so close to Ryan's office, from the prospect of having to go inside it again. That's it.

...Right. You've spliced how often exactly in the five or six days you've been here? It doesn't exactly take an expert to say that that's enough to form a dependency. But honestly, Jack. Sinclair would rather have you spliced and happy than suffering withdrawal and inevitably turning crazed and violent.

If that happens...

which it won't, but if it does.

...Sinclair decides not to follow that train of thought. Right now they need to find a way out before he starts deciding the details of what happens when they leave.

"Alright, alright, fair enough," he cedes, "but if you want to make a pit stop just say the word. Won't bother me one bit."

"Okay," says Jack testily.

Speaking of sea slugs, they're coming up to one of his previous kills. The girl's nowhere to be seen but there's a huge dead pile of metal and leather -- and ruined flesh too, where some entrepreneurial splicer has scavenged pieces of its diving suit. At least it doesn't smell as bad as the one back in the flooded room, though at a certain level of stench these distinctions do become a bit pointless.

Two of the fresher corpses lying near it suddenly laugh and spring to their feet. Jack jumps, and then -- well, the chemical thrower's right there in his hands, so he lets fly with the napalm, leaving them screaming.

And that's what it would have looked like if someone had attacked Sinclair back in the bathy bay. Lucky thing they decided to keep away.

Sinclair jumps a fair bit too, and takes several sizable steps backwards until they fall writhing on the floor.

"You weren't kidding," he says, once they're good and dead. He steps forward again and pushes one of their legs with his foot. Yep, dead.

"...Of course I wasn't."

That would be a weird thing to kid about.

There's a bit more colour in Jack's face. Wasn't a bad fight -- okay it's not like there was risk, and okay it was really short, but it did get his blood moving.

He crouches down next to one of the bodies and retrieves a crispy creme.

There is nothing on this green planet that could stop Jack from eating something he finds on a dead body.

Literally nothing.

And it's like he's got a radar for it to. Sinclair almost asks how he does that, sniff out the snacks on his victims, but thinks better of it. Maybe next time he'll remember to bring food with them, if it'll keep Jack from eating...corpse food.

Wow. Gross.

He's gonna pretend it doesn't completely disgust him. They've got work to do, and he'd rather focus on that.

"Where next?" he asks, grateful that the cake disappears as quickly as it does.

"I think there's one more level down," says Jack with his mouth full. Simultaneously, he's pulling a face. The cake kinda tastes like burnt plastic and charcoal. Can't imagine why, of course.

It's still with inexplicably heavy spirits that he leads the way down to Heat Loss Monitoring.

Another thing Sinclair can say for sure about Jack is that he's got an impeccable sense of direction. Sinclair can find his way around, but for only being here a few days it seems like Jack knows a good bit of this city like the back of his hand.

They continue on without speaking, mostly listening for any potential company they might have. Sinclair watches for bodies lying around, but for the most part Jack has all of that covered. Which makes it particularly easier on Sinclair. All he really has to do is keep an eye on Jack's splicer shakes in case he needs to demand a detour. Jack can fight off all the splicers he wants, but like it or not, he's technically one of them. It's just a matter of how long it takes him to start acting like it.

They plumb deeper into Hephaestus -- down stairs that must be leading into the heart of the earth by now; through a tunnel lit red, crossing the rock and sand of the seabed, passing by pillars of rock that spew hot black smog into the water.

And as they go further, Jack still can't put into words why it is he feels so miserable.

He likes fetch quests. Searching for things and then finding them is rewarding, he's good at it, that's how it's always been. And he really wants to find a sub to get out of this horrible place. So why does this feel so much like a chore? It's unfair and it's preying on his mind; he's had more than enough mysteries and nasty surprises for one accelerated lifetime.

He's tempted to ask for that pit-stop after all. At least there's one thing guaranteed to lift his mood and he'd really like some right about now.

But before he can make up his mind to say anything, the radio crackles, and a voice comes out.

"Jack? Are you here?"

It's Tenenbaum. It's Tenenbaum, and she doesn't sound as if she wants to chew him a new one. Jack stops walking, stares wide-eyed at Sinclair for a moment, then grabs the radio in his free hand and starts talking into it. (And he puts his back to the wall as he does, pretty much by instinct.)

This time it's excitement and trepidation making his hands tremble.

"Doctor Tenenbaum? I'm here? Did... did you........"

Sinclair jumps slightly at the crackle of the radio, a bit on edge looking out for splicers, but once he processes that voice...

Well he'll be damned.

That was one of the last things he expected to have happen today.

He joins Jack on the wall, watching his face, which is about as surprised as his own, if slightly more anxious. And there's a hint of relief in there too. He said he knew she'd call, somehow he turned out to be right.

