Dustland Lullaby
Type:Collective ones-shots.
Rating: Mature.
Summary:Just because you're a woman doesn't make you any less of a warrior with a shotgun.
Genre: Romance. Adventure. Hurt/Comfort. Family.
-II-
"Slaver Games and Soft Hymns."
Mable waves the smoke out of her face when Butch draws near; he's bickering about something, yelling the next, and he's hovering all too close. All she can comprehend is the consuming smoke that floods her senses, and the ash that she can actually taste on her tongue. She can hear static, and she only assumes that the buzzing is coming from her Pip-Boy. In a desperate moment in trying to reach reality, she remembers an annoying hum of a song – something about sunning and flowers and Three Dog harping about one end of the Wastes to the next, talking about actual trees that spring to life; the tune's been haunting her for the past month, and the repetition of the little song refuses to leave her.
"Wake up, girl! Wake up!" Butch's fingers dig into her shoulder blade; the incoming missile shook her, and all Mable can see is white light; she holds her breath, and panics when she actually believes she's fallen prey to death. Anxiety nips at the back of her thoughts, and it rattles her own being – any second now, she'll see her father at the end of all that drowning, luminous light. She's in complete shock, and she loathes it; this fight was almost over, and she wouldn't be around to see it come together.
Butch is left alone, huddled behind a barricade with several slaves and a couple of children Mable tried to escort out. Butch should have calmed her when she witnessed Eulogy backhand one of the women she couldn't buy out from under him; it took many hours to lay out some sort of deal. Mable even offered a month's worth of pay just to have those two women come with her; it would have set him and Mable back in a financial slump, but she hardly cared. She wanted – had to – save those women. Sadly, her barter was all in vain, and he automatically tore down her handsome offer with a bitter smile. Watching Eulogy treat those women like trash tore down her sensible side. She could deal with the sleazy men eyeing her, but hurting other women rubbed her raw.
Butch should have stepped in her crosshairs when she threatened to hoist her shotgun like daybreak. But the alarm went off way before he could put two-and-two together, and found that his wife killed the main man in charge - right in the middle of Paradise Falls for all to see; she blasted his skull wide open, scattering brain fragments that only served to startle the two sex slaves by his side. Mable had that funny look to her, like she found twenty caps in a gutted desk sort of satisfaction.
"Is she going to be all right?" One of the slaves leans over Butch's shoulder, and he has to snap back to give Mable some space, knocking the woman's hand away who touched his shoulder while he tried to assist the situation for the rest of them; he doesn't respond, but instead peeks over the blocked barricade and watches two straggling slavers advance. A couple shots ring out, and he quickly pulls himself back down and against the structure that protected them all. Clearly, he's not in the right state of mind.
With an auditable sigh, Butch comes to the conclusion that his wife is incapacitated; he rummages through her belongings, eyes shifting from his perch to the remaining slavers that dared to come closer and closer. He tenses when he hears the older of the slaves, Breadbox, scream out. "We're over here! Over here!" The old man waved his arms madly, and it only spurred the surviving slavers to drawl near.
"Shut that ol' man up, why don't ya? One of you: shut him up!" Butch hissed over his shoulder, fumbling with Mable's grenades that hung off her utilities belt. There's panic in his eyes when he finally obtains a grenade from her belt, taking the moment to linger his gaze over her pale face. "We're goin' to make it out of here, babe. I promise you. You and all these people will make it." Her face is solemn; her skin is stained in blood and dust, the smell of gunfire and fresh copper was all-consuming. She doesn't reply back, only slumps to one side.
"Breadbox, please!" Bleak, the slave that tried to comfort Butch in this tight squeeze, is the first to quiet the old man down. "We're going to be free! Can't you see that? Free!"
"They'll catch us! They always do! And soon they'll have two new additions," Breadbox's voice pinched, his voice rough and brittle; a shell of a man that Butch never wished to become; it made him grit his teeth together at the mere thought of being dominated by the inhuman, and allowing Mable to suffer the same folly. "We're never truly free!"
"Only because you say so doesn't make it true! These good people right here are showing us. C'mon, Breadbox, the war is over. We can finally leave. They cannot hurt us anymore, but only if we work hard for it!" Bleak chokes on the remainder of her words, and it only pushes Butch to try harder; seeing a woman in these conditions – these people – only made him think of Mable and 'what if' scenarios; he hated watching women cry.
