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]

COUGH SPLUTTER UGH

"I don't know," he admits, in a brief moment of respite.

EW SPLUTTER SPIT SPIT cough cough wheeze

"I... thought of this."

[You have SUCKED GASOLINE INTO YOUR MOUTH. You are a MORON! For twenty-four hours, your breath will STINK!]

"...Tastes bad." He opens his mouth and sticks out his tongue in the universal symbol for ew, gross.

[modestman]

"I can see that," Sinclair says, letting out just the smallest laugh shhhh he's not laughing at you he's laughing with you.

He goes back to the box o' treats and pulls out another cola and the bag of chips and brings it back to Jack. "Here, this oughta get the taste out of your mouth."

At least it worked. He watches the gas pouring out of the pipe resting on the edge of the trash can. Better Jack than himself, anyway.

[did_unkindly]

Jack's just gonna attempt to use the soda for mouth wash, swooshing it round with his tongue and spitting it into the dock water. Don't judge him yo, that water has been sitting there for a long time and is already more grody than he can hope to make it with his petrol spit.

Spoilers: it doesn't really help.

Oh well. Bad taste or not, chips are nothing to be sniffed at. crunch crunch crunch

[modestman]

Sinclair watches Jack, only mildly disgusted, and focuses his attention back on the trash can. It's about half full now and the flow is just starting to slow down. It looks like it was just big enough, that was lucky. A minute or two more and the flow is down to a trickle. Sinclair pulls the trash can away and lets the pipe fall to the ground.

"Alright, try that now. Maybe you'll get out of this operation with both arms after all."

[did_unkindly]

"I'd like that," says Jack mildly.

Was that an attempt at humour or just a complete failure to recognise it? Who knows?

Jack goes back to the panel he was working at before, slow and cautious, and finds it idling sluggishly. A little poking around fails to fatally electrocute him. He gives Sinclair a triumphant thumbs-up.

[modestman]

"Alright!" Sinclair laughs, stepping back to give the working guy his space. "Looks like we're in business! I'll be over here if you need anything else."

He retreats to his bench and drops down on it, glad to be off his leg again. ...Jack is definitely not the brightest man he's ever met, but nobody can ever say he isn't resourceful.

Be that as it may, something about all of this still just doesn't add up. And maybe, no, it's probably got something to do with the fact that he's the son of Andrew Ryan. But in Sinclair's experience, the less intelligent ones are usually the first to succumb to the side effects of splicing. And here Jack is, a man who should be a time bomb of raging addiction, gentle as can be so long as no one is threatening his life. Almost as if he was built for taking this stuff.

Sinclair laughs to himself. The pompous bastard would make sure his offspring is some sort of superior human being. But no, that's absurd. Plasmids didn't come around until just a few years, and you can't create a resistance to something that doesn't even exist.

He shakes his head and drops it. There's no way he's going to figure this out on his own, he's going to need Jack to just tell him whatever it is he's hiding.

"How's it looking, kid?" he calls out.

[did_unkindly]

"Good," Jack replies. He sounds less distracted than before, now that he can take his time with the pipe dreaming. He's also blissfully unaware of Sinclair's sadistic plot to wrest the story of his past out of him, so there's that.

He's not going to declare an unqualified success just yet, though. The bathysphere is more complicated than anything he's hacked before, it's still perfectly possible to non-painfully screw up, and he's trying not to do that so often that he straight up breaks the thing.

As he works, he ronch-ronches his way loudly through the rest of the bag of chips.

[modestman]

Several more minutes pass in relative silence before Sinclair gets bored enough to stand up and hobble on over and check out Jack's work again.

"Once we've got this thing working right, we should be able to take it straight out of here," he says. "I'm gonna need to collect a few things to take back with us, but if all goes according to plan we just may be out of here tonight." And won't that be an enormous goddamn relief. It'll be good to see the stars again. Or anything that's not cold and damp, for that matter. It seems like the closer he gets to escaping this place, the uglier it all looks.

[did_unkindly]

"Tonight?"

Wow. He's gone from trapped and banging around, straight to we may be out of here tonight. Jack couldn't keep the hope out of his face if he tried.

He nods with quick excitement, and redoubles his efforts on the wires and piping.

[modestman]

Sinclair nods, grinning proudly. The look on Jack's face is priceless, and while it hasn't ever really been much of a priority to make sure people around him are happy, it doesn't hurt when it's a side effect of something he wanted to have happen anyway.

"I can smell your feast already, son. We're gonna be some of the wealthiest men in the country."

[did_unkindly]

And so the day passes. Sinclair packs his luggage, money-making masterpieces and all. Jack, who has nothing to pack but lots to do, stays at the bathysphere and takes occasional breaks to scavenge for parts or murder over-curious splicers.

As artificial evening falls, he's in the bathy's cabin, poking at the jury-rigged steering. He's pulled up a lot of the floor, cut the rudders off from their original radio controls. It's not pretty; there are splinters and wires everywhere. But it's let him stretch salt-saturated ropes from those rudders to a kind of makeshift joystick cluster.

He's even tested it a little. He figured that, if worst came to worst and he was trapped underwater in a non-functioning sphere, he could shoot himself in the head and start over again. But that was never necessary; he managed to take the sphere a few feet down the docking rings without incident, and even got her back again, although it took at least an hour to figure out how to turn around.

Jack is still jubilant from that test run. His heart beats faster every time he thinks about sunlight.

He's whistling, even, completely tunelessly, as he lies on his stomach to check the integrity of his knots.

