A/N: Hey guys! Sylphie here. I've been working on this piece for about a month now, between writing/editing and having my best friend (smol-swol-bumblebee on tumblr) read it to catch anything I might've missed. We've both put in a lot of effort, and I hope it's decent!
Also, breaking news! I have an AO3 now! By the same name, but what's different is A) it's a brand new account, so a lot of the stories here won't be up there for a while, if at all (with the exception of my Fallout 4 works, like this one and Cigarette Burns), and B) I'll be able to put all of my out-of-order works for Nick and Angela into a series for easier access. So if you'd rather read or favorite/review on AO3, you can! Amazing.
Angela is shaking. From rage, fury, terror, she doesn't know, but she's been on edge since they entered Fort Hagen, shoving her machete, Godsend, over and over into bots with her best friends face (they're taunting her, she thinks, making a mockery of Nick, and she hates them) and now-
Now there he is, the man of the hour, surrounded by walking, talking computers. The man who killed her family, stole her brother and ended her world for the second time; there he is, bald and scarred and looking for all the world like he's going to kill her, too.
This could've happened months ago. Should have, really, but when she and Nick had shown up, bedraggled and unnerved by the silence of the fort, there'd been nothing but a note on the door, handwritten and addressed to her. Turns out they'd waited too long, and the oh-so-important mercenary extraordinaire had other things to do. He'd given a date, and the detective and his client had obliged.
It's a good thing she doesn't carry guns, all things considered, because even if she had aim better than a grandmother with palsy she wouldn't be able to hit a target at point-blank range. She's shaking, and it's not something she'll be proud of later, but she can't think past it, can't move, can't even breathe-
"What, you deaf or somethin'?" Kellogg sneers, kindness painted on his face like a bad used car salesman's, "I said, let's talk."
To her right, just behind her, the familiar sound of metal on metal and the snick of a revolver's chamber sliding back into place ground her. Nick's here, and that's what's important. With him, she could take on the world.
With Nick, she could face the man who killed her mother.
Kellogg, the man of hour, stands before her in all his mercenary glory, confident that he's going to walk away from this in one piece. She strides to meet him, machete drawn, murderous intent in every heavy step. Valentine shadows her, watching his Institute-fresh clones while Angela goes to meet her demon.
"There we go, sweetheart, just like that. Like I said, the most resilient woman in the Commonwealth. Sorry we couldn't have had this meeting earlier, but there was some… business I had to attend to. You know how it is," the mercenary says, a hint of stony determination showing through that charismatic mask.
"Don't I ever," she says, tone as flippant as it is hateful, "A man as prestigious as you? Must've had a lot of infants to kidnap."
She's playing with explosives here, and she knows it. Kellogg's jaw tenses, his hand twitches towards his gun - she's touched a nerve.
Good, she thinks, tossing her hair over her shoulder with a smirk. The coins, beads and bolts tied within clinking together, the weight and sound reassuring.
"Now, now, Angela," he says, tone canted in a condescending warning, as though he were speaking to a small child. "Kids aren't my thing. Your brother is a very special boy. Well, was."
Now it's his turn to look arrogant while she snaps. She lunges two steps towards him, brandishing Godsend, stopping only when Nick grabs her free wrist from behind. Beside her, an Institute synth raises it's laser pistol, aiming mechanically, perfectly, for her temple.
"Hijo de puta, where is my brother?" She snarls, ripping her hand away from Nick's loose grip. Grief and rage burn in her stomach, a noxious combo that turns her vision red. She's shaking again, but this time she knows why: anger, not fear. She's not afraid of him. Not anymore.
"Somewhere you'll never find him."
"What did you do to him?" She's seconds away from just slitting his throat, carving him a gory second smile, information be damned.
The mercenary cocks an eyebrow, face amused at her outburst, but there's something like empathy in his eyes, like pity.
