Though the days were hot and heavy in the Nevada desert, and the wind was often biting and bitter, the weeks that passed in that little shack were some of the happiest in Nick's life.

He had spent every single day just...talking about books with Darren. Darren would sit in one of the few chairs the shack had, or lie on the bed as Nick would go into as much detail as he could, trying to remember everything he could about his favorite stories. Nick would spin ornate worlds as if from thin air, trying to remember dialogue as firmly as he possibly could, wanting above all else to do justice to the books he so loved.

He'd spoken especially of the Silver Chair, and of the speech that the "mudman" character had given, the idea that the "real" world the Queen of the Underworld claimed was the only kingdom was a very poor one, far poorer than the "fake" one she decried, that the "fake" world was more meaningful, more truthful, more worth believing in.

Darren seemed to take that incredibly to heart, Nick had noticed that because of what he kept saying every time Nick made a comment on one of the books Darren had brought, and Darren had brought many. MANY. And quite a few of them were all about the government of the United States. Nick couldn't believe some of the things he was reading about the Fallout Universe.

"This...is...INSANE!" Nick had insisted at long last as he pointed down at a passage in "Vault-Tec's Hidden Truths", a book that Nick had assumed was conspiracy theory bullcrap. After all, it talked about the idea of an "Illuminati" esque society that had secretly built all the Vaults, that they were the ones who commissioned the darn things and they'd made them as social experiments and allowed funding to be gotten FOR the vaults right from Congress itself! Surely, that couldn't have been true!

But then Nick had cross-referenced it with a book that had gone into detail on the presidents long past, and he'd found a disturbing revelation. President Perkins had absolutely refused to sign such a legislation, saying that it "unfairly balances the budget on the backs of our poorest and most hardest hit citizenry". This same President Perkins had been arrested for jaywalking, leading to a period when his vice president, Dawlish, had temporarily been in charge and had passed the legislation!

And Dawlish, Nick noticed, had been in that "Hidden Truths" book, listened in a photo as being on the Vault-Tec Board of Trustees. This was clearly a conflict of interest.

"And it totally violates the Fourth Amendment, doesn't it?!" Nick had asked Darren as they'd sat together at the table, eating roasted giant mutant mole rat, Nick waving a leg slightly up in the air, one hand having the book open, righteous indignation a-blazing in his hazel/green eyes. "I mean...spying on people in secret like this and using the vaults as social experiments clearly violates the spirit of the Fourth Amendment! How could Congress pass this? And this...this "Enclave" actually tried to...tried to destroy everyone on the Surface?! Everyone who wasn't Enclave?"

"Oh yeah, it was a huge thing a while back." Darren admitted, chewing noisily on his extra crunchy mole rat meat, Nick noticing that Darren did not quiiiiite look you in the eye at first. He sometimes had to almost remind himself, occasionally a look would flitter over his face as if he realized "Oh woops, I'm not looking at you right!". "The Enclave evidently thought any person that wasn't in a Vault like they'd been was a mutant. Even if the most you had was an extra toe or just a slightly higher degree of radiation, you were "mutant scum", no better than a ghoul or super mutant freak."

Darren cringed. "I mean, I can GET why people don't like ghouls, they're damn nasty. Look like all the skin rotted off. Creeps me out just bein' around them. You can say whatcha like, but I think they're gross, and they ALL smell awful, just no helpin'. Comes from being so damn irradiated! But just assumin' every single mainland human's the same as them is…"

"As racist as thinking all black people are thugs?" Nick asked. He IMMEDIATELY regretted it, and he found himself dropping the mole rat meat and actually slapping himself in the face. "Sorry! Sorry, I am SO sorry, I-I didn't mean…" He began to say, Darren shaking his head.

"No." The African American young man remarked. "I'm right with you on that. It was damn bigoted, pure and simple. I don't mind you trying to make that point."

