This is more or less my take on a more realistic conclusion for Benign Intervention, without the Deus Ex Machina magic addiction curing machine. Comments and criticisms are welcome, I haven't written a true fanfic in years so apologies if the characters feel a bit off.
A final gurgle signaled the death of the last Gunner, in perfect synch with the cessation of all the gunfire that had been echoing in Valut 95's decayed corridors. The commander of the force that had been occupying the centuries-old structure finally crumbled into a bullet-riddled heap, a corpse tumbling over nearby railing down to the floor below. Smoke poured from the barrel of the sidearm that had delivered a few 10mm killing blows into his cranium moments earlier.
Clicking became the first sound to break the silence as the empty magazine slid from the pistol, a new one replacing it in seconds. With the same relative speed, the ringing in Elizabeth's ears began to dissipate, much to the relief of her aching head. Even after seven weeks of daily shootouts in the Commonwealth, her brain had an intense negative reaction to prolonged bouts of high-decibel excitement. One of those things not even the Sole Survivor of Vault 111 could adapt to, she supposed. It was at least becoming easier to tolerate the migranes.
From behind the relatively tall blonde, a second figure moved forward, the double-barreled shotgun gripped in her hands twitching every so often. Not that it was easy to see any particular part of Cait shuddering, when her entire body seemed to twitch every few seconds. Elizabeth still hadn't decided what was more unnerving a sight: her redheaded companion's full form jittering about an evening campsite, visibly screaming out for another hit of Psycho, or the coughed-up blood that she was having an increasingly difficult time hiding from the former Vault dweller. Both had a certain subdued terror about them.
Cait was already moving up before the last death spasms of the Gunners came to an end, her firearm waved around in a manner that could be described, at best, as dangerously erratic. Concern for the safety of both of them drove Elizabeth to pick up her own pace, stepping up behind her fellow traveller to grasp the woman's shoulder. "Hey," she said with a light tug backwards, "I think we're clear. Should be safe to rest for a minute."
The redhead's response came in the form of a dismissive half-shrug, half-surge forward. "No time," she growled back through an Irish accent thick enough to stop a bullet. "More'll come soon. Need to do this quick." The curt response was all she offered before storming ahead, kicking aside the scrap remnants of destroyed turrets, as Elizabeth was left with nothing to do but sigh and continue on ahead. She was, if nothing else, consistently goal-oriented in this endeavor.
Not that Elizabeth could blame her companion for being so focused. A Vault dedicated to combating drug abuse that allegedly had a chair capable of removing every addiction a person had, no matter the severity or how long they'd been dependent? That kind of medical miracle would've brought massive interest in the blonde's own time, before Boston had been reduced to an irradiated hellhole where half of everyone alive probably had some sort of drug problem. To a woman who was so addicted to Psycho that it was slowly killing her from the inside-out, it must have seemed like a gift from the heavens.
It had taken three days of stumbling around what was left of old Natick just to find the entrance to this damned Vault. Upon locating its doors at last, they had come under immediate assault from the battalion of Gunners who'd been using the structure as their best-defended garrison in the southwestern Commonwealth. Half an hour and a few hundred rounds of ammo later, Elizabeth was exhausted, half-soaked with blood (little of it her own, mercifully), and ready to sleep for about a week. If it hadn't been so important to her friend to reach the heart of the Vault, she might well have turned around and gone back home some time ago.
Yet they were here, at the deepest level of the crumbling bunker, the heart of an experiment into curing people of their physical dependencies. Cait's normally sullen face was lit up with excitement as they crossed into the large medical chamber together, eyeing the relatively intact supplies strewn about the… surgical ward? Elizabeth couldn't tell. There were enough operating tables and aluminum trays everywhere to give it that impression. Perhaps the Gunners had been using it to operate on wounded troops, on the rare occasion where they bothered to even treat men and women injured by the dangers of the wasteland.
Useful supplies to scavenge, but Cait was concerned with none of it. Her eyes were instead drawn to a chamber at the end of the large hall, sequestered from the rest of the room by a currently open doorway and an observation window. The ex-pit fighter muttered something too rapidly for Elizabeth to pick up the words as she rushed to the terminal near the door, her hands dancing across the keyboard in an erratic flurry.
"Here it is," she said with the first hint of glee that Elizabeth had picked up from her companion in days. "The Clean Room. This is where those Vault-Tec bastards flushed the addiction outta people's systems." Her green eyes narrowed as she looked at the contents of the room; a few ruined lockers, a table ready to collapse, and a pockmarked leather chair with a solitary light above it.
