Merry Widow Waltz
InBata'd
Rated: T
Warning: Domestic Abuse, Implied/Refrenced Child Abuse, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Murder ~3
Title taken from the song "Merry Widow Waltz" by Franz Lehár
He came into the vault, along with all those rad suit wearing researchers, all grim and handsome. He was covered in a layer of dust from head to toe and slung a laser rifle over his broad shoulders. He gave her a look with his dark eyes and smiled around his cigarette, and it was right then and there that Ellen knew she was going to have that man.
She clung unto him, listening to all his stories about the outside world (he called it the Capital Wasteland and she'd giggle as she ran her hand through his dark, thick hair). She drank it all in just so she could regurgitate it all back out to her friends in the most colorful ways. She would turn him into some kind of legend that all the little vaulties wanted to be. They treated him nice and welcomed him in just like she wanted; just like she planned. And when it came time to close the vault once more, she sunk her claws into his tanned skin and begged him not to go with a sickly sweet voice and crocodile tears.
She had once read somewhere that you couldn't tame a wild animal. And at the time it made sense. Why try to control something that obviously wanted to run free? It was a waste of time and energy. The thing is, though, she never thought humans could fall under the same logic.
Looking back on it now, Ellen should have known better. Sure, you could love and lie all you wanted, but you can't confine a beast and expect it to be domesticated in a day. At first, it didn't seem so bad, and truth be told Ellen didn't see the problem with blaming herself, but after four years of backhands and hiding bruises she had had enough. Ellen realized that the beast couldn't be restrained, and there was only one option for that. When an animal bites the hand that feeds, you put it down.
Ellen sits on the examination table, as Doc James takes a look at her. It's two in the morning and about an hour ago, she crawled her way towards the clinic after she and her husband got into a little disagreement about Butchie. She can't really remember what it was about (she thinks it had something to do with him spending so much time around Paul Jr.), but in the end, it left her bloody and bruised on the living room floor. It's when she can feel her nose bleeding and her eye swelling that she decides to do something about her life.
Luckily James was at the clinic. Usually, Ellen hides these things from people. It's only natural to hide your own shame. Alfonse was right, she shouldn't have made that man stay, but she's not about to actually admit that. However she can bare to let Doc James in on the little secret, or maybe it wasn't that much of a secret to begin with. People like to ignore the misfortunes of those they don't particularly favor.
He gives her a look after mopping up the blood on her face. "Does he really do this that often?" The concern in his voice almost makes Ellen laugh. She forgets that he hasn't been here long, the poor dear. He probably thought escaping the Wasteland would've seen the end to all things violent. That the Vault was a perfect little utopia in the middle of post-Armageddon. But things don't work like that. The Vault isn't capable of creating the perfect society, just as the Great War was incapable of eradicating all the evil in this world.
"Normally he leaves my face alone, but tonight he got a little rougher." She smiles in a vicious sort of way. "I think it's because Butchie's at the Hannon's this weekend. Otherwise, he might have held back a little."
James can only look at her with a mixture of horror and distress written on his face, but he doesn't say anything. The silence stretches between them and Ellen welcomes it for a little longer before continuing.
"He's killing me, Doc," Ellen admits with a quiet voice. "And I let him do it for so long, I forgot what it's like to stand up for myself."
James looks on sympathetically, "You're a strong woman, Ellen. Everyone knows that." His weak reassurance puts a smile on her face.
"I didn't say I was weak, Doc. I just forgot." James taps her nose lightly and Ellen winces.
"It's not broken, but it could be fractured. You'll need to put ice on it. Come in tomorrow and I'll have the x-ray machine up and running. We'll get a better look then."
"What about the rest of my face? I gotta look presentable now, don't I?" Ellen jokes bitterly, she knows that no amount of cold packs and makeup can hide these bruises. She can tell that James knows she isn't serious, but chooses to humor her anyway.
"I suggest an ice pack." He says as he reaches into the mini refrigerator. "Keep it on your eye overnight and it'll reduce the swelling considerably, but I can't guarantee that the bruising will go down by then." He says it like a regret, and Ellen isn't sure why he sounds like that. Not like it's his fault that her eye is gonna be the shade of an eggplant for the next week.
"Thanks, Doc." She says as he hands her the ice pack. She gingerly places it on her left eye and hisses in relief as the cold calms the raging pain.
"I'm sorry I can't do more." James' expression looks apologetic, but his posture looks like he's debating something. Ellen decides to take a chance and grab at it like a lifeline. She was always good at reading people like that, knew how to see the hesitance and grab a hold of it. And now she might be able to use it to her advantage.
"There's really nothing to apologize for, Doc. You didn't get drunk and start a bunch of bullshit. And you certainly didn't beat me to the floor." She starts to get up, trying hard not to wince because that would just be overly dramatic (it would also be too pathetic for her tastes). "Look, you're a nice guy and I should count myself lucky that you work this late. So really Doc, thank you."