"I just...I wasn't thinking." Nick murmured nervously, going beet red in the face. He considered himself a good liberal, but he had a bad tendency to be a bit blind when it came to "responding properly". It came with the territory when you were on the "Autism Spectrum", having been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, Nick had for a long time not really shown good interaction with people, he'd say and do the wrong things, act out in strange ways. He still had issues, people told him he had a bad tendency of doing stuff like drinking out of the side of his mouth, or obsessing too much over Monty Python or-

He looked up. Darren wasn't looking him in the eye. He wondered if maybe…perhaps. Perhaps he too was on the Spectrum. Darren sighed a bit and kept looking at the floor a little. "I had been hoping to find a bit more...hopeful in the books about Congress and the Presidents, but I was amazed at how incredibly dumb and in Vault-Tec and the Enclave's pocket they seem to be. Over half the laws they passed seemed blatantly unconstitutional. How the big library the books CAME from came to be was started from unconstitutional bullshit!" Darren said with a dark glower. "They started burning books!"

Nick looked disgusted. The faintly overly crunchy, almost sunflower-esque tasting meat of the mole rat forgotten, he rose up. "No way! That CAN'T be! That…" He picked up the book on Congress and began reading through it as Darren's tone got bitter and his expression foul.

"Go to the part about them 'fighting sedition'." He grumbled. "At the start of the war against China."

Nick reached it, and his eyes turned into wide saucers, mouth slightly agape. "They can't do this!" He yelled out. "The government demanding books like that be burnt is a blatant violation of the FIRST FUCKING AMENDMENT!" He snarled.

Darren stared. The kid before him had sung Everly Brothers at night under the stars to pass the time. He'd said stuff like "Dang" and "Frack". He looked as white-bread as it GOT, and he had been disgusted with himself for threatening a Deathclaw, a murderous killing machine. Yet hearing about the government demanding books be burnt for seditious material was so unbelievably horrific and foul to him, it had driven him to swear. And not just that, but the fuckin' f bomb at that.

"This is WRONG, damn it!" Nick snarled. "I can't believe-of-of all the-I...I!" He slammed the book shut and flopped onto the bed, now furiously scrunging his fingers through his hair. "This is so unfair! Why the Hell did people just accept this!?"

"I don't know why. But its the worst thing I've read so far about the old world." Darren said with a deep sigh. "I had such high expectations for it, but...almost everything I'd read keeps dragging me down."

Nick suddenly shuddered. Darren had that...that tone. Nick had not originally been good with reading tone, but years and years of social experience being hammered into him by every extreme circumstance imaginable had taught him to recognize when someone was on the verge of doing something awful. Darren's defeated, incredibly depressed tone always made Nick wonder if, had Nick not found him sooner...Darren would have ended up dead like the previous shack owner, a pistol in one hand and a bullet in the brain.

"Hey." Nick said quickly, rising up. "Hey, how about I sing another Everly Brothers song?" Nick offered quickly. Darren seemed to really like the old-time songs that Nick's dad had had on a huge stack of CDs way back in the day. In fact, he'd get sung to sleep on the Everly Brothers when he was very little, he knew their discography even better than Elvis, though the BEATLES came close.

"Um...how about something new?" Darren mumbled. He seemed to be losing himself in the mood, that awful, depressed mood and Nick cleared his throat, then looked over at the watch on his wrist. It was a special little watch, it played music! Tons of music, on top of telling the time. He couldn't get enough of it. He fiddled with it for a little while before finding a good one, turning it on.

"You guys get much Beatles over here?" Nick asked eagerly. He LOVED this one. He'd get to use Darren's harmonica for this one!

"Who?"

"The Beatles, man! They were bigger than Jesus!" Nick insisted, but then the watch, instead of playing "I Should Have Known Better", began playing a DIFFERENT Beatles song, one that made Nick whip his head in its direction, giving it a furious, angry look. He had always suspected the thing had a mind of its own, and a nasty sense of humor…

"Yesterday...all my troubles seemed so faaar away! Now it looks as though they're heeeere to stay, oh IIII believe...in yesterdaaaay!"

"You asshole!" Nick snapped at the watch, angrily giving it a BITE in irritation before fiddling with the controls, switching it to something more peaceful. "Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup! They slither while they pass, they slip away, across the univeeeeerse!" Nick sang along, Darren slowly getting into the bed, and gently lying down on top of the sheets, closing his eyes, his chest slowly rising and falling, letting himself be lost in the song.

