And Wolves Beneath Their Seams
Part 14
"The Weatherly has rooms," Butch tells them, down to two bottles of Nuka-cola and crumbs littering the table. "Expensive though. I know where we could swipe a mattress if you guys wanna crash here."
Sucking two-hundred year old chocolate from her thumb, V smiles.
They make an odd party—a war-battered woman, a pretty-boy barber, and an enormous ghoul—wrestling a graying twin mattress through the halls of Rivet City. They catch a few stares, but though guards pass through, they all touch fingers above their eyes in quiet respect.
One stops them to say, "Caravans are coming regular now," her heart thick in her throat. "My girl was sick, but Doc Hoff—the caravans got through. Thank you."
V does not know what to say—freezes like an old-world rabbit in the spotlight—but the guard moves on without waiting for a reply and Butch leans forward, whispering, "See—couple of big damn heroes," to break the moment.
He spends the rest of the return trip complaining about his ruined reputation until he has V smiling again, reaching around the mattress to swat him in the arm.
Family, Charon thinks, and finds himself grateful.
They set the mattress down in the near corner of the room, sharing the wall with the door and a clear line of sight. Long familiar with each other, Charon and V undress without a word, settle in with backs touching, guns near at hand. Butch rolls into bed and slaps off the lamp.
Quietly, V kicks him in the ankle. "No boots in bed," she whispers.
Charon rolls his eyes, but toes his boots off anyway. Though he cannot see her face, he feels V smile.
"Thank you," she says. Not long after, her breathing slows, evens.
It takes Charon somewhat longer—Butch shifts, kicking, mumbling, the sounds jarring and unfamiliar in the dark—but V settles him, her heat at his back a solid comfort.
Eventually, Charon sleeps, too.
He wakes hours later at a knock on the door, certain he has dreamed, but does not remember what. He smells no smoke, hears only the ship stirring around them. For once, his bones do not hurt. He feels warm and slow. Not an old battle, then. Strange.
Whoever stands outside the door knocks again. Butch groans.
"Too goddamned early for a haircut," he says. "V, you get it," and pulls a pillow over his head.
At Charon's side, eyes still closed, V frowns.
"No, fuck you," she grunts and rolls over, curling into him. Her hand flattens against his stomach. He feels her nose, cool, pressing into his shoulder.
The knocking continues, but V does not stir again. Considering the last four months, Charon is not surprised. He surprises himself, though, not wanting to get up—by wanting at all, much less something so simple as a warm bed.
But V has not slept properly in weeks, and Charon eases out of bed so as not to wake her. He rolls to his feet, scoops up his shotgun on the way, and goes to open the door.
Outside, the courier doesn't even flinch at the sight of him—a six-foot-something ghoul with a shotgun, freshly woken and pretty close to pissed. Evidentially, the man has some practice at his job.
"You're Charon, right?" he says and hands over a holotape. "Good. Message for V."
Charon takes the tape, turns it over in his hands. The casing is whole and undamaged. As far as he can discern, it has not been tampered with—no explosives or poisons—as safe as its audible contents. He nods to the courier and closes the door.
He finds V still asleep when he glances back, curled into the warm divot his body left. Quietly as he is able, Charon takes his boots from the bedside. He sits down at the table, spreads out their cloth for cleaning guns.
It will not, he thinks, be a short wait.
A few hours later, Butch wakes, bleary-eyed, hair stuck flat to his head. He looks older without the leather jacket, with circles under his eyes and his face still swollen with sleep.
"What's that?" he asks, pointing his chin at the tape on the table.
"For V," Charon says.
Butch nods. He scratches his neck and stretches, watching V. "Wow, she's really down for the count. Huh. You hungry?" he climbs out of bed, pulls on his boots without bothering to lace them. "I'll grab something."
Reaching into his pack, Charon tosses the boy one of V's bags of caps, each carefully measured to 100 each. Butch catches it neatly, opens the bag and whistles.
