Wasteland Legends: Conception
or
"For those of you who thought Hog and John had it bad, meet Kristen."
The next chapters of MiA and TTL are in the works. You can actually expect the next chapter of TTL within the next few days.
Warning: this is probably the most fucked up thing I've ever written.
Fallout belongs to Bethesda, blah blah blah, if I had the money I'd totally buy the rights, yadda yadda, come and get me you lousy Feds!
She should have gone back when the voices shattered Katja's sanity.
She should have turned around and fled when the walls of bubbling flesh reached out for Tycho and swallowed the giggling Ranger whole.
Now, in the depths of the Cathedral, nobody could hear Kristen scream.
Her silver tongue had betrayed her only another time before. That time, it earned her a boot out of the Vault, an example of too being persuasive for her own good. She should have learned from that, but for all her wit and social intelligence, introspection was never her forte. Too much ego by half for that, Ian would tease her.
Kristen's voice, capable of charming and compelling mobsters and idealists alike, broke as the Master's mind dug deeper and latched onto the image of her erstwhile lover, morphing and warping it as it searched, unable to care for damage and consequences, only for results and the proof hidden behind her mental barriers.
It didn't take long for those to crumble as the Master forced her to relive Ian's immolation, every excruciating moment amplified, every sliver of guilt and grief magnified into a wrecking ball, its momentum increased by the weight of her lies.
Brittle Ian, who'd believed his love was met truthfully, when she only needed protection in her early days and a good-looking distraction later on, after Tycho supplanted him. Gullible Ian, who she'd illuded by dangling the prospect of a family before his nose, to the point that he jumped without hesitation between her and a flamethrower to protect that future.
If it weren't for the psychic axe splitting her brain and soul in two, Kristen would have appreciated the irony of suffering a fate worse than death for telling the simple, unadulterated truth for once.
Was it karmic retribution for all the times she warped it and through it the minds of her audience to pursue her agenda, or just because she could?
Even if she'd been capable of introspection, Kristen was in no condition to even contemplate that question. Not as the Master ravaged her mind to find confirmation of a truth he wasn't able to accept or see by himself, even when it was as clear as the daylight she'd never see again.
After all, who'd ever seen or heard of a super mutant baby, right?
And just like that, she found herself no longer a prisoner within her own mind. She came to curled into a ball, arms wrapped around her belly. The fleshy ground pulsated under her. She tasted blood and smelled canine fur: Dogmeat was curled around her. Together, they formed a breathing impression of yin and yang. The doggie's dry tongue lapped at her face, but Kristen could barely feel it.
Her body didn't feel her own anymore. That veneer of control she'd fought to maintain against everything the wastes had thrown at her, even in the face of the truth she learned in the Glow, was gone.
"You speak the truth. Truth!" Three voices shouted and whimpered as one, with words and mind. Kristen heard and felt both, but couldn't muster up any satisfaction or gloating.
"All my sacrifices, all the things I've done. Done. In the name of healing and progress. My race. Race! Race. It's flawed. There can be no future without procreation. No mastering the wastes without breeding. Failure. Failure! The master race, mutants, flawed!" The complex and Kristen's mind alike shook with the power of the Master's despair.
"But you. Normals carry the solution. No mutant babies. Yes. You carry the solution. Mother. Pure strain Mother! The FEV-2 produces only failures, no babies, but you are pure. Your mind is awake! Awake. Awake!"
Horror gifted Kristen with enough coherence to respond, and yet she didn't hear her own voice.
"We destroyed your vats of goo at Mariposa. The Brotherhood is on their way." Why, why hadn't she waited for them? The Cathedral had beckoned her. A trap, and she'd swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. "You're done."
"Lie! Truth! Lie. It doesn't matter. My Unity is necessary to rebuild this world. One race. One. One! One. Need a new one. Normal and mutant, merged into one. Perfect, at last. Last! Change. Last!"
