Took some creative liberties with Charon's story, since we don't get much of it. I quite like the fact that they're vague with the details of his contract and his past/upbringing/etc, as it gives a chance for things like this to be written. Any constructive criticism or corrections would be much appreciated, as this was written at roughly three in the morning, and was not beta-read. If there are enough requests, I may make this multi-chaptered, dealing with Charon being hired by the Lone Wanderer, since that time period is about when this ends. Any ideas regarding that would be much appreciated, if that is what you, as the readers, request.
EDIT: Long story short, as far as this first chapter goes, this sort of my head canon for how Charon came to be, well... The snappy ghoul we all know and love. I like to think it makes quite a bit of sense and follows a timeline fairly well, but, well, only reviews can really tell me if I'm correct.
EDITEDIT: Oh, come on! Seven hits and not a single review? Normally, I wouldn't ask for them, but, well... This is the first Fallout 3 story I've ever written, along with the first one I've written since I was twelve and thought I was cool for writing in all caps.
"Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness."
When asked, Ahzrukhal will tell you little more about Charon's past than that he was raised by a group of people who brainwashed him into obeying whoever physically has his contract. Ahzrukhal insists that he isn't a slave. What Ahzrukhal doesn't mention is that the people responsible for brainwashing Charon were part of some big name corporation that was going strong, until shortly after Operation: Anchorage began, and the fact that his name is definitely not Charon. Ahzrukhal implies that Charon did something in the past to deserve his 'employment' — but he's wrong. Charon is only a child, ten years old when his parents pass and those men find him weeping at their graves, shaking like a leaf in the pouring rain. It's two years later, after they've done extensive testing — physical, mental, emotional — that his training starts. At seventeen, he has exceeded all expectations they had, and is one of seven to survive this treatment. By the time he turns twenty-five, he's one of two left, trained in stealth, and enlisted in the military.
The men in possession of his contract force him to enlist when he's twenty-three, selling his contract to the lieutenant general the moment Charon — then known by some generic name that he hardly remembers now, after two hundred years, like John Smith or James Anderson or something — managed to rank as brigadier general. After two months with his contract in the possession of the lieutenant general, he gains the nickname 'Charon', after the ferryman of the river Styx, for taking out more of both the elite and standard Chinese troops than any other soldier. Despite outranking a majority of the military personnel where he is stationed, Charon is not treated as such, thanks to his contract — most of the soldiers consider him little more than a pathetic fucking slave, and the small handful of people who outrank him do nothing to stop this.
When the bombs fall, Charon's employer is killed, while Charon miraculously survives, taking massive amounts of radiation. It only continues, as Charon is incapable of taking his contract from the corpse — something inlaid deeply in him by his training to keep him from taking the contract while his employer sleeps and running off, his freedom literally in the palm of his hand. He waits there for weeks, watching that corpse, only occasionally looking away to find food, and not even thinking about the fact that the radiation isn't even bothering him anymore. It doesn't worry him that his skin is starting to peel — this is just the beginning, he figures his skin's just dry. It doesn't even worry him that now, after who knows how many weeks, the radiation isn't an annoying tickle that makes him vaguely sick to his stomach — it's a pleasant warmth that spreads from his abdomen and makes him feel infinitely better, stronger.
It's been roughly two months when Ahzrukhal happens by, skin already deteriorated, rotting, discoloured — he got the worst of the radiation poisoning. Charon still has most of his skin, even if it's ruined. Almost all of the skin on Ahzrukhal's body is visible thanks to the merc grunt outfit he's currently clad in — not unlike what they will later see Doctor Barrows in — and most of it is gone. There are small patches of flesh left on his arms, and shoulders, and, based solely on the holes in his pants, it's safe to say most of the skin on his legs is gone too — but even at a distance, Charon can tell that what skin is left, stretched taut over muscle and bone from not eating enough for too long, is leathery, and he can smell what he thinks is the wet coppery smell of blood. It's just Ahzrukhal, he is startled to find out. This is when Charon starts paying attention to the fact that his fucking skin is rapidly peeling away in long strips or short, square patches.
Ahzrukhal catches sight of him, sees the body of that lieutenant general, surprisingly well-preserved due to the radiation and approaches. When he speaks, Charon doesn't answer, merely stares from him, to the corpse, and back again. The ghoul takes this as a hint, kneels beside the body and digs through the pockets of the old blue jeans and suit jacket. His beady eyes, a faded shade of what may have once been green or blue or something inbetween, narrow as he finds Charon's contract, reading over the words that had once been clearly printed in black ink, words that were now smudged and faded after the contract had spent too much time in someone's pocket. Then, that sleazy rat bastard has the audacity to grin like a fucking Cheshire cat, and that's when Charon knows he's in for a whole fuckton of trouble. As it turns out, blood or caps aren't required to for the transfer of the contract the way his fucking makers claimed to get all of that cash in return for his contract — it's all about possession, and Ahzrukhal, from this point out, keeps that damn contract on his person at all times. Charon doesn't know where. He doesn't want to.