Nick kept gently singing, Darren's chest rising and falling more slowly, more peacefully until, at last, the song came to an end, and Nick waited, a silence stretching out, long and full, until, at last…

"It's a good song." Darren said, as he reached down into the bookbag he'd brought, and pulling out another book, this time one that said "Your Employees and You", with a stupidly cheery "Vault Boy" on the front. Clearly some kind of Vault-Tec employers manual, Nick noticing Darren had an UNMARKED book in the bag-

No, not fully unmarked. There were some scratches that Nick faintly recognized on the upper right hand side. Oh, a journal. Darren turned onto his side, opening up the employee manual and deeply sighing. "Ugh. Just...ugh. Wish we had more songs like that where I lived. Just stuck with the same thirty something country songs from Mojave Radio. You're lucky, being rich enough to afford to listen to THOSE songs."

Nick inwardly cringed. "I don't know why more people wouldn't bring the songs over to the west, there's a lot of great ones people overlooked."

"No kidding"." Darren grunted. "The music scene's abysmal here. "All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth" was a top ten hit song in fuckin' FEBRUARY." The college-aged African American moaned, deep brown eyes closed tight. "Evidently the Mojave thinks whistlin' teeth is a laugh riot!"

"A few replays of "All You Need is Love" would do the desert a lot of good. Nothing can't be improved with a bit of Beatles!" Nick insisted. "So where DID you grow up?"

"Novac. Rather small town. Built around an old motel, hence the name." Darren remarked. "I was born in a motel bathroom and everything, and my dad, a ranger, struggled to make due. But it was hard, since...well...it ain't the best salary, to be honest, and he couldn't leave me alone too long. So his work hours got cut into. I grew up not knowing how to read or write cuz the most the hotel had was some stupid magazines. Wasn't until I got brought on a work trip to his office in New Vegas that I got to get a look at this old bookcase."

Darren's tone seemed to perk up, and he began to describe it vividly, voice clouded with memory. "It was huge and mahogany and beautiful. The wood all swirled and curved along as you reached out and plucked a book of its thick shelves. First one I ever read was this little book called "The Big Friendly Giant"."

Nick's eyes went wide slightly. "Roald Dahl? I LOVED Roald Dahl!"

"He's such a magical author." Darren admitted. "I was drawn into this strange tale about giants and I brought the book home. Then another...then another. When Mom wa sdoing these archeological digs to try and find pieces of the Old World we could sell or use, she'd take me along with her and I'd bring some books. Between them and what we kept digging up, we'd always be seeing these glimpses of a different world. Of a time before the bombs. Bits and pieces of what was real mixed in with what wasn't, and I wanted to know more."

Darren sighed. "Dad told me a lot of tales too, heard them from HIS dad. All these stories about the Golden Era of the Old World, and of cars that almost drove themselves and these big, giant computers and...and it was amazing. I wanted to know so much more, and then! THEN I heard tales of this big library. Ah, but that's a story for another time."

Nick pouted a bit. Darren never quite told him everything about Hypatia. He would occasionally hint that there was something important he wanted to do, something he'd left behind that he wanted to get back to, perhaps a book he'd been unable to finish reading, but he also seemed a bit...nervous...whenever Nick brought it up.

Maybe it was a book about some kind of fetish. Nick wouldn't blame him, people could get easily worked up over that sort of thing, but he wouldn't have judged after all he'd seen. Shrugging, Nick got up. "I'm gonna go for the town again, try and get some more supplies."

The Deathclaws had stayed away from Nick. They'd grown to fear him ever since that one nasty incident where he had almost killed their children, and they eyed him with distinct uneasiness and terror in their piggy little eyes. Because of that, it had been Nick who'd headed into the nearby town of Nipton, a rather unpleasant place the brown-haired youth hated being in. He only spent as much time as he could stand, JUST to get them more supplies.

Nick had been lucky, he'd had a few measly Earth dollar bills in his pants pocket in the back, and thank goodness, people viewed "Old World" money highly. But then he'd had to resort to scrounging, and learning that people valued bottle caps as currency had been...a bit insulting at first.

He'd tried his luck in town singing. He'd had a little hat up and was singing by the nearby bar to try and earn a bit of money and people had just tossed bottle caps inside. He'd eventually gotten annoyed that half the cap was full OF caps and had been about to toss it into the trash when he'd overheard a loud argument from the bar.

"I AIN'T PAYIN' TEN CAPS FOR THIS SHIT!"