The flesh carpeting the floor began to bubble and morph, stretch and wrap around her. Dogmeat growled, rising of shaking paws. He bit and pulled at her sleeve, begging her to move.
She tried, but her body refused to obey. The Master's mind pinned her as a cocoon swallowed her body like it had grabbed Tycho. Her own flesh fused with his, but the pain was nothing to the thousand different voices that answered the Master's call and sieged her mind from all sides.
All were him, and he was all of them.
"True Unity. One Race," Tycho's voice said, emerging from that amalgamation for the briefest of moments, one that lasted an eternity.
"A new process. For the future," Katja's added, eons later.
She struggled under their hold, pushing and clawing and biting with her mind when her body wouldn't.
She may as well have been a toddler taking her first wobbling steps on the toe of a giant.
In that part of her mind that was still stubbornly hers, that core that clung to her individuality yet had lost contact with her identity, she realized the Master was changing her. More importantly, he was meddling with the three lives in her belly, experimenting by the sheer power of mind and virus on Ian's and her babies.
She'd have cried if she remembered how when the three lives became two.
"Failure! Success! Failure. Sacrifice and solution!" The Master crowed as what had been a spark of life was taken apart and flushed from her body. "You will be the first to carry the Legacy! Legacy! A more perfect Union."
Heat. Metal. Resolve. Pain.
The Master was burning, and she with him. With all of them.
"No! No! No. It's too soon. Soon! Incomplete! The process is incomplete!"
For the first time in several lifetimes, the Master's presence retreated from her mind, leaving ruins and devastation behind like an indelible imprint.
The creature that was once Richard Gray clung to life as stubbornly as the humans he wanted to evolve, however. Like the mental parasite he had become, as the Brotherhood sliced through her cocoon and extracted her from the belly of the beast, he attached himself to the nearest lifeform still fully in his clutches.
Through a link that faded as the Paladins chopped away at the Master's sprawling, formless body, she felt him reach out to Dogmeat, pouring every ounce of psychic power into a last, desperate attempt at survival.
"You. You! Animal, weak, no more. More! You will be the Guardian of my Legacy. Forever bound, forever Compelled to serve. Forever! Serve. Until my Legacy manifests, until normal and mutant will be one and the same. One. One! One..."
Head Scribe Vree called her Initiate Dufrense. Kristen Dufrense. The Vault Dweller. Those were her names, she was told, before they'd been stripped from her. She mouthed them as Vree went over her physical, trying to make them hers again, to force them to take root and fill that endless void surrounding her thoughts ever since she'd been reborn again.
The exams and machines said the twins were healthy. She was healthy too, despite the days - only days? - spent in gestalt with the Master. No radiation, no deformities. No FEV contaminations. The only visible signs of her imprisonment were the thick scars covering her back and limbs, from where she'd been ripped away from the Master too forcefully. That, and the damage to her larynx that ruined her voice into a croak.
She knew otherwise. Something had changed. The Master had changed her, no matter what the exams said. Sooner or later, the Brotherhood would know. Some already called her mutant behind her back. As her belly began to swell, she knew she couldn't stay.
The Guardian was waiting for her when she stole out of the bunker. From there, the huge dog with yellow eyes followed her in her wanderings, providing for her what the wastes refused to relent to a single pregnant woman.
And wander she did. The woman chased after her other name, Vault Dweller, seeking the unique brand of completion that came from knowing who she was. When the gear door of Vault 13 closed behind her for the last time, however, she was still short of an answer, yet richer in nameless followers. They chose exile willingly, drawn by the mute promise of the woman who no longer poured honeyed words in their ears, but whose presence spoke directly to their minds, dwarfing the material concerns and the calls to reason and affection from their families and Overseer.
They weren't the last to flock to her. In the aftermath of the chaos and devastation left behind by the march of the Master's army, the silent, pregnant woman and her stalwart dog were more of a presence out of the Holy Book than broken creatures of flesh and blood. Dozens, then hundreds tailed her in her peregrinations, joining without being prompted but never rebuffed, enthralled and unflinching even in the face of death by thirst, starvation, and monsters.
