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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Jack's leaning against that empty pillar, resting the back of his head against the cold stone. He's not tired, exactly. But his anger and worry have drained into apathy and he really doesn't know if that's better or worse than before.

But at least he's not as reluctant to go near Ryan's office as he was this morning. Memories schmemories... he just wants to get this search finished with some, any, degree of success, and then go back to Olympus Heights and hibernate.

"Alright."

Sinclair keeps his eyes on Jack a few seconds longer, trying to assess whether or not he's alright to keep going or if they should give it a few more minutes.

"Think you'll make it? Or do you want to look for another Sister?"

"I'll make it," says Jack, as if he doesn't understand why the question would even be asked. He's made it this far; of course he'll make it.

He's made it all the way through physical trauma and through highs and lows of awful emotion. Just being a bit listless doesn't count.

(The tremor is creeping back into his hands, almost invisible for now.)

Jack sounds almost offended; his humor's obviously growing shorter. Not a good sign, but Sinclair's always been pretty good at tempering a disagreeable demeanor. As long as Jack keeps away from any sort of violent reactions, they're in the clear.

So Sinclair follows Jack out of the trophy room, down the hall and through a couple bulkheads before he recognizes where he is again. At the end of a short corridor lies the control center of Rapture. It's looking a little neglected, which is something Sinclair might worry about if he didn't have plans to be out of here in the next day or so. Somebody else can figure out how to make sure this city keeps running. Or not. Once he's out of here, the whole population can drown for all he cares. In fact, he hopes the whole population drowns. The tiny fraction that doesn't deserve to die will then at least be put out of their misery.

But it's darker here than he's used to, even in Persephone. Maybe it's because they're deeper down, or maybe it's the red cast on the room from the volcano.

He's got a good feeling about this place. They're close.

"We can skim this place first and then head up to the office, if you want."

"I've looked around this room before."

Pretty thoroughly, in fact. Had something to do with the one and only other door, the one that he thought was the only way to Ryan until he found that loose grate. If there was a way to a sub here he would have found it.

The room's only a wall's thickness away. Jack's tense, as if expecting an attack, even though they can see from here that there are no splicers in the room.

"I'll... try and open the door. You can look."

Sinclair nods his concurrence and takes off for the wall in the opposite direction from where Jack goes. It's lined with control panels and desks, buttons and knobs and lights that mean next to nothing to Sinclair, but if he can spot any kind of departure from the typical, that's all he needs. Something that stands out.

Meanwhile Jack heads for the door, the one that was busted beyond trespass last time he was here, and finds--

--it's open.

Not wide open, not even visibly open until he gets close and starts examining it. But the doors are thrust slightly apart, a small amount of light escaping through them. He throws up dust as he gets close, the motes spiralling in and out of this almost imperceptible glow.

Someone has been through here.

He thinks he might prefer the apathy, because this makes his stomach drop.

Reaching the end of the wall...there's not really anywhere else to go. If there were anything hidden in this room, it probably would have been here. So either Sinclair missed something crucial or it's just plain not here.

He turns around to check out Jack's progress, and there's definitely more happening on that side of the room than on his. He gives the length of the wall one last skim for good measure and rejoins Jack.

Jack, who is looking at the door in his way like it caught him stealing two Silver Eagles from a cash register in an ice cream shop in a parallel universe.

"...We going in there?"

It worked hard for that money!

"Uh-huh." Jack gets his fingers into some of the door's moulding and pulls. Then tugs. Then strains. Then, at last, shifts the door enough to get his fingers in the gap and pull some more.

And this is why it's useful to take a guy around with you who's built like a brick shithouse.

Jack's concentrating on getting it open, so he doesn't look inside right away, but as the door opens Sinclair will be able to see a more recently-spoiled room than he might be used to. There's no rotting corpses and the lights are all on, but the trash cans are overturned, and there are holes torn in the couches. It looks like it was some kind of waiting area, lushly-appointed, with paintings on the walls and coffee tables on the floor. To their left, it rises into a broad staircase leading out of sight.

The helpful green Office of Andrew Ryan signs have a presence here as well. They're on the right track.

"Looks like we're a little late to the party," Sinclair says. Although to be fair, this place still looks one hell of a lot better than the majority of Rapture.

...Having said that, it sure didn't take long for it to start its descent into the unholy mess it's about to become.

The last time he was in this room was around the time he first came to Rapture. The first step in growing any sort of roots in this place was of course going to be figuring out how to make himself necessary to The Man. That conversation was probably the most civil one they ever had; everything after that remained professional with deep undertones of distrust and spite. Which is the way things went for most people who had to do business with Andrew Ryan. No one really liked him, but it was almost impossible to get anything done with him working against you.

