weathertop | darling it's better down where it's wetter

"Hold on!" says Jack urgently.

Alarm bells are going off in his head and self-preservation kicks into high gear, and he yanks the controls again as the sonar noise swings back around behind them.

The bathy, not designed for this kind of off-road nonsense, starts to spin. The torpedo misses them again. But good luck guessing which direction it went, or even which direction is up, as the sphere rotates like a fairground ride.

Jack, teeth gritted, fights to get them back on course. But it's not like there are seat belts. He's half tugging on the joysticks, half hanging onto them for dear life.

Sinclair is forced back onto the seat as the bathysphere takes a sharp curve, and he ends up on the floor, hanging onto the seats for whatever kind of security they can offer.

This was definitely not part of the plan. Even if it should have been, it wasn't. Sinclair tries to rifle though everything he's learned about Ryan's defense system for some sort of piece of instruction he can offer Jack, but he comes up dry. A missile was fired, the only thing to do is try and avoid it. And that part's already in action.

"Get us straight again, kid!" he shouts, "Straighten us out!"

I'm sure Jack would otherwise calm Sinclair with some eloquently soothing words, but fight time is quiet time, come on man we've established this.

He wrenches the controls, slowing their spin, hoping against hope that the whole thing holds up. If a rope snaps or a knot comes undone, if a pipe bursts, if a connection breaks, they're fucked. Simple as that.

They're free-falling like a shot dogfighter. The rocky sea floor spins towards them.

Jack twists the rudders, creates as much drag as possible. The spinning slows. They're falling straight. But they're still falling.

He holds his breath and pulls the controls one more time.

The whole bathysphere shutters and groans. The bulbous nose begins to lift. The sea floor drops to the bottom of the porthole and then disappears. Now they're rushing up past neon signs and windows. They're rising.

They're rising, they're rising, they're rising!

And then Sinclair can feel the bathysphere balancing out, resetting its course. He pushes himself back up to his feet and claps Jack jubilantly on the shoulder.

"You did it, sport! Andy Ryan's got nothing on--"

...wait, do you hear that?

Jack hears that.

Jack hears that all too well.

He wishes he could just blow the torpedo out of the water, take the fight to it instead of having to run away, but in a sphere that's not really an option. So he twists the controls again and takes them spiralling out of the way of-------

That's all folks.

Just kidding, there's no such thing as a quick death in Rapture.

The torpedo clips the outside of the bathysphere, sending it careening off its course, spinning uncontrollably in some indeterminable direction. At least until neon starts flashing past the porthole, though it's hard to catch anything more than streaks of color when it's possible to look out of the porthole at all. Still, from what is visible, Sinclair can tell that they're headed directly for the city.

There's not even time to say anything, or even think about much other than MAYDAY, MAYDAY, INCOMING, before the impact forces Sinclair to the floor.

Behind them is a half-assed explosion. Or maybe it's just the walls caving in. Maybe it's the boom of the sea, eagerly chasing them in through a broken window. Maybe it's even their eardrums giving way.

And Jack's still wrenching at the controls. Even though he's being flung around and he can't tell right from left, let alone which way they have to go. Even after a rope snaps and lashes him and takes away his steering. Even though everything's movement and pain and confusion and a split second long. He made a choice, god fucking damnit. He made a choice and it's not allowed to fail, that's not how it's supposed to work, they're getting out, they're --

The bathysphere stops, very suddenly.

And now all he's aware of is a numbness and deep pain, the sense that he should move, and no sound except a ringing in his ears.

Edited 2013-03-10 12:13 (UTC)

It takes a moment to figure out which way is up, but once Sinclair gets his bearings, that's when the adrenaline kicks in.

They're in the bathysphere, in a room that is quickly filling up with water. The door of the bathysphere is crumpled and leaking and he needs to get out of there. Fast.

