DISCLAIMER: I am not advocating recreational drug use. "Happy" though this fic may seem, it's actually a smaller part of a much more extensive fic that shows just how devastating drug use and drug addictions can be. Just to make this clear: I am not advocating recreational drug use, nor is this fic glorifying or romanticizing drugs.
He looks from Jericho to the inhaler and back again a few times until he notices that the man's grin is now a scowl and his half-lidded eyes are now open and glaring. Jericho shifts away from him, reaches ever so slightly for the inhaler, but before the former raider can touch it he hurriedly puts the wiped-clean end to his mouth. He hesitates for half a second before he presses the button on the inhaler and takes a breath.
As it turns out, he can only breathe in a quarter of the container before the horrible, bitter chemical taste hits his tongue. It sticks to his throat and leaves him hacking and sputtering, his body instinctually trying to get it out of his lungs and mouth. He's coughing so hard that he can't catch his breath and a bolt of white-hot panic runs through him that only makes him cough harder.
"Jesus, you are new," Jericho laughs from somewhere to his right. He can't tell where anything is through his watering eyes. "Stop fighting so much and just wait. It'll come."
He's torn between wanting to tell him off for asking him to control an involuntary reaction and asking him what he means by "it'll come," but is derailed by the world shifting suddenly before he's shot out of the end of a gun barrel.
"Oh," he gasps. His eyes go wide and when he sucks in two lungfuls of stale Megaton air he feels like he's flying, like the thousand pound weights on his chest and head suddenly disappeared and he can breathe, really and truly breathe, for the first time since he set foot in this godforsaken world. Every other sensation is wiped out by the wave of jittery focus that washes over him and makes him believe that everything's fine and that he's got everything under control. He's happy and energized and he feels so good that he might be crying a little and he's pretty sure that this is probably the best feeling in the world. "Oh."
"Yeah," Jericho says, a grin cracking through the grime on his face as he leans a little closer. "Feels good, huh?"
"Yeah, it does," he replies. The world's accelerated to a hundred miles an hour and he can hardly stand to just sit there. Every nerve in his body is screaming to go, to get started on finding his father and fixing everything, but he can't bring herself to do more than turn the half-empty inhaler around and around in his fidgety hands and look at the rest of the reddish-orange gas still inside.
"Makes you feel like you can go and do anything?"
"Yeah."
"Heh, I remember that. That first high, when you feel like king of the fucking world. That's good, kid. Remember that. That's as good as it's going to get."
He wants to ask what he means that this is as good as it gets, because this is so much better than anything's ever been before, but he doesn't get a chance before Jericho nudges the inhaler back towards his mouth and he remembers that he only took a quarter of the stuff. It can only go up, right? It'll get better from here. He can feel it in his bones: It can only get better from here. Who knows what he'll be able to do with the rest of it?
So he quickly brings the inhaler back up to his mouth and inhales nearly twice the amount he did before, and it's still just as bad and choking as the first hit but he knows what to do now. Stop fighting so much and just wait, it'll come. And come it does—this time, he's not shot out of a gun, exactly, but he's pushed higher up into the sky, and that book he read about the atmosphere when he was twelve must've been wrong, because if anything it's even easier to breathe when he's just a few feet from space. Everything still feels like it's going a little too fast, like it did when Jonas picked him up that one time and ran all the way down the stairs towards the reactor room and he felt his stomach drop to floor, but he hardly even notices that. All he can see is how great everything's going to be and how he can work this whole thing out and all the little scratches and dirty spots on the inhaler that's spinning, spinning, spinning in his fingers.
A/N: I'm really interested in drug addiction and its effects in Fallout's world, mostly because who could blame the people in the Wasteland if they just want to get away from it all? Fallout's world, romanticized though it may be from time to time, is hell. People shooting at you, everyone more or less out for themselves, very twisted if not non-existent senses of morality and ethics in a lot of the people you come across...doesn't make for peaceful living.
It's that aspect of the raider groups that interests me the most. (I'm of the mind that they're made up of a lot more desperate chem addicts than portrayed in-game.) The things people do to get their next fix, the stress that drives people to chems in the first place, how lost and messed up and turned around you can get in a world where most people are looking for a way out no matter how bad that way may be-I find these concepts all very interesting. Especially when you think of what a greenhorn the LW can be. A kid who just lost their dad and got their world turned upside down and is in a completely new universe full of real, honest-to-god dangers to their life when they were basically the walking definition of sheltered not a whole day before they stumbled into Megaton? It'd be more of a surprise if they didn't experiment with chems as an escape than if they did.
As a side note, if you're interested in the different drugs in the Fallout world and their real life counterparts, I compiled a bunch of information about both in a somewhat-handy guide. (Partly in preparation for this fic, which is actually part of a longer story I want to do that deals with the LW and chems.) It's posted at my LiveJournal (kojum). Just look for the post titled "High Times in the Capital/Mojave Wasteland." Should be on the first page.