Almost.

"I doubt there'll be much in here, but I can look this room over anyway if you want to go on ahead to Ryan's office," Sinclair says.

If Jack is gonna need a minute to himself, he should at least have that option. It's some heavy stuff, Sinclair gets that.

Jack pauses, slowly stretching his arms, giving the question really good consideration. He pays more attention to it than he does to the new room, in fact.

And he... does want to see. It's not like Sinclair's going to backtrack as soon as he's gone and shimmy through the crawlspace on a whim. And Jack just has this impending sense of doom about Ryan's office. A feeling he wants to dispel before he goes in there with anyone else.

"...Good idea," he says, nodding without looking at Sinclair's face.

Now that the door is open he sets off up the stairs, not wasting any time.

Sinclair watches Jack disappear up the steps and frowns. For having such a hesitance about coming here in the first place, he took off in something of a hurry. And that tugs at Sinclair's curiosity something awful, but an offer is an offer and Jack took him up on it. So now he's going to search this room.

For what, he's not really sure. If Ryan was hiding a sub anywhere, he wouldn't have left evidence of it in a room for his guests. But nonetheless, Sinclair picks up a newspaper and shuffles through it, magazines, observes the pictures on the wall. There's a group photo of Rapture's Best and Brightest, opposite a poster for one of Sander Cohen's god awful productions. Sinclair can thankfully say he's never had to sit through one himself.

He kills about three or four minutes that way before he runs out of ways to stay occupied and decides to find Jack again.

And maybe he ought to announce himself coming up the stairs, but he's not sure what he's about to interrupt, if anything, so he keeps quiet.

He's not about to interrupt anything, at least not right away. The landing of the staircase is a hallway that curves away to the right; when Sinclair turns the corner he'll find a long stretch of uncluttered wall on his left and a door with a sparking panel to his right. And beyond them: the actual door to Andrew Ryan's office. Or at least it had better be this time, jesus christ, this place has more entryways than Return of the King will have endings.

The door is closed; Jack is inside.

Jack...

...when he gets to the office, he has to hack the door. And that itself tells him that either it's someone else's home now, or it's untouched.

And it's the second possibility that turns out to be true.

Ryan is still lying on the floor. There are still bullet-holes everywhere from the bots that strafed Jack as he escaped. He doesn't check yet to see if the red Fontaine Futuristics sign is still in place; he's already crouching next to Ryan's body.

It's soft, beginning to rot. His face is eggshell white, but where he touches the floor, where Jack can see skin, he's turned an ugly blotchy purple. The smell is getting towards horrendous. Which is to say it's not much worse than any other part of the city you could name.

The broken golf club is still embedded in his skull, for fuck's sake.

Jack reaches out to touch it, pull it out or something -- but he can't, he pulls his hand back as if it's been burned.

Well it may not particularly look like interrupting anything, but it feels that way. Sinclair walks up to the sight of Jack crouched over his father's dead body and wonders briefly if he ought to go back downstairs and wait a while longer, but the sound of the door sliding open has probably already alerted Jack to his presence.

It smells something terrible in here, but after the room with the decaying Big Daddy, it's nothing he can't tolerate.

Sinclair gently clears his throat.

"Waiting room's got nothing."

Jack stands quickly when he hears the door open, and turns to see Sinclair -- and then doesn't move, standing between Sinclair and the body, feeling strangely as though he's hiding the evidence.

"I... haven't looked around yet," he admits. "I had to hack the door open."

"Whoa," Sinclair laughs softly. "At ease, soldier. Take your time. I can start looking if you need another minute."

He gestures back to Ryan's desk on the other side of the glass divide to let Jack know he'll still have a small amount of privacy if he wants it.

Jack finds his gaze pulled back down and behind him, back to Ryan. Back to the guy who's apparently his father. Not that it matters, it's not like they ever did... father-son things, or anything. It's not like he even thought anything of Jack, he called him less than human.

One thing he will admit to, though: looking at the broken club is bringing back awful memories of moving and not being able to stop himself, aware for once of the fact that he wasn't in control of himself at all. He tenses, scowls at the floor, looks up at Sinclair for a moment.

"I don't," he says.

Sinclair lets his smile fade a bit.

"Kid," he says, sighing like he's searching for the right words. "You don't have to be a tough guy about everything. Go ahead and take as long as you need."

And with that he starts for Ryan's desk, actually somewhat curious about what he'll find. This is a rare opportunity, and although he's not sure exactly what he's looking for other than evidence of a submarine, he is sure he'll know it when he sees it.