"That's… strange," Cait said, drawing a worried glance from Elizabeth.
"What?" Strange was a word that the blonde was trying to force out of her vocabulary. There was far too much weirdness up here on the surface for the word to maintain its meaning anymore.
The Irishwoman's eyes were widening at a slow pace as she dropped her shotgun and ran inside the Clean Room. "No no no no no." She was starting to sound worried now. She never sounded worried; this had to be a tremendously bad development. "No! No, damnit, no!"
"Cait! What's wrong? What's going on?"
"It's not fucking here!" The redhead suddenly delivered a heavy kick to the base of the chair. "It's not bloody fucking here! The device that they were supposed to have isn't here anymore!"
Elizabeth winced as her friend let out a guttural roar of frustration. Her first instinct was to quip about how much time and ammo they'd wasted getting this far into the Vault just for that device, but that would be of little help now. "Okay… okay, let's just try to keep this calm."
"Fuck that!" There was a rage burning in Cait's eyes with the same fire as her auburn hair as she spun around, spitting out her words at Elizabeth. "This is the one fuckin' thing that can help me, and it's not here! I bet those Gunner shitheads took it, didn't they?! We need to find out where they dragged that device to, and we need to get it back!"
The fuming woman tried to exit the Clean Room, only to be stopped as Elizabeth blocked the doorway, one hand resting on her companion's shoulder. Cait's mouth opened to make another foul-mouthed remark, only to snap shot as her blue-eyed friend let out a growl of her own. That little reminder that the blonde was not without some backbone was enough to snap her into line, if only for a few moments as she spoke. "I'll check the terminal for any sort of logs on what happened here," she said in a firm tone, "You check the commander's corpse for a note, or holotape, or something. Then we'll go from there."
She stepped aside to allow the marginally calmed woman to storm out, thundering towards the body as the more technically-inclined Elizabeth took a seat at the computer wired up to the clean room. Silently the blonde started counting down from 100 to keep her own sense of calm preserved, all the while reminding herself that Cait had a right to at least some small measure of anger. Her own frustration at days of effort proving fruitless couldn't even match how pissed her friend must have been right now at her own rotten luck.
Vault-Tec built their computers to last, that much was in their favor. Finding a few logs and journals related to the clean room was not terribly difficult, though the speed at which records appeared on her screen was less than ideal thanks to the havoc that two centuries of decay had played on the terminal's processor speed. A few quick searches for discussion of a device brought up records of the machine they were after: the Vault-Tec Toxin Flush 2000, guaranteed to flush all toxins from the bloodstream of any individual in a timely and efficient manner. Past all the internal PR nonsense, she quickly found records of its first tests in the Vault, and the initial positive experimentation results…
And the side effects. Followed in turn by the Overseer's response to 'unfortunate occurrences resulting from the use of the VTTF'.
"Cait?"
The redhead swiveled around, scurrying over to Elizabeth's side. "You found it? Did you figure out what those Gunner bastards did with the device?"
It had been a long time since Elizabeth had felt her icy blue eyes droop to this degree. Not since the first horrific few minutes when she'd awoken from cryo-sleep. The feeling of helplessness that was washing over her right now wasn't dissimilar to those three minutes of terror. "Cait, the device had… problems."
She swallowed audibly. "People died. The Overseer… he decided it was too dangerous to use. He, uh… he had the device… dismantled."
In the long moments of silence that came next, a magazine clattering to the floor at the Vault Door would've been audible all the way down here. Elizabeth forced her eyes up just enough to watch as Cait's jaw loosened, slowly dropping open in shock. What color was visible in her cheeks underneath all the dirt and grime vanished in the span of a few seconds; the blonde wondered if that was how she'd looked when Nate's death had first set in.
"Liz." The redhead's loud, boisterous voice had been reduced to a whisper. "You've gotta be the worst fuckin' comedian I've ever met."
She tried not to laugh, and succeeded, but the faint hint of a smile still appeared on her lips. "Wait'll you hear the one about killing babies," she replied in her own quiet tone, desperately trying to dampen the blow with the first outrageous thing that came to her mind. "It'll knock ya dead."
There was another, shorter moment of silence before Cait began drifting downwards, collapsing onto her knees. Her slackening form shuffled over towards the nearest steel wall, coming to a rest as a pair of bloodshot emerald orbs stared out into space. Her mouth hung open without a single word being uttered, though her brow was furrowed as if she was in a maddening search for something, anything to say. What exactly could be said right now was a mystery Elizabeth would need a lifetime to unravel.
