A/N:I was horribly sick with a cold when I wrote and uploaded these first two chapters, so I am in the process of revising and updating them. Please stick tight while I refresh my thoughts!
This is just the beginning of a few simple fics featuring the relationship between my savant lone wanderer, Thea, and Fawkes. I did some bare-surface searching for fic featuring Fawkes and usually found it lacking. As a student of Buddhism myself, I love a Fawkes with clear, consistent references and language based in Buddhist philosophy. I am also doing some small set-up for additional story, but it won't be anything major or conflicting with the game. I'm a very interpersonally-motivated person, so relationships will be a key focus in most writing. I also view the wasteland as a living place, full of life that most humans simply don't value, like small and megafauna and healing plant ecosystems slowly recovering the soil.
This is aiming to be an eventual romance, because I'm sappy and wish to enjoy my guilty pleasures. If something displeases you, please ignore it and enjoy what parts of this writing appeal to you.
I'll figure out how to signal good paragraph spacing eventually, bear with me for now, please!
Also, for Thea, an ellipsis in conversation means she has a short pause before continuing her statement in the same tone it began in. For Fawkes, an ellipsis has the same effect as "Is something… troubling you, my friend?" Where the word 'troubled' has a sudden sharper, almost strained sound, like he's somewhere between saying it and shouting it. He has a very emotional voice. I also supplement my imagining of Fawkes' voice by referencing Virgil's voice acting in Fallout 4.
…
Thea found it hard not to steal glances at him. He was huge and green, and staring at the sky with all the wonder of somebody that had never seen it before. Despite his upturned face, his slow steps kept steady in the stone and roughage. They were slowly picking their way south of Raven Rock, Thea trying to go easy on a bit of a sprain and a banged elbow.
"We must be mindful of the present moment." Fawkes had been otherwise quiet since leaving the burning wreckage of the base, and his sudden comment startled her.
"What does that mean, exactly?" She blew some stray blonde hair out of her eyes and squared up to look at him. Look up at him, rather. They were maybe six feet apart on the old asphalt and he looked down at her; she up at him. She fiddled with her power helmet where it was strapped to her hip.
His face wasn't unkind, merely fierce and impactful in its ridges and coloring. It didn't help that his lips were pulled back over his huge, flat, cutting teeth. She thought it was mostly due to his squinting grimace against the setting sun. "The present moment is all that exists. The past is a memory, the future a phantasm. There is nowhere to live but the present moment." He spoke slowly, measured. He looked around the surrounding ridges, then back at her.
She nodded, a simple small answer. Maybe someday she'd have more of an answer to give. She slowly started the entourage moving again. After a few breaths and feet of walking, she said softly, "It's just that I've never heard anybody say something like that, before. It almost seems strange." She stepped over an old guard rail. "Life is almost too big to look at, you know, with everything going on and all of the people in it, for there to only be… the present moment."
He was quiet as they scaled a small hill. The huge satellite disks rose over the sun-touched hills to the south, casting a huge shadow over their path from the golden sunset in the west.
"You are right, that it seems strange. I have only been free for a few days and have yet to see much mindfulness."
"Though it must be hard, being meta human. Has anybody talked to you yet, besides me?"
"No."
They walked in quiet for a while. Thea picked off a distant protectron with a loud Ping from the gauss rifle, but it was blessedly quiet, otherwise. She found it almost refreshing to get lost in the little bits of nature in the wastes; a scorpion or spider scuttling under a kicked stone, or the distant sound of some bird. Occasionally she would admire the glow of a leggy weed against the sunlight and remark to herself that it was growing straight through concrete. Visiting Oasis, a verdant refuge in the north, had only deepened her affection and attentiveness for the hardiness of wasteland life. Her favorite books in the vault had illustrations of forests, ponds, steppes, meadows, deserts, mountains, and the fauna and flora that populated them long ago. She loved to find the remnants of those beings and the silent promise they kept toward Life.