Nick had gulped and quickly barreled into the nearby alleyway, and kept the cap full of caps tight to his chest as it quickly rose and fell, and a furious and beaten-up man in mohawk and a dark vest was thrown out of the bar, right on his face. He skidded, his nose slightly broken and bleeding everywhere, his face muddy and darkly glowering at the bartender, who had a gun pointed at him as his friends nervously ambled out to follow him, Nick stuffing the cap to the side behind a trash bin and trying to make himself look small. It failed since he was 6'2, they gave him a dark look as he watched them shuffle off.

"The fuck YOU lookin' at?!"

Nick shrugged nervously. "N-Nothin', sir." He said quietly, looking away, but the man's ugly, nasty look and the drunkenness emanating from him in waves had made Nick suspect the man didn't believe him. It was lucky the bartender had noticed Nick DID have caps and had offered to give him a "free drink on the house" as a sign of his "courtesy"...and to make Nick pay him for more lovely drinks.

Well, Nick DIDN'T drink, but since Darren did, he'd bought two Nuka Colas just about every day and two beers, and he'd been chatting it up with the bartender quite a bit about he and Darren just hanging out, alone. He'd bragged about taking on the Deathclaws, he'd sung for the bar, everyone seemed to love him, to think he was real brave.

Things had been going well. The bar had almost made Nipton bareable, because otherwise it was a rotten place. The people there had a sort of sleazy air about them, a miasma of oppression seemed to linger around. He could find NO children, strangest of all, and...the women seemed to be oddly…

Beaten. They didn't look him in the eye. They kept glancing away from him. And quite a few of the men would shamefully glance away. That, combined with how poor the upkeep on the town was, so poor that it was not uncommon to find rats mating right in the middle of the general store, made Nick hate staying in Nipton.

And he'd had no idea of what was coming when he'd decided to try the Sarsaparilla one day.

"What the heck!" He remarked aloud to the bearded bartender as the few other patrons in the bar chuckled and guffawed, and Nick held up the brown bottle of "Sunset Sasparilla". "Why not? I love root beer." He said, the bartender's blue eyes glittering with delight as Nick uncorked the cap of the brown bottle and lifted it up. "You say it's a best seller?"

"Our best!" The bartender remarked with a grin. "Well, truthfully, the LADIES seem to love it more than the men, always makes them swoon. But hey, I've got a liking for it myself too, so…" He shrugged a bit. "Give it a try. If you like root beer…"

"Why not?" Nick remarked. "I mean, doesn't cost any more than the Nuka Cola." He said, giving the guy five bottle caps and downing a swig of the sarsaparilla with a GLA-GULP. Hmm. Tangy, but robust! Not bad at all! No, not bad at all. So he kept drinking from it, even as a faintly...swimmy feeling sank into his head.

...a VERY swimmy feeling. A…

"Aw Dang." Nick realized aloud, as he collapsed off the bar stool, suddenly being clued in to the fact he'd been poisoned. The world around him was growing dark and cold, and he was only very faintly aware he was being dragged...dragged into a back room BEHIND the bar…

Nick awoke with a start. He found himself chained to the wall, a manacle around his wrist, and he gasped at the sight around him, astounded...and horrified. He was in an eight by ten room, of absolute grey steel, with a few others stuck to the wall as well, a man and a woman, all looking dejected and one was nursing a black eye.

"What...what's going on?!" Nick asked, his mouth agape. His head was no longer swimming, thank goodness. He felt all-too sober.

"We're going to be sold into slavery." The black-haired man in front of him mumbled. "That's what they do to all visitors to Nipton, and to, well...half the women here. And all the children. Ugh...my HEAD..." He grunted.

Nick's insides turned to ice. He stared in amazement and disgust, mouth half open as the door slowly slid open, the bartender smirking darkly at them all, holding up a pistol. "Get a move on!" He remarked. "Up, up. I know how hard it is, but you can stand up at least, I didn't give you THAT hard a dose." He remarked with a smirk. He gestured for them to rise up from the floor, as the woman and man groaned a bit, Nick deciding to play along, pretending to rise slowly up from the floor.

Just play dumb. Play stupid. Slur your speech.

"You...d-drugged me…" Nick muttered out. "If there weren't five of you in f-front of me…" He grumbled. "UGH…"

"PFFT. Barely gave you a full dose. Lightweight like you who can't handle one beer couldn't handle a full dose. And you're still seeing five?" The bartender sneered, undoing the others manacles and kicking them through the doorway with his foot, before turning to Nick.

