Tony met the first competition for the job about four days into his trip north. He examined what maps were available―very few, since this Three-Mountain place was very xenophobic, and gathered some supplies to keep him going for the first few days. He had been late in leaving Gladstone because his father, who always seemed to know where his kids were at all times, had accosted him and asked him not to go. He went, anyway, because he had nothing else to do with himself in Gladstone except to ruminate on the women in his life that had abandoned him.

The competition was an older merc and some dumb woman that followed him around like he was the best thing since the world ended. Tony had little patience for the idiotic woman and her man, so he did what he could to avoid questions, and continued on his journey.

He did find out from the woman that they were attempting to locate the girl overland. And this was a trend that continued―none of the mercs that he met along the way seemed at all interested in the Metro system or the rare chance that the girl was capable of making it across the water east or west of Three-Mountain. Tony ascertained that the Metro system was almost entirely ruined, and was not an option. Too many raiders, too many creatures. Mercs knew better than to try it.

He heard from a merchant on the road that the Metro was home to some kind of crazy boogeyman. He laughed it off, but the look on the face of the merchant's bodyguard made him reconsider. He camped with them, and wheedled the story from the bodyguard as thoroughly as possible.

"There's some kind of bad guy in there," was how it started. "No one got out alive, at first. No one could figure out what was killing people who went into the Metro, killing the raiders. People started to think there was a monster, and it stuck."

"At first?" he asked.

"Well..." the bodyguard, a tanned and handsome woman, with a tiny but rare smile much like Tony, shrugged. "Every few months, a raider will come up from the Metro with a story about someone they call Bitch and a big-ass marauder named Dog, killing raiders and taking their goods."

"But not the story-teller," Tony said.

"No. Usually it's a girl," the bodyguard said. "I saw the last one, myself. Wasn't more than eighteen, scared absolutely shitless. If I were you, I'd stay away from the Metro."

"But if someone is down there, killing raiders―"

"Then it is a good thing," the bodyguard said. "Because those fuckers deserve every bit of lead there is to spare." She tapped her head knowingly, and her face was hard. "And you look like you should understand that, too."

Tony ignored the pointed comment about his appearance. "I am not afraid of raiders," he countered.

"Neither am I," she replied. "Doesn't mean I wasn't given reason to, at one point."

Tony weighed the options, and determined that he should continue his job―still had seven days before he would consider the job null and void, anyway. And this Metro story was interesting enough that he might as well give it a shot at the same time.

The land north of Gladstone was full of radiation, and rocky as hell. Tony thought it was actually worse than Grayling, because the mountains here had been blasted by the bombs just as dramatically, but had been split into numerous thirty-foot deep craters, all deeply scored into the rock at an angle. The effect looked like someone had stuck their hands into the earth, a thousand quick little jabs into the ground. Irradiated water pooled in every single one of them, and Tony had left his I.V. line in place for RadAway, it was so bad. It made it difficult to cross, and he understood why he'd been warned off from the area.

He approached a place called The Republic but shied west, away from it, when he noticed ghouls through his scope. Too many of them for his taste, and he was instantly angered by the thought. He knew that was stupid, being angry at a whole group of people who could no more help their condition than Tony could help loving that chocolate-skinned―he sighed. He shouldn't remind himself more than he needed to.

As he was staring at the entrance to a Metro station that had seen better days, he wondered how long it would take him to get himself killed. Even if he'd told his uncle he wasn't trying, it was bound to happen. Tony would rather be killed on a job than stay at home and shoot himself in the fucking head because he couldn't get her out of his head.

And he knew that was stupid, too , but he couldn't help the feelings as they wormed around his brain. He walked down into the Metro to test his life on this so-called boogeyman.

Phoebe realized she'd been shot. No amount of cursing could take it back and she cried without stopping at the pain, because it hurt! She'd never been shot before, and by the look of the weapon, she had been lucky it wasn't her head. Her entire arm hurt from the tips of her fingertips to the muscles in her shoulder.