"Wipe that smirk off your face, Kellogg. It'll freeze like that once the rigor mortis sets in," Nick says from behind her, voice holding none of his usual dry humor. Just a threat, a warning.
Kellogg glances at the detective over her shoulder and sighs, lets his mask down for the first time since she's come face to face with him, rubs at his eyes with an index finger and a thumb.
"Look, kid-"
"I'm no child." Her voice is low and dark with rage, and it tears at her throat. This conversation isn't going to last much longer, and neither is the man in front of her.
"That's fair," he says, nodding in agreement. "Nobody is for long in the Wasteland. That's what makes you so remarkable; I didn't think you'd make it this far, especially when I had you waiting. You're a good big sister, the kind of sibling I like to think I would've been, given the chance."
"Mira, pendejo. I didn't come here to listen to your fucking sob story. I came here to find my brother. Where. Is. He?"
"He's not dead, if it helps. He's at home, in the Institute. A little… older than you might think, but safe. A good guy, too. But," he cuts her off as she opens her mouth, raising one hand. "It's like I told you, you'll never get to him."
"I'll find a way," she takes a single step back and tightens her grip on Godsend. "He's my little brother. I'll find him. Wasteland, Institute, wherever. I'll get him back."
I have to.
"Pity you're not going to make it out of this room, or I'd believe you," Kellogg says, his voice heavy and honest, of all things.
Angela takes another step back, reaching for a grenade as she does so. Valentine takes flank and turns off the safety of his revolver.
"Any last words, Angela?" It rings of goodbye, sounds almost sad, even as he reaches for the handle of his own gun.
"In a hundred years," she snarls, voice dripping venom, hand fiddling with a pulse grenade she doesn't bother to hide, "when I finally die, I hope I go to Hell so I can kill you all over again, you son of a bitch."
Kellogg chuckles, a dark thing, and it's the last thing that registers as human to her before she hears Nate screaming in her ears, Shaun's high-pitched wailing, the gunshot that destroyed her family, and she raises the grenade to her mouth, grabs the pin between her teeth, and throws it.
It arcs in slow motion, like she's taken a hit of jet she doesn't remember, and when it lands-
All hell breaks loose.
Valentine, behind her, pops a couple rounds into the nearest synth, and Angela hits the floor to avoid the one that had been aiming at her. The heat of it's lasers singe the top of her hat, and the aiming modules the thing's got running have that rifle pointed at her face again in less than a second. She lunges, bobbing and swerving out of the line of fire, moving just outside of the combat prediction programs they all seem to have. All it takes is an upward thrust under where the ribs would be and the synth's eyes, so familiar and yet so alien, flicker dark as it slumps. She whirls around, hair flying in a postapocalyptic fan, eyes wide as a bullet flies past her face. A near miss.
Kellogg.
"I got the bots," Nick yells, grunting as he slams the butt of his pistol into the head of a synth that's gotten a bit too close to comfort. "You go after the main event!"
And she does, whipping around with the speed of adrenaline and searching with the clarity she can only ever manage when her life is on the line. Rage burns in her stomach and she pushes it to her arms, her legs as she prowls through the room, looking for revenge.
"Almost feel sorry for ya'," Kellogg shouts, voice bouncing around the chaos of the command center. He's disappeared - a Stealth Boy? "You came all this way for nothing."
In her head, like a holotape on blast, her mother croons with the radio, voice accented, rich, and playful as she cooks. Grief washes over her vision, bringing everything into sharper focus.
Not for nothing. Never for nothing.
She stalks the room, ducking behind a desk to avoid the shrapnel of a lobbed grenade, courtesy of Kellogg. A blur, a small distortion, that's all she needs.
A synth sprints at her from the left, gun missing, monotone indecipherable in the din of the room; it manages a single cuff to her shoulder before she dances around it and slides her machete between the plates of it's back. The vibration of stuttering fans and chugging mechanics sends waves up Godsend's blade, coolant splashing her face as she tears the knife free.
