By the fourth day without sleep, Ruby's hallucinations had come back – she heard voices, ghost ordinances, Shaun crying from some unreachable place, and saw little black things scurrying all around around. She began to rely on the dog, constantly keeping him in arms reach so she could catch an ear swivel or see his dousing rod of a hound nose pointing at anything. Despite often getting underfoot, he had become a great treasure to her; a reminder that a way to survive and thrive existed here. If a dog, especially a working breed cultivated to serve, could carve out a space in this hellish environment, it was an even greater miracle that after countless generations they remained unchanged from the long forgotten time of posh kennels and selective breeding. It gave her almost paralyzing hope.

Meanwhile her head and body ached incessantly and she was perpetually on the edge of puking her guts out. These drugs were the fucking tits though. She had no concept of how they were made, perhaps it involved quantum mechanics or some other wizardry. They had the power to rebuild her threadbare DNA in perfect sequence so that every cell in her body basically got a hard restart without the need for immediate termination. A brilliant set of concoctions that would have led to curing all disease and even immortality if not for the war.

She was needing to pop, huff and shoot up almost hourly to keep herself on her feet and looking forward. She couldn't walk ten feet with Strong's big dumb ass stomping along without a care in the goddamned world. Every bloodthirsty shit bag within earshot would come down on them with damn near suicidal prejudice. Then Strong would trumpet a war cry and blindly sprint right out toward them. Sometimes he would step on a frag mine and he'd be down until the fight was over. Then the dog would get over excited and take off in another random direction. Ruby was then left to dive for cover and frantically shoot at every window, door and crack in every building for enemies that she couldn't see or risk getting hit with a crippling injury. This wasted a lot of ammunition, as well as first aid because she always got shot at least three times, and Dogmeat always got shot at least once and kept getting pistol whipped hanging off of raiders' arms. Then after it was all over, he would laugh at her for being weak and scared and give her shit about wasting what was left of her precious medicines on the dog instead of just putting him out of his misery and eating him. Ruby was never one to take sass from anyone anyhow, but since she made a promise not to stun baton him again, she was left with just yelling at him about how it wouldn't kill him to walk more carefully every now and again.

"HA! Only weakling humans need sneak!" Strong proclaimed upon her suggestion.

"Excuse me, but how else do you think I popped all twenty of your brothers' heads back at the tower?!" She demanded, chest out, hands on her hips and using her courtroom voice.

"...use gun?" Strong blinked at her, then off in to space, creasing his brow with the effort of thinking.

"Oh yeah, that's right. You're a fucking retarded-ass trash monster! It's really no wonder everything under the sun gets the drop on you!"

"Why sun drop on Strong?" He squinted up at it.

"God DAMMIT! That's it! I'm done!" she threw up her hands and turned to leave him.

"Done with what?"

"You can take your milk of human kindness and shove it up your ass!" she kept walking.

"Why should Strong put milk in ass?" Strong followed her. "That how to drink it? Humans put things in butts alot..."

Needless to say, she started drinking raider booze to try and take the edge off.

By day six she had looted a comic book store and found herself a double headed steel ax that felt good in the hands. It felt even better to hack those fucking bitch ghouls to bits with it, so she sharpened it and leapt at any and every opportunity to fucking murder anything else that got in her way. Those people that took her baby were fucking dead. If it didn't move right it was fucking dead. Dogmeat stuck with her because he was a good boy, and Strong strangely gave her less trouble after seeing her ignore getting shot in the stomach and cleave a man's skull like a melon.

Using words to argue with Strong had turned out to be a waste of time. She instead learned where his tender spots were in order to get his attention. He wasn't too different from a human being; his sides, in particular the ribs just under his arms had slightly thinner skin, so she could jab him there with two fingers and he would feel it. She gathered from the arrangement of his armor that his lower abs and groin were probably vulnerable as well. He peed standing up, so there had to be some gonads under there. If only the opportunity to test the effectiveness of a swift kick would present itself.

She came to expect every building and sinkhole to be lousy with some kind of rabid animal or poisonous insect, or a cluster of glowing zombies, or a crazed robot left over from the war, or fucking anything at this point. Whenever Dogmeat's ears slicked back, or he pointed, she knew to duck down because something was there. If he growled it was an enemy, if not, he had found something else. Strong as it turned out had pretty sharp senses as well, but he tended to focus them more for the purpose of killing and looting than avoiding danger. He wasn't bothered by radiation or disease, and most enemies didn't stand a chance against him. But he constantly complained about hunger. He absolutely had to eat every four hours and was never satisfied with anything smaller than a person. He would eat an entire person, bones and all if there was just the one. It must have been the price he paid for being able to shake off bullet wounds in minutes.