She looked up quickly to catch Fawkes sneaking glances at her, just as she had been looking at him! She smiled. "I'm sorry, by the way. I hope I didn't hurt your feelings. When I had just left my vault, nobody wanted to talk to me, either. I still had it easier than you, but it was very very lonely. I can only imagine how it must feel for this to be your first time outside of that isolation cell." They crested a hill that revealed some sheltering scrap at the base of the satellite dishes. "I'm glad you're out here and not trapped in there."
His grimace against the sunlight became a smile.
They made up a rudimentary camp, partly sheltered in the empty foyer of the satellite station and partly out under the stars. Fawkes mostly kept out of the way while his new companion did the work exactly as she liked it. Thea carefully tucked her power armor inside the door, ready at a moment's notice, and dressed in simple thick wool fatigues for the evening. Fawkes watched her idly as she dabbed the inside of the metal armor with a towel and fed the padded liners into a separate pot of water to wash. To his eye, she had a certain way of putting up camp very efficiently—here goes the fire pit, there the bedding, as soon as the coals are hot she lays at least three pitchers or pans of water on to boil clean, washes everything soiled by the several days of being kidnapped, touches up any wounds and scrapes with a small hand mirror and some salve… then rinses and drains stored grain with the hot water. He was momentarily lost in thought at the momentum of this evening ritual and comparing it to his own; for days his every morning and night was spent watching the horizon for signs of where she might be.
Thea tapped Fawkes on the shoulder, drawing him out of his thinking, "Hey, could you watch this boiling pot for me? It's got wild rice in it. I saw a scavenger in that shack over there and I want to see what she has. I'll only be a moment."
Fawkes lifted the lid to peek into it and laughed "If the Buddha himself appeared above the pot, I would beat him away from it!"
Thea looked askance at him, but figured it best to go barter before the sun was down and the scavenger in bed.
She took the opportunity to overthink the way she was trying to talk to him as she hiked down the hill and back up in the moonlight. 'He's really smart, should I be speaking more carefully? Do I just sound like a dumb kid? Does he feel like a dumb kid being outside for the first time? I felt like a dumb kid for my first whole month, hell, I still do! If I'm too formal, will that be too harsh, and if I'm too informal, will that be like telling him I think we're both dumb kids? Does he have less context for the outside world than I did?'
Fawkes watched one of his first ten sunsets there on the hillside, alone with a pot of fragrant rice. The stars arose as little pinpricks, first a few of the brightest in the dusk, then revealing a sea of smaller lights as the sun dipped fully below the horizon. He laid back in the dirt, one arm behind his head as a pillow, and gazed up at the stunning melange of shapes. His taut face slackened into an easy smile; the worries of the day as distant as the disappearing light. "There's Orion… Ursa Major… and Polaris…" Glad, gravelly, whispers fell from his mouth, too reverent to speak too loudly, as he followed one edge of the sky to another, "Vega, within Lyra…"
"Don't forget Arcturus, that orange one over there."Thea chimed from the dark. Fawkes turned to look for her and found the red of firelight bright on her boots, the bag held carefully in her hands, and on her chin as she looked up into the stars.
"In Bootes, to the west?"His voice cracked upward in volume in the question, and her face dropped to look at him. He could see the outline of her features in the dark, though she could only see the shadows of his outline against the fire.
"Yea!" She grinned wide. Her voice was excited, but hushed, like she was sharing a secret, "And Orion, and those big clusters of stars over there—those are the Plea-deeds— rise in the evening in September when the great bear is almost above Polaris. It's supposed to have something to do with farming." She settled on her knees near the fire and selected a new pot for washing greens and veggies. She'd carefully picked the best roots and dried shoots from the scavenger's pickings
"They are the Pleiades, my friend. The rising of these stars indicates that winter will soon arise, and that now is the time to plough-under the fields and let them rest. Though that time was closer to our month of October, I am amused and surprised that you know of Hesiod's testimony to astronomy." He'd returned to his usual, loud, shifting speaking voice out of excitement—talking was new and almost laborious compared to reading off elocution practice tapes.
