Mortality
by Excellent
The real question is, how much sense does this actually make?
It is said that young people do stupid and dangerous things because they fail to understand the true ramifications of their actions; they see themselves as invincible, immortal, untouchable. Barbara was nineteen, almost twenty, and she did a lot of stupid and dangerous things. She was not sure how she felt about that sentiment.
After all, she faced her own mortality every day-- raiders, the Enclave remnants, the Talon Company, Super Mutants, radscorpions, Deathclaws, and all other creatures that meant her harm. Death lurked constantly behind her, breathing the same thought over and over down her neck: "Be careful. You might die any second." She had accepted that as fact long ago. She saw death every single day, and it was she who caused many of them. This did cause her some distress, but she consoled herself with the fact that, as terrible as it may sound, the people she killed basically did deserve it, she was saving innocents, and there was no guilt at all for the monsters. Of course, she did know more than her fair share of brash young fools, and she observed that many of them did not live to see forty.
In the end, she decided that she was an exception to the rule.
She prided herself on her ability to survive and to help others survive. That was her new goal: to teach the people she had learned to love, who were defenseless, how to better handle themselves in the Wastes. She believed that with the majority of the Enclave destroyed and its vestiges dying, with the source of the Super Mutants discovered, and with the purifier up and running, the Wasteland was headed toward recovery, and she was proud that she was a part of it. All she had lost, she deemed worth the cause.
It was her biggest, and most impossible, hope that the next generation born would not need her training; that her own children would live without the fear of death looming constantly over their heads. Barbara put forth all of her energy into coming as close to this goal as possible.
So busy was Barbara that she did not notice something amiss.
Shortly after Barbara did turn twenty, she agreed wholeheartedly, heavy-heartedly, to the thought she had previously rejected.
All those things that she could list that caused her pain, that threatened her life on a daily basis were the tangible opponents that caused her physical pain. They shot her. The stabbed her. They lunged at her, with their claws and teeth and stingers. It was so easy to see the danger they presented her flesh. It was so easy to see the damage they caused on her arms and legs.
Her birthday, celebrated in Megaton with its people and other friends from the Wastes, inspired her to reminisce about birthdays past. Her fourth, when she got her first tricycle. Her eighth, when Wally Mack kissed her on the cheek and immediately began being mean to her. Her tenth, when her father gave her a BB gun. And her thirteenth, when she got her first menstrual period and woke her father with screaming at three in the morning.
This thought hit her like a bullet, a knife, a claw. She realized that she had not menstruated in so many months, that she had forgotton completely about this crucial womanly function ever since setting foot in D.C. for the first time. Prior to that, when she was hunkering down in Megaton, training herself for D.C., she had assumed the unfamiliar environment and stress had caused her to skip and had not been worried.
She remembered that one of her first acts in Megaton was to sit in a puddle of irradiated water for an hour for the sake of Moira Brown's misguided attempts at science. It occurred to her that this was a stupid and dangerous thing to do. As she thought, more and more memories of her ticking Geiger counter, of wading through dark murky water, of drinking from old sinks, of hiding behind glowing barrels flooded into her mind. She could not remember being worried; she had a stash of RadAway at home, so why would she have worried?
In her youthful folly, Barbara had completely disregarded radiation as a real danger to her. She knew now that RadAway takes away the rads, but not the damage they cause.
Painfully, she had no choice but to accept the fact that one half of her biggest, most impossible hope, the half that was partially possible, that she glossed over in speech but clung to in the back of her mind-- that her children could live without the constant fear of death-- was truly unattainable because she could have no children. And it was her fault alone.
Barbara was twenty and agreed that young people do stupid and dangerous things because they fail to understand the true ramifications of their actions.
Thanks for reading!