But the minute he undid the manacle, Nick HEADBUTTED him as hard as he could, and then wrapped his arms around the man's neck, and wrestled him to the floor, tightening his grip har. The bartender was now sweating up a storm, his neck pale, Nick glowering balefully. "You're gonna freakin' DIE for this!" He snarled, and he then BIT into the man's neck.

The man let out a horrified cry...and then passed out, Nick letting go of the man's neck with his teeth. Geez. He hadn't even bitten him that hard! Rising up, pocketing the pistol, he headed out to the man and woman. "Listen, get behind me, he probably's got some friends waiting." Nick suggested, the two groaning, still barely conscious as they followed him down a long, dark hallway, moving towards a doorway, Nick hearing some faint murmurings. The bartender's friends were just outside a set of double doors not too far away…

Then loud, angry yells. And a cry of "OH CRAP". And Nick recognized the voice of someone very, very distinct. Someone he knew.

"Make me pay extra for your shitty beer?! See how you like it when its all burned up!"

"RUN!" Nick gasped out, realizing what was going on, grabbing the two other prisoner's arms, forcibly tugging them through the door. Sure enough, the entire bar was now in flames, burning and sizzling, the air choking and foul, and it was hard to see more than a few feet in front of him! Nick put an arm around the shoulders of each of the other prisoners, moving them as best he could towards the faint feel of wind, towards the exit, coughing and spluttering. His lungs were burning, his eyes like being stabbed by knives, but, at last, he'd made his way out of the bar, and collapsed on the dirt outside, hacking and spluttering…

Before a new worry came to him as he looked up, seeing the slightly stunned-looking mohawked man that he'd seen before. The man looked at his buddies, grinning a bit, Nick noticing that the mohawked man…

Had a bookbag. A very familiar backpack Nick recognized.

"Where did…" He murmured, blinking his eyes slowly. "That backpack, wh-where…"

"Got it off a dead black dude." said the mohawked man with a chuckle, Nick's face falling, his body seizing up, his expression full of horror and terror.

No. NO, NO, NO.

"Awww, was he a friend of yours?" said the mohawked man with a bit of a sneer on his bearded face. "Well, his shit's OURS now. Not that it meant much, I mean...the fuck good is all those books? At least you had a couple bottle caps and some nice med supplies." He remarked, KICKING Nick squarely in the chin, knocking him back, making him flop next to the other prisoners as the mohawked man pulled out his pistol and chuckled softly...before he turned the handle up. "Nah. Don't wanna waste bullets on you."

Nick was faintly aware of something smacking him hard in the skull. And he remembered nothing more.

...Nick awoke with an even worse state, and he looked around. He head was pounding, throbbing, and he clutched his skull, feeling blood. LOTS of blood flowing forth. He panted and heaved, his head feeling even more swimmy than before for a few moments, until he saw...he saw what laid next to him. The two prisoners looked almost as bad as he FELT! He quickly took off their shirts, cringing, panting and heaving, wrapping their busted-open heads in their shirts, and began to carry them up, lifting them onto his shoulders.

The shack. He had to get to the shack. AWAY from Nipton. Away from these...these awful people who were slavers, and...and to Darren. Darren could NOT be dead, he couldn't. He COULD NOT be dead.

"Come...on!" Nick grunted. That manta, that prayer, it coursed through his mind. He kept trudging along, across the sands, some people scampering away from him, his expression having that same horrific resolution the Deathclaws had seen. Some folks peered out their windows, then slammed the blinds shut. Others hid behind barrels and trash bins.

He didn't care. He hoped he never saw them again. He wanted a bed. He wanted to set these people down somewhere safer, and to find Darren.

Don't be dead.

DON'T BE DEAD.

Yet even as he slugged his way along the dirt...past dead, bullet-ridden corpses of Deathclaws...even the children…

He knew.

There was a distinctly bloody, horrific splatter of blood outside the shack. Inside...was a ravaged wreckage of a room, several books torn to shreds, Darren's journal included, and...the "Chronicles of Narnia" in chunks on the side. Nick put the man and woman down on the bed, and then barreled out, racing along the bloody pathway, up a hill, towards a big chunk of rock where a single tree was situated on the other side, and then…

He saw Darren. Darren, who's life was bleeding away from his blown-open chest, who was looking up at Nick with a bit of a sad, small smile.