It is too much, but V is sleeping soundly for the first time in four months—easy in this boy's company, something like herself again—and Charon is grateful.
"Fuck, you're hungry," Butch laughs, but through the bravado Charon sees something quieter in his eyes. Despite their differences, Butch understands. "Alright, then," he says. "I'm gone," and careful not to wake V, slips from the room like a ghost.
Near evening, the two of them alone in the room, V finally wakes. She staggers bleary-eyed into the bathroom and out again, drops into a chair at the table. Without a word, Charon hands her something to eat.
"Had a dream," she tells him, cracking open the can of Cram. "Big Town."
Fingers trailing the pieces of a broken gun, Charon thinks of his own dream, hazy and gentle—the first of its kind in many years. He feels the memory of V's hand pressed flat against his stomach, her heat against his side.
Charon shrugs. He concentrates on his work, wonders if she will let him clean Never Again.
"Message for you," he tells her.
V pauses, bent spoon halfway to her lips. "From who?"
Charon shrugs again. He fixes his attention on the gun beneath his hands. Still, when V puts the tape into her Pip-boy, he cannot help but watch her, stealing glances at her face like sips of water.
Crackling, her father's voice fills the room. "Veronica, thank you. I know we've had our differences, but you risked a lot, clearing out the Jefferson Memorial—clearing out DC, if the radio can be believed—and now, thanks to you, Project Purity can finally move forward. Thank you, sweetheart. I just want you to know—"
V pulls the tape from her Pip-boy. Gently, she lays it on the table and smashes it to dust with the flat of her palm.
"Fuck you, Dad," she says, sounding almost calm. "I'm going back to bed."
Abandoning the half-eaten can of Cram, V crosses the room and drops back into the mattress. Charon waits for a moment before leaning forward, sweeping the bits of tape into the trash and away from his cleaning station. Though her back is to him, V notices. She turns, grimaces, "Sorry."
Charon shrugs. He returns to his work, hoping the remnants of her father's voice will dissipate without the tape to hold them, hoping it will not haunt her as the vault did.
Quietly, V offers, "You can explore the ship if you want. I know I'm not good company."
Charon shakes his head, mouth tight. "My place is at your side," he tells her.
V catches the admonishment, such as it is. She smiles. From the corner of his eye, he sees her shoulders ease. "Relax, Charon," she says. "I'm not sending you away. Just… You do what you want, okay? If you get bored, don't feel like you have to stay and watch me snore."
The entirety of their conversation sits uneasy in his stomach—feels too much like I owe you one—and Charon shifts in his seat, massages an old bullet wound in his thigh.
"You can… you can do that can't you?" V asks, voice low, searching. "You can make choices like that?"
Charon purses his lips. He shrugs, tries to bypass the question through his silence, but V props herself on one elbow to look at him. She does not press, only watches, her eyes on his fingers as he turns springs and triggers over in his hands. At last, somewhat against his will, Charon considers it.
"It is within my capability," he decides at last.
V nods. She curls up, carefully, on her side of the bed.
Before long, he joins her.
They don't speak. They don't need to.
They have money for their own room in Rivet City—more than enough—but Butch does not complain and V finds his proximity a comfort. One day turns into two, then three, then a week.
"He makes me feel human," she tells Charon, when Butch leaves again to do whatever it is he does with his days. "But he doesn't make me feel like I have to be."
Four months ago, fresh from salvaging the vault, Charon thinks her admittance may have bothered him. But he understands their bickering, two-headed conversations now and sees the certain sort of care Butch takes around her.
They fall into a different pattern; something easier, softer. V spends every night with her back pressed flush to his, close enough to feel her heartbeat through her skin—spends every day locked in step with him. People want to speak to her. Some offer her things; food, gifts, whatever they can spare. Others have walked her road of shells. Still others want something from her.
Charon learns to distinguish between them, to gauge V's patience by her mood. When her shoulders bow, when her fingers graze his wrist, Charon steps around her, warns any on-comers away with a heavy gaze.
