weathertop | a soviet defector and a test tube baby walk into a bar

a soviet defector and a test tube baby walk into a bar

Jack is really looking forward to getting out of here.

Maybe he'll visit his parents. The farm seems like a beautiful dream compared to the broken, bloody awfulness of Medical Pavilion. He's pretty sure he never walked around in fear of drowning any second back in Kansas. Nobody tried to put hooks in his liver at all. It was nice!

He sits behind a reception desk, shaking. He knows he's got to push forward, he's going to keep pushing forward, but... give him a moment, okay? He's just been swarmed by splicers; he's found out that he has to detour around and find some kind of mad doctor just to reach Atlas's submarine. Boy. That's going to be... great. He's going to die, isn't he.

So he's regrouping behind this reception desk -- the receptionist's still here, give or take some of her head -- with the wrench in one hand and a creme cake in the other.

Munch. Munch. Munch.

Breathe, Jack. It's aaaaall gonna be okay.

Probably. Maybe.

Index, Why Not?
Scene One: He Blinded Me With Science ~or~ Stop Giving Yourself Brain Damage, Asshole
Scene Two: Telekinosis ~or~ Been Around Rapture And I, I, I, I Can't Find My Baby
Scene Three: All I Wanna Do Is [Bang Bang Bang Bang] And [Big Daddy Noise] And Take Your ADAM

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Well, it depends. Is the girl you're looking for a creepy zombie with glowy eyes?

Jack might appreciate that first aid kit sometime in the near future. He's tearing through them pretty quickly, and tearing through his arm as well -- he's learned to use them on the go in past splicer fights but this one is going to leave him an expert. If, you know, it leaves him alive at all. Which he's still not sure it will.

He paralyses the Bouncer with a blast of electricity -- unloads the shotgun into him -- chances one shot too many to dive away in time and gets caught a glancing blow on the Daddy's armour as it charges him again. The ground unkindly breaks his fall. He might be pinned and slaughtered then and there -- but the Bouncer is paralysed again, this time by the mass of lightning that came off Jack when he was struck, and Jack has just enough time to scramble away.

Holy jesus fuck that hurts, he's sure he's broken a rib or five -- another health kit bites the dust just so that he can move without screaming any more.

The fight goes on for a while, and without his health kits Jack would be stone cold dead about ten times over.

At last he's squaring up to the Bouncer -- the diving suit's scorched and broken and bloody, the creature's movements clumsy -- and Jack's tired too, only moving on adrenaline and ADAM, but he readies a handful of fire anyway and throws it. Dives as the ground trembles. Lands hard to the sound of screeching metal and agonised groans. And shoves himself up again and---

---and sees it lying there, armour smoking, still as death.

He did it.

Jack lets himself fall back, just lies there heedless of pain for a few moments, and laughs with the exhilaration and insanity of the fact. He did it. He actually fucking did it!

He can just picture Atlas cheering.

Kostya takes a quiet breath of relief. Good. One more health kit for himself.

And now the moment of truth. He hears the little footsteps, for a minute something pulling at his heart, and...

... Black hair. Slava bogu.

Jack hears the footsteps too. And then, a few moments later, the crying.

Oh jeez. They cry?

He pushes himself to his knees, and then to his feet, slower than he'd like and it still feels as if he stood up too fast. No health kits left to deal with it, though. He'll just have to grit his teeth and power through the feeling that his various extremities are haemorrhaging away.

"Hey," he says to her, "shut up?"

She spots him, gasps, and kind of toddles away so that the Daddy corpse is between them. Oh my god, he doesn't feel like chasing her in circles around the thing. "Hey, would you come back?" he asks, fighting the urge to start coughing in case it brings up his own blood or pancreas or whatever's gotten loose in there.

He kind of stumbles forwards, suddenly realising just how much he fucking hurts, and that apparently catches her by surprise -- because she freezes in place and he turns it into a grab that gets her arm. Immediately she's struggling, but she's a little girl and he's built like a house of rocks. There's only gonna be one victor here, injuries or not.

Okay. Moral choice time.

And with everything in balance -- he knows how bad the fighting's gotten already, the smaller dose was great but could've been greater, nobody's threatening to cap him if he does one thing or another -- his choice is sort of clear. They're not human, Atlas said so, no matter what they might look like -- so really it's like killing a turkey or something back on the farm. And, you know, he's kinda earned this. That was a hell of a fight.