Bleak swallows her sorrow down, and the old man watches; his voice has died thirty years ago, but watching the younger generation of slaves struck something foreign and it leaves him deathly silent amongst the calamity of gunfire and bombs and bloody yelling. The reality of tasting freedom only reminded him that he has no idea what to do outside of caged walls.
Butch haled a frag grenade over the wall of the makeshift barricade. There's delayed screams, and a heart pounding explosion follows and it knocks them all behind the barricade; dust scatters, and the sickening crash of flesh hitting earth echoed off the concrete. This fight has lasted two hours. For the first time - in a long time - Butch can finally catch his breath. The slaves and the children rounded the corner and found the area devoid of life other than their own.
Butch slumps next to Mable.
-II-
"The name: Breadbox derives from a slavers game," Mable said casually, looking over her shoulder to catch Butch's bewildered glance. He watches her drag the bodies of the slavers into one pile, set aside for an evening pyre; she finds no respect in this funeral and only sees it as a way to delude the chances of diseases and flesh eating bacteria. "That slave, the old man, his name is Breadbox." She still looks shaken by the battle. That slaver hoard really did a number on her, and she was paying for it by her dreary approach and throbbing headache; there's work to be done, however. 'No rest for the wicked,' was a philosophy Mable lived by.
Butch merely nods, "So I've been told by the others." He paces next to her, leaning over to help her with the burden of moving the bodies from one end of the settlement to the other end. She looks up at him with silent gratification, but she's not pleased with whatever is on her mind. Butch only figured she was embarrassed that he had to drag her through the muck this time, rather than her saving him; it's usually how their big shoot outs ended.
"Well, it's a game usually preformed on new slaves," her lips thinned at the morbid thought, but Butch wasn't following yet. She could see that, and she was struggling with this little tippet; if she didn't tell anyone – it would have hounded her and made her sick. "'See what'll fit inside a breadbox.' I heard one slaver say; the first time I heard that term was when I was stumbling around the Wastes – just me and Dogmeat. And this man, he was standing over a little girl. She had to be only ten. And he taunted her with that phrase, 'See what'll fit inside a breadbox.' I saved that little girl, and I didn't really think over the hidden message it implied, not until I was cornered myself with it in the Wastes."
Butch halted, but Mable continued on in her work, refusing to meet his gaze. "It had to be a month after I left the Vault. I was so foolish and driven, I didn't listen to the locals' warnings about being careful on the open roads, just pass D.C. Well, one Raider held me up, cornered me against one of the ramshackle buildings. Just him and I. I was so damned tired, and he was approaching me too fast. Repeating that horrid phrase, 'See what'll fit inside a breadbox.' And it hit me. I finally understood what it stood for, and why I hated it so much; it was a term held desirably to all slavers. I lost it. I ran forward, and refused to let him have his way with me," Mable's fingers faltered on Eulogy's clothing; he was faced down in a puddle of his own blood, and she was dragging his skull across the pavement. "I bashed his head in with the butt end of my rifle. I couldn't stop. Even when he was finally dead – I just kept going. Breadbox goes by a nickname that's destroyed him. They raped him, and broke him by giving him that name. Good god -,"
"-I hate it out here. There's been nothin' good underneath all this sky," Butch says, and he means it. When he approaches her, Mable stops him with a look that told him to hold his pity for another time; she didn't need it. Butch wasn't a man that often shared pity, anyways.
"I find no love out here, but we'll make do. I'm just sorry that I couldn't keep my emotions intact when it came to this grimy bastard. But when I saw those girls - it made me think: what if I had daughters in that position."
"Do not dare apologize to me for that, and that will never happen," Butch cuts her off, seething at the mere thought; they were still young. Still roaming and adventuring. The thought of children never graced their minds. Not in this mutated hellhole. "I'd be a dead man before I allow that to ever happen. Here. Give me that. You're the nerdy tech in the group girl, go bother yourself with those weird collars around 'em peoples' necks. Set them straight; you're a lot better at consoling than me." With that, Butch took the burden of hoisting Paradise Fall's leader, and dragging him away. Far away from Mable's direction.
He just wanted to get the hell out of here.