Thea laughed at being corrected,"Well, I don't know too much about Hesiod. I think I read more Homer." She dipped handfuls of greens into the pot and scrubbed them with her nails—dipped, drained, shook them out, "There was a holotape game I used to play with Amata, our teacher gave it to us to borrow but we just never brought it back. The game part was about piloting a space ship from one star to another to gain points… but I would mostly just replay it to read the vignettes on mythology and history for each of the major constellations and the brightest stars." She busied herself with tending the rice and breaking the new-bought veggies into chunks. "When I got older, I went pilfering through my Dad's old stuff and found a lot of star charts. Some of them were very old, and some of them were new." Her voice shook slightly, and her face was tense. "Like, I think he drew them or something while he was out here in the wastelands. He took them back when he caught me with them, but I wish I'd kept them." The veggies dropped into the rice pot with a heavy sigh."There were also these beautiful paintings and an encyclopedia of classical mythology on the school terminal. I think Mr. Brotch… he was the school teacher… had bigger plans for us that the overseer never allowed to come to fruition." She wiped the damp from her hands on her pants and selected a spot near Fawkes to fold her legs.
The meta human looked curiously at her. She was maybe 5'6", 160 pounds of muscle on a bottom-heavy frame. He'd never actually seen her outside of her power armor before tonight, and he was surprised at what fury and strength she possessed for being so small. Her favorite weapons were a shishkabab and a gauss rifle, and she carried a whole pouch of hand grenades but neglected to use them. He knew she was intelligent, even among vault-dwelling humans, but this revelation of love for mythology mystified him. He could feel the primal part of himself, over-excited and chomping at the bit like a mutant hound, to be expressive of his joy to finally discuss classical western mythology and astronomy with another person. The controlled parts of his mind hesitated, pulled back on the reins, and demanded non-reaction.
She'd been beeping little buttons and twisting knobs on her pip-boy while his internal conflict had set in, oblivious or unbothered by his staring. She grinned as she finally found what she was looking for and turned the little glowing screen toward Fawkes. "Here, see this? It's a really really old painting of Demeter and Persephone. I love how soft everything looks, and the pomegranate trees that foreshadow the myth of Persephone's descent into the underworld."
His eyes lit on the shadow of weariness on Demeter's brow, the youthful beauty but determined look of Persephone, the distant verdant landscape of that mythological world. A muted "Oh…" was all that he could manage as his hands mindlessly went to grip the screen and bring the painting closer—still attached to Thea's arm.
"Wah?" Thea startled a little bit and Fawkes released her arm.
"Oh, no, sorry, I just got carried away looking at it. I did not mean to touch you, friend." He was more upset than she was.
"No worries, Fawkes. I've gotten to stare at this painting for hours and hours. Here," She unsnapped a few clasps and removed the padded wrist computer. She put it into his huge hand with both of hers, "Now you enjoy it. I gotta bandage this arm, anywho, and it's in the way. Just make sure to bring that back to me before either of us sleep, okay?" She showed him the knob for browsing the folder of paintings, and beamed up at him.
She twisted away to grab a medical bag and left him breathless and gripping a tiny little computer full of knowledge. He didn't want to accept it, because he'd been rude and thoughtless enough to touch her. He didn't want to bother her by handing it back without enjoying the paintings she had offered, either… and he really really really wanted to see these beautiful pieces he'd never seen before. This was a very new way to be worried and it was making him nauseous. He took a few deep breaths and ran through a brief mindfulness routine to ease the upset, primal parts of himself.
