9. Hide

Summary: Butch finds a place of his own and a person to share it with.

—0—

Butch was so goddamned tired of this shit. It was one of those—whatchacallits—endless cycle things Brotch talked about. Every goddamned month she spent half the fucking coupons on vodka and beer and Butch was sick of peeling her up off the floor. He needed a place of his own and he needed it now—Overseer or no fucking Overseer. There was no way in hell he was sleeping in that shit hole any more. He was too goddamned tired of waking up to broken glass first thing in the morning.

Ducking into the shadows with his back against the wall, Butch glanced down at his Pip-boy. A few green dots were meandering around the common room, a few more scattered through the apartments. The blue dot he'd set to track Cynthia's Pip-boy showed her still sleeping—sprawled out in the middle of her room.

Butch frowned and let his arm fall. It wasn't like he needed her help or anything. He didn't need anyone. He'd find the coolest damn hide-out anyone had ever seen and it'd be all his. No worries, no nothing. Just him and a bottle of whisky and a big-ass apartment all to himself.

Except he knew it wouldn't be any kind of hide-out without Cynthia there to paint faces on the walls and crack bad jokes about his taste in mattresses, so he'd just have to go back and get her as soon as he found a really good one. Or—better yet—as soon as he got it all set up. She thought she was just the best damn thing ever with her secret shooting range—and hell, so maybe she was—but he'd have his own place with a fridge and a bed and all kinds of shit. Maybe he'd even rig up something for them to listen to her mom's old records on. And they could just hang out—no parents, no rules, no worrying about Stanley dropping in at the wrong time, no nothing.

It'd be perfect.

Easing around the corner to watch the camera, Butch waited for it to turn away before sprinting down the hall towards the restricted hallway. The camera was one of the old creaky ones and the door was at a sort of angle, so he had exactly thirty two seconds to pick the lock on the door before he'd be spotted. He'd been practicing on the door into the shooting range for almost a week now and he'd gotten his time down to eighteen seconds—enough time to pick the lock and have the door closed before the camera swung around.

But just in case, Butch slipped a piece of wadded up gum into the camera's gears as he darted past. It wouldn't stop the camera from moving—he didn't want to catch the Overseer's attention—but it would slow the damn thing down some.

Screwdriver already in hand, he grabbed a handful of his mother's bobby pins from his pocket and set to work on the door. Broke one as soon as it hit the lock his hands were shaking so bad. Shoved the broken halves back into his pocket and tried again, hearing the camera click on its hinges as the gum caught in the gears.

"Shit," he hissed to himself, wedging the screwdriver farther into the lock as the second pin broke. The camera had finally reached the end of its rotation, the clicking pausing for a minute as it took a long shot of the hall before it started to turn.

Butch shoved another pin into the lock, torqued it, pulled the screwdriver just so and flew inside as the door ground open.

And then he stayed plastered against an inside wall for a good three minutes after, breathing hard and listening as outside the camera clicked towards where he'd been the moment before and counting the broken pins in his pocket. The Overseer couldn't be looking at all of the cameras all of the time, but he was enough of an asshole to notice something like half a bobby pin five feet away on a grainy camera image.

He'd done it, he realized when the adrenaline faded. He'd fucking done it. Butch grinned and pumped a fist in the air, suppressing a whoop of sheer triumph. They didn't think he was smart enough to pull something like this off. Nobody could beat the Overseer's damn cameras and even if there was somebody, it certainly wasn't Butch Deloria. But he'd showed them. He'd gone and gotten in a section of the vault that nobody had seen for probably fifty years and it was all fucking his.

Cynthia was gonna be so excited.

Still grinning, Butch strode down the hallway like the king of everything, looking into the doors as he passed. There was a bathroom with toilets that still worked when he turned the water on. Probably a shower too, but he knew better than to risk that. Stanley knew where every toilet flushed and exactly how much water each used. He'd know where they were and he'd make up a good excuse for the extra water filtration so nobody went looking but there was no way he could cover up a whole shower's worth of water.

Most of the rooms he found were pretty much empty. There was no reason to waste perfectly good supplies, after all. But he found a computer in one room that looked like it might work again with a few parts and fan that worked just fine if you didn't mind the bent blade. In what had probably been some kid's room, he found a bed with a metal frame that had broken through the middle, punching holes through the mattress.