Perhaps it was best to keep it simple. From her chair she slid to her own knees, one hand reaching out to form a ginger-light hold around her friend's arm. Her thumb shifted upwards in surprise as she felt the bump of a Psycho injection site. "C'mon," she said, licking her lips between words for the sole purpose of stalling for time, "We'll, uh… we'll find something else to help you. I promise."
"Shoot me."
Elizabeth's head recoiled by several inches. "What?"
"You want to help me?" The redhead waved a shaky hand towards Elizabeth's sidearm. "One bullet. Right between me eyes."
It was the Vault dweller's turn to hang back with her mouth agape. "Cait, that isn't going to help anyth-"
She was interrupted mid-sentence by her companion ripping the 10mm pistol right out of its holster and forcing it into the blonde's hands. "Have you been listenin' to a single word I've said these past few days?" The fire was beginning to rise in her tone once more. "No doctor can help me. That device was me last hope. Without it, there ain't no other way outta this, and I ain't got the guts to do it meself."
Elizabeth's hand lingered, maintain a tenuous grip on the pistol as she pondered the best course of action. When a response finally came, it was indeed in the form of violence inflicted with a firearm: the butt of the weapon slammed hard across Cait's face. The redhead keeled over in abject shock, coughing out a few handfuls of blood before she looked up in bewilderment at her companion.
"What the fuck was that?" she screeched, dragging herself up the wall and back to her feet. "I asked you to shoot me, n-"
She was interrupted this time, by a swift punch to the gut. More blood was spit out in response, landing on the face of the blonde woman now pinning her against the wall. "You don't get to fucking quit!" Elizabeth yelled into her face. "I killed a dozen fucking Raiders just to pull you out of that pit you were fighting in, I killed another couple dozen Gunners just getting you through this stupid fucking Vault, and Jesus Christ, I don't even know how many people I killed out in the Commonwealth just before they could take out your Potato Farmer ass! I am not putting all that to waste just because you're trying to pussy out!"
There wasn't even a token verbal response before Cait attacked Elizabeth with a surprise headbutt. The slamming of their foreheads sent the Vault dweller reeling all the way back to another wall, where she stumbled over an operating table right onto her ass. Cait was along seconds later, kicking Elizabeth in the ribs before descending to start wailing on her face.
In between fists slamming into her features, Liz's hands stumbled over a surgical tray that she quickly sent slamming into the side of Cait's head. The impact disoriented her companion long enough for her to throw the redhead to the side, pinning her against the wall once again. This time, she wrapped one hand around the redhead's throat, just tightly enough to make breathing less than comfortable without causing any serious damage.
Blood, this time far more of it Liz's own, trailed down the blonde's nose and onto her friend's face. "Y'know," she said, pausing to spit out a mixture of saliva and more blood, "For someone who wants me to shoot her in the head, you sure put up a good fight."
Cait's hands were already wrapped around Liz's arm, trying in vain to break the blonde's grip on her throat. "For someone who couldn't keep her baby safe, you sure try to save a lot of people."
She supposed that letting the redhead off easy with that comment was only fair after the slur she'd delivered. "Only when I think they're worth saving." She let out a long breath as her grip around the redhead's throat loosened. "Cait, I'm not giving up on you because the easy solution isn't available. I'm sticking with this, and with you, until we get this fixed."
Her hand drifted all the way off Cait's throat, the pit fighter's grip on her arm releasing as she slid back down to the floor. "There's no fixing this." she growled back up at her companion, "The Psycho's already killed me. The end's just a matter of time."
"Then we've got time for you to fight." She held out her hand, not to strike Cait again, but as an offer of help to her feet. "That's what you're good at. Might as well go down doing it."
Cait's eyes trailed upwards. "It's a waste of your bloody time."
"Yeah, well, you've got a nice ass. That's worth wasting some time for."
A weak chuckle accompanied Cait lifting an unsteady hand up to grasp Liz's. The redhead was on her feet again with one hefty pull, her shaking knees straightening up after a few moments. Elizabeth was quick to collect her friend's shotgun and stuff it back into her hands.
"You sure you can trust me with this thing?" Cait asked as they started moving back towards the door. "I might shoot you in the back."
"Not too worried. You're on point so I can keep a good view up of that ass."
A genuine laugh could be heard echoing in the halls of Vault 95.