Ellen begins to leave the clinic, hoping that the bait she dropped will catch something good. As she reaches the door and it slides open, she hears James call out quietly, "Wait, Ellen..."
She smiles to herself before wiping it off her face and turning around. She got one, but when she looks towards James, he's in his office near the safe. Confused, she walks over wondering what James is grabbing. "Doc?" She says as she reaches his office door.
He turns around, "Stick out your hand." he gently instructs. She does as he tells her and he places something in her hand. When he pulls away she sees a capped needle cradled in her open palm. Her eyes widen.
Ellen knows what this is. She's seen it once before a long time ago when she was a little girl. There're reasons why they only have a single jail cell in the Vault. They can't afford to cater to a felon for life. She remembers the vaultie that killed his wife. They made the execution private, but she remembers seeing the previous doctor carry a needle on a tray. She remembers asking her mama what it was. Her mama said it was medicine, something that could make everything better for everyone.
She grips the needle carefully, she wasn't expecting this. "Doc!" She hisses as she physically cringes into herself. "You can't just... You can't give this to me!" She looks at his calm collected face. She expected James to talk to the Overseer on her behalf, to try and get Alfonse to get her monster of a husband locked away for a few days, or kicked out the Vault. But not this! "If they catch me with this, the Overseer's gonna throw you and your little baby out on your asses!" Not to mention her and her son too.
"Don't worry Ellen, I'll handle it." He says like he actually has a plan here. "Look, you just need to sedate him somehow, probably wait 'til he's asleep. Then take his arm and inject it here." He rolls up his sleeve and shows Ellen the crook of his elbow. "Try to get a vein. It'll be much quicker that way. If you can't do that, find a way to make him ingest it."
"James, no!" Ellen says trying to hand the thing back to him. "You can't guarantee that all this'll work out!"
"Ellen," James says calmly, taking her hands. "This man is going to kill you. I've seen this one too many times before and damn if I let it happen again. You told me that you forgot how to stand up for yourself. Well, consider this me showing you the 'how' again."
"I... I ain't a killer Doc." She shakes her head and looks up at him. "I can't do that to him, even if he's capable of it. I just can't."
"Then do it for Butch." He says. Ellen snaps her attention to him. "Ellen... What do you think will happen to Butch. He might be docile now, but what happens when your son is a little bit older? What then Ellen? You can't subject that on to the boy. What will Butch do without his mother?" The words echo in her head like the Overseer's daily announcements.
If he can inflict this kind of damage on her, what's he gonna do to Butch? He'll kill her sweet baby before he sees his tenth birthday. She was always told that she'd make a terrible mother to the point that she accepted that. So she doesn't know if it's some kind of powerful, maternal instinct, but like hell is she gonna let that coward near her baby like that. Ellen clutches the needle and stands a little taller.
"Why?" She asks James because she has to know. She has to know why he's so determined to do this; why he's so willing to help her at all. "Why give me this?"
He looks down and she catches something in his eyes that she's seen before. Maybe people in the wasteland are all the same when you get down to it. All they know is how to survive. "It's like I said before, I've known his type, and I know how this ends if something isn't done about it. I don't want that to happen to good people anymore."
She huffs a smile and looks at him, "I ain't a good person, Doc."
"But you're not a bad person either Ellen." He offers. She takes it because it's the most sincere anyone has ever been to her. She then turns to leave for the night.
"Thanks, Doc." She says one more time before leaving the clinic altogether.
When she reaches her apartment, the coward is already passed out on the kitchen table, clutching a bottle of booze. She rolls her eyes and walks into the bathroom. In the mirror, she sees that her eye is already bruising a nice shade of purple, almost like the color of wine now. Her nose is swelling up too, but for the most part it looks fine. She counts her bruises and aches all over her body as she dresses into her sleepwear. She grabs the needle from the counter top, where she left it and goes into the living room.
She stands there, staring at her husband's unconscious form. She spends a long time there, just standing. She thinks that maybe it was her fault to begin with, for it all ending up here. And maybe that's true, but it takes one hell of a coward to beat his wife because he's unhappy with his life. She thinks about the day he'll go too far and throw her face against the corner of the kitchen table. She thinks about how he'll spin it like it was an accident, and how they'll all watch her body burn in the incinerator. She thinks about Butchie, her sweet baby curled on the living room floor, crying as his daddy kicks him again and again.
She grips her hand around the needle 'til it's white. She heads to the liquor cabinet and sets the needle down before rummaging through the many bottles of alcohol. Ellen knows how to mix drinks, knows exactly how much to give a man so she doesn't get herself puked on later. She quickly mixes her husband's favorite before taking the needle and gently squirting its contents into the tumbler.
