July 13, 2280
The Last, Best Hope of Humanity exhaled smoke, watched it swirl and linger in the stale air of the old bar. Her extensive medical knowledge had once led her to hating the small, white and yellow cylinders. And yet here she was, sucking smoke into her body, because deep down she knew if Gatling lasers, super mutants, and stab wounds couldn't kill her, she was going to be just fine.
Leah curled up on one of the battered chairs stuffed into the corner of Gob's saloon, tanned arms perspiring slightly in the radiating heat. She'd slipped on the loosest and least-constricting tank-top she had, having already been frustrated by her two-century-old life partner that morning. Charon had woken her up with a warm kiss, tangled their bodies together, then grabbed his clothes and left, assuring her that he would be back by evening, Dogmeat trailing dutifully after his heels.
After questioning every single person in Megaton who had any affiliation whatsoever with the offending ghoul, Leah had come to the conclusion that they were all rat bastards and they were all in on whatever surprise Charon was trying to come up with. So she'd committed herself to sulking in the corner with a box of cigarettes and a bottle of whiskey until somebody caved.
It hadn't happened yet.
No, everybody went about their day as if it were totally normal for Charon to keep something from his smoothskin and run off like the day she'd freed him. It gave her flashbacks; she felt like a PTSD sufferer just thinking about it, the memories making her sweat even more.
Joseph was sitting in the opposite chair, head bent low over a rifle he'd taken apart on the table between them. She'd drilled him until he'd clamped his mouth shut and wouldn't say another damn word until she changed the subject. Damn kid was as loyal to Charon as the latter had been to his contract-holders—Leah shuddered. It hurt to think about that, no matter how long ago it had been.
Besides, Leah could hardly call Joseph a 'kid' anymore. He was steadily reaching for six feet of height and his curiosity had only grown with age. He was ruthlessly intelligent. He hated bandying around with idle chatter and just wanted to get to the heart of things.
Joseph looked up, noticing her intense gaze on him. "What's up?" he asked as he dusted dirt from his hands.
"Oh, nothing," she sighed, slouching down in her chair and tapping ash into a tray on the table. "Bored as hell."
"Not the same without gramps around, huh?" He laughed as she scowled.
"Whatever, loser. You're just jealous I have somebody to tangle around in the sheets with."
Joseph openly grimaced and clapped a hand over his mouth as if to stop himself from vomiting. He added a few very convincing retching sounds for effect. "Oh, God, Leah. Please – I can't take the mental image –,"
Leah snorted a laugh and stubbed her cigarette out. "All right, all right, you little smart ass."
"Besides," Joseph said, dropping all pretenses of disgust, his voice becoming overly casual and piquing Leah's suspicion at once. "I might have someone like that in the future sometime soon."
Leah nearly spilled her bottle of whiskey as she shot up in her chair. "Who?" she demanded excitedly.
"Jesus, keep it down," he snapped quickly, shaking a hand to gesture her voice to a quieter level. He glanced around, paranoid, and looked back at her once he was certain no one had heard her. "Just . . . a girl I met. You'll figure it out, but I don't want to name any names."
Leah harumph'ed and dropped back into her seat. "All right. Well, I wish you luck. Don't knock her up, though, I swear to God, Joseph, if you get some girl pregnant, I'm not –,"
"Oh, my God, you never shut up," he griped, sliding the last piece of his rifle back into place. He glanced back up at her, took her in inch by inch, eyes falling onto the tattoo on the flat of her shoulder: three numbers scrawled in elegant script. "What's twenty-one-colon-six?"
Leah blanched and she followed his gaze. "It's twenty-one-six. Revelation twenty-one-six. 'And he said to me, I am Alpha and Omega. I will give unto him who is athirst of the fountain of the waters of life freely.' It was my mother's favorite passage, and my father would tell it to me all the time," she explained in a too-aloof tone.
"You must have loved them a lot, to get that tattooed on yourself," Joseph observed shrewdly.
She shrugged and looked down at her hands. "I loved my father very much. I never knew my mother."
"I've heard the story," he agreed, still eyeing her curiously. "I never knew my family. Well, I knew my sister. But she's gone now."