When it came to sniper fire, Ruby could triangulate their hiding places based on the patterning of their rounds on Strong's body. Once locked on, she would lob a grenade in that direction and run off from the group in order to flank them. The explosion usually made quick work of them, but she always had to clear the area herself just in case it didn't. Magnum rounds were hard to come by, so they usually got a shotgun shell to the face, a knife in the gut, or got hacked up with an ax if she was worked up enough.

Once fully saturated in the blood of her enemies, Ruby would return to her team and give dogmeat a belly rub for being so sharp. Then she would punch the fuck out of Strong's kidneys with the butt of her shotgun, or drop him by kicking in the back of his knee for starting the whole thing and making her finish it again. Soon Strong learned never to turn his back on her again.

Clearing and then taking their breaks in raider camps became the regular routine. They would pile the bodies up in the center, then sort the loot. They occasionally had something useful, but the pickings seemed to get slimmer as time went on. In fact, she recognized many of the items as her own discard. For people that thought they were big and bad, they sure lacked initiative. Ruby would lounge in one of their decaying couches or lawn chairs and read their porno while Strong ate their bodies and bundled up what he couldn't finish for later. The pre-war girly mags were too crumbly and brown to read, so she ended up mostly looking at hand drawn erotica that was entertaining purely out of it's absurdity. They were crudely drawn and depicted gang rapes and torture mostly, but they didn't lack charm in a twisted way. She still fought the urge to sleep, forever expecting Strong to get bored and forget about their agreements at any time.

Ruby was shaken out of a harsh buzzing blackness by a loud clang. Then brought back to the physical plane by a booming gravely voice.
"Strong hungry too! Save some for Strong!"

She was kneeling on the groin of a young man, pinning him on his back while he screamed in agony for her hands were elbow deep in his guts. She tasted blood in her mouth and felt the wetness of it all over her face. Her eyes met those of her victim, helplessly pleading her with unintelligible gurgles. This wasn't a faceless enemy in a gas mask. He was a lost and scared human being. Like that pimply high school kid that bagged her groceries at the market. The absence of any sound aside from the boy's tormented spluttering started buzzing in her head, then came the disembodied whispers again.
"Sure, Strong." Finally she took out her kabar and gave that kid a small amount of dignity by plunging the six inch blade through his forehead. Then she dismounted her victim and stood up. She saw that her ax was lying a few feet away on a metal platform and went for it, leaving the meat for Strong to enjoy without guilt.

She numbly stumbled around the smoke filled manufacturing complex for a short while following her path of destruction. The dingy fire-lit rooms were lined in fresh, bright red spatters of viscera and peppered with bullet holes. Limp and shredded bodies lie scattered on the floor and hanging from catwalks. She tried to remember where she was and what had transpired. From the looks of it it was an auto factory that was home to a very large raider gang. And yes, they were causing trouble for some newly recruited settlers just to the north of here. Thank god for that pip boy, as it was keeping her on task like a second brain that wasn't affected by sleepless nights, drugs and alcohol. Although it did annoy her to find that she had side-tracked a half day's walk from the detective's last known location. She caught a glint of reflective surface walking past a trash fire and turned to see a reflection of herself in a dusty plexiglass window. She stopped to look closer, realizing that she hadn't looked at herself since before she was frozen. Her chocolate brown skin and blue vault suit looked the same color of flat pitch save for the glistening of blood and sweat on her face and hands. Removing her aviators for a better look, she blinked initially in the flickering firelight. Leaning into the reflection she noticed an obvious banding of lighter color around her eyes where the glasses had been. She lifted her cover and discovered a similar happenstance underneath; the filth stopped just short of her hairline, outlining where the cap had been. She set out to find water.

She stepped out into a clear day, and found a pond near the industrial waste runoff that ran dry hundreds of years ago. She didn't care if it was still polluted, everything was fucking polluted. She unfastened her armor piece by piece and then unzipped her vault suit. Once completely naked, she took a bar of soap out of her pack and carried her wadded up clothing with her into the water. If their were any thieving, raping raiders around, she was quite confident that they were all lying on the ground rotting and being eaten.

The water was cold but it felt heavenly after days in the heat and dust. She took her time scrubbing off and dunking herself, rinsing plumes of soap and dirt into the water upon rising out again. She threw her unders over her shoulder and started scrubbing her vaultsuit. By the time she had just started to see blue again, the dog found her and jumped right in, splashing her whole upper body with that cold water, causing her to reflexively suck in a loud gasp.