He took it with him, dragging it down the hallway as he peered inside room after room, looking for another one. He was in the last room when he finally found it—an adult sized mattress leaned up against the wall on a pile of shit with one corner burned off.

Butch struggled out of the room with it and leaned it and the kid's mattress up against the wall, throwing his jacket over one of them before peeling off the top half of his jumpsuit. It was hot back here. They must have turned the air filtration off or something to save resources like the Overseer was always going on about.

Well, fuck them, Butch decided with a grin, checking his Pip-boy again. He knew he should probably turn it off—keep people from tracking him down—but he wanted to see if Cynthia was up.

Not yet. And judging by the time he had another hour or so before she even started twitching. Perfect. By the time she woke up, he'd have this place so fucking awesome she'd want to marry him.

*

Cynthia blinked, peering out at the hallucination from under her nice warm pile of blankets. She'd been having a wonderful dream. It hadn't made a whole hell of a lot of sense, but then, most of her dreams didn't. One time she'd even had a dream about Amata turning into Grognak the Barbarian and breaking out of the vault. That dream, however, made slightly more sense to her now than this one.

"Well, you gonna get up or not?" Hallucination-Butch prodded her, dirty faced and grinning. "I gotta show you something."

Cynthia blinked again, staring at him and trying to align what she knew of Butch with this hallucination.

Butch was not a complete idiot. He knew her dad didn't like him the least little bit. He also knew that should her dad happen to stop by to find Butch hovering over his scantily clad daughter's bed that there would be serious hell to pay, the majority of which would be painful, in secret and without the Overseer's consent.

And yet here he was, standing in the middle of her room with dirt streaked across his face and arms, half dressed and grinning like an idiot. Stuff of dreams, yes. Under normal circumstances, Cynthia would have been quite happy to stare at him all day. But normal circumstances would have put her father on the whole other side of the vault and her in more than a thin, faded t-shirt with a tendency to ride up.

"Are you crazy?" she managed, her sleep soggy brain still a little slow firing up the speech centers. "What time is it?"

"Almost noon, Lab Rat. Com'on. You wanna see it or not?"

"S'not almost noon, you liar. If it was almost noon, I'd be hungry." She glared at him, or would have had her eyes not closed on her. "Fuck off."

For a moment there was silence.

There was also a breeze.

Cynthia groped for her blanket without opening her eyes and found only Butch's knee where he balanced on the edge of the bed.

"Come on, would you?" he said and his voice sounded a little… thicker than usual. "You'll love it."

Cynthia opened her eyes to find him staring down at her and blushed, shoving him off the bed with as much force as she could manage first thing in the morning.

"Go find me breakfast, you pervert," she laughed. "I'm going to get dressed. And if dad comes home and asks you what you're doing to his daughter—run away."

Butch stopped halfway to the door and turned.

"Tunnel Snakes never run."

"Out, Butch!"

He laughed and winked at her, opening the door.

"Whatever you say, baby."

*

The look on her face was just like he imagined it. Butch grinned, watching her stare at the room in total awe, taking it all in. The mattresses weren't the same height, but he thought he'd done a pretty good job covering that up with a few strategic pillows and a pile of sheets. The desk on the far wall looked pretty good too. The top was barely even dented at all and the computer covered the worst of the scarring.

"It's not really done yet, you know," he told her. "I thought I'd rig up something to play your mom's old records on, you know? Maybe even some shelves for our shit."

Cynthia blinked.

"This is… ours?"

"Well, yeah." He grinned a little wider, resisting the urge to squirm like a kid in the spotlight. "You let me come shooting with you, so I figure it's okay if you hang out here. If you want to, I mean. Just don't tell anyone."

"You gonna bring your Tunnel Snakes here?"

"Naw." He shrugged, still grinning. "You know Mack can't keep his big mouth shut. Why ruin a good thing?"

And suddenly she was staring at him like he was the best goddamned thing she'd ever seen and Butch knew his ears were bright red. Nobody'd ever looked at him like that before—like he was the only thing in the whole world worth a damn.

"You, Butch," she told him, "are a fucking saint."

He turned to her, meaning to say something clever and charming but the words died on his lips at the look in her eyes. And when she leaned in he was ready for it, pulling her closer with one hand on her hip and the other in her hair. And they were kissing—honest to god kissing—lips and tongues and teeth in all the wrong places, but it was her and it was him. And everything in the world felt like it had been leading up to this point and Butch realized somewhere between the first kiss and the third that he had never been happier.