"Gone?" Leah's head snapped up and her eyes narrowed into slits. "What do you mean, gone? Why did you never tell me about this before?"
He rolled his eyes, setting his rifle down. His gaze flickered back and forth, thoughtfully, constructing sentences in his head—something he'd picked up from Leah, this verbal caution. He'd learned to be as conservative with words as he was with bullets "Because I knew you'd overreact. I'm ninety-percent certain that she's dead, Leah. Don't get all heroic on me. Slavers took her and two other Little Lamplight children away over three years ago. I stumbled into the Wasteland and looked for them for days, to no avail."
Leah let another moment of silence slide between them as she prepared her own barrage. "That may be what you assume, Joseph, but people don't kill slaves."
Joe's brow twitched in obvious discomfort and his hands whiteknuckled the rifle in his grasp. "Just drop it, Leah," he insisted, fire glinting in his dark eyes. "Really, just fucking drop it."
Never once had Joseph cursed at her. Leah blinked, taken aback, before she slowly nodded and filed that information away for later. She and Charon would travel the entire fucking Wasteland to find that girl. Whatever it took, they would gladly sacrifice, because Joseph was their family now. As well as RJ. The boys had been old enough to come along with them on their adventures. They'd learned and grown and evolved into arrogant little sons of bitches—with a role model like Charon, overconfidence was only to be expected.
"Gob?" Leah called in a hashed-up attempt to dispel the new tension in the small section of the saloon. She climbed to her feet and stretched, cracking the muscles in her back, before wandering over to perch on a barstool.
The bartender put down a glass—he was always cleaning glasses—and cocked the remains of an eyebrow at the smoothskin. "What do you want, kid?"
"Where's RJ?"
"Hopefully running with knives, or playing around on unstable rooftops somewhere."
"Oh, don't play like you don't like him. You agreed to put them up for us."
"Nova agreed to put them up."
"And you agreed that a month without sex just wasn't worth it," the ex-whore's purring voice interjected as she came forward and leaned over the bar to flutter her eyelashes at her ghoul.
Gob sighed and touched her face, shaking his head. "What you smoothskins do to us ghouls. You should be arrested for it."
"You'd take that back if you saw what Charon did to me last night," Leah teased with a spark twinkling in her blue eyes. She lowered her voice to whisper, "You'd switch that sentence around in a heartbeat."
Nova sighed as Gob let out a wild cackle. "That man is a wild beast, I swear it!" he roared in laughter. He'd gotten over his previous aversion to the bigger ghoul after seeing him so desolate and broken at Leah's absence. It had become quite clear at that moment how much he cared about her and would walk to the ends of the world for her.
Leah's pink lips were just curling up into a reply when the saloon door was slammed open. They all turned at once to glare at the figure silhouetted against the setting sun outside.
"Who –," Gob began, but the man stepped inside and his identity became clear once he had come into the artificial bar lighting.
"QUINN!" Leah screamed, throwing herself from her stool and lunging across the distance to throw her arms around the ghoul. "What are you doing here? Oh, my God, it's so good to see you!"
"Good to see you, too, smoothskin," the trader laughed, patting her back. "It's been a while. Had to stop by on this day of all days."
Leah pulled away, frowning. "What do you –,"
"Smoothskin," another raspy voice interrupted and her mind instantly erupted into bliss as she peeked past the short ghoul to see the love of her life standing in the doorway with a smirk to match his normal arrogance. She skirted Quinn and marched determinedly forward to shove him hard in the chest, scowling.
"And where the hell have you been all day?" she insisted loudly, ignoring Dogmeat as the canine trotted in and rubbed up against her legs.
"Retrieving Quinn, of course," Charon replied easily, taking her hands in his despite her struggles. He leaned in close so that his lips grazed her ear. "Happy birthday, my smoothskin."
He realized the instant she froze against him that she'd had no idea whatsoever what day it was. He took a quick glance at her face to see her expression wiped like a blank slate. "Did you genuinely forget your own birthday, Leah?" he asked gently.
"I've had other things on my mind," she confessed, looking embarrassed. "I take back my anger at you. I can't believe you remembered."
He laughed and picked her up into a long and passionate kiss before setting her back on her feet. "I was off at Underworld, dragging Quinn back to see you."