"Show your face, coward!" The now-defunct synth crashes to a desk, skull smashing through a computer monitor, an ancient coffee mug meeting it's end on the gray linoleum.
Kellogg may have a Stealth Boy, but hell hath no fury like a woman on a fucking mission, and she sees the flash of the gun an instant before she feels the slug carve through the skin of her thigh.
She stumbles before the adrenaline kicks in full force, roaring in her ears and blocking out the pain. With a scream, visceral and painful, she charges at the distortion in the air, Godsend an extension of her arm, shattered glass crunching under the soles of her boots.
His Stealth Boy sputters out as she reaches him; she's all animal instinct, blunt, brute force against a tactical operative. He dodges her first fast, hard swings, face carefully neutral, responding to her attacks before she even knows she's making them. He doesn't respond in kind, even though he could - the butt of his pistol to the head would end her fast, as would a 10mm point-blank in the face. He just dodges, avoiding her vengeance with ease. He's studying her, she realizes; this dance, her blade, her anger, it's all a game to him. He's just seeing how long the little girl out of time can last before he puts her down.
So she changes tactics. Wide, enraged swings narrow down in scope, and when he bobs down and away from her blade, she catches him in the jaw with her other fist. Her hand screams, knuckles splitting against the bone of Kellogg's face. His head snaps to the side even as his free hand snatches her wrist, thick fingers vice-like and knuckles white. He twists her arm, just enough to hurt, to bend her at the knees but not enough to topple her, and they're nose to nose.
"You're wasting your time, kid," he taunts, breath hot and smelling like he couldn't tell a toothbrush from a deathclaw on her face. "And trust me when I tell ya', you don't have that much left."
Angela lurches back, raising Godsend in a downwards arc. Like before, he follows her movements and responds accordingly, dropping her empty hand and reaching for the handle of the descending blade. He's confident, cocky even, and doesn't count on the change to the angle of the swing at the last moment - she's not aiming for his head or his chest, but his wrist, the one in the air. Godsend catches Kellogg's palm near the hilt, and she drags it down, slicing his forearm to the bone from wrist to elbow and shoving him back into a filing cabinet.
He grunts, jaw working to hold back a scream, and his right arm falls limp at his side. Blood spurts from the cut, staining both their shirts and dripping down to the floor.
"Gotta tell ya, sweetheart, didn't see that one coming." His breath is ragged, shaky with pain.
"Shove that sweetheart up your ass," Angela growls. A knee to the groin on sweetheart drives Kellogg to his knees, doubled over and dry heaving in front of her.
He groans on the floor, and she savors this moment. This is how the pig that ended her family is going to die. On the floor, sat in his own blood like the coward he is.
She raises Godsend, distantly hoping it glints in the bad fluorescent lighting. In the space between that thought and the next, Kellogg sweeps her feet out from under her - he still has legs, idiot - and the back of her head makes acquaintance with the linoleum with a sharp crack. She gasps, vision going black and coming back in patches.
When she can make out more than vague shapes, Kellogg is standing over her, one hand supporting his weight on a bent knee, face a blurry grimace and pistol shakily aimed between her eyes. Finally, he takes her seriously.
She stares down the barrel of the gun of the man who killed her family, and she hates him. Her vision swirls, her body is screaming with pain, and she's going to die.
But not, she thinks, before him.
Angela lashes out, grabs a boot and yanks with all her strength. His shot goes sideways, into her shoulder, and he falls harder than she on his bad elbow, then onto his back when it gives out. Pain explodes through her left arm, hand spasming, fist clenching and unclenching in a desperate attempt to douse the fire that is her shoulder. Nick's worried shout, the crash of a metal body into something hard and unforgiving, the sound of a laser rifle going off, it all sounds miles away, through a tunnel. She curls into her wound, nursing it for a moment before the situation hits her like a super mutant.