'Reactiveness is caused by Suffering, and Reactiveness only causes more Suffering.' Fawkes inhaled this thought, and his heart rate began to lower. 'There is nothing but the present moment; there is no past and no future. Regret is a symptom of suffering due to being in the past; Fear or Worry is a symptom of suffering due to being in the future.' He exhaled these thoughts, and the primal nature in him was soothed. 'In all things, the calm heart must prevail…'
Thea deftly bandaged up her elbow while Fawkes thumbed clumsily through the paintings. His huge fingers rolled the dial further than intended, two clicks forward then several back. There was only one of them out of the collection of twelve that he'd ever seen before, and each was more lovely than the last. The final painting in the collection struck him. 'Truth climbing out of the well.' The figure of an enraged, nude woman emerging from a half-covered well. Her snarl and her flail stood out to him, juxtaposed with her soft form and the floral background. His head tilted to one side and he squinted, committing the vivid pink skin against grey cobblestone and the emotional power of Truth's expression to memory. He couldn't help but associate the piece with his new companion. She climbed out of a well, she beat unjust things with swords, she was dedicated to truth and kindness but had a vicious vengeance to unleash on any fool that dared defy her values. He grinned at his comparison of the vault to a well, then became somber as he considered the implications of the painting in his own life. Fawkes furrowed his brow and considered the Path he had chosen—perhaps he was not too dissimilar, or was he? Usually he had a few years or a decade to consider these things to himself in private.
Thea watched his face from the corner of her eye as she routinely moved through her tasks. She had oriented herself across the fire from him specifically so she could see his expressions. Bandaging and cooking had become muscle memory. She didn't even have to think about how long the cram should brown on the potlid over the coals—it had become routine to lean forward, flip, lean back and take a few deep breaths of the fatty scent, lean forward, scrape it off. She smiled idly as she prepared a second sizzling plate and heaped a good serving of rice next to the meat. It had felt like forever since she'd cooked for Charon—and Star Paladin Cross always preferred Brotherhood field rations to foraging. She hummed through the last preparations and carefully turned, rose onto her feet, and carried the dish across the fire to her companion.
"Now, I know you don't need to eat, but I figured this would be a nice change of pace… something different just because you can." She traded him a plate for the pip-boy and folded her legs neatly next to him on the ground. Her eyes flicked from his single hand holding the plate up to his face, watching how he regarded it. She realized she'd forgotten a spoon and quickly grabbed one from the fire ring and dropped it into his rice. "Whoops, forgot something important."
Fawkes slowly took the handle of the spoon in his hand like one would grip a steel pipe, and again furrowed his brow. The focus in his face was not so much about how to eat so much as the moral implications of eating. Thea noticed his drop in expression and mistook it for embarrassment or befuddlement, and took a few exaggerated bites of her own dish without looking directly at him. Her kindness cracked his serious facade and he smiled into a spoonful of over-cooked rice and crisp root. 'There is nothing but the present moment… worry about the beast will summon it.' He banished the mental image of his violent brethren stirring vats of dismembered body parts or crushing bones for marrow and focused entirely on the taste and sight of this new event. The bottom of the plate was warm on his palm, and the handle of the spoon cold. There was a slight breeze and dampness in the air that signaled a coming rain shower. The wild rice was seasoned with green herbs of a mild flavor, the cram tasted… exactly like the strange orange color it was.
The cook looked back over at him and delighted in his slight smile and focused gaze. She laughed a little bit to herself in victory and took his own careful tasting, scenting, and looking at the dish as a cue to do so herself. "Did I really do that good, or is this just your first meal in two hundred years?"
His face went blank in though before he nodded, "Both, actually." He thoughtfully chewed, tasted, and swallowed another bite while Thea beamed at him. "Yes, I am pleased that this is, itself, a good and varied dish, and that this is a good first meal. I have… apprehensions about eating. I am certain you have noticed a certain propensity for cannibalism among my kind, have you not?"
Thea's eyes widened and her brows knit up in concern. She nodded silently.
"I have refused offers of such meals while trapped in my isolation cell. At first, I believe they meant to seduce with their vile… basal indulgences. When I rejected them, year after year, they began using it as another form of torture. The cruelest among my brethren would bring in and display live catches to me… then the results of their butchery." Fawkes grew quieter and quicker as he spoke, hands frozen holding the plate and spoon.
