Goodneighbor was, in Hazel's opinion, the worst place in the Commonwealth.

She'd only been there a few times before—once, when she'd first joined the Railroad, and a second time when she needed to eliminate a threat to the Railroad. She considered herself lucky that she had remembered to pack the disguises on their way out of Sanctuary; the ghouls in Goodneighbor had long memories.

It had been a few days since the battle at Sanctuary, and Owen and Hazel had managed to sneak out to Goodneighbor without too much incident—other than a Mister Gutsy that Owen had somehow talked into exploding by repeating everything it said.

Hazel was almost more on edge because of the peaceable nature of their journey than if they'd run into trouble every hour. She'd expected there to be a thick crowd of Gunners near Goodneighbor, since they'd always crowded near the easy-access-chem-dealing town. But they hadn't come across a single Gunner, not to mention any Railroad agents.

It was times like these that Hazel wished she still had access to a Railroad radio, or even just a dead drop. She longed to know what was happening—not just because of her father, but because she wanted to know if the Gunners had attacked any more settlements or safehouses.

"How do I look?" Owen asked her, emerging from around the side of the mailbox they'd used for privacy as they'd changed.

Hazel wrestled down the urge to say, handsome with a stubborn tenacity. He did not look handsome. He looked…

"Adequate," Hazel told him, analyzing his costume (in a purely professional manner, of course).

Owen was wearing simple suspenders and slacks, but with a green woolen cap. Most triggermen in Goodneighbor wore something similar, so he wouldn't be too out of place. She found her desire to brush the one lock of hair that escaped from under his beanie immeasurably frustrating. Her hormones were driving her insane.

She, on the other hand, wore a simple scavenger outfit, so she'd look like another Commonwealth prospector looking to resupply. Both of their normal, more comfortable clothes were hidden in their bags. They were just outside the entrance to Goodneighbor, and Hazel found herself looking around in a bit of a paranoid manner.

"Put this on," Hazel told Owen, tossing him a green bandana.

If she was being a little terse, well…good. She couldn't risk another incident like the one in Sanctuary or the DC cache messing with her sensibilities.

"You got it, boss." Owen pulled the bandana over his face as ordered, and she could feel his eyes watching her even as he pulled on his goggles.

Hazel shook her head to clear her thoughts and pulled on her own bandana and sunglasses. She needed to get a grip, or her father was doomed.

"The Gunners are sometimes allowed in Goodneighbor," she told her partner, "so long as they don't cause trouble. As long as we keep our head down, we should be fine."

Owen nodded. "Where are we going, again?"

Hazel frowned behind her bandana. She might as well tell him.

"We're going to see Doctor Amala," she said. "The woman who wiped your memories."

x x x

"You want me to what?" Amala demanded.

Hazel winced. Amala had always been…abrasive. It seemed that the past several years, and old age, had not mellowed her out a bit.

She was an older Asian woman with a fair amount of gray in her hair. She had started wearing reading glasses in her old age, though her hands still looked plenty steady for a doctor. Good. They'd need to be.

They were sitting in the basement of the Memory Den. Well, Hazel and Amala were sitting on the small red couch near the wall. Owen was pacing up and down the room and kept glancing at the memory lounger in the room with something close to animosity.

"We need you to hook find the tracker in Owen and…disable it." Hazel figured that Owen would not appreciate the phrase "cut it out."

Amala was already shaking her head. "Even if I knew where it was, I wouldn't do it. It's too risky."

"But—" Hazel started, feeling her eye twitch.

"Think of it this way," Owen suddenly said, stopping his pacing to turn around and stare right at the doctor. "Either you get this tracker out of me and disable it, or I'll stay right here until the Gunners come knocking on your door."

Amala and Hazel both stared at him. Hazel, for one, wasn't expecting such a bold statement from him, but she guessed that being so close to a memory lounger probably put him on edge.