She fumbles quickly, one-handed, for the combat knife strapped to her calf while Kellogg groans on the floor, keeping his injured arm close and digging through a pack on his belt with his other hand. His gun is somewhere to the side; out of reach, for either of them.
Then the dagger's in her hands, maple, solid, and engraved, a gift, and she shuffles forwards on her good hand and her knees to sit next to Kellogg, looking down at him.
His face is dirty, jaw swollen with the makings of a bruise, covered in dust from her grenade and the perma-muck of the Wasteland. He growls at her, she sees it - the baring of teeth, the weak upwards twitch of his lips, but all she hears is Nate, talking about the newspaper before school.
"I didn't come all this way for nothing," she says, and her voice is breaking, almost gone. She raises her arm, knife in the air. Kellogg scrambles back, all knees and a good elbow, only to come up short against the filing cabinet. His breath comes short and fast, panicked, and it hits her: he knows he's going to die. He knows.
She would meet his eyes, but her mother once said that eyes are the windows to the soul, and she's scared of his.
So she changes the fall of Hancock's knife instead, lets her injured shoulder scream as she raises her arm to plow it through Kellogg's stomach. Rage, white-hot and boiling, drives her strength, overriding her morality.
I came for Mom-
There's blood on her face and grasping fingers at her wrists, ragged nails biting into her skin. She twists the knife in a satisfying jerk, relishing in the gurgle and the cough of the body underneath her.
For Nate-
She raises the knife again, one-handed, brings it down just below the sternum. A weak, reactionary pull is all that comes now, a hand slapping ineffectively at her arm.
For Shaun-
Again and again her blade comes down, between ribs, into the muscle of the stomach, into the neck, long after the body underneath her stops resisting. It jerks with every blow, and her throat is raw - that's her screaming, she realizes from a distance - and her blood is liquid fire. There will be nothing left of the Institute's dog when she's done, this she swears.
For my family.
And she tears the knife down to his pelvis. It's not an easy motion, having to cut through muscle and viscera, but she wasn't just given any knife. Hancock would never leave her any knife; only the best of the best for his friends, he'd said, and so she manages despite the pain in her shoulder. The cut isn't neat by any definition; it rips and tears, and more comes out than she was betting on.
For my family.
Angela looks down at the man who ruined everything, dead and helpless beneath her, blood and organs spilling out in a vulgar display, and in that moment, she doesn't regret a fucking thing.
But then…
Why is she crying?
She barely notices when Hancock's gift falls from her fist, when Nick approaches, takes in the gory mess in front of her with an expression of horror; her vision narrows to the body propped up against the rusted cabinet, bald and scarred, blood and gore pooling underneath it.
The monster that kidnapped her baby brother, that shot her stepfather in the head and turned off her mother's life support while she watched. The demon of her nightmares, dead.
She did this.
Hot tears streak down her cheeks, carving paths through tacky blood and soot. Grief rises up, bile covering the ashes of her fury. It's sticky and green, nauseating. Her head throbs and her vision wavers, black spots dancing over Kellogg's corpse. There's a quiet about him in death she doubts he ever carried in life; his face has slumped into almost a peaceful expression. He could be sleeping, if it weren't for the essential organs on the floor.
She did this.
Nate would hate her. Her mother wouldn't even recognize her. And Shaun-
"Angela?" a voice to her right, low and concerned, all gravel and cigarettes. Nick.
She shakes her head, beads clinking with metal, a windchime in the tomb she created. She can't take her eyes off Kellogg's face. He's more of a human to her now than when she was killing him.
She did this.
"Kid, talk to me," Nick whispers, crouching next to her, a hesitant hand on her shoulder. She can't decide whether to lean into or away from it so she doubles over, arms wrapped around her stomach and hair falling to curtain her face, the ends trailing on the bloodied floor.
The bile rises in her throat and she shudders. Nick swears under his breath, scrambling to grab her hair as she retches next to Kellogg, kneeling in the blood she spilt.