But it's not just him. Jack is on the floor of the bathysphere, and there's blood. A lot of blood. Sinclair gets to his knees and shakes him. "C'mon kid, we gotta go," he says, trying to keep his voice even. "We've got about ten seconds before we're fish food, you have to get up." No response. He's still breathing, but there's a dangerously distant look in his eyes. "Kid," Sinclair says again, trying to get an arm under his shoulders to push him up.

"C'mon kid." Jack is dead weight, he doesn't even make a sound. Meanwhile the water is getting up over Sinclair's elbows and time is running out. "Kid," he says. "Jack."

Nothing.

...He has to go. There isn't time for this, he can't save Jack and there's no point in dying with him. He lets Jack sink down into the water and braces himself to kick the door open with his good leg. The water rushes in a little higher and Sinclair pulls himself out into the room where the water is just over waist deep, but he spots a bulkhead on the other side of the room and if he can just...fight this current...

Jack, below and behind him, starts to shudder and thrash in no particular direction. A last automatic reaction to realising that he's breathing water.

But soon he goes completely still. He already had a collapsing lung, so all the drowning didn't help.

You jerk.

Hey, he did what he had to do. An attempt was made.

Pulling the door open and shut is harder with every passing second, every inch the water rises, and water spills into the airtight room but with no small amount of effort he manages to push the door shut behind him. And once that's done, the second door is much easier to work with. The water spills out into the the room and disperses until it's just a thin layer licking at the soles of his shoes.

He stumbles to a bench and falls down on it. Adrenaline can only push you past so much pain and the bandages on his leg have fallen to pieces, the blood dyeing his dress pants a sick maroon.

And Jack. Poor kid. Sinclair isn't one to wallow in self pity, but this was his fault and that's really all there is to that. They could have stuck to the original plan of stealing a sub, something with a little more of its own defense system, but he was overeager and it screwed them over. It screwed Jack over.

Sinclair hunches over, rubbing his face. The kid was so full of hope, he'd trusted Sinclair to get him home, and then Sinclair let him down. Disappointing people is practically standard procedure for him at this point, but somehow it's a little different when it ends with you holding a boy's dead body in your arms.

He's sure he should keep moving, wherever he is is probably crawling with splicers, but he's gonna need a second to regroup.

He's not wrong about the splicers. A couple of voices reach him from the distance -- a way away, probably, but something for Sinclair to keep aware of. Sounds like a man and a woman jeering at some third party.

Apparently things escalate quickly, because the sound of taunts turns straight away into the sound of flying bullets. And then there are no more taunts. Perhaps there are two fewer splicers for Sinclair to worry about after all.

...Although he may want to worry about the single pair of footsteps that remain.

Between the thin layer of seawater flowing across the floor, and the echoing stone of Rapture's corridors, the footsteps are clearly audible. And they're jogging in Sinclair's direction.

Sinclair perks up at the sound of distant voices, his cue to pick up and move. But there's no way he's going to get very far very fast with his leg bleeding like it is. His best bet is to find a hiding spot and hope his gun will fire wet.

There's a desk a few paces away, and he makes a break for it, squeezing himself underneath and holding his breath.

The footsteps get closer.

And closer.

Clooooossseeeerrrrrrr

And then Jack appears, navigating his way back by going against the current. His clothes are still filthy with blood and saturated with water, but he's moving as if completely uninjured. There's a gun in his hand.

As he enters Sinclair's room he looks wildly around, and spots the closed bulkhead from which all wet things flow into the city.

Running towards it... does not produce a portly gent from Georgia.

Jack stops, dismayed. He's not about to open the door, since it's pretty obvious that the crash site must be beyond it. But he... kind of never thought about what he'd do if Sinclair wasn't somewhere very obvious in the crash's general vicinity.

Spinning in a circle to look around the room also fails to make Sinclair appear.

Well, shit, Jack's fresh out of ideas.

It's a very quiet splicer. Usually they'll wander a bit and entertain themselves with a riveting conversation about the current state of things, sometimes they'll whistle a merry tune, and it all typically sounds frighteningly deranged. But this particular splicer hasn't made a sound besides the quiet splashes of their footsteps.