She looked at the injury and understood that this wasn't as simple as she figured it should be; the weapon used metal pellets in a wide spread to cause pain and damage. It was not a plasma weapon, with which she would have been more familiar, nor was it a laser, with which she was also familiar, either one of those would have easier to tend. This was bad. This was real bad, and she didn't know what to do, and she was bleeding everywhere, and she couldn't stop crying―

And to make matters worse, she heard another sound in the distance, someone was walking around in the Metro entrance.

Phoebe forced herself to stop making noise by jamming one of the leather straps from the dead woman's outfit into her mouth, and picked up the weapon. She looked it over, briefly, and understood how it worked. Why?―her head hurt again, and she ignored the question, just accepted it and worked with it.

Eventually, she was going to have to deal with that. She held the weapon to her chest, two hands on it, aimed it up, and waited for the person out in the Metro to walk by the door. She wasn't going to wait, this time, to see who it was. She didn't have any option.

The footsteps stopped, and a throat cleared. "Well," a man said. "I'm here, monster. You can kill me now." He chuckled. Phoebe felt the pain spreading, clenched her teeth on the strap, and blinked through the tears at the doorway.

Someone came into view and she pulled the trigger, not once or twice, but five times, in her panic to make sure whoever it was didn't shoot her first. The first shot impacted the door frame, and the man yelled out; the next three shots went high and spread across the ceiling, and the fifth shot would have been perfect―if the man hadn't ducked out of the doorway and disappeared after the first shot.

"Damn!" he swore, from the hallway entrance. She heard another noise, sounded like metal against metal.

"Don't you come in here!" she shrieked, spitting out the leather strap. "I will shoot you!"

"You already did!" he yelled back, angrily. "Dammit, that hurt!"

"Well―" she felt the pain catching up to her. "Well, don't come in here, again!"

It was silent for a moment. Then, he laughed a little, like he was relieved, and she frowned. "I mean it, man, don't even!"

"I take it you killed this raider here?" he asked, and she saw a piece of debris bounce down onto the dead woman.

Her legs had fallen across the doorway when Phoebe woke up from her fugue and realized she'd killed the woman. Phoebe didn't understand what a raider would necessarily be; she only knew that heathens came in a wide variety of ways, all of which were supposed to be terrible. If the woman was a raider, anyway. She didn't trust this man.

"I'll kill you, too," she said, steeling herself.

"I don't suppose you checked the drum on that shotgun, did you?" he asked, his voice floating through the doorway.

"Wha―Drum?" Phoebe didn't know what he was referring to. Just because she knew how to operate the gun―her head hurt again. "Stop confusing me! Go away!"

"I was going to go," he said, "but you won't let me walk past the door, so thank you, but no. I'm staying right here."

Phoebe's arm started to waver and she felt blood dripping through the flimsy hospital gown. "Well, you can't," she said, her voice catching the pain. "You come out where I can see you, and I'll shoot."

She registered movement and fired the weapon―but nothing came out of it. Phoebe looked down in confusion and didn't have enough time to catch that the man had moved into the doorway with his own weapon, a rifle, and was aiming it at her.

"Drop it," he said. "And any other weapons you have."

Phoebe shivered, and couldn't stop herself. "Don't―" she said, dropping the gun, raising her hands. She jerked in pain at her arm wound, and began cradling it. "Please!"

He wasn't very tall, but loomed over her like a giant, as she examined him. He had short black hair, messily arranged on his head. His skin was brownish and a lone bright blue eye stared at her above a nasty scar that ran from one mouth corner to his ear, but no beard. The other eye was covered in a black eye patch and was bleeding from a few lone pellets that had managed to grace his temple and cheek. His outfit was―some kind of animal hide, maybe. And that rifle was larger than life in her field of vision, too.

"I won't shoot you," he said. "Are you Phoebe Falconbridge?"

Her eyes widened, and she gasped, and then she fainted.