[modestman]

Sinclair returns to Jack a few hours later, walking into the docks with a bag full of Rapture spoils hefted over his shoulder. This single bag is what's going to secure them both an extremely comfortable life on the surface. And Jack is so tolerant of the effects of ADAM, he might even be able to show the right people how it works. And it all starts here, tonight, leaving Rapture and never looking back.

"How's it looking, chief?" he says, setting his bag down on the bench.

[did_unkindly]

He knows it's just another verbal quirk like kid or son, but Jack finds he likes this one. Chief. Has a nice ring to it.

"It runs great," he says proudly. "I made it steer, look."

He tugs on one of the jury-rigged joysticks. The water in the dock is already choppy, so the movement of the submerged rudders isn't really visible, but if Sinclair peeps inside the bathysphere he'll be able to see the taut rope jerking something around in its depths.

Sorry about the mess, by the way.

[modestman]

"Hey, nice work!" Sinclair says, patting Jack on the back. "When do you think she'll be ready for lift off?"

[did_unkindly]

Jack tenses at the sudden approach, because there are some things you have to get used to again after all the fighting for his life he's been doing. But he appreciates the compliment, he really does.

"She can go now," he says, and he says it with unusual fervour. A minute surrounded by Rapture and its memories is a minute too long. "I tested it."

[modestman]

Sinclair couldn't keep the grin off his face if he tried. Finally. After fruitlessly trying to piece together some sort of exit strategy, the son of Andrew Ryan falls from the sky (quite literally) and now, a whole 24 hours later, he can already feel the sand between his toes.

"Well what are we waiting for then? You got everything you need?" he asks.

[did_unkindly]

Jack nods, then thinks of something.

"Did you bring anything to eat?"

The box of goodies is loooong since picked clean, and they won't be served in-flight snacks by friendly attendants, so uh...

[modestman]

He looks over at the box from earlier and sure enough, as full as it had been, it is now barren.

"Anyone ever tell you you eat like a horse?" he says, laughing. "Alright, I'll bring back some more of that. How's that thing on gas? Fill it up?"

[did_unkindly]

"I get hungry," says Jack, extremely helpfully.

Oh, and he also answers the question that isn't rhetorical.

"I put gas in it. But I used it. I'll fill it up now."

He springs up and makes a beeline for the handy filling station behind the dock.

[modestman]

Sinclair picks up the box and makes as quick a trip as possible with his healing leg. Which is feeling considerably better, by the way, though it still aches more than he'd like it to. It's easier to ignore with the bubbling excitement in his belly. Sure, he was excited when he came to Rapture, but this...this is different.

Rapture is toxic. Staying here is a slower and more painful death than anything an atom bomb could do. This is a chance to start over. Sinclair's had his run, playing the game, turning a profit. He's beyond ready to cash it in and live out the rest of his days in luxury. Real luxury, not Ryan's artificial paradise. That's what all the work was for, anyway. This is it. It feels like Christmas.

"I'm telling you, kid," he says upon his return, setting the box down outside of the bathysphere. "This is the best thing that could've happened for either of us. A clean slate, starting fresh. You're gonna be able to do whatever you want."

[did_unkindly]

"Whatever I want?"

A smile grows on Jack's face. He likes that idea. Deciding what he likes to do, not taking orders from endless voices on the radio who may or may not turn out to be a dead guy. It's the final looked-for slap in Fontaine's face, he realises. He, Jack, was supposed to do whatever he was told. Well, now he's going somewhere where that won't ever happen again.

Yes, he likes the idea of that a lot.

[modestman]

"Anything at all. Now what do you say we get this show on the road?" he says, collecting his bag of treasures from the bench. There's a mess of stuff lying around the dock, a trash can full of gasoline, but for all Sinclair cares this entire city could be painted in shit. They're out of here, none of it even matters anymore.

[did_unkindly]

Nodding more eagerly than he thinks he's ever done in his life, Jack hops into the bathysphere and crouches next to the controls.

Of course, of course, this is the moment at which singing becomes audible outside the bathy station.

Jack's hand goes automatically to his revolver, and he half-rises again.

[modestman]

Ah, well that could put a damper on things.

"Goddammit, Weir," Sinclair says under his breath. "Hope you were right about this thing being ready to go, kid." He shoves the box through the threshold onto the floor and drops his bag on the seat before reaching for his own gun.

[did_unkindly]

Hurriedly -- he's not let splicers spoil his progress before; he's not about to start now -- Jack kicks the bathysphere into whatever kind of gear it's capable of. He slams the door shut. Airtight seals hiss; the needle of a pressure gauge wavers back and forth.

The bathysphere rocks for a moment and then starts to descend. Hang on, Sinclair. It's a bumpier ride than usual. While Jack hauls at the joysticks, he keeps one eye glued on the station entrance -- and the splicers who've begun to appear there.

They're shouting abuse, some of them running towards the sphere. Their voices are muffled and echoing but it's still possible to make out the words.

"Where are you going?!" "Think you can escape, monster?" "Hold the door for your elders and betters." "The spheres? In service again? At last! We can take the children to Arcadia!" "DON'T LEAVE WITHOUT ME!"

They make it beneath the water. A few seconds later, there's a splash and a crash and the bathy rocks alarmingly. A pair of feet appears at the window, kicking wildly, half-crushed against the wall by the descending sphere. Sound travels well underwater, and they can hear the exact moment when the drowning splicer stops screaming.

Nobody else follows them, after that.