He tries putting a hand over her mouth and nose. Closes his eyes, as well, because she's crying so hard and that kinda makes it feel like he's doing something wrong.

Eventually she stops thrashing. He lowers her quietly to the floor, just like a plucked Thanksgiving turkey.

But then she opens her eyes and hauls in a breath.

"What?" he says out loud, panicked. Holy shit. Holy shit, that wasn't meant to happen. "What? No, stop it."

She tries to crawl away, but he retains the presence of mind to grab her again. He stares at her for a moment, reeling, because she was dead. Then he breaks her neck.

Again, she returns to life. It's really really really freaking him out.

"Stop that!"

The turkeys. He remembers how they pacify the turkeys. Electrobolt comes out and he zaps her, hard, in the back of the head before she can wriggle away. And now -- unconscious -- she doesn't open her eyes again.

Jack kind of slumps down with the Sister in his arms, using the Big Daddy's arm as a gory leather couch. That diary he found, about how they're invulnerable with the slug inside them. He recalls it now. Of course he recalls it now, when he's already figured out the shocking way that they don't die. Jesus god almighty.

He pulls himself together a bit, trembling as if he's caught a chill.

And what he does next is obscured by a choking cloud of dark green smoke.

There's something about what he's observing that makes Kostya's blood run cold. And this in a man who's seen what he's seen, and does what he does. The boy he's been speaking to and the boy he's just watched harvest are making for a powerful dissonance.

Wrong choice, molodoi. Good thing it wasn't his --

?!

Kostya leans over the railing and stares in at the smoke. What the hell is going on over there?!

Edited 2013-03-29 09:00 (UTC)

It's blatant infanticide, cleverly obscured to get through an approvals board!

The smog caught Jack by surprise as well, and now he's coughing away down there, feeling rather nauseous. It smells gross as hell, but also weirdly appealing -- like the nasal equivalent of picking off a scab even though it hurts. Maybe it's an acquired taste.

He does the thing quickly. There are still splicers running around, they might show up at any time, and he really doesn't feel up to fighting off vultures.

He kind of... feels his way. And... rummages around. It's easy to tell when he's found it.

By the time the smoke clears, the Sister's body is out of sight behind the Bouncer's arm, and Jack's hands are gorily full of his very own prizewinning wiggly ADAM slug. It's bigger than he expected. Big and full of awesome drugs.

He holds it up and stares at it as if it's the weirdest goddamn thing, because it is.

After a moment or two he goes over to his radio -- which sat out the fight over by the wall; it's really not into that sort of excitement -- and kind of pokes it with his foot to make sure it's still on. It's constantly tuned to Atlas's frequency; makes sense to keep him up to date.

"Atlas?"

He's been waiting by the phone.

"You still with me, boyo? Thought I heard that big lug gettin' a few hits in."

"I'm here," says the kid. "I won." He sounds relieved -- definitely in pain, but relieved and is that a hint of triumph? Great, why not. If the kid's warming up to the place, he can have a fun few final hours.

Fontaine nods impatiently. "Good job, y'should be proud. So you're all stocked up?"

"Well..."

Oh my god. Are you kidding Fontaine right now. What could've gone wrong?

"Well?" he repeats, keeping his voice kinder than his thoughts.

"I've got... one of the slugs."

Oh.

Oh.

Oh, that's not something gone wrong. That's not something gone wrong at all.

Fontaine can feel the smile creeping up the corners of his mouth. Kid really is warming up to the place. So much for Mother Goose's little morality play.

"Good work, boyo," he says, slow and -- okay so maybe he's laying on the approval a tiny bit thick, but the kid's gotta have a carrot as well as a stick. "I knew ye had it in ye. Go on then."

There's a pause on the other end of the line. Then Jack's voice comes through again, uncertain. "...What do I do with it?"

Ha. Haha. Kid, you're gonna love this part.

Fontaine grins.

"Y'eat it."

"I what?"

Okay, Jack has eaten cakes out of trash cans and pep bars that've literally been sitting for weeks in rotting corpses, an hour ago he smoked a whole pack of cigarettes that he found in a flooded toilet, but that is grody.

"Ye heard me, boyo," says Atlas helpfully. "Go on then, slurp it up."

Oh that's gross. Oh that is so so gross. Oh my god.