Something about her spoke to their minds and once they were drawn in, they could never let go. She gifted them with hope, solace, and purpose even when she had none for herself, and they worshipped her for it.
Had she cared to, or even fully realized the effect her awakened mind had on people, she could have been a queen, a leader to eclipse all others in history, capable of bending the will of any man or woman to her will, in such a way to make her previous dealings look like child's play.
The part of her that thrived on such things, however, had died in the Cathedral when the Master shattered her identity as Kristen Dufrense.
Finally, as the term of her pregnancy approached, the Guardian found them all a new home to settle, a corner of nothing untouched up until that moment by the Master and his Unity.
When Pat the midwife put the twins in her arms and they started suckling, she cried. They weren't tears of joy. A boy and a girl, only their eyes indicated they were related. They both had Ian's eyes, a deep, warm brown she recalled fondly in her dreams of better times; yet when she looked at them, what she saw was the same yellow staining the Guardian's staring pupils at the entrance of the tent. Theirs was only buried, waiting to be awoken.
She wanted to love them. The part of her that listened to her instincts did from the moment she lay eyes on them. And yet, she knew her instincts were no longer her own. The Master had warped them like he'd warped every part of her, tearing and discarding pieces of her until what remained was just a tool to perpetuate his Legacy. A marionette subservient to his will and with a face she barely recognized anymore slapped upon it.
She may have carried them for nine months, but she couldn't be their mother, not truly. That choice had been taken from her, another piece of her sacrificed on the altar of his Legacy.
That realization broke something within her she didn't realize had been there until it snapped.
She didn't name them, leaving that burden to Pat. She couldn't bear to hold them and see the taint and promise ensconced within their tiny bodies, so she refused to feed them again, even when the Guardian, once her most loyal friend, growled and barked at her and dragged her out of her tent to Arroyo's nursery, leaving bloody bites on her arms.
Control, on herself and others around her, had once been the driving need behind all her actions, lies, and manipulation. The Master had stripped her of any semblance and illusion of it, be it past, present, or future. He had taken everything, from her identity to her values, to her children, her own flesh and blood, making them, and her, his.
As she stared at the canyon running around Arroyo, she could only see one path to assert control over herself again and have the final word on her destiny.
That same night, when she left her tent, the Guardian tried to bar her way. She knew he was unable to disobey the Master's Compulsion, a fate she pitied and envied him for at the same time. If she'd been as far gone as he was, maybe she'd have been free to love her children, even if that love and freedom were only empty constructs.
But she wasn't, couldn't be, and so she shot him until the dog couldn't stand anymore. And yet, she couldn't bring herself to deliver the killing blow, even if she knew it was the mercy the last of her companions deserved.
She walked away instead. On the edge of the canyon, she turned around and took a deep breath. A bare foot slipped, and she just let herself go.
The villagers found the Vault Dweller's body washed up on the bank ten miles downriver. They interred her in a temple built in her name, an inspired feat of architecture carved with zealot fervor into the side of a mountain.
As the years passed, the memory of the woman faded, while tales of her deeds grew into legends. Her icons remained ensconced in the Temple, awaiting for the Chosen One to claim them in a time of need.
The Guardian vanished the night the Dweller died. From time to time, he'd reappear, often only in the form of yellow eyes glowing in the night. He was sighted the night the Son left Arroyo; several villagers swore they saw him when the Daughter and future Elder gave birth to her son Aki. The last time, he was there when the same man was christened Chosen One.
Together, they left in search of the Holy Thirteen.
AN: Thank you for reading. Don't forget to review, ok?
Edit: Just to clear up one thing, the terminology is intentionally ambiguous in places, but the Master did not impregnate the Vault Dweller like some Japanese tentacle monster. There are lines even I won't cross. She was already pregnant with triplets by Ian, and the Master tinkered directly with their DNA to try and integrate it better with the FEV and avoid the issue of sterility, killing one in the process.