Butch laughs about it at his place, over food from the cantina.
"You should hear how they talk about the two of you out there, V. Like you're not some snot-nosed kid from the vault," he says. And then, eyeing her plate. "You gonna eat that?"
V brings an arm down around her food. "What're they saying?" she asks. "And fuck yeah, I'm eating it. I'm eating yours, too, you eat any slower."
"Keep your mitts off my food, woman." Butch grins, makes a few playful jabs at her hand with his fork. "They're calling you the Saint of the Wastes. Can you believe that?"
V falters. "What about Charon?"
Butch shrugs. "What about him?" And then, stabbing a sausage from her plate, "Ha! Don't give me that look; you were killing it, not eating it."
V does not move. She holds herself like a weapon, like a trap ready to break. Insists, "What do they call Charon?"
Butch frowns. For the first time, his eyes dart away. He shrugs again. "Most people just call him Death. You know, like those apocalypse guys. You're War and he's Death."
V's shoulders bow. She stares down at her plate, fingers tight around her fork, lips pursed knife-thin. Very gently, Charon brushes her wrist.
"It is intended as an honor," he murmurs.
Butch looks between them. He senses the low danger here, bad wiring in high water, but wades in just the same. "Yeah, V. Come on, lighten up. You're out there kicking ass and taking names. People like it."
V sighs. Her fork drops. "I know."
"So what's got your panties in a bunch?"
V's eyes fall on their packs, loaded and ready beside the mattress. She looks at Charon, finds his eyes.
"We should head back to Big Town."
Charon understands they are fleeing from Rivet City, the crushing weight of Never Again suddenly too much to bear. But he follows where she leads.
He will always follow where she leads.
Camped in a defensible corner of Farragut West, Charon sits up, keeping watch. V lies beside him, spread out and staring at the ceiling, one arm draped lazily over his outstretched leg.
"If I'm War and you're Death," she says, the first she's spoken since Rivet City, "Then who are Famine and Plague?"
Charon looks down. He expects he will find her sad and distant, Never Again a sleeping monster behind her eyes. But V smiles up at him from his hip, taps a rhythm against his calf.
"Enclave?" he offers.
V hums. "Can they be both?"
Charon shrugs. Dust falls in a trickle from the ceiling—something passing aboveground, overhead. He scans the area out of habit, glances down for any sign of red on V's Pip-boy screen, but the metro remains quiet.
"I think they're Famine," V murmurs. "Maybe raiders are Plague. Slavers, too. Talon Company. It has a nice symmetry. A plague of man."
She smiles again, her eyes bright in the near dark. And looking at her, suddenly, Charon cannot imagine his life without her. Though he has known her for little more than eight months, V has become somehow necessary.
Charon swallows, overwhelmed, feeling her fingers like a fire through his armor, a pressure against his name.
V is, by his contract, his employer. But she does not treat him as any employer ever has, lying at his side in the dust of an old subway. He does not feel bound.
With her, his contract takes on an inherent beauty, a purity of intention it never had before—could never have—conceived in war, for death.
But now, she is his War. And he will fight for her until the end of days.
Charon finds the concept a comfort. A strength.
"I think we should take Wadsworth to Big Town," she says. "Unless purifiers are standard issue in Gutsy models?"
Charon changes his grip on his gun, shifts, ends up closer, his hip against her shoulder. "They are," he tells her.
"We could find another one, then. We could fix it?"
Quietly, scanning for hostiles, he agrees. V smiles.
For some time, they fall into an easy silence. Until, at last, V murmurs, "Hey, Charon? Proud of you."
Charon feels his chest constrict. He swallows, rolls his shoulders to loosen the cramping muscles, but the fist around his heart will not unclench.
He does not know what to say, but when he looks down, he finds V already slipped into an unsteady doze.
Proud of him.
Proud of him.
Very carefully, he reaches down and brushes the hair from her face.
V smiles in her sleep.
It is enough.