They trek across the states, all the way from Texas, where his stupid goddamn employer had insisted on moving after Operation: Anchorage had more or less ended, claiming he was tired of the cold and being able to see Russia from his house (Charon had known that was a joke, but he couldn't quite bring himself to laugh), all the way to Florida. They stay there for ten years, Charon constantly watching over the house that Ahzrukhal had claimed as their own while that bastard runs who the fuck knows where. One day, when Ahzrukhal returns, he orders Charon to gather their things, because they're going to fucking DC, to the ruins of the old Museum of Natural History. He figured it was because he'd been stuck in this fucking shack for so damn long, but he hadn't heard a goddamn thing about this 'Underworld' place that Ahzrukhal wouldn't shut the fuck up about, supposedly a safe haven for ghouls.
Whatever the fuck a ghoul was.
By the time they reach what was once the National Museum of National History about two and a half weeks later, Charon's skin is completely ruined. It'd been peeling for some time now, the muscle that was slowly exposing itself turning smooth and feeling vaguely like those shitty fake leather couches that all of the kids in his neighborhood had had when he was a child. Surprisingly, he isn't upset to see his skin go. He'd come to accept whatever happened to him, come to assume that he deserved it after some of the shit he'd done before his contract was sold to Lieutenant General Ryan Hart. When he realizes that it's the first time since his death that he's thought of his former employer (he has to remind himself that one of the only orders he was given after Operation: Anchorage was to address the man as Ryan — the other being to act as he might if he were free) by name, he frowns. Ryan had been a good man.
By the time Doctor Barrows arrives in Underworld, roughly three months after Carol and Greta, and that fucking sap Gobtholomew that Carol calls her son, Charon's ghoulification is complete. As a human, he'd stood at six foot five, with thick, red hair that was left shaggier than was really helpful in what was officially the Capitol Wastes, and kept off his forehead by a black bandana; He'd constantly worn his dog tags, one labeled with his real name, the metal so worn it could no longer be read, and the other labeled 'Charon'; He consistently wore the pants from his military uniform, along with an old, white tank top. Now that he was officially a ghoul, regardless of if he was effectively stuck in fucking Underworld for the rest of his miserable life, he figured combat leathers were better — kept him protected on the off-chance that he had to leave, and it was easy enough to clean vomit off of them if one of the drunken idiots he had to throw out of the Ninth Circle (the stupid fucking bar and junkie corner that rat bastard employer of his had opened) managed to blow chunks all over him. On top of that, his hair had been coming out in chunks for days - the last thing to go. All that was left now was a few wisps here and there.
He threw away the bandana that he'd had for years.
He's there for a whole goddamned century by the time someone (not just someone, some stupid fuckhead ghoul who'd lived in Underworld for years) is stupid enough to bring a weapon into the bar. Instead of escorting the fucker out, he simply plucks the combat shotgun off the table from beside him — when the other ghoul protests, Charon simply shoots him a menacing look and returns to his corner. Over the next seventy-five years, he starts modifying it — fixes it so there's less kickback, so that each shot is more powerful; Hell, at one point, he tampered with the idea modifying it so that it could also fire grenades. He didn't have the time or the funds for that, since he wasn't getting fucking paid.
By the time humans, smoothskins, start occasionally trickling into Underworld, battered and bruised and pumped full of lead thanks to the horrendous amount of fucking super mutants that have filled the area outside, carving out trenches and setting surprisingly elaborate traps, Charon has 'officially' been a ghoul for one hundred seventy-five years and five months - nearly two damn centuries. And the entire time, he's been stuck in a goddamn corner in the Ninth Circle, only moving if the drunks got rowdy or crossfaded on too much booze and jet. Almost two hundred years of total and complete monotony, of mind-numbing boredom and napping in spare minutes for a week whenever a new ghoul would stumble upon Underworld and make it their home, because Ahzrukhal was paranoid. But that was still better than it had been at the beginning - at the beginning, Charon had stayed awake for days at a time. He had been trained to stay up for three, then nap in spare minutes when you thought it was safe. Ahzrukhal had him staying up for a week at a time, until Doc Barrows had wandered in one day with Patchwork, complaining that his limbs always seemed to fall off more frequently after the sloppy ghoul had spent time in the bar and seen Charon in the corner. Ghoul or no, stoic or no, it was easy to tell he had been awake for days - and Barrows knew that, if they hadn't already, soon the micro naps would start, and with them would come the hallucinations.
Things had been better, after that.
Ahzrukhal knew Charon's contract like the back of his ruined hand by the time the second century rolled to a close. Knew the ins and outs of every clause and could probably figure out a good handful of loopholes for most of them. At least he didn't have to run about, performing menial fucking tasks - it said in his contract, in fairly specific terms, that his services applied to combat only. Being a bouncer in the Ninth Circle was a loophole - he didn't usually have to fight anyone, but he assumed that Ahzrukhal had defined what he was to in the contract, added to the end of it so that he could keep him here. And since physical violence only invalidated the contract if Ahzrukhal himself was the one perpetrating said violence… Well, that was an obvious enough loophole, and Charon had harmed himself on more than one occasion, on Ahzrukhal's orders. After all, for good or ill, he served him.
The rat bastard.