Thanks for the lovely new reviews, folks! Rufus(along with Eddie and Sam, obvs) is an OC, and somehow just wandered out of the murk of my brain to insert himself into this story(I guess he wanted a cameo?). He'll be appearing later in the other one I'm writing at the moment, 'Gerry'. Eddie's here because of a 'fridge logic' moment I had after gameplay, and Sam's really just a dick.

Kneeling inside the large cavern of the Super-Duper Mart, Cort watched Eddie hover around the perimeter of her light as she worked on the gash in the still-unconscious Sam's forehead, and smiled to herself. He was staring at her whenever he thought she wasn't looking, and wasn't very good at hiding it. Taking another discreet peek at him, the little glance going unnoticed as he kept his muddy eyes on what she was doing, the smile turned into something sad. Rufus was pre-war, Sam was knocked out and therefore indeterminate for the moment, not that she expected him to tell her even when he wasn't, but Eddie...Cort pressed her lips together for a moment, then busied herself with swabbing the dirt out of the gash on Sam's head.

Eddie was turning right now. It had started some time ago(she couldn't be sure when, Carol having told her it differed for every one of them), since his ears were entirely gone, but there was still a ridge of cartilage in the middle of his nasal cavity, a cloudy ring of deep brown in his eyes, and most of his shaggy blonde hair was intact, as well as his skin. It looked more flaky and raw than anything else, like a sunburn run amok. There was no clear delineation between the patches of dermis and muscle yet, the two surfaces blending together like a fire-damaged painting. He was also young; if she was pegging it right, looking at him with a rather rusty but well-trained clinical eye, he was somewhere around sixteen or seventeen, his voice dropped but only a few inches taller than her. The shocking combination of both, a body barely started out and already rotting away, was what had ultimately stopped her from shooting Sam. "Do you want to watch what I'm doing? I can teach you how to clean something like this out properly."

He shrugged nonchalantly, swaggering a bit as he finally walked up to her. Eyeing the arrogant but gawky movement, Cort immediately thought of Butch. This was something else that had helped her make up her mind, watching him act puffed up and completely uncertain at the same time. He sounded the exact same way.

"I don't need to. I know how it works. I find radiation, I'm fine."

"Yeees, but wouldn't it be nice to get the crap out before you heal over top of it? I know how much that itches whenever you're not near any." She was fairly certain she still had a bit of something stuck in one of her legs from her adventure with Winthrop, there having been so much caked into her by the end of it, and waiting for whatever it was to finally dissolve or work its way out was driving her crazy. Knowing what it most likely was, she also tried not to think about it too much, only wallowed in relief whenever her Rad levels got high.

"How would you know."

Oh great, Einstein, how do you know. Cort sassed back, sounding equally snobby. "'Cause Charon told me."

"Why would he tell you anything? You're a smoothskin."

The last word came out like it was something dirty, and she shook her head. Christ, what the hell happened to liking me? "Because he's my friend."

"We're not supposed to be friends with you."

"And who told you that?"

Cort found herself fairly unsurprised when he pointed at the lump on the floor, resisting the urge to rip out what was left of Sam's greenish hair. She also found herself suddenly feeling old, having this conversation with him. Thanks kid, so much. "So what does Rufus say?" That tripped him up, and she smiled as he scrambled to come up with something to say back to her. "Yeah, I thought so. Now get over here, it's lesson time."

Immediately squatting down next to her, he straightened his shoulders and tilted his head, aiming for a disinterested tone and achieving the exact opposite. "Sooo. You're the lady on the radio?"

Cort pinched the line on her nose and heaved a sigh, not needing to clarify his question. Lord help me, I think I preferred being called 'kid'. "Yes, I am. Now be good, be quiet, and watch me."

He was, for all of ten seconds. "So. How old are you?"

Criminy. "I'm nineteen, as in not really very old at all."

"Oh." He appeared to parse that for a moment, surreptitiously moved three fingers along his knee, and then turned to her, the sudden brilliant smile on his poor degrading face breaking her heart. "Good!"

