"No Dogmeat. You can't come with me. Stay."
The grey and black dog sat down with a whine and cocked his head in confusion, but he obeyed the words of his owner, who slipped out the door and closed it before he could follow her.
"It's for the best buddy." She murmured to herself as she walked towards the steps which would take her up out of Megaton's crater towards the town's gates. She knew the dog hated being left behind, but she knew that she couldn't take him with her; the wastes were to dangerous for a dog, and she knew she couldn't handle losing him too. It seemed everyone who travelled with her died no matter how hard she tried to keep them alive. At one point she had considered leaving the dog behind in the wastes to make a life for himself, but the though of the roving packs of starving dogs she had seen stopped her. She couldn't leave him to become one of them. She couldn't leave Dogmeat knowing that he would likely die a slobbering mess with every rib showing as he attacked some caravan on the chance he would eat.
So she let him stay and worried every minute.
But after the last trip up north she knew she couldn't even do that any more. Dogmeat had run afoul of a very large and very angry radscorpion and she had only barely managed to save him. Indeed, it was nearly a week later and the dog was still limping slightly.
She was not going to lose him like she lost Star Paladin Cross, whose armor had proven almost useless against a deathclaw that managed to get too close. Her holotags still hadn't been returned to the Citadel. There were too many painful memories associated with that place. There didn't need to be more.
As the gate of Megaton slowly slide upward she lowered her biker goggles against the fine rusty dust that drifted down from the aging metal, as well as the dirt picked up by the ever whistling wind. The wasteland had become familiar to her in her months of trekking across it, no area more so than the area around Megaton, but as she stepped out now she felt even more alone than she had since she first stepped out of the darkness of Vault 101 and into the blinding sunlight. Back then she hadn't truly understood how vast the world outside was, and part of her hadn't believed that the world wouldn't just end over the next hill or behind that building. But now she knew better. Now she knew that she could simply keep walking, and that nothing would stop her for she could always go around.
But she would have to walk around the mountains alone now, for she would not have Dogmeat there to walk in her footsteps.
She would not lose him as she lost Fawkes. He hadn't hesitated to open fire on the large group of Talon mercenaries with his gatling laser when they had been ambushed and outnumbered near a relay tower. Only one of the Talons had fallen though when the laser stopped firing, and before she could so much as blink Fawkes had been dragged to the ground by the swarm of mercenaries. She herself had only barely managed to evade them, sneaking through the darkness and trusting her pip-boy and Dogmeat's keen senses of smell and hearing to alert her to the Talons' locations as they searched for her.
As she walked west she reflected on what seemed like a never ending list of people she had travelled with or met, however briefly, who had died because of her. Because she wasn't good enough, or strong enough, to protect them. Through her inadequacy so many had died that might have lived. The inhabitants of Big Town who she had been too late to rescue from the super mutants who had dragged them away. Poor Rory who died when she couldn't get him out of Paradise Falls before being spotted by guards. The poor beggar who had died in her arms outside of Tenpenny Tower because she had no purified water to give him.
The further down the list she got the more she searched for names, trying to delay getting to the bottom of the list where the most important failure resided.
She would not fail Dogmeat as she had failed her father. A life in the Megaton house would not be perfect, but at least Dogmeat would be safe.
Just knowing that would be enough to keep her going.