Sinclair's not really sure what's about to be said by either of them, so he tries to keep his face clear of any real expression. Wouldn't want to influence anything he shouldn't.

"Sh, and listen to me," she tells him.

So he's there. Good. From the sound of machinery he's out and about, but if he's busy, then he can damn well stop and make time to listen.

"A girl comes to my home last night. She has not been with us before and I know I did not rescue her." And when it happened, it caught her completely by surprise -- because there's only one other person in Rapture with the ability to cure the Little Sisters. And last she checked, Jack didn't care to use it.

"She comes to me with a strange story. About you."

"Did she tell you what I told her?"

Not gonna lie, Jack's heart is kind of in his mouth at the moment. This is pretty stressful. But if it pays off... He tries to remember Sinclair's advice about not getting too emotional, or not pulling a gun on her, or whatever it was.

Wow Jack, impatient, she's trying to tell a story here.

"She did." But from Tenenbaum's tone, whatever Jack might have expected, this issue is a long way from resolved. And the casual observer might be able to guess the issue in question, because when have these two ever fought about anything else?

"But I must ask myself then, is this a change of heart? Or is it a bribe? I do not know." Jack starts to speak on the other end of the airwaves, but she cuts him off. "No, do not try to tell me. You have shown that I cannot trust you, any more than I would trust..." It occurs to her that Sinclair might be there, so she amends 'Fontaine' to: "...your father. Now you must show me that I am wrong."

It feels like a cruel thing to say, but he has to understand. She won't pretend to trust him with her other children's lives.

Yeah probably a good idea, if you'd compared him to Fontaine he would have literally flipped a table all the way to Olympus Heights.

As it is, this was not the response he had hoped for. He looks positively injured, and a bit of a whine enters his voice to complete the picture of mature dignity. "How?"

"Do not kill them," she says. Duh. "Cure them, send them to me. Then you will prove to me I can trust you."

Or at least show her that she might be able to. Because believe you her, she wants to be able to.

"Then I promise you will have your talk."

Well that's.

A turn of events.

He keeps to himself, but listens closely. So Jack saved a Sister! That's good news, in the context of his own conversation with Tenenbaum. His inner twelve year-old is sticking his tongue out at her, singing I TOLD YOU SO, I TOLD YOU SO.

But on the other hand, without harvesting Little Sisters, Jack's withdrawal's only gonna get worse. Whatever ADAM he can scrounge up from other sources isn't going to give him the boost he's used to. And Sinclair really doesn't want to have think about what he's going to do if Jack's cravings get out of hand.

Whether he likes it or not, he's going to have to have a way out in mind. And it's not that he didn't know what he was getting himself into; Jack Ryan's got a trail of bodies in his wake, each one showing evidence of a different kind of extremely unnatural death. He's been splicing since he got here, that's not a secret. But knowing he can't die throws something of a wrench in the Quick Exit gears.

And for what it's worth, he likes the kid. He's not terrible company, especially considering the type of company Sinclair would usually have to pick from. The whole scenario is unpleasant.

Maybe he'll have to talk to Tenenbaum again, figure out a better way to keep him on this side of sane.

Jack's thoughts have taken a similar line as Sinclair's -- though in his case, it's more from an angle of shit now where is he going to get ADAM? There's some when he rescues a Sister, sure, but that's some and he's used to hitting upwards of a hundred and fifty at a time, several times a day. Or at least he got used to it, during his first couple days here -- it's dropped off to almost nothing since then. Maybe that really is why he feels like shit.

That's why he gives Sinclair a kind of horrified look.

...Oh great. And Jack knows it too.

Sinclair gives him a nod. Go on. It's his choice, after all, and Sinclair's going to work with whatever Jack decides.

He really is quite set on talking to Tenenbaum. He's decided that they'll talk, after all. There are questions only she can answer. Stuff in his head only she can understand. When he lets himself think about it, she's the closest thing he has to a mother.

But this is a steep-ass price.

Believe it or not, Jack carefully filed away that advice Sinclair gave him before, treated it as gospel as any other items in his quest log. And so he's silent for several moments more. Because he is trying, very hard, not to yell into the radio.

...

"Okay," he says at last, but it comes out a bit strangled.

Wow, don't be overenthusiastic.

Tenenbaum closes her eyes briefly, puts a hand across her face. Disappointed. She really suspects that he did not intend to turn over a new leaf at all, and so once again she is disappointed.

But she wronged him horribly, and maybe it's not up to her to decide when she's repaid that debt. Ugh. She'll give him this chance to prove himself, and hope for nothing, so that whatever happens can't be worse. The alternative is giving the child up for lost. Just accepting that he's no more than what she and Suchong and Fontaine fed into him.

He's agreed to try.

"Thank you," she says, sincerely.

Then she turns the radio off, and lights a cigarette, and takes a deep, steadying breath.

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