Jack tells himself just how much better he'll feel afterwards. He tells himself this for several grody grody seconds. And then he opens his mouth, and -- there is no way he's getting this whole thing down in one bite -- OH GOD IT'S ALL RUBBERY -- NO NO NO -- wow at least it tastes better than he'd expected -- this is still so not cool --

Okay he ate it jesus. Jack pulls a long and very eloquent series of faces as he feels the dead slug slip and slide its way down inside him. The kinds of faces that parents tell their children will stick that way if the tide turns.

And as the slug goes down, he can feel the repairs begin. ADAM, the great healer -- he'll be able to move without feeling like a bag full of splinters now.

He's barely done with his super mature slideshow of grossed-out expressions when the rush hits hismfjghfhgdjkikflgg
adhfj!!!! dhf jdfhghhfhjdhdfhj????
jeusSUS CHIRT.S
FUCKIGN

OKAY HE
HE HAS TO SIT DOWN FOR THIS

"Let me know when it starts working," says Fontaine.

The request falls on deaf ears for a while, though there are noises of activity near the radio, so that's something. Fontaine can't wait to get hold of that security system in full, though. He dislikes working blind.

"Boyo?" he prompts after a few more seconds.

The response this time is favourable. It's the noise of someone shifting, half-lost in static -- and then the kid's voice, dreamy and double-toned, the kind of sheet-iron two-tone you only hear in Little Sisters and in people who've just spliced right the fuck up.

"I'worked," says Jack.

And Kostya can't... help but cringe to himself as he sinks to the floor and listens.

Chyort, he swears, at Jack's out-of-body voice. It got to the dopamine receptors.

Didn't he discover a treatment years ago? Back in '56, by accident. Of course he did. Kept it to himself, like the rest of his research, as Ryan pounded at his pneumo with letters. Letters about how knowledge was wasted if it was hid under a bush, not to quote the Bible, of course, though he had just quoted the Bible.

Interesting man.

Interesting just like Jack. He still hasn't decided how to approach the boy in his altered state, and he's not fully sure he wants to.

Edited 2013-03-30 07:47 (UTC)

"Alright lad," says Atlas -- his voice crackling in Jack's ears as well as on the radio waves. "Getcherself pulled together and get goin'. Time's been wastin'."

Jack nods, forgetting for a moment that Atlas can't see him, and then crawls the last few inches to the wall and sits against it. His whole body is flush like lava and so the damp stone feels wonderfully cool. And he indulges in a bit of mental window-shopping -- what's he going to use all this ADAM for? Everything he can buy, all the plasmids. He might get so much that he can straight up blast his way out of Rapture. Not a bad idea!

He grins broadly at no-one in particular, then stands. Perfectly normally -- there's none of the blurred unsteadiness of being drunk -- his edges are sharpened, not dulled. Happier, braver, smarter, faster, stronger -- the strongest asshole in Rapture. He reminds himself to keep looking out for splicers, though it's not like any of them could touch him if they tried.

Jack breaks his shotgun and starts to reload it with antipersonnel rounds, whistling tunelessly. From here, to the docks, to the sub, to the surface -- it seems about as daunting as a hop, skip and a jump.

All right. This circus has gone on too long.

Kostya stands and relies on the echo to carry his voice down a floor of rubble.

"Molodoi!"

God, what is the poor boy going to do to himself? Walk off a ledge? Fall down a bathysphere tunnel?

Jack starts a little, and stares up in the direction of--- okay, stares around in a few directions, because the tiles of Med Pavilion form kind of an echo chamber and it's hard to pinpoint the source of the voice. But a second or two later, he does spot Kostya.

Whoa, short time no see!

"Doctor Konstantin!" he calls back, openly delighted. Finishes pushing the last round into his shotgun and puts it back together with a click.

(Somewhere on the other end of the radio, Fontaine nearly swears out loud because god damnit this guy again.)

If Kostya's close enough to see it, the veins of Jack's eyes are as red as his cheeks, and his pupils are as wide as if he were standing in a lightless room. From Jack's point of view the world is bright, bright and golden and frayed at the edges. And it's awesome.

He's not close enough. But he's seen some ADAM overdose patients in his day. Being wheeled down the halls and coughing blood up on his doorstep...

All right, he tells himself, heading down the stairs. The first order of business with a drunk is not to scold them for drinking. Just ride out the euphoria... he rounds the corner - and see what happens.

"Mister Jack!" Like hell he's trying that last name with his accent. "You look... ehm..."

An eye up... an eye down.

"... Cheerful."