If her family could see what she had wrought in their name, they'd be destroyed.
Later, when she's done, she leans back into Nick, head on his shoulder and eyes trained on a speck in the cheap tiled ceiling. He's tense, at first, he always is, but he relaxes, almost forcefully, and moves the both of them out of the pool of blood and bile to wrap his arms around her. The room smells like ozone and vomit, enough to make her stomach turn if there had been anything left to remove. Angela shudders again, sight mottled and head somewhere in the atmosphere.
They sit for a while, her unable to move and he holding her, skeletal hand rubbing her arm, whispering comfort into her hair. At one point, Nick reaches into a pocket in his coat, and she feels the sting of a stimpack in her shoulder, and again in her thigh.
"I killed him," she mumbles, voice thick.
"You did quite a number on him, too. Can't say he didn't deserve it, though."
She wants to stand, to gesture emphatically and rant, rave, but her body is free-falling and leaden at once, somehow, so she doesn't respond. Just lets her head fall into Nick's chest, cheek against his threadbare shirt, close enough to feel the vibration of his fans and the steady faux-heartbeat of coolant pumping. He squeezes her, gentle as always, and she doesn't so much as twitch in acknowledgement. The adrenaline's worn off, and the dull, blunt throbbing of her shoulder, head, and leg come to the forefront of her mind. The rest of her might not even be there, for all she knows. She's weightless, and so goddamn tired.
"Don't fall asleep on me here, doll," Nick says, hooking one arm under her legs and bracing the other against her shoulders. "You took a nice hit to the head. I wouldn't know myself, but I don't think stims do much for concussions. At least, not that quickly."
Then she's rising with him, carried bridal style out of the office, away from the wreckage of Kellogg's body, and the vertigo is almost enough to make her puke again. Or pass out, maybe. She's not sure which feeling is what right now and it's awful. She tucks her face into the collar of Nick's coat, taking shaky, deep breaths of the oil-and-tobacco scent of him. It's comforting, safe - two things she doesn't deserve, at this moment, but she's grateful for it.
He deposits her in a swivel chair in the next room over, and grabs her backpack from where she'd left it in the corner, next to the door to the control room. She stares at him, listless and weightless, watches as he pulls out a bottle of Med-X, another stimpack, some bandages in the form of a ripped up sheet, a bottle of clean water, and her spare change of clothes without really understanding the movement. Everything is shiny and surreal.
"Here," he says, shaking out two pills and handing her the water, "take these, sip this, and get decent if you can. The rags you're wearin' ain't going anywhere but a bonfire when we get outta here." He places an affectionate hand on her shoulder for a moment before turning back the way he came.
Going to inspect the mess she's made, no doubt.
Regret pools in her stomach, a swirling black singularity, and she collapses into herself, head resting on the console with all her things on it. She stares at her knees for what seems an eternity. Breathing is a conscious effort, and a difficult one at that. Slowly, the medicine in the stims gives her her faculties back. Her body is still in space, but her mind drifts closer to reality as medicine works it's magic.
She's lost all sense of time when she comes back to herself enough to move. A weak grip unscrews the water bottle, and she tosses the two pills in her mouth to swallow them in a single gulp. It clears her head somewhat, brings her back down from the clouds. She can feel the long-broken leather of the chair, the ground beneath her feet, the weight of her hair, her clothes where they're stuck to her skin.
Slowly, she undresses, wincing as she pulls the shirt away from her injured shoulder, and again when the waist of her ruined jeans passes the graze from Kellogg's bullet. The room is freezing in the aftermath of combat, and she redresses as fast as she can without inspiring vertigo in a heavy green plaid shirt and cargo pants. They'd have to stop at the BADTFL to pick up a new jacket if there are any left, but for the moment, this'll have to do.
She ignores the stimpack and the bandages; her wrists are still pockmarked from Kellogg's nails, but that's alright with her. Might as well save them for an actual emergency.
