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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That is one hell of a relief. It's not that Sinclair thinks he'd never get out without Jack, he had some semblance of a plan before they met, but it would be one hell of a lot harder to do.

"I'm glad to hear you say that," he says with a smile, rising to his feet again. "What do you say we find that code and take a look at our new submarine?"

You know. If the code wasn't burned along with all the other stuff Jack was so terrified of Sinclair discovering.

It's okay, I don't think quest items are destructible.

"Yeah." Not a whole truckload of boundless enthusiasm, but some relief that he doesn't have to talk about difficult things any more.

"I searched through the desk here pretty well, didn't find anything. You might have some better luck."

Meanwhile there's a bookshelf over there that he could probably look through all day long and then maybe a couple days after that. ...That'll be a last resort.

"I'm gonna have another look around in here. Holler if you find anything."

He nods. Then catches himself and stops nodding. Then goes ahead and finishes the nod, because come on, Jack, don't be oversensitive.

"Got a tonic for that," he mumbles, in support of his desk-searching credentials.

The marvels of splicing. Sometimes the conveniences it allows for are pretty tempting, but it only takes a stroll through any given hallway in Rapture to make your mind up for you in a heartbeat.

Speaking of which, Sinclair can't imagine Jack is holding up too well over there, having not spliced properly all day long. He's keeping himself together well enough, but it's only a matter of time before it starts to really show. And there's that urgent need to talk to Doctor Tenenbaum, but there's nothing he can do about that right now. He forces it back down.

The other side of the room is...not likely to have anything with a code. It's mostly furniture, there are a couple pictures which Sinclair takes his time inspecting, but mostly he knows he's putting off the inevitable bookshelf search.

A few minutes longer of staring at a portrait of Andrew Ryan, checking behind it, examining the entire frame, and Sinclair gives up.

He drags himself back over to the bookshelf and sighs. This could take a while.

Jack does make a show of putting in an effort, but his heart is about as in it as the code is in the drawers. He spends more time staring blankly into them than searching them, and even more time than that trying not to look at Ryan's body, which is more prominent in the room than it has any right to be.

And honestly it shouldn't be like that, because he has to find the code to get them out and where on earth has his get-up-and-go got up and gone to?

Maybe it's that he's hungry. He makes a somewhat noisy pit-stop at the nearest trash can.

And comes up with a crumpled bit of paper, torn out of a planner, four digits written on it.

"...Mister Sinclair?"

Sinclair has pulled the first book out of the shelf and is sullenly thumbing through it when Jack speaks up.

"Hm?" he says without looking up.

"I found something," he says with cautious optimism.

The book goes back on the shelf in about .01 seconds flat and Sinclair is at Jack's side to examine his find.

Four digits.

6225.

"...Where'd you find this?"

"In the trashcan," says Jack, pointing a finger at the offending receptacle.

And there were no cakes at all, by the way.

Well that's. An odd place for something so important.

"Can't hurt to try," Sinclair shrugs, stepping back and motioning for Jack to lead the way. He follows behind him, stepping over Ryan's corpse as they exit the room.

Thanks for nothing, asshole.

Jack straight up treads on Ryan's hand to show how much he doesn't give a shit (plot twist: he does).

He does a rote glance about for splicers as they leave the office, but the hallway and the rooms beneath it are silent. Nobody's there to interrupt them as they make their way to the control panel for the moment of truth.

A glance at the paper, and then Jack taps the number into the control panel, not expecting very much.

And then the whole wall begins to move.

The wall is moving. It's moving.

It splits and slides apart, not very far, but far enough to fit both Jack and Sinclair in side by side.

And it's open there in front of them. The wall has opened. The wall has moved away and it's open and there's a room behind it and this is it.

This is it.

The submarine sits solidly by a short boardwalk like it was waiting for them.

Sinclair lets out a joyous laugh and walks into the new room spreading his arms and turning back around to look at Jack.

"Kid! We found it! We found our sub!"

He laughs again and turns back around, soaking in the sight before him.

"...We found our way out."

Jack's enthusiasm is a bit more cautious and subdued, a little more slow in coming. He's staring at the sub, wondering if after all this it can really get them out of danger, whether it's so much better that they won't get shot down again.

But Sinclair certainly seems to think it is. And Jack sure would like to believe the things that Sinclair says.

So a smile breaks like morning across his face. Fetch quest successfully completed.

"Our way out," he repeats, and hears himself sounding hopeful.

The doubt is certainly still very present for Sinclair, but this is everything he could have hoped for in terms of an escape plan. A sub is going to move faster than a bathysphere and it's a hundred times more fortified. This is their shot. They can't blow it because there isn't anything else. They can't blow it, so they won't.

They're getting out in this thing and that's just how it is.