Slowly, silently, Sinclair sets the hammer and waits.

Very cautiously, Jack walks up to the bulkhead door. There's a little bit of warping and spurting, like any good Rapture door hit by the full fury of the sea, but otherwise it holds firm and true. And for all Jack knows, it was closed and sealed when they first crashed.

If Sinclair's behind that thing, he isn't getting rescued.

Like the sea before it, the full failure of the situation crashes in on Jack. He decided to get them both out. He was making it work. They made a plan of what to do when they reached the surface. And now... are they on the surface?

No. They're still in this fucking fish tank. Sinclair's probably dead. It's a complete failure. A complete failure to escape. A complete failure to affect his own future.

Jack takes out his pipe wrench, goes to a wall perpendicular to the bulkhead door, and begins to smash the shit out of it.

Now that's a little less quiet. Sinclair jumps as the first clang of the wrench hits the wall accompanied by a fair amount of angry grunting and cursing. And it would be a little more along the lines of run-of-the-mill splicer behavior if it didn't sound so much like...

wait.

Sinclair pulls himself out from under the desk, hoping the violent noises will cover up the sound of moving water, and looks around the corner.

And he'll be damned if that isn't Jack. (spoilers: he might be damned anyway.)

"...Kid?" he says, standing up. "Hey, kid." A little louder in case he didn't hear.

He hears, and he spins around, squaring for a fight before the identity of the voice filters through.

Then rage melts into surprise, as if he's the one who should be experiencing surprise right now. You know, that his compatriot isn't dead as a drowned doornail. Sinclair still being with us is totally the strangest thing about this situation.

"Mister Sinclair," he says, with the sharp relief of someone whose fuck-up might not be as big as he thought it was.

...Not quite sure strange begins to cover it.

There's no way Jack made it out of the wreckage, Sinclair escaped with mere seconds to spare and Jack was nowhere in sight when he shut that door.

He looks him up and down for a moment as if trying to convince himself that what he's seeing is real and he didn't just swallow too much sea water or something.

There's a sickening amalgam relief and confusion twisting up his insides but after another moment he speaks. "You were dead, son," he says, "I saw you."

"I come back alive," says Jack.

That's really the simplest way he could put it, though Sinclair is an inquisitive sorta fellow and may well want to inquire further into the mystery.

He starts wading steadily forwards, quite ready to collect his not-radio buddy and find some higher ground.

Sinclair shakes his head, frowning. "Come again?"

"In the Vita Chambers."

It's okay, it was a big deal for Jack the first time too.

"We should go higher."

"The Vita--" Sinclair starts, but that's a whole mess of questions they probably don't have time to get into right now. He holsters his gun and follows Jack, allowing the relief to take over. He smiles. The kid's a damn wonder, and at this point Sinclair expects it's not the last time he'll surprise him.

Jack isn't easily given to awe and wonderment -- he was always supposed to just accept things and move on, not dwell on them too much -- and his mind is on the job of finding a staircase. But he keeps remembering the thought that Sinclair was dead, and half-glancing at Sinclair alive and walking behind him, and getting these sudden feelings of relief. It's almost bizarre. There have been plenty of people down here who've made him feel all kinds of things, but relief has not been a frequent offender.

At a broad staircase, he begins to jog up, but then he pauses and looks back to make sure Sinclair is limping up it without issue. He's not letting the guy get away again that easily.

Sinclair's slowly shuffling his way behind Jack, not at any sort of speed to worry about. He's trying to keep up and succeeding reasonably well, though jogging is probably out of the question.

At the top, he leans back against the wall and holds his hand over the wound on his leg. When he pulls it away, there's blood on it. Well, you know, it's pretty impossible to heal a cut in a bunch of water. He'll need more bandages, whenever they come across them, but he doesn't suspect he's in danger of bleeding out.

While he's leaning, he takes the opportunity to voice one of his many questions. "You're telling me...you can't die?"

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