Cort made herself smile just as happily back, privately restraining herself from throttling Sam. She didn't want anyone to ruin the inside of Eddie as the outside went to hell. Please stay nice. If there's more nice, it's easier for me to be. "Yeah, good! Now come on and watch, we can't leave dipstick here oozing."

Charon was holed up in the lobby with Rufus keeping guard, Cort having vetoed his plan to barricade both sets of doors, just in case someone else who wasn't psychotic needed the shelter. He had insisted on tying Sam up before she tended to him, not trusting the man to be any calmer upon waking than he had been when he went down, particularly if he did so while she was jabbing her fingers into the hole in his head. Unsurprisingly, his companions had offered no objections, Charon snapping a rope between two massive fists apparently being a rather persuasive argument.

After he had knocked Sam out, she had promptly started barking orders like a little field marshal, Charon obeying them out of compulsive habit and Rufus and Eddie because they were more than a little thrown off by the preceding shenanigans. The fact that the first words out of her mouth had been 'alright, drag the asshole farther inside so I can stop his last braincell from leaking out' had also probably had something to do with it.

Now, Cort was working on a trussed up Sam farther inside the store, Eddie was hovering around Cort, and Rufus was sprawled out and looking at Charon. Charon was standing against the wall and staring impassively back, half-wishing that he had ended up shooting everyone or still outside in the dust storm. The other ghoul wouldn't stop talking.

"So...you're travelling together?" Rufus tilted up the brim of his hat and peered at him inquisitively. All three had stripped the rags from their heads, Rufus promptly slapping his hat back down over his ratty brown hair, peeping out from under it like an oversized degrading garden gnome.

Charon considered staying silent, letting out a stream of colourful language, or telling him to talk to Cort, and dismissed all three. Staying silent would most likely do nothing, insults might result in resumed hostilities, and hiding behind Cort in this situation would feel cowardly, the evasion something that he only liked to perform when he was uncertain how to handle someone properly. He knew how he wanted to handle this, but just wasn't permitted. Charon decided he would try a reliable fourth and well-favoured option; being a brusque, monosyllabic crank. "Yes."

"Where were you two headed off to?"

"Home."

"We were heading to Underworld. If you're heading deeper out, I have to warn you, it's not safe out there anymore."

Charon found this statement ludicrous enough to respond to in more detail. "When the fuck has it ever been safe?"

"Those creeps in the black armour, the Enclave. You could go a whole day and not see anyone, but now it's next to impossible, it seems like they're everywhere. It's why we're travelling right now instead of waiting for the weather to settle down. It's not just us moving either, I've seen settlers on the move, even some smaller bands of raiders packing it out. It's one of the reasons I finally left my home. You know it's heavy shit if those maniacs are going away instead of towards."

Any desire to snark at the other man dropped away at this information, and Charon started pressing for specific intel. "Where precisely did you see the Enclave? Did you spot any around Megaton? The outlying areas?"

"Various places on the way down from up North, camps, patrols. Last ones I spotted were two days ago, to the Northwest of Megaton, where it starts to get hilly. Four or five of the buggers, looking for something, I think. We didn't go too close to the town itself, place is full of Atomites. I've had more than enough of them over the years, and I didn't want them around Eddie or Sam. He's still too naive, and Sam. Well, Sam's just..."

"A fucking asshole."

Rufus choked back something that might have been a laugh and looked amused. "I was going to say overly sensitive, but that shoe probably fits just as well. What about you? If she's the one on the radio, then you've seen them too. How hard is it going to be for us to get where we're going?"

"You know how to get there through the Metro tunnels?" Rufus nodded, and he decided to be helpful in return. "Then not very, if you stay in them. They're in the city, around the Jefferson Memorial. Not in the Mall near Underworld. Other than that, I don't know. We didn't go looking." He snapped his head around, suddenly hearing Cort laugh, any desire to aid them running out of him. The short one was crouched directly alongside Cort, hand on her back as he leaned over a still insensible Sam to watch what she was doing, his raspy voice carrying back.

"Is he going to be okay?"