"You dirty son of a bitch!" she smiled as he paddled around in the waist deep water. "Come here! Lemme get some soap on you!" She playfully grabbed him and started scrubbing his fur with that soap. He returned the attention with earnest licking of her face. When she was getting in between his scraped up little dog toes, she noticed Strong treading heavily up to the shore out of the corner of her eye. She turned her head toward him, squinting tightly from the soapy water and glinting sunlight, forgetting that she was still in the buff.

"Everything okay, Strong?" She seriously wondered why he wasn't still looting the place.

"What human doing?" He cocked his head back slightly as if in disgust.

"I'm taking a bath. Care to join?" she knew he didn't and cared not to see him undressed anyway, but asking was the polite thing to do.

"Humans take bath, not Super mutants." Strong scoffed, looking at her and then the edge of the pond with some reservation.

"Why? You guys don't like water?"

"Water for drinking." He frowned even harder than usual and turned to leave.

"You're scared of the water, aren't you." Ruby grinned.

"Strong not scared of anything!" he spun back and shouted squarely in her direction.

"Okay! I believe you." Ruby shrugged. Now that her face was starting to relax, she noticed that Strong was a little wobbly and clamping a wound on his upper arm that seemed to be deeper than the usual spattering of bullet wounds on the rest of his body. Blood was spurting through his fingers; the heavy flow of red ran down that hanging arm and poured steadily onto the dirt at this feet. She had seen him hit with just about everything from bullets to saw-blades, but no matter how deep the would was, he always ignored it completely. This must have been the closest he'd ever been to loosing a limb.

"Hey, what happened to your arm?" She fished her clothing out of the water and started wading towards him.

"Strong get in the way." He eyed her suspiciously as she came out of the water and reached for him, but did nothing to stop her. Dog meat followed her to the shore and shook himself dry. Strong recoiled from the water spraying him in the face and nearly lost his balance just as she had come within arm's reach. She reflexively pushed back on him. For the split second it took for Strong to right himself, she felt his entire weight on her and feared being crushed to death.

Strong shook his head and blinked a few times while she braved his swaying bulk and moved around to his arm. His hide was wet with sweat and cool to the touch and that hot blood was rhythmically pumping out with his heartbeat. She coaxed his clamped fingers away and his arm fell open, spilling a pint of blood onto her in that instant. It was a clean, broad slice through Strong's skin, fat and muscle all the way down to the chipped bone like a spiral cut ham. She was taken aback by the severity of the injury even though she had inflicted similar, if not worse, on others. Then it dawned on her that she had done this to him. She couldn't remember anything but she was almost certain of it. Her chest tightened with guilt, knowing that this whole time he had never given her more than a deep bruise even though he was more than capable of tearing her limb from limb. Meanwhile, he was loosing gallons of blood and he couldn't move that arm, but he wrote it off as being his own fault and was making a conscious effort to ignore it the way he ignored all his injuries.

"I- ... Let me help you with this!" she backed away momentarily to grab a stimpak. She rummaged around in her supplies until she found what she was looking for.

"Why human help Strong? Strong not human!" Strong looked on as Ruby returned with a stimpak and jabbed him hard on the shoulder with it.

"I help everyone Strong." She pressed the open wound together as best she could while it healed. "I have a problem."

"Hrmmmm..." Strong nodded thoughtfully.

They made camp for the night just outside the factory. Strong plucked a dead tree from the hardened ground for a bonfire. The tall flames lit up a large expanse of the clearing and provided good heat to dry Ruby's vault suit and unders as they lay spread flatly on a steel drum. Evidently female nudity was nothing new or particularly enticing to Strong, he tolerated her the same as always and never gave her a second look. It was strangely liberating to be bare skinned in the open air without judgement. She laid out her sleeping bag and sat cross legged on it while she roasted her dinner on a stick over the burning wood fire. In the warmth of it all she was finding it harder than ever to fight sleep.

Properly cooked, Ruby found that human flesh reminded her of a shoulder cut pork steak. She felt more than guilty for enjoying it. The dog enjoyed it too, but he was a dumb dog and he treated everything she gave him like it was mana from heaven. Strong was already on his third body, enjoying the tender innards after Ruby had insisted that no, she didn't want any. Not liking the taste of human waste aside, Strong was obviously starving.

"Strong learn new word – respect." He told her between chomps.