Amala looked him over. "I remember you now. Q1-91. The one—"

"Are you going to do it or not?" Hazel interrupted, feeling her heart jump out of her chest with how close the doctor came to revealing the truth.

Amala glared at her, then at Owen. Then:

"Fine. Owen, is it? Take off your shirt."

Five minutes later, Owen was sitting shirtless on a table, watching Doctor Amala warily. He made no attempt to hide his dislike of doctors or surgical procedures, but Amala ignored him.

Hazel, on the other hand, was having a harder time. She'd seen Owen shirtless before, but it was when half of his torso had been covered in bandages. She swallowed and looked up at the ceiling so that the dizzy feeling she got when she looked at him would go away. This was making her angry.

Amala held a geiger counter up to Owen's chest and hmmed.

"What's that for?" Owen asked, not even bothering to hide the wariness in his voice.

"Institute trackers give off a slight radioactive signal," Amala replied in a matter-of-fact voice.

"They what?"

"Owen," Hazel said, forcing herself to look at him and keep her attraction to him off of her face, "it'll be fine. Amala has done this before. You're in good hands."

Owen looked at her, swallowed, and then relaxed as Amala scanned him with the geiger counter.

After a few minutes of tense silence, Amala's frown deepened. She looked up at Owen with confusion on her face.

"Have you soaked up any rads recently?"

Owen grimaced. "Yeah." Then, to Hazel, "I fell in the creek below the bridge."

Hazel covered her face with her hand, more to hide her growing concern for her careless companion than anything else. "Moron." She knew he'd fallen, but she'd forgotten just how soaked with rads the creek was.

He smiled at her, but Amala rolled her eyes.

"Well, I can't find the tracker with all the radiation in your skin, and I don't have any rad-aways on hand." She shook her head. "That's all I can do for you."

"Wait," Hazel said. "What if you hook Owen up to one of these Memory Loungers? Surely, he must have a memory of being implanted with the tracker somewhere in his head."

Before Owen could protest, Amala did. "Impossible. Any memories of his synth life would be impossible to find."

Owen and Hazel shared a look. His synth memories were doing a really good job of breaking to the surface, but Amala didn't know that.

Owen finally cursed, rubbed his face, and said, "Not exactly."

It took a few minutes to explain the entirety of Owen's situation to Amala, but once they were finished, Hazel could see the fire of curiosity in the scientist's eyes.

"I might be able to do it," she said, seemingly talking to herself. "If I can bypass the secondary memories…"

"What's the risk?" Hazel asked. There always was one, where memories were involved. The story of her father diving into the assassin Kellogg's mind gave her nightmares as a child, and sometimes it still did. She didn't want something like that to happen to Owen, regardless of her complicated feelings regarding him.

Er. Not that she had any, of course…

Amala thought about that for a moment, then shook her head. "For a minimal procedure like this, the risk should be nominal."

Hazel looked at Owen, who was viewing the memory lounger apprehensively. Clearly, he was not a fan.

"Owen," she said, drawing his attention to her despite the fact that she knew very well he was still a shirtless distraction to her. He sent her a nervous smile, and she nodded levelly at him. "It will fine. I'll be right here the whole time."

He took a breath and nodded. Then, to Amala: "Do it."

x x x

Being hooked up to a memory lounger was a very strange experience. While the thing he was lying in was very comfortable, with all of its cushions, the experience itself was not. He couldn't help thinking about what would happen if something went wrong. Would it fry his brain? Would he forget the life he had now?

"Are you ready?" Amala asked him.

Owen wanted to say no, but instead he nodded. As Amala turned back to her computer, Hazel approached him.

"You'll be fine," she said.

"How do you know?" he asked.

Hazel sent him a small smile that he rather liked on her face. "Plenty of other synths have been in these things without too much consequence, remember?"

"Yeah, but none of them have two different lives in their heads," Owen pointed out.

Hazel sighed. "Just…trust me, all right? I trust Doc Amala, and if anything goes wrong I'll make her pull you out of there right away, okay?"