When she stirs it, the sound of the metal and glass clink together. It oddly calms her in a way. Makes her more confident in her actions as she takes the drink and heads into the kitchen.
Her husband's head is down on the kitchen table. He's fast asleep, but Ellen couldn't bring herself to care. She set the tumbler down onto the table making sure the glass clinks loudly enough as it hits the surface. His head shoots up and he mumbles something incoherent before looking at Ellen.
"Baby?... Wha..." He rubs his face. Once he moves his hands and gets a better look at her, he winces. "Fuck... Did I do that?" He has the audacity to ask.
Ellen sets her jaw, but calmly replies, "Yeah, ya did tiger." There's an awkward silence between the two. Her husband simply rubs his face again after a few minutes of getting a stare down from her.
"Shit... Look, babe... I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hit ya like that. I just... it was an accident..." He fumbles through an apology, using worn out excuses that Ellen doesn't believe anymore. But she humors him none the less.
"It's okay, hon." She adopts a sweet tone in her voice and wraps her arms around his neck. "It was my fault anyway. I shouldn't've made you so mad." She purrs as she rubs her unbruised cheek against his scruffy face.
"Uhh... Yeah." He said, scowling confusingly at the tumbler on the kitchen table. "Hey, babe what's that?" He points out, ready to drop the subject of spousal abuse.
Ellen smiles and pushes him back enough to gracefully sit on his lap and place a kiss on his temple. "It's your favorite, baby. I made it just for you... as an apology for the nasty things I said." She coos. Her husband side-eyes her for a moment, hesitating. She blinks innocently at him and smiles gently. It works and he grabs the tumbler and downs it in one gulp, just like she knew he would.
Ellen kissing him on the cheek one more time before getting off his lap. He scrunches his face and holds the tumbler up as if inspecting it will do anything. "Tastes kinda funny... Did you put something different in it?" He scrutinizes her as she pretends to look thoughtful.
"Must of been something I cleaned the glass with..." Ellen provides as she plucks the tumbler from his calloused hands. She checks the glass halfheartedly, putting on a little show while inspects the inside of the drinking glass. She shrugs after a minute, "I'll go buy different soap then."
"Ha! With what ration coupons?" He mockingly asks as he grabs a half empty bottle still on the table. He's about to take a swig but suddenly drops the bottle. It hits the ground spectacularly, spinning in circles as liquor spills out in all directions "I... shit... I think I drank too much again..." he slurs the last part out as he starts swaying.
"No, hon... I think you drank just the right amount this time." She sneers at him as he slumps against the table.
Ellen stares at her monster of a husband for a while after that. She equates the feeling to being stuck in limbo, but she only has a vague sense of what limbo actually was (she never really read any of the Vault issued Bibles). So she just stands there, holding the tumbler for about an hour not thinking of anything at all. When she starts to move again, it's to clean the glass, fill it with whiskey and place it in her husband's cold, dead hand. She moves his arm, despite its slight stiffness, and makes it look like he dropped the bottle while trying to fill up his glass.
She ignores the stench that fills her kitchen as she walks into the bathroom and washes her face. She wasn't a killer. Ellen repeated those words like a mantra as she dries her face and looks into the mirror, but she couldn't help the deep satisfaction she felt when she saw her husband go limp.
She cleaned herself and the sink up before going to her bedroom. She passes the kitchen along the way, letting the fluorescent light cast an imposing shadow across her form for but a moment, before descending back into the darkness of the living room. She takes a swig of gin that was left on her husband's nightstand and promptly goes to bed.
She falls asleep all too quickly and wakes up feeling much more refreshed than she has in years.
She makes her way back into the kitchen, gliding through the stale air and to her husband's lifeless side. She stares at the body for a few moments, then quickly glances at the clock hanging on the wall. It's just about nine in the morning.
Ellen takes a deep breath and screams.
The funeral is short and impersonal. Butch seems to be the only one really crying as the Overseer says a few words (not exactly comforting, but decent all the same) and then gives the signal to have his father's body incinerated. Ellen chooses to stare at the metal walls apathetically as her three-year-old son clings to her sleeve and asks, "Why are they burning him, mama?"
She brushes his thick black hair (hair he inherited from a man who was now burning to ashes) and says, "Because we can't bury people here, Butchie." before planting a tender kiss on his tear stained cheek. Doc kept to his word. When her husband's body was brought to the clinic. He performed the autopsy that was requested and said it was acute alcohol poisoning that did her husband in. That it wasn't whatever was in that needle, but liquor that finally killed him. It was jotted down in Alfonse's terminal while she watched people put her husband in a Vault issued black bag. It was officially on the record now.
