26. Idiot

Summary: Cynthia feels like an idiot and Amata isn't helping.

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Cynthia's head hurt like hell, she couldn't remember great chunks of last night—like how she'd ended up in Butch's jacket, for one—and the look Amata was giving her just now was not helping. She knew her dad had let her in here in the hopes Amata would at least throw some logic in her direction but she was not in the mood for it.

"Look, save the lecture, would you," she said before Amata could start. "I don't care."

Amata only blinked at her and Cynthia curled a little farther into her chair, waiting for the inevitable.

"Please tell me that is actually Paulie's jacket," she said at last. "And that you are not as much of an idiot as I think you are."

"Fuck you, Amata," she ground out, pulling Butch's jacket tighter around her. "Not everything in the world has to live up to your idea of perfect."

Amata only shook her head, looking so much like the Overseer Cynthia wanted to shoot something.

"There's a big gap between my idea of perfect and being a total moron, Cynthia. What in the hell were you thinking?"

"I was thinking that Butch makes me happy and I can do whatever the hell I want without other people running my life for me."

"He came with Christine!"

"So what, she has dibs now? Screw her."

Cynthia curled her legs under her and zipped the jacket up. She was so damn sick of Christine. For that matter, she was so damn sick of Amata's goddamned lectures. She was a grown woman now and she could do whatever the hell she wanted to. And if that happened to include running off with Butch every so often, then what the hell? It wasn't anyone's business. It certainly wasn't Amata's business. And funny how lots of them had played Overseer as kids, but Amata had never stopped. She still tried to run everybody's life. Still kept on with her well meaning advice and moral lectures and Cynthia wanted nothing better than just to run so far away from this goddamned place and her she'd be no more than a blur in the distance.

"You're an idiot, Cynthia," Amata said, crossing her arms. "If Deloria was the prize you make him out to be, he'd have gone with you."

"Did you ever think that maybe I knew about it beforehand?" Cynthia snapped, glaring from behind the turned up collar. "That maybe we had an agreement going because I didn't want anyone putting their goddamned nose in my business?"

Amata glared and tore a hand through her hair.

"I just don't understand how you can be so stupid, Cyn. Do you think he loves you? Hell, do you think he loves anybody but himself?"

"Why does he have to love anybody?" she snapped, glaring back from the shadowy recesses of her chair. "Why the fuck does there always have to be something more?"

And that was just it. That was the problem right there in black and white. It wasn't enough that they had fun. It wasn't enough that she could make him laugh after Ellen went on one of her binges or that Butch made her feel like she wasn't trapped without hope of escape. Apparently, that sort of thing would never be enough because that sort of thing wasn't important. A sense of humor didn't make babies, after all. A proper cuddle didn't preserve the integrity of the vault.

"You just don't understand, Amata."

"And yet it's funny how you can never explain it to me," she said, glaring. "What makes a guy hell bent on causing trouble and destroying everything my father has worked for worthwhile?"

Cynthia gaped at her.

"Your father?" she managed at last. "Your father is an egomaniacal dick-wad trying to brain control the rest of us into worshipping him. And yeah, so maybe it worked on you, but maybe the rest of us aren't that—"

"That what, Cynthia?" Amata cut in, glowering. "That stupid? Because selling your soul for a chain-smoking wannabe gangster is smart? Well, god save me from the geniuses then, because I'd sure as hell rather be brainwashed."

"Then why are you still here?" Cynthia asked, rising from the chair. "Go run back to your father and tell him how bad I've been if you're so damn angry. Hell, maybe if I'm lucky he'll kick me out of the vault."

Amata shook her head, arms crossed over her chest and Cynthia had never wanted so badly in her life to throw something at her head. She didn't get it. She'd never gotten it. Hell, she'd never tried. She'd just looked at her and thought about poor, deluded Cynthia and how much goddamned better it was to play at some kind of celibate saint while her dad tried to be God.

"You know what, Cynthia?" Amata said at last. "I've tried to be nice to you. I've tried to be a friend. But I can't do it anymore. I just can't help you. I'm done. You're too destructive."

"Sure," Cynthia snorted, hands clenching without her quite meaning them to. "Because you've got so many other friends, Amata. Because everyone in the vault is just lining up to get turned in to the Overseer for their bad habits."

Amata turned beet red from the roots of her hair to the collar of her vault suit.

"There is a difference between bad habits and forging ration coupons, you know," she ground out.

"And it's funny how Butch is nineteen and yet he doesn't get any. And that wouldn't happen to be because he called you fat last year, would it?"

"Stop it, Cynthia!" she shouted, hands balled into fists at her side. "Just stop it! Your little stories aren't cute anymore. Join the real world, would you? Butch is seventeen—just like you, just like me. You're not older than the rest of us, you didn't come down from Topside—there's nothing even left Topside. Stop with your stupid fantasies and grow up!"

Cynthia stood there, head pounding from the noise and the light and felt absurdly like laughing. There wasn't anything left up there because Amata's father said there wasn't. There weren't cities built around leftovers from the war and perpetually hungry dogs roaming the wastelands in between. There weren't men up there disfigured by radiation or roaming gangs of psychotics. There wasn't anything like that because in the beginning, Alphonse Almodovar had created the heavens and the earth and when he said "let there be light" he hadn't said anything about a fucking sun.

And it was funny in a sick, horrible way because this was it. If she wanted to stay here—if she wanted to keep her goddamned sanity—the truth of it didn't matter. The only thing that mattered was what the Overseer said. And if the Overseer said there was no such thing as sun and sky, well what did the rest of these poor deluded idiots know anyway? And if he said the food and light bulbs would never run out, they wouldn't. Because the only logic was his logic and if he hadn't okayed it first, it wasn't logic at all.

Cynthia felt her stomach twist and closed her eyes, trying not to look as green as she felt.

"Look, Amata, just go," she said without venom. "I'm tired of fighting with you. I think by now it's time to concede we're never going to see eye to eye and I don't plan on changing."

Amata shook her head, still red as anything with old anger flashing in her eyes.

"You're an idiot," she said again, turning for the door. "I just hope you realize it before you're forty."

And as Cynthia ran to the bathroom to empty her stomach for the second time that morning, she found herself wondering vaguely how nice it must be to live in such a small world, everything of any importance planned out with absolute certainty from start to finish by men who had died two hundred years ago.

And then, thinking about Butch and the way the sun would look on his hair, she wondered if they'd ever get out.