It all started with that one first stupid punch. Butch had always held that over you – his strength. He was tall enough, manly enough, muscled enough, to scare you. And he was impressive… for a vault dweller. You didn't know any better - not that you allowed yourselves to linger on that part. Put enough teenagers in one place and they'll soon start spouting off shit to impress each other. So it started with Butch. Stupid name, stupid like him. He'd always threatened a little, cajoled. I'll show you a real tunnel snake, he'd say, snickering. Stupid, slow Wally would snicker, and Paulie would look sheepish from side to side, eyes flickering and flitting like a gas fire. Boxed in, you'd see the glint of a knife, flickering, flitting, with a too-clean gleam and a show-off twirl. He's never used it in his life, but you don't know that. Not yet. You don't know yet the look of someone intimately acquainted with the many and varied ways you can rend a man's flesh from his bones, but that will come with time. At the moment you're seventeen, and naïve, and Butch is flashing his flickblade at you and you don't see red, you see white. It's not even anger you feel, not as you know it. This is the beautiful clarity of rage; the manic, otherworldly focus of the primeval lizard part of your brain. Something in you snaps, and you feel pain as your fist snaps in a beautiful reflection of your feelings straight into Butch's smug, greasy face.
He's hit you before you can think to react. There's hissing from his posse of Snakes, I can't believe you hit a girl, and you grin around the iron tang in your mouth. You probably look crazed with blood smeared across the sharp white glint of your teeth, but you don't care. Vivid red bubbles up dramatically at the corner of your smile, but you're the doctor's daughter – you know the punch did no damage to you other than cosmetic. You spit the leavings of his pathetic punch out of your mouth and towards his face; it misses but the satisfaction when the wine-dark glob plops neatly onto the collar of his regulation-white shirt is no less. Too high to hide, he'll have to carry his badge of shame. A second punch from him is conspicuously missing, and the significance of his tightly bunched hand and straining arm is not lost on you. His standing in the Tunnel Snakes is tenuous at best; he doesn't want to risk ostracising his followers. Judging by their reactions, you imagine they're all still bound by the old world values of gender inequality. You never hit a girl, you hear them muttering, and feel like screaming yourself. I started it, you'd say. Is that all there is? Is this what I've been so afraid of? This momentary pain?
Butch backs off, rotating a shoulder in its socket, shaking out his hand, muttering to a follower. Bad boy posing. Bad boy scared that little old you will go and tell on him, and have the split lip to prove it. Scared of his mum, mean and drunk and bitter. Scared of the broken bottle brandished, glass sharp and slashing. Cruel words, unexplained cuts. You're not afraid. Not any more. Is that all there is to be afraid of – pain? Death? The latter is certainly of no consequence to you, here, in this vault. In fact, looking at old lady Palmer, old as the walls themselves and lost in the machinations of her mind, the lack of the latter is a much more pressing concern. But not here. Not now. All things in their appropriate time and place.
Crimson blood smears burgundy on the sleeve of your jumpsuit. Your face is clean, your wound less so. Home to dad to be patched up. Stitches and disapproving looks. Take your pills, sweetie, he says; he thinks that, like Freddie, you're depressed. That's just the opposite, though. You haven't lost your will to live. You've just found a reason to continue.