Sinclair could almost walk up to the sub and kiss her fading exterior. If Ryan trusted this as a backup to get him out of Rapture if necessary, there's no reason Sinclair shouldn't trust it to do the same for them.

Although finding the key code in the trash, knowing now that that's what it was, speaks volumes in terms of the plans Ryan had about escaping.

"Let's get inside and make sure everything's running properly," he suggests, and the excitement definitely soaks through in his voice. And why shouldn't it? This is the best luck they've had...probably since they ran into one another.

"Okay," says Jack.

And then the excitement ends and seems to take the last of his wind with him. The fetch quest is done, so he doesn't have that responsibility to keep moving for. So he just... thinks he needs to

lean... no, slide down and sit... against this wall. For just a moment. Till his mental energy comes back.

Sinclair starts toward the sub, but there's an unusual silence behind him. After a while, you get used to the heavy plodding of six and a half feet of muscle behind you. When he turns around, Jack is sliding to the ground, looking alarmingly pale.

He takes the few steps back and tries to catch Jack by the arm but he's already slouched over.

"Hey, alright, let's take a break," Sinclair says, kneeling down beside him and looking around the room as he continues speaking. "What do you need, chief? I'll see what I can do."

There's nothing in here, Andrew Ryan didn't splice. Shit.

Whoa, hey, he didn't mean to cause a fuss. Jack tries to wave Sinclair off, though he kinda has to concentrate on one thing at a time, moving a hand, then lining up words, then speaking them. The alien apathy's hitting him pretty hard and turning things he shouldn't have to think about into hurdles.

Of course, fully comprehending and worrying about this development is a set of mountains to climb all by itself.

"No, I'm just..."

...losing concentration, judging from the way the sentence wavers.

"I'll look inside in a minute."

Ohhh man. Priorities.

If they leave the sub now, they're risking needing to take an extra trip back for maintenance purposes. If something's not working correctly, whatever else they might need to do, anything could put them off an extra day or two.

But Jack's not going to get anything done like this.

Sinclair holds his breath for a second before deciding on what to say.

"It can wait."

Man but he really doesn't want it to.

"Let's get you back to Olympus, sport. We're gonna have better luck finding you something out there than in here."

That chat with Doctor Tenenbaum is imminent.

If ever he should fight Sinclair on something, it's this. Because it can't really wait, they need to get out of Rapture and who knows if splicers might ruin the sub, or Sinclair might get hurt again, or something else could go wrong while they're waiting for Jack to get his arse in gear.

He opens his mouth to say it, but the words fall away like mist. They won't be gathered again. And time passes.

Then Jack makes himself concentrate, and summarises: "The sub'll... be okay?"

He watches Jack go in and out of focus until finally he says something, and Sinclair exhales.

"If we close it all back up again, nobody's gonna be able to touch it. It'll be fine."

But now the question is how in the hell they're going to make it all the way back to Olympus with Jack in this sorry shape. Sinclair can't defend the both of them, even with the nifty chemical thrower. He can surely try, and he will if he needs to, but that would probably not end well.

"You good to make the trip?"

Because if not, they might be better off just waiting this out. However long that may take.

"Mm."

A noise of assent.

He frowns, and then a few moments later he slides himself back up the wall like a fall in reverse. His hands are far from steady.

Everything seems to be taking Jack at least three times as long as it normally would, and that seems vaguely like something Sinclair should be worried about. But there's nothing he can do for him right at the moment. He just hopes that when they come across any splicers, the adrenaline will be enough to shake him back to real time.

"We'll be home before you know it," Sinclair says, leading the way out and stopping by the key pad to scramble the numbers again.

Jack follows, moving more alertly now that he's just moving -- a simple task and he can keep momentum going. He doesn't feel physically weak or tired, he just feels... stopped. Blocked up. Something cold and grey that he can't really find the words for.

It can only be the ADAM, can't it? The sudden lack of it over the last few days. It'd make him feel better, he knows that much.

...Huh. Apparently he's still quite capable of feeling fear.

Eventually, they reach Olympus Heights, and though Jack is more tattered and bruised than he might be -- he's taken more hits than usual, reacted without some of his speed -- they've gotten there in one piece.

Jack sinks onto the couch, more awake than before but still listless. Finds himself staring at no particular part of the wall.

There are things he'd like to do, but damned if it isn't going to take him a few minutes to straighten them all out.

Back inside, Sinclair makes a beeline for the kitchen. It's not what Jack needs, but then again it's not exactly something Jack doesn't need.

A couple minutes later, Sinclair appears back in the living room with two sandwiches. He sets one down on the coffee table in front of Jack and places himself at the opposite end of the sofa, immediately digging into his to assuage the persistent growling of his own stomach.

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