Charon's own lashed out. "Get your fucking hand off of her." The small ghoul jerked back from her like he had been burnt, Cort doing nothing aside from glancing with amused exasperation at Charon and apologetically at Eddie, before speaking kindly to him. Rufus carefully watched all three of them, his own face looking almost comically surprised before it became appraising.

"He's fine. He'll just have one big fat headache. Goes with the big fat head."

Rufus barked out at him. "Eddie, get your damn ass over here."

Eddie dragged himself up, shooting a longing look back to Cort as he obeyed. "What did I do wrong this time?"

Rufus flicked up the brim of his hat with one thumb to look at him directly as he flopped down, mentally totting this particular faux pas down to tell him about in detail later and speaking in an undertone. "You, young sir, put your hand on his girl, and he didn't like it much."

Now it was Eddie's turn to looked surprised, and he whipped his head back to Cort before turning to look at Charon with something akin to wonder. "Sooo. Is it any different from before? Being...you know. With a girl?"

Charon stared back, his face unreadable. "I don't know."

"What? How can you not kn-" He stopped abruptly as Rufus gave him a smart whack up the side of his head, then rounded on the older ghoul indignantly, cutting off again when he saw how unimpressed he looked. "Hey! What was that f...oh." He turned back to Charon, even more wide-eyed. "Are all the girls in Vaults like that?"

Charon narrowed his. "I highly doubt it."

Rufus decided to cut the kid off before he could ask any more questions that could result in some sort of bodily harm. "Eddie, just go...I don't know, go clean up or make supper or something. Scram."

"Fine, fine."

Rufus watched him jam his hands in his pockets and slump off before turning back to Charon. "Sorry. He's not very old, either way. Hasn't learned his lessons yet." He shook his head. Eddie hadn't learned much of anything, aside from knowing how to shoot straight. Whoever had raised him before he and Sam had gathered him up hadn't done much in the way of teaching him how things were generally expected to work, sheltering the everliving hell out of him in the process(Rufus had no idea who they had been and where they had gone, Eddie merely saying that he was sixteen over and over when he had first found him, as if that was supposed to be some sort of valid explanation. Once he had started babbling about needing cave fungus, Rufus had stopped asking).

He couldn't decide if that had been a disservice or not, watching Eddie blunder around trying to interact with people, ghoul or otherwise, but still tried to keep Sam from jading the kid entirely. Eddie was taking to being a ghoul better than he expected, all things considered, and he wanted to keep it that way for as long as possible, for however much time the kid had left. Rufus was attributing this unexpected behaviour either to his upbringing, or the fact that teenaged boys tended to have a macabre obsession with gory things, his own self apparently included.

Charon grunted. In a way, the little squirt reminded him simultaneously of Cort and Gob. "I can tell." Looking over, he eyed Cort and then swore to himself. She had finished with Sam, and now seemed to be fussing around with nothing in particular, Eddie back to circling her like she was some sort of unidentified landmine. He swiveled his head back to Rufus as he spoke up. He had pushed his hatbrim up again, and was now peering at Cort.

"She's one strange little smoothskin."

"I'm aware." Charon, incredibly relieved as the oddball in question finally came over and sat down, instantly placed his legs where she could lean on them, crossed his arms and visibly shut himself off, his face going blank and seemingly fixing his eyes on nothing.

Rufus got the oddest feeling, watching that. It was like he was aggressively guarding the girl while hiding behind her at the exact same time. The first was easy enough to understand, women in the Wasteland tending to be rarer than men, and those that had one were usually extremely protective of them, treating them as either queens or commodities. He supposed one that would open her legs for a ghoul could be considered both, worth and made of solid fucking gold(pardon my awful pun, he thought) either way.

The second, though. Rufus wasn't sure if he could wrap his head around it, and supposed he didn't need to, but it was a long life with too few puzzles that didn't somehow end up with a solution of maiming or death. He brought himself out of his musings as the girl started asking him questions.

"You're going to Underworld? Do you know anybody there?"

"Yeah, I know Quinn. Met him a while ago, long and long." Rufus raised an eyebrow as she beamed at him crazily, suddenly getting the distinct feeling that her elevator didn't quite go to the top floor.