Quinn beamed at her when she turned, as if confirming Charon's statement. "I came at once. I needed to run another route anyways. I also . . . erm," he cleared his throat, "wanted to see a certain smoothskin."
Leah's smile turned devilish. "You can come see me later. You have priorities, my friend."
Quinn smiled gratefully at her and slid out of the saloon and into the evening air. Charon perked an eyebrow at his smoothskin, who laughed. "You seriously never knew he was fucking Moira? God, you can be dense sometimes, Charon."
He growled threateningly and slid his bag to the ground. "You are lucky it is your birthday, smoothskin, or else I would punish you for that statement."
Leah slipped her body close to his. Her voice tickled his ear. "You could still punish me . . . if you really want to."
"Get a fuckin' room," a crass voice interrupted and they parted to see RJ stroll into the room. He cocked a grin at Leah. "Happy birthday! You're ancient!"
There was resounding chorus of "Happy birthday, Leah!" and she chuckled in slight embarrassment.
"Is this really what all you troublemakers were up to?" she asked with a grateful smile. "I can't believe I didn't realize it."
Like you said, you've had other things on your mind," Nova comforted with an easy smile. Charon propped his bag up onto the counter and began to ruffle through it. He deposited four boxes of Fancy Lads Snack Cakes, along with a dented metal box. He grinned at Leah and waved an arm out in a grand gesture.
"I hope you enjoy, smoothskin," he said, sounding a tiny bit worried. "I'm not so good at giving gifts."
Leah turned pink and she picked approached the metal box. She glanced up at her ghoul. "You didn't have to do this," she whispered softly.
"I wanted to. You deserve it," he assured her with a quick kiss.
Smiling with anticipation, Leah slid the lid off of the box and peered inside. With a quiet gasp, she gently pulled the material of a dress up by the shoulders and held it up for everyone else to see. Two thin slashes of material ran from the front to back of the bright red dress. It flared out into a wide skirt that Leah knew would look wonderful if she twirled in it.
And it was completely flawless, the few slits in material sewed expertly together with matching red stitchwork. She ran her fingers over the soft dress and felt tears burn in her eyes as she looked up at her ghoul. "It's beautiful. So beautiful."
"You needed something to wear that matched your beauty," Charon said with a shrug. Leah carefully put the dress down before leaping into his arms and kissing him hard.
"You are the best ghoul in the whole wide world," she cried happily, ignoring Gob as he cleared his throat pointedly.
"I certainly try," Charon admitted with a grin, his sentence cut off as she kissed him again. He smirked as she pulled away for air. "You want to try it on for me?" he suggested with a glint in his eyes.
"You bet your sweet ghoul ass I do," she said breathlessly. She grabbed the material and Charon marched them up the stairs to an open room in the saloon, too impatient to cross the catwalks to Leah's house. In all honesty, they just weren't going to make it that far. Hell, they'd hardly make it up the stairs.
Gob and Nova shared a laugh as Joseph and RJ exchanged a disgusted glance.
It wasn't long before the screaming started.
The two teenagers slinked away, looking sick.
"Let's go play with knives," Joseph proposed as his face turned green.
Leah woke up in the middle of the night with a full bladder. Sighing at her body's needs, she wriggled out from under Charon's arm and stuffed herself into a pair of sweatpants and a baggy shirt. She yawned as she trod silently down the stairs, hoping not to wake anybody. She felt a little bad for her lack of consideration for others earlier, but after Charon had so kindly escorted her through her third shuddering orgasm she just couldn't bring herself to give a fuck anymore.
She was surprised to find the flickering light of a lamp guiding her attention to the back room once she'd reached the ground floor. A dark figure was huddled into a chair beside it, unaware of her intrusion on his reverie.
"Joey?" she asked tentatively, approaching with audible footsteps to alert him to her presence.
His head shot up at once, confirming her suspicions. "W-what are you doing up?" he demanded in a hiss. When he'd lifted his face, it had allowed the flame of his lamp to cast a light across his cheek bright enough to illuminate the blue and purple skin there.
"Is that a black eye?" Leah crossed the distance between them in a flash of movement and caught his jaw in her lithe hands. She tilted his face up, ignoring his struggles against her hold. "Oh, Joey," she sighed, releasing him once she'd gotten a good look. "Stay there," she ordered, crossing to the refrigerator and pulling out a handful of ice cubes.
"You're not going to demand who did it or threaten to give me another one if I don't tell you what happened?" he asked bitterly, clearly torn up over whatever had caused the black eye.
"No, because that won't get you to tell me. You'll close up like a goddamn clam," Leah replied in a whisper, wrapping a rag around the ice and handing it to him.
He pressed it against his injured eye with a grimace of pain. "Fair enough."
"Of course, I'd like you to tell me," she informed him with concern etched into the planes of her face. "I love you, Joey, you know that. But I know when someone needs to fight their own battles. If you don't want my help, that's fine. But the instant you need my help, I'll be there with a goddamn super sledge in hand to drop some cold fucking justice on whoever thought they could touch you and get away with it."
Her cool statement made him chuckle and then wince as it jostled the ice against his black eye. "It was Billy Creel," he said in a sigh, turning his face away.
"Go on," Leah encouraged softly. She'd suspected who the girl was all along, but she knew if she interrupted with an "I knew it!" Joseph would cut her out again.
"I've been hanging around with Maggie. She's sweet, and funny, and cute as hell. He caught us kissing on top of the Church of the Atom. Got so pissed he hauled and punched me, right in the eye. Don't underestimate me, though, Leah, I got a few good hits in on him, too. He'll be walking funny tomorrow, I guarantee you that. It would've been worse if not for Maggie. She was freaking out. Worried about both of us. So I stopped and walked away." He appealed to Leah with a desperate look in his one exposed eye. "He's not even her real father! Who is he to determine who she can or can't hang out with?"
Leah tenderly lifted the ice to inspect his injured eye. "I know he isn't, Joey," she agreed, lowering the ice once more. "Keep that there. But he's raised her from childhood. I expect a bit of parental protectiveness, but he did take it too far by hitting you. You guys were just kissing, right?"
"Correct. My arms were safely wrapped around her waist." He ducked his face into his hands and shook his head. "Goddamn crazy one-eyed freak," he muttered in frustration.
"I know you're angry," Leah said, cursing herself for the obvious statement. "But you need to calm down. You'll need a cool head when you go and apologize to Billy Creel."
"What?" Joseph demanded, his head shooting up.
Leah shushed him at once, glancing fearfully at the stairs. "If you want this to go over smoothly, it will be prudent for Charon to not know. You think he'll just stand aside when some guy is beating on a kid he loves like a son."
Joe's face softened at once. "Gramps really thinks that?"
"Of course he does, you dense a-hole," Leah laughed quietly. "But you will need to apologize to Billy, even if he was being a dick. You'll never get to see Maggie again if you don't. She cares about Billy and you don't want her to feel torn between the two of you. How would you feel if you had to choose between me and Maggie?"
Joe hung his head, but nodded. "I understand." He sighed, looking unhappy but determined. "All right. I'll apologize tomorrow for sneaking behind his back with his . . . 'daughter.' Thanks for the advice, Leah. You can go climbing back to your ghoul now."
"Gladly . . . once I take care of my business." She quickly used the bathroom downstairs—feeling grateful that Charon had installed a wall and door to cut the area off from the bar as a whole per her request.
"By the way," Joseph called quietly, just as she was rounding to climb the stairs. She peeked her head around the side to catch his eye.
He was smiling. "It'd be no contest. You'd win out every time, Leah."
Leah stole up the stairs with a grin on her face.
She wasn't surprised to find Charon awake when she slid back into their room. What she didn't expect was his unquestioning invitation back into their bed. He even held up the blankets so she could climb back into the warmth and the circle of his arms.
"Too tired to care what you were up to," he explained roughly into the curve of her neck, kissing her once on the tender skin there. "Will question you ruthlessly about it tomorrow."
"It's a date," she promised with a quiet laugh, before settling against his chest and falling back into gentle, easy sleep.
Pattyn and katersss:
I dare say I'm quite excited too! Thank you to both of you for following along into the next story. Wouldn't be here without you ;)
Also, thanks for the heads-up, Pattyn haha. I was thinking when I picked it, 'Vault Dweller doesn't sound quite right.' Much thanks haha.