"You're...hurt."

"Looks worse than it is." Nick insisted fervently, kneeling by Darren. "Really dude, your...your chest is open, man! I-I think I can see your heart!" He screamed out. "Oh God, oh God, I...what do I do?! They took all the med supplies, I…" He began to take his shirt off, to try and wrap it around Darren's chest, to stop the bleeding, something, ANYTHING-

Darren smiled a bit more. "I'm glad I got to meet you." He said and this time...he did look Nick in the eye. "Because...it showed me that...I was kind of right. There was something beautiful in the Old World. People just...weren't looking in the right places. So they couldn't see it."

"What do you mean, Darren?" Nick asked, his voice cracking, faint. He had SEEN people die before, yet...he never, ever could get used to it. And he didn't want to.

"Going to the Library felt...felt like a dream. I got to learn so much. You should go there…" Darren murmured, his voice getting fainter. "It's beautiful in there. Like...like a little slice of Heaven. Every shelf was like a voice from the Old World trying to speak out...and the more I learned, the more I wanted to know. It gave me a dream." He whispered. "I...I want more songs."

His body was getting cold. His eyes were drooping.

"I want more...people reading...Narnia. I know it's...made up. But...that made up thing...seemed a great deal more important...than the real world. And I...wanna stand by that play world."

"Darren-"

"Just...do-do me one thing. Try and...make sure...the library gets...opened. Convince...them. Convince...Arthur."

And with that, Darren Robinson breathed no more, and Nick was left staring quietly, and emptily and sadly at one of the only friends he'd had in a world he knew so little about. And he felt alone, and scared, and like a little child who wanted to go home.

Nick didn't know what to do.

And that terrified him. Darren had been something to hold onto. He had been a tether, a rock. Having SOMEONE to bounce all this off of had been of endless comfort to him. Especially since Nick thought he could see a bit of himself in Darren. But now…because of that…

"That mohawked murdering sack of feces." Nick whispered balefully. He felt pure, raw, hatred and fury, like some sleeping serpent, rising up inside him, spitting venom out his mouth as he rose up. He wanted to hit something, and keep hitting it until it screamed or broke. Something, anything, he-he…

And then he realized he was gripping Darren's shoulder too tightly, and he felt sick again, and he began to cry and cry, sinking his face into Darren's now near-broken shoulder, and wishing he could just go HOME.

But he couldn't. He didn't know why. He didn't know why he had been sent here. He always seemed to come to a world to help it, to help people, to make it a better place somehow, in whatever small way he could, but...he felt like he'd failed. Darren was dead. And the murderer was probably miles away and he'd never catch him and-

The library. A thought was now rising in Nick. The only thing he could cling to.

Darren had said the library had had so much of the Old World in it. So many beautiful books. A library unlike any other. It had been his dream. He wanted the library open to everyone. He wanted Nick to "convince Arthur" to open the library. Surely, that had to be why he was here. It had to be the library! After all, if whatever had sent him here had wanted him to save people's lives, surely...SURELY it would have let him keep his powers! Right?

...right?

The library sounded unique and special. And it had given Darren a dream. This world, Fallout...seemed so broken and beaten and...DARK.

It needed dreams again. If the library was open, then maybe...they could begin dreaming again. Maybe more children could start reading stories about giants and magic, about lions and witches and wardrobes. About strange and beautiful fables.

So Nick rose up, bringing Darren's body with him, back to the shack to bury his friend...and to read that journal. He had to know. He had to know where the library was. Where HYPATIA was. It wasn't long before he'd found the journal, and was reading through it.

Well...at least, he TRIED. It was quite clear that though Darren could read, his writing skills were lacking. It made sense, he'd not had a book in his hands until he was what, 9? Ten? It took a while to learn to write. So Nick tried to make out what Darren's words said, and he cringed a little as he gazed at the pages.

"I learned a lot today!" And genitalias had been written all over the back of the sheet.

"Oh, Darren." Nick chuckled, shaking his head, trying not to laugh as he kept reading. Dicks, dicks, dicks, dicks...so many dicks! He almost found himself laughing, what...what was WRONG with him?