"Yeah?" Ruby was prepared for him to not know what respect actually meant. "Where from?"

"You say to Strong. And to other humans."

"Oh..." Ruby was prepared for the worst. "Yeah."

"You say 'I ay-no bitch! How bout some mu-tha-fuckin respect?' Then kill!" He crudely retold the incidence with his hands, first pointing forcefully upward as she must have and then pounded his chest on that last part. Then he hunched back down to meet Ruby's stunned face at her level.

"Human good fighter. Almost as good as super mutant! Strong give mu-tha-fuckin respect." Strong's normally hard and beady eyes now looked at her almost the same way the dog did.

"That's uh... thank you Strong." Ruby started choking up, not from the joy of being accepted, but from shame. "I respect you too."

"Of course. Strong is strong!"

"Yeah..."

He went back to eating and she looked at the ground in silence, unsure of how she felt. She stared into the flames, numbly weighing the pros and cons of being worthy of a super mutant's respect.

"Hope we find milk of human kindness soon."

Ruby thought that she could just keep letting him believe that bullshit indefinitely, but some part of her knew that she was in too deep to keep on. She damned her woman's heart.

"Strong, now that we're friends, I think it's time I set you straight."

"What is not straight on Strong, human?"

She took a deep breath. "About the milk of human kindness... It's not something that you can find and drink."

"What?" Strong's eyes widened and he froze, which universally indicated that a bubble had been burst. "But Mac Beth say milk make humans stronger than super mutants! Why can't Strong drink milk?!" he lunged forward angrily. Dog meat instantly flattened his body as much as he could. Ruby balled up and almost peed.

"I-i-it's not like that, Strong! It's a figure of speech! Humans can't drink it either! I swear!"

"What is 'fig-yer of speech?' Strong confused." His heated breathing started to slow.

"A figure of speech is words that mean something else. And Macbeth isn't real either. He's just a made up story, Strong."

"Made up?" Strong scratched his head and furrowed his brow, still eyeing Ruby with confusion that could turn to homicidal anger any second. "What are straight words, human? Tell Strong now!"

Ruby took a second to get her wits about her. Apparently the very concept of fiction was beyond Strong's comprehension. She nervously continued, hoping to god that she could break it down far enough.

"Humans made up the story of Macbeth to show that being greedy will kill all of us eventually. When all you do is just kill and take just for yourself and no one else, ... before you know it, all your friends are dead and all you have left is enemies."

"Strong not care. Smash everything."

"Yeah, but then when everything's all gone, what will you eat?"

"..." Strong blinked dumbly as though the atrophied synapses in his brain were suddenly being used at full capacity. After some three minutes or so, Ruby began to suspect he was having a stroke.

"Strong?"

"Tell Strong about milk. What are straight words?"

"Well, being full of the milk of human kindness means that you have compassion for others."

"Comp-ash-hun?" Strong's look of angered confusion now progressed to a strange state of contemplation as he let that sink in.

"That's when you see someone suffering and you want to help them."

Strong looked at her suspiciously as though she were talking about butt stuff again.

"What?" Ruby asked cautiously.

"Only weak suffer! Weak should die!" he insisted furiously, pounding his fist on his knee.

"So you shouldn't have shared with me?! And I suppose I shouldn't have helped you either?!" Ruby matched his volume angrily. Her fear of being beaten to death eclipsed by her temper.

Strong deflated and stared at her. He looked away from her toward the ground and palmed the back of his head as though he were getting a headache.

Dogmeat sat off to the side between the two of them at full, anxious attention. When Ruby finally noticed him, his nose jerked away from Strong and pointed squarely at her, his round brown dog eyes nervously looking both away and back in rapid succession, waiting for her to do anything else besides look at him. But she was petrified.

"When Strong help human... " Strong finally broke the silence, supposedly stringing everything together in his head. "... and human help Strong... " She watched him absently brushing his fingers over the fresh scab on his arm. "That was milk of human kindness?" He looked up at her for an answer.

"Yes, Strong."

"STRONG HAVE HUMAN KINDNESS!" Strong abruptly shot up and roared into the night sky as if he had just ripped the head off a death-claw, the explosion of sound and movement jolting Ruby and the dog. "STRONG SHARE WITH BROTHERS!"

While he triumphantly stomped away from her, she sighed in relief, feeling more drained than she had ever been in her life. She drearily watched Dog meat playfully yip and hop around Strong's legs until she finally dropped. She enjoyed the first deep sleep since she first stepped out of that cryo-pod almost two weeks ago.

She dreamed of Nathan.