"I'm not a kid," he retorts, regardless of the fact that Sinclair's walking away. "I'm not anyone's kid."

At least Sinclair didn't comment on the unusual murder weapon. Jack really doesn't feel like explaining himself about that one.

Well Sinclair gathered from the wrench that Jack favors blunt objects. The fact that the golf club is currently embedded in Andrew Ryan's skull just speaks to the passion with which he favors them.

But they already had the conversation on why Sinclair has no intention of eliminating the word "kid" from his library of endearing terms. Still, Jack's tone makes him a little sad.

"You're somebody's kid," he says, raising his voice a bit for Jack to hear him. "Didn't you have folks back in Kansas?"

He starts on the bottom drawers of Ryan's desk, rifling through files and folders of papers, financial records, the boring stuff. Nothing there.

Well, it was more a declaration that he doesn't belong to anyone, but since you ask.

"I..."

Jack's answer takes a bit too long to arrive. He doesn't want to tell the truth here, but there's a sentiment fighting to get out.

"They're gone."

He's found some more drawers on this side of the room and he opens one, taking his cue from Sinclair. Papers, nonsense, no big sheet with "SUBMARINE THIS WAY" printed on it.

"I don't want to talk about this, mister Sinclair."

So they're gone too. Ryan's gone. Whatever life he did have on the surface is gone. That's a whole lot to lose before you're even thirty. But sometimes that's just the hand you're dealt. If you're weak, it can break you. If you let it, it'll drag you down and bury you alive. Or, you can use it in your favor. If you turn it around, it can make you great.

It's a little too deep of a conversation for Sinclair's taste, though, and Jack's already shutting down to that anyway so he doesn't say anything. But part of him hopes Jack knows it. Weak isn't really a word Sinclair thinks he'd ever use to describe him.

The next drawer up is almost empty except for an Accu-Vox recorder, which doesn't play anything. Blank.

"You're still their kid," he says.

And the top drawer is a long skinny one below the center of the desk, which reveals a few of Ryan's personal effects. A watch with a dead battery, unused stationary with his monogram on it, a picture of Diane McClintock, the pretty blonde who might have been Ryan's wife if he'd had anything other than ice in his ribcage. And buried under all of it, a paper folder which Sinclair fishes out and spreads on top of the desk.

There are a few papers. The first couple are diagrams of pieces of machinery, and the last few are blueprints.

...Blueprints. Of Hephaestus and Central Control. He skims over them, trying to orient himself. There's the main room of Central Control...the stairs they just took...

"Hey, chief, come take a look at this," Sinclair calls out, dropping their previous conversation per Jack's request.

Jack doesn't dignify you're still their kid with a reply. But he does shut the drawer with rather more force than necessary. Because no, he isn't and he never was except in his head.

He keeps wishing that maybe he could be wrong, maybe the memories are based on something real, because they sure as hell feel real even after everything he's heard. But all the evidence points to nope, sorry kid, you really are a motherless freak. Maybe the realness of the memories only go to show what a number they did on his brain.

Oh god what the hell is he going to do when they get to land and he can't find them.

Jack's composed but kind of red-eyed when he joins Sinclair across the room (but if you mention it he will fucking cut you).

"Blueprints," he realises out loud. "There might be a submarine dock on them."

He's taken refuge back in emotional numbness, but this is still a pretty capital find.

What do you mean Sinclair dropped the conversation one sentence too late? Of course that last little bit was totally necessary.

And as Jack looks over the blueprints, Sinclair gets just a moment's look at his face. But he's not going to say anything about that. He wouldn't. Whatever Jack is feeling for whatever reason, it's justified and Sinclair feels confident that he already knows what it is. There's a lot of emotion in this room for Jack, and whether it's any sort of remorse or trauma about what happened with Ryan or whether it's just general homesickness, he doesn't need the salt in his wounds. No, Sinclair didn't see anything.

"I'm thinking even if it's not spelled out on here, we should be able to spot one a lot easier. If you see any unmarked rooms, any doors that look like they don't lead anywhere, any doors that look different from other doors. Those are gonna be the best places to start."

Well, so long as none of those unmarked rooms are little cramped ones full of photographs.

Jack takes a couple sheets off the top of the pile, glances them over. It's all a bit obtuse and hard to read -- lines on lines on tiny notes on symbols he doesn't understand -- but he tries to work out where they are anyway, going off the shapes of the rooms.

"Where are we?"

Concentrating on work. It's how he's distracted himself from a crushing existential crisis so far and it's how he intends to continue, even if work comes less naturally now for reasons he also chooses not to examine.

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