Thea stared at him, big eyed, too serious to swallow what she had in her carefully lifted her hand from the handle of her spoon and laid her palm flat against his arm.
He looked over her, face drawn long with shadows, and balked at her serious and sad expression. "Ah! I apologize, my friend. I do not mean to crush you with such dreadful topics. Please, allow us to digress somewhere more pleasant for the both of us, or to enjoy comfortable silence." He slipped another spoonful of dinner into his mouth as a peace-making gesture.
Thea slowly swallowed her held bite and took a deep breath. "I'm really sorry that they did that to you… and I thought Butch was mean putting hair in my food." She scraped the last of her dish into her mouth quickly and set the plate in the wash bucket. Swallowing hastily, "So, what was that you said about a Buddha in the pot, earlier? It just… seems like a weirdly positive thing to say… and just kinda weird." Fawkes stopped mid-bite and leaned back with a short, barking laugh.
"'Jinsei Ryori no Hon!' and 'Tenzo Kyokun!'" He couldn't contain his excitement and rocked back and forward at his seat. Thea skipped away at the sudden movement to wash the dishes a few feet further away. She was quickly done and then seated across from him. "They are two texts on the arts of cooking in zen monasteries, the first section written by Master Dogen more than a thousand years ago. The second section, 'Jinsei Ryori no Hon', or 'How to Cook Your Life', was written by a zen Roshi, or teacher, in the 1900s, with an English translated version briefly available in the 1970s. That section expounded on applying Dogen's advice for cooking to the rest of life practice." He took a few breaths and settled himself. "Though that does not answer your question, and I apologize. There is a story of a zen cook in a monastery having a vision of a specific saint hovering over his rice pot, and he beats the vision away and says 'Even if Sakyamuni Buddha appeared above my pot, I would beat him, too!' Part of the cook's duty is to prevent anyone from opening the pot and prolonging the cook time of the rice." He gestured with his spoon for the final sentence and finished off his meal. He took the dish over to the same basin Thea had just been in, and mirrored what he'd seen her do as closely as possible. It wasn't theoretically difficult to wash a dish, merely new in a practical sense.
Thea nodded her encouragement to his back, humming curious approval. It had mostly gone over her head, but she was hopeful she'd get to see it for herself someday. She grabbed a bundle of towels and fabric and settled close to Fawkes as he drained his clean dishware and knelt by the fire. She threaded a needle and began patching towels together. "How did you get access to such a text? There wasn't much of anything that old in 101's mainframe, except western classics."
"In the first fifty years of my entrapment, I read through the entirety of the vault mainframe records and taught myself more and more complex concepts in spelling, linguistics, genetics, mathematics, physics, biology… the list is long. There was a large section of the mainframe devoted to training a second and third generation of scientists to replace the first generation team that entered the vault. After I finished that section to my liking, I looked back at the philosophy sections and noticed that new files had been appearing. With the first three, there was a note attached to the file, 'With love, from Uncle. Please enjoy these if you have any capacity to.'" Fawkes realized his voice was becoming louder and louder as he spoke. He coughed a short "Excuse me," and resettled himself. Thea waited patiently, watching him closely as she worked with her hands. Her expression was somewhere between amused and mystified.
"I couldn't find a way to return a message to the source of these new files, so at some point this 'Uncle' figure stopped attaching notes. He was somehow uploading new files to the vault 87 mainframe!" Fawkes made a wide incredulous gesture and knocked a pitcher of water, hissing and spitting, into the coals. Thea startled, but remained kneeling. He barked in surprise and grabbed it by the handle and put it on a further rock, taking a moment to kiss his heated fingers before continuing.