Owen thought about that for a second. Trust Hazel. He could do that—after everything that had happened, she had earned his trust. And his heart. In fact, she was one of the few people (if not the only person) he trusted implicitly. He nodded at her. She patted his knee comfortingly before backing up and looking at Amala.

"Is it ready?"

"Yes." Amala turned in her spinning office chair to look at Owen. "This will be completely painless. Just sit back, relax, and let your brain do all the work."

Owen wasn't quite sure how to do that, but he agreed. He sat back in the memory lounger, entwining his fingers together in his lap. He could do this. It was just a memory, right?

He almost lost his nerve as the glass top started to descend, but then he looked at Hazel, and relaxed. Everything would be fine. All he had to do was—

That screen. It read PLEASE STAND BY in big letters, and Owen knew he'd seen it before. In another life, it seemed.

The next thing he knew, he was in a memory.

"Just sit still, Q1, and this will all be over soon," the scientist promised.

Q1 scoffed. The SRB scientists always made promises like that, and they were almost never true. Not that it mattered. Q1 was a trained Institute synth; he could handle anything the Commonwealth could throw at him, which meant he was more than capable of standing up to a simple shot.

So he rolled up his sleeve and stared at a Courser across the room. As far as he knew, the Coursers had never gotten tracker shots. Why must he?

Because you have a mission from Father, he reminded himself. Nothing was more important.

Q1 didn't even wince as the SRB scientist injected the tracker into his left bicep. He was well trained to deal with pain.

"That's it!" the scientist said. "You're all done."

Q1-91 stood. "I have a mission to perform. Please remove yourself from my path."

"Er…right."

Owen woke from the memory with a gasp, feeling as if he were going to vomit. His body was trembling all over, and the moment the glass pod lifted, he rolled out of the memory lounger and onto the ground. His costume was soaked through with sweat.

"Owen?" a voice said. A moment later, hands lifted him to his feet and stabilized him by holding his arms tight. Hazel's face swam before him "Oh my God, Owen? Are you all right?"

Owen had just enough sense to shake his head no, he was not all right, before Hazel grabbed his hand and led him to the couch—something that, under normal circumstances, would have made his heart leap for joy. He was too out of it to notice. He barely even noticed the difference between standing and sitting on the cushioned couch.

"It was like I was really there." It took him a second to realize that he was the one speaking. "I could…I could feel what it was like…to be a synth, a programmed synth…"

"Hey," Hazel said, her voice soft but drenched in concern, "look at me. When my father did this, he said it helped to focus on someone else."

So Owen did focus on her. He focused on the way she smelled; on how the dim lighting of the Memory's Den basement made her eyes shine all the brighter. On how she was somehow turning his thoughts from the horror of the Institute to her, as if by magic. Once he had his senses back, he focused most of all on how she was still holding his hand. Tightly, as if she were in danger of being blown away by the wind.

He couldn't help it. He grinned. Hazel Lewis, daughter of the famous Sole Survivor, was holding his hand, and didn't seem to realize that she was still doing it. Oh, she would slap him if she knew what he was thinking, but he didn't care.

Unfortunately, as soon as he grinned, she seemed to realize what she was doing. Hazel let go of his hand quickly and scooted away from him on the couch.

"Are you all right?" Amala asked.

Hazel and Owen both jumped. Owen, for one, had forgotten that someone else was in the room. He grinned again, more sheepishly.

"I'm better, now," he said. "Did you see where the tracker was?"

Amala nodded. "Your arm. Now, if you will please remove your shirt again, I will remove the tracker and we can destroy it."

For a moment, Owen thought he imagined it, but then he nearly fell off the couch as he realized what it was. Hazel had made a small strangled sound in the back of her throat, and he almost didn't notice it.

But he did, and he hid his grin as he started to unbutton his shirt.

He wasn't sure what was happening to his friend. All he knew was that he really, really liked it.

yah so reviews are really helpful guys