On their way home, Butch grips the vase holding the ashes like the lid is gonna suddenly fall off, and all that remains of his father will fly out the vault in a gray cloud of death. Ellen honestly wouldn't mind if that actually happened, but knows better than to snap at Butch about it. When they arrive, Ellen gently pries the vase out of Butch's little hands and tells him to get a picture of his old man. She places her dead husband's ashes on a shelf, next to little trinkets that serve no purpose. She stares at his remains and wishes they would get sucked up into the vents and disappear forever.
Butch comes back with a picture of the three of them. He was only a newborn when they took it, but there were Ellen and his old man, both holding his blanket covered body and smiling towards the camera. They were happy then and Ellen can't bring herself to tell Butch to fetch another photo. She knows Butch has seen what his dad did to her on more than one occasion, and even at three years old, he'd rather remember the man that was nice and happy, like the way he was in that picture.
She smiles half-heartedly at him before placing the picture on the shelf next to the vase. She leans down and kisses Butch once more on his cheek before heading to the kitchen. Ellen hears Butch move towards his tiny room with each of his footsteps. When she hears the door hiss shut, she leans over the kitchen sink.
She's expecting to vomit, but she isn't yet. In fact, she hasn't at all since murdering her husband. She knows that this is a thing that people do, they get sick after seeing or doing something awful. She's seen it in the movies they play in the atrium. But the thing is, she hasn't. In fact, she doesn't feel awful or sick. She feels fine, like killing her husband has washed away every horrible thing in her body. She feels fine...
And that makes her upset. Regret was a thing people felt, but when there was no regret, then what? What did that say about her? She reaches for a glass in the cabinet and pulls out the tumbler she used a few nights ago.
She stares at it long and hard, trying to feel and an ounce of guilt for what she did. It's not there. She can't feel it at all. So she pours herself some whiskey and downs it in one go. It doesn't taste different like her husband said.
She keeps drinking more and more 'til she's slumped against the table and the curfew lights are on. She hears tiny footsteps come towards her before a tiny hand pushes her gently.
"Mama? Gonna tuck in now?" Butch says sleepily. When Ellen turns her red-rimmed eyes towards Butch, for a moment she sees her husband. Standing there, staring at her, with menacing eyes glaring right through her.
"Get the fuck away from me!" She yells and pushes Butch away. She forgets that it's her little baby boy, not her dead husband that's come to haunt her, that he's only three so he falls to the ground right on his ass. He looks up like he's about to cry.
"Ma-mama?" He whimpers and she's on her feet fast and crouching over him, shooing away his tears.
"Mama's sorry! Mama didn't mean it, my little Butch-man! There, there..." She coos frantically. Ellen has Butch scooped up in her arms and quickly goes to his room. He's still sniffing when she gently lays him in bed and tucks him in. "Mama loves you very much, she didn't mean to hurt you." She strains her voice to say it because there's a terrible feeling, low in her gut that says she's exactly like her husband. That she's a terrible mother because she makes up the same excuses. That she let all this happen. That she wanted to hurt Butch because she's frustrated about not feeling guilty over murdering her husband and had to take it out on someone other than herself. That she really isn't all the sorry.
She swallows the lump in her throat and kisses Butch on the forehead. He sniffs again and gives her a kiss on the cheek before snuggling up to the blankets. "I love you, Mama." He says quietly.
"I love you too." She says back and makes sure she puts in as much meaning into it as possible.
She heads back into the kitchen and picks up the whiskey bottle and tumbler off the table. She places the whiskey back in the cabinet, hoping to not take it out for a while. When she's about to rinse out the tumbler, she stops and gives it one more look.
She realizes that there is guilt hanging heavy on her heart, but it isn't the kind she wants. It's the kind of guilt that's only there because the guilt she's supposed to feel isn't. She doesn't regret a thing, and that's what she's guilty about. And she didn't want that guilt.
Ellen throws the tumbler in the sink and watches it shatter into a thousand tiny pieces. She didn't want that guilt.
She grabs the whiskey bottle out of the cabinet and takes a swig.
A/N: Okay, so like I just wanted to write a story about what could have possibly happened to Butch's dad. In all honesty I didn't expect it to turn into an Ellen angst fest, but here we are. I thought it would be appropriate that Ellen would eventually just turn into her abusive husband once she murdered him, having been affect by the guilt of not actually being guilty and regretful of killing him. James' involvement was more of a "he's seen it in the wasteland before and he doesn't want it to happen in the Vault too, not when he trecked all the way here to ensure his baby grew up in a safe environment" kinda deal. So yeah, there is some selfish motives there too.
I purposefully kept Butch's dad nameless, James' last name unsaid (hence Ellen referring to him as Doc a lot), and the LW nameless and genderless, so as to let you guys better connect with the writing.
Also, Butch doesn't deserve any of this...