Well he's not coughing blood yet, though from the amount he took all at once, he by all rights should be. But that's something for Fontaine to understand and everyone else to wonder about.

"I am," beams Jack, informatively.

"Yes." He quips. "Well." His hands fold behind his back. "I'd hate for a splicer to come and sour your day."

And he steps out into the open. He's not afraid Jack will hurt him. For now he's proven himself... well... if not an ally, at least the boy knows he won't knife him in the back.

"I don't suppose you found your doctor?" He asks, pacing and stroking his neck scar.

It's true! Jack is much more interested in going through the Bouncer's pockets than he is in stabbing Russians in the back. Well, this Russian. Did you know that Big Daddies carry fat wallets? It's totally true!

"I did," Jack tells him quite proudly. "And I got the key."

He's been a good dog!

"Did you find your not-dead person?"

Kostya's feet lead him behind Jack... to his side... and behind the Big Daddy's arm. And as soon as he finds what's there, he's certain it was the last place Jack wanted him to go.

So he kneels in the puddle, water billowing with threads of blood, and pushes the girl's eyelids closed.

"No, molodoi."

"Oh," says Jack.

He sees Kostya close the girl's eyes, but he's not sure what else he can add to it, really. That's a gesture people do to bodies. And it doesn't seem to say much to him, one way or the other.

It's a bit weird to look at the Sister's body again, but he's seen so many dead bodies by now and they all stop moving in just the same way.

Jack looks at Kostya again, eyes still wide and wild and excited.

"I should help you find him," he says. "I'm good at that."

It's worth mentioning that at any given point there's no snideness or sarcasm in his voice, he's not trying to provoke Kostya, he's just saying what it occurs to him to say and meaning it at face value. And he really does feel like he could find the doctor's missing person right now. He feels like he could do anything.

"Her," he corrects. But gently. Imagine that. Kostya being gentle.

"And I don't mean impoliteness," he adds, rising and shaking the bloody water off his fingers - "but you would find her for a different reason."

Well. There. He said it.

It made sense in his understanding of English, anyway.

Jack's face registers a complete lack of understanding. Sometimes he can not be very bright.

"But I'm not looking for anyone else," he says. "Except Atlas's family...?"

He kind of lets that end as a question, trusting that if Kostya means Atlas's wife or something, he'll pipe up and fill in that piece of information.

A sigh, and a pinch of his nose.

"No, Jack." He stands so he's looking away. "Not his wife." And then he takes to muttering. "Didn't even know he was married..."

He really didn't, either. Who has time to keep up on the social column when the neighborhood is going to hell.

"Then who is it?"

Jack finally gets around to stuffing the late Bouncer's somehow-gotten gains into his own wallet. Aww yeahhh, somebody round here's got a date with a vending machine and about eight hundred cake bars.

Well...

... maybe it's time the doctor told him. The boy's riddled with more drugs than old Cohen on opening night, but what the hell.

So when he speaks up again, he's quiet.

"I have a daughter," he begins. "Not mine. Adopted." He still won't turn and face Jack. "I found her when she... escaped... from the house of the Little Sisters. Before they could do this." A limp-wristed hand beckons down to the corpse. "But when the war began, she disappeared..." he brings it up to pass it over his brow - "... and I haven't seen her since."

"You understand, molodoi, I'm not an optimist." His tone darkens. "And you know what is easy to assume."

Kostya's sad story just makes Jack all the more convinced that he can come up with the perfect answer. He switches out shotgun for pistol, checking and reloading as he talks -- something that's already second nature.

"I haven't seen any children," he says. You know, besides the uh... obvious. "Only Little Sisters and grown-ups."

...Although. Ah. Actually, that might not be so reassuring as he intended.

"But, um. If she's one of them... there's a lady who looks after them, she might have seen her!"

Jack is a fucking genius.

"You have strange taste in company..." Kostya observes, the moroseness not totally drained from his tone - "... for you to know Dr. Tenenbaum."

He rubs his chin as he searches in his pocket. "Then again... if you want to know a city..."

The thought trails off as he pulls out a wallet and produces a slip of paper.

"Here." He comes back around and holds it out to Jack. "In case you find her and I'm not with you." What a surprise - a photo of a little girl. "Though you should know I can help you, in ways..." a pause for thought - "... Atlas cannot."

That may have been a bad decision. Oh well. At least he didn't say anything incriminating.

a soviet defector and a test tube baby walk into a bar

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