Well, a different emergency. Regardless, she shoves them back in her pack and slings it over her good shoulder. It's difficult to stand with the extra weight, much less move, but she does it anyways, even when her head rushes and black clouds her peripherals.
A deep breath. In and out. Simple. Go in, grab her blades, get some ammo off the synths, and get the hell out of this godforsaken fort.
In and out.
Simple.
There's a dragging sound from inside the control room; metal over linoleum. Nick grunts, most likely out of habit than anything, and something squeals, painful to her still overstimulated senses, and she stops shy of the door, unable to see completely inside. A synth, now inactive, sparks on the floor, frayed wires coming out of a puncture wound in it's skull - a courtesy of it's sentient twin.
She steps inside to find him shrugging his trenchcoat back on in the center of the room. It's strangely… something. A casual, nonchalant motion, and in any other situation she would've paid attention, committed the odd intimacy to memory. Instead, she shuffles towards him, trying to remain upright and on her own two feet. Even with the Med-X, she's so tired. Her body has some weight to it, at least, but that means everything hurts; a dull ache she's getting very frustrated with very fast.
"And so she emerges," he says, giving her a once-over with worried eyes. "Glad to see it."
"Yeah. Med-X and water helped." She winces at the effort and hopes he doesn't take offense at her tone. "What was all that noise?"
"Just rearranging some furniture. Thought I'd give it a bit more charm."
And so he had. A heavy wooden desk had been shoved against the back wall, Gen-2's and cabinets scattered helter-skelter to make a path. Well, more so than it had been; Kellogg had made sure to rearrange the desks and cabinets to suit his own ends with little thought to the room's feng shui, and Nick doesn't have much more of an eye.
What she does notice, a little belatedly, is the streak of red that starts in a pool, next to a rust-eaten filing cabinet, and runs across the floor to disappear under the desk against the wall.
He's hidden Kellogg's body. Under a desk. Whether it's for his benefit or hers she doesn't know, but relief comes fast and strong, dizzying. She braces herself against the door to keep her balance, and she almost misses the way Nick's eyebrows furrow, the lines well-worn by time and synthetic skin with no elastic bounce back.
"Thought you were a detective, not an interior designer," she tries for a grin as she says it, to bring them back to easy banter, but it's likely more of a grimace.
He shrugs, looking her up and down again. It's not intrusive or objectifying, but concerned - he knows body language, can read people like books even at the worst of times, and Angela is far too gone to put any energy into trying to hide from him.
"Now there's a line I've heard before," he mumbles, voice awkward, posture straight where it's normally hunched, hands stuffed in the refuge of his coat. He's not nearly as much of an open book as she, but they've been together for almost a year and a half at this point, taking odd jobs to earn the caps for the key to Kellogg's pad in Diamond City, searching for clues, and then waiting for the bastard to show. If Angela couldn't read him at least a little after the time they've spent together, she could hardly call herself his friend, much less his partner.
It's almost like he's… hiding something? But what? Unless-
He doesn't want to travel with her anymore? Doesn't want to put up with someone who'd eviscerate anybody that pissed her off? Didn't like her revenge? He's going to leave her here, she knows it, this is how Kellogg must have felt before she stabbed him, oh God.
Everything is hazy, oversaturated. Nick's voice is a distant rumble, he's probably saying something important, he's going to leave her here with her hidden demons, alone.
"...Doll?" Nick is closer than he was, human hand extended towards her, eyes blindingly yellow.
She snaps back to reality, slumping as her body feels gravity again. Her joints are air, her head in the clouds again despite the Med-X. She'd gotten lost in thought, in Nick's discomfort, lost what little sense of herself she had, and she's pitching forwards, her body a vague, pained blur that doesn't feel like it's hers.
The old burn scar on her hand throbs, the one part of her she can feel through the haze.
There's a shout - her name? - something crashing, warmth around her, and then everything-
-goes-
-black.