Bitch heard the shots, exploding in the distance. She turned to Dog, and gestured silently. He shrugged, put his feet up on a chair, and grumbled a little. "Didn't get enough blood today?" he rasped, from behind the black face mask he wore.

"Maybe," Bitch said. "Or maybe I just love to see you smash bastards into the ground." She was grinning behind her blastmaster helmet.

"Huh," he grumbled. She knew he heard her excitement. "I need sleep," he said.

"You were asleep five fucking minutes ago!" she said, angrily. "What the hell is wrong with you?"

"The only time I get away from you," he muttered, and she growled. "I'll kill 'em later," he added, stretching out his arms behind his head. "When you're done complaining."

"Fuck you!" she yelled, and he launched himself at her from the chair, and she laughed.

They wrestled on the ground for a moment, and Dog won―he won every time, naturally, he was stronger and bigger than her―and Bitch cowed to him. She let him win, and curled up with him on the grungy mattress, cooing in his ear.

He replied with a snore, and she scoffed.

Tony laid aside his weapon and examined the injury the girl had received. She wasn't badly wounded, but it bled copiously. He noticed her blood was strange-looking, and smelled like chemicals. If it wasn't the objective, and he was wasting his time with a junkie of some kind... He sighed. Only one way to find out.

Quickly he went through his pack and pulled out a stimpak, and jabbed her in the shoulder with it. He held the injured arm up over her heart and wiped the blood off with a bit of cloth, then watched it healing. He really hoped she hadn't passed out from blood loss. It would take more than one stimpak to replace, and he only had three left.

Pellets from the shotgun wad began to pop out of her skin and bounce off his raised thigh as he held the arm, leaning on his other knee, and he watched carefully. The shot had gone across the underside of her arm, likely when she had raised it to attack. He'd seen that kind of injury before. He shot a glance at the dead raider and then the girl, and wondered what she'd cut the dead woman up with. Looked like a rake.

She was pale, almost gray. Maybe he'd have to apply RadAway to her, too; he hoped not. He needed that for his return trip. Her hair was pale, too, but sort of blonde-gray, and she had pale gray eyes, too. It was strange how faded she looked. He noticed her long fingers twitching, as he held her arm up, and grabbed up his rifle with one hand, holding it on her just in case.

Her fingers were covered in blood, and her fingernails very sharp. He stared at them for a moment. She almost looked like she had―

She swiped at him with the other arm, catching the side of his head, pulling his eye patch off his head. He ducked back and swore, and placed his rifle directly at her heart. "Stop!" he said, and to his surprise, she did.

Her eyes grew wide. "You―" He was still holding her arm up, his knee at her side. She looked him up and down. "Are you crying?" she asked.

Tony's face twitched involuntarily, but he kept his temper in check. "No," he said, in a low voice. "You shot me in the eye." Which was true. His eye patch hung from her hand, and she lowered it slowly.

"But―"

"Listen," he said, testily. "I won't shoot you, if you stop fighting. Promise."

She looked at the rifle and he saw her eyes focus on the barrel. "Yeah, okay," she said, weakly. "My arm doesn't hurt, what happened."

Tony lowered the rifle to his side, away from her reach, and ran a finger along the underside of the arm, catching on the now-healed bumpy scars. "Stimpak."

She jerked and he reached for his gun. "Tickled," she said. "Sorry. Okay. You helped me."

Tony nodded. He snagged his eye patch, and let go of her arm. His head started to hurt from the stray shot but how he was going to check that without a mirror, he had no idea, so he ignored it. He positioned his patch and put it to rights over his eye.

"I am Phoebe," she murmured. "How did you know?"

Tony wiped blood from his head and backed away, pulling his rifle with him. He shoved the dead raider to the side and sat on his heels in front of her. "First Iron Falconbridge sent out a couple of requests for assistance," he said.

She looked shocked. "I won't―"

"Look, if you don't want to go, I won't make you," he said, surprising himself. "But your father put a very high price on your head, and you are less than five miles from Three-Mountain, so someone is bound to find you again."