Another page. "Sometimes I don't know what to do with all this knowledge. When I think back to the stockmen at the NCR, I can't imagine what they could do with it. They wouldn't even care about any kind of ramification, any kind of long-term consequence, they would simply use it." Nick cringed. Harsh.

Another page talked about how Darren had found this really impressive, big gun...only for his mother to blow it up. And she'd said that bringing out weapons that could burn down entire towns, well "there should have been some rule against that". But then another page made Nick feel...a shudder dig into him.

"I'm getting tired of playing dumb. They probably think I can't write or read a single word before I came to their library, when I've been reading since I was about 7 thanks to that little NCR bookshelf. And been keeping a journal since I was 9! Faking illiteracy led to a comfy stay, but didn't net me as much rewards as I'd hoped. I know they got weapons. From what I've gathered, the access is in the southeastern corner, first floor. Secured, but it's there. There's got to be a way in. I can't pick the lock, and no terminal's connected to it...and I'm getting sick of this place. Knowing I'm here, trapped with the dead, and with Arthur always watching...always watching. ALWAYS. I'm getting a bad feeling. Time for me to leave."

Nick cringed even more. This sounded so...mean spirited and cynical. It was as if all the hope and dreams had been stomped out of this version of Darren, a version far different than the one he'd grown to know over these past few weeks. But the next page made him even more disgusted and horrified. The pen markings in the journal had been scribbled in with such ferocity, the words almost bled over onto the other page behind it.

"The library's a serious blow to the morale. Pops raised me on such beautiful tales of the Old World. Technology and progress and enlightenment and whatnot. The more I goddamn read all those goddamn BOOKS, the more I see how petty and vain it all was!" Nick read aloud. "What's even more depressing is our civilization's trying its utmost to pick up the Old World's trail where it was, going straight ahead for the same wall it crashed into! And nothing I read makes me think we'll ever learn from our history. Since I've been here, I'm asking myself how much better off we survivors would be if there wasn't so much of the Old World relics to keep us down! They even got a book on how to lobotomize workers to make them more efficient for fuck's sake! Time to hit the bottle!"

Nick put the journal down. He did not want to read any more. Suddenly he felt almost as awful as he'd been minutes earlier, crying into Darren's dead frame. Hearing these words...it sounded as though Darren would have most likely blown his own head off if someone hadn't come along to blow him open. Yet at the same time, Nick felt a tiny bit of relief. Meeting him had clearly made Darren hope again. Dream again.

It sucked out here in the desert. Out in the wastes.

But maybe the library could make it suck less. If HE'D been able to rekindle someone's spirit again just with a bit of music...maybe the biggest library in the world could rekindle the spirit of who knows how many generations?

It was the only hope he had. The only idea he could think of. And he would cling to it until forced to let go. Rummaging through the journal, he found the location of Hypatia. It was Northeast, to the east of Novac, not far from where Darren had been born. It wasn't too far off.

He'd leave soon as possible. The man and woman from earlier were still fast asleep. He sighed a bit, hoping they'd be okay, and decided to start a fire, cook a little dinner and then head out. If he kept walking, he'd probably reach Novac in about four hours walk, maybe three if he was lucky, and didn't encounter anything unpleasant. He could rest up there. Maybe even find Darren's family, if they were still there.

Nick made his way outside, and headed for the dead bodies of the deathclaws, cringing a bit.

This was gonna suck. He took a deep breath, using one of the bigger one's claws to slice huge chunks of death claw flank off. He had a feeling deathclaw meat wouldn't taste like chicken. And about half an hour of cooking later, he was proven right.

"RRRGGHHH."

Not one bit. In fact, it tasted like eating very, very rough, chewy pork that was far too spicy. Still, at least it was filling. He could thank God for some small mercies. After eating every last chunk of it, he finished his meal, and quietly gave a final, sad look back at the little shack he'd spent so many weeks in. He thought of the nights looking up at the moon, back lying against the shack, singing Everley Brothers songs with Darren. He thought of reading deep into the night with his friend, and of the face...the face of someone who had seen their dream die, and then slowly crawl back out of the grave.

"...bye, Darren." Nick murmured out, as he hit the road, and headed for Hypatia, as a cool autumn breeze began to mercifully cascade over the Mojave.