After a few breaths, he began was more and more difficult to contain his excitement in the retelling—his volume varied widely between a whisper and a shout, some of his sentences were punctuated with an extra 'Ha!' or a wide flourish of his arms. His face had a far wider range of expression than Thea would have guessed! Luckily, with this story, most of it was smiles or surprised gawks. "I felt certain that this must have been an inside job from another intelligent meta human in the vault. What stranger would pay me such a kindness, or even know that I was here to receive them? I adored each volume, confused and encouraged by these words of wisdom. It filled out my view of a wider world than the mere west, especially that there was more out there than what Vault Tec felt appropriate to teach a new generation of scientists and unwitting lab subjects. For some of these texts, like the Vedas, Uncle included tapes on learning the language of the text itself. It took me five years to learn sanskrit, nine to practice Japanese enough to read 'Tenzo Kyokun', and then another few years to realize that antiquated and new Japanese were very different languages!"
Fawkes was standing over the fire as he expounded on the process of learning new languages. He made vivid gestures, fist in hand or palms over his heart, scratching his head in confusion…. Thea loved this. She was idly hemming a huge blanket for her new friend and became more and more whipped up into his excitement as he spoke. She hopped up to mirror his own excitement and asked, incredulous, "You can speak Japanese?!"
Fawkes dropped his arms and was momentarily bewildered. He shrunk under the weight of the question. "Well, no. While I am very skilled in reading and writing, I did not dare breathe a word of anything I was doing while in isolation. If any of my less intelligent brethren had heard of my hard work, I would have lost the terminal far sooner than I did."
Realizing she had deflated him, Thea laid a reassuring hand on his upper arm. "Well, hey, that's still more knowledge of languages than anybody up here. I won't complain if you practice or speak anything you know." She made a point to smile as he looked down at her. "I'm sorry for the circumstances you lived in, and I'm very glad you are free from them and get to keep all this knowledge of what is important to you. You wouldn't have this present moment if you didn't have that past."
Fawkes sat back down and Thea draped his new blanket over him. He furrowed his brow and looked up at her. She was smiling, so he smiled back. "Thank you, my friend. It is… all too easy for me to get lost in emotions and reactiveness. It is my greatest goal and greatest effort to stay on The Path despite any extremes of …feeling I might experience. That is why zen texts, and to a lesser extent all Buddhist texts, are of great value and guidance to me." He looked into the coals at the base of the fire. "In all things, my calm heart must prevail. I cannot be lost to baser desires, like rage or fear or worry."
Thea gave a challenging giggle, "You n' me both, buddy." She gave an understanding smile and touched his shoulder again as a sign of understanding. "Well, thank you, too. It's been a lonely summer… for my first summer ever, really. I don't mean to overshare. I just don't get to talk very often, especially not with somebody that understands where I'm coming from without having to explain a billion things for it to make sense." She felt the texture of his thick skin with her palm and fingers as she spoke, especially his radiant body heat. "I think you're doin' great. But it's also time for bed if we're going to get through that next valley tomorrow. It's a long way to the citadel. Would you like to take first or second watch?"
Fawkes exhaled hard through his nose. "I will watch the entire night, my friend. Sleep is not necessary for a meta human like myself, but is very necessary for you." He gestured to her bedroll in the open doorway of the satellite station. He casually mirrored her soft hand on his shoulder by laying his palm over her shoulder blade and turning her toward bed. "Please, go and rest until you naturally awaken. I will remain here with the remains of the fire and this… lovely accommodation you have just made for me." He pulled the blanket a little closer around his neck and shifted his seat to be on her makeshift Fawkes-sized bedroll. It was really just a tarp with a single layer of soft mid-weight wool on top, with some extra pants balled up as a pillow, but it was more than he'd had before and it was the thought that mattered.
Thea squinted at him to determine whether he was genuine or just being nice. Deciding he really didn't need sleep if he said so, she smiled and tucked the pip-boy into his lap as she turned for her bedroll. "See you in the morning, make loud noises if anything fishy is going on out here!"
Fawkes got up to return her wrist computer, but her body language and quick retreat made it clear she wanted him to have it. He took a deep breath and sat back down, smiling first up at the stars then down at the gift of new friendship in his hand.