"I'll shoot them, too," she muttered. Her voice didn't sound very sincere, though.

Tony forced a laugh. "I believe it," he said, and felt his face hurting. Reminded him a little too much of―he let his mouth fall into a frown. "Why don't you want to go back?"

"I―" she opened her mouth and closed it. "I don't know, exactly," she said. "Just―pain, and I can't think straight―"

Tony looked at her head. No obvious wounds. She was bloody as all get out from the shotgun wound. She was also wearing something that he honestly couldn't figure out, some kind of long shirt, maybe? Or a dress? Looked thin as paper and worthless at keeping anything off her skin.

"You hit your head, maybe?" he asked.

"Don't know," she said. "I've been getting headaches when I try to remember what happened."

He glanced to the doorway and stood, put his rifle over his shoulder, and poked his head out. "Are you alone?"

"Yes," she said. "Except for you and the dead one."

"Alright," he said, turning back. "I'm going to take the raider's clothes off so you have something better to wear than that... thing. Wherever you want to go, doesn't matter, you need armor." He crouched down over the raider and tugged on the straps of the armor.

"But I'll look like a... raider," she said, and he paused, mid-tug.

"You have a point." Tony sighed, and sat back on his heels again. "What do you want to do, Phoebe?"

"Um." She looked confused. "Why do I have to change, again?"

Tony stood and stared down at her. "Maybe you did hit your head." She wasn't making a whole lot of sense. He moved toward her.

"Don't touch me!" she said, and put her hands up again. "I―I might hurt you."

"Might?" he stared at her harder.

"I don't remember killing the... raider... there." She looked a little frightened. "I don't want to kill someone else... unless I have to."

Tony looked at her hands again, and he'd be damned if she didn't have claws. "What the hell is going on," he muttered to himself.

"Don't―" She wiped her eyes and blood smeared across her face. "Don't take me back. I can't go back there."

Tony was quiet for a moment, trying to wrap his head around her claws. "Yeah, okay," he answered, his voice strained. "But you still need clothing that is more appropriate. ...And less see through," he added, even though he hadn't noticed that until that moment. The long-shirt-thing was definitely going to have to go.

She looked down and nodded, slowly. "Okay. Okay. Um."

Tony was sure that she had hit her head somehow, and that whatever the hell was going on with her hands was something he couldn't begin to try to fathom. "Get up," he said, instead. "Wash up in the sink, and I'll get the pants off this woman, and we'll go from there."

Phoebe nodded, again, and pushed herself up off her feet, and Tony hissed a breath out in surprise. "What―" the fuck, he caught himself saying.

"What is it?" she asked.

How could she look so damn normal and still have monster feet and hands? he wondered. Good God. Her toes were much too long―like those weird fingers―and practically had talons on them. "Nothing," he said, swallowing hard. What did he get himself into? He wished Amos had been a little more forthcoming with information about Three-Mountain.

She washed her hands, shakily, in the sink, and used the cloth he gave her to wipe her face off. Tony busied himself removing the pants from the dead raider, tossing the severed hands the woman sported to the side. Once he'd sanitized the pants of raider accessories, he handed the article to her and kept his back to her while he tried to figure out if she could even wear the boots.

"Um." Phoebe tapped his shoulder and he almost jumped out of his skin. "Sorry. Um. Is this okay?"

He turned, swept his eye from her crazy feet to her hips, and jerked back when he realized she'd removed the shirt thing altogether. "Shit," he muttered, and hurriedly removed his jacket. "Don't move," he added, when she started to take a step.

Tony stripped his t-shirt off and handed it back up to her, replaced his jacket and felt the countless scars across his abdomen rubbing on the leather. It would hurt, but he'd rather not―see this strange person, half-naked, again. Wasn't right.

"Um." She pulled the boots on―without issue, thankfully―and Tony felt his fingers twitching, wondering if he could convince her to cover up her freakish hands. But he wasn't removing any more clothing, unless he was wounded.

"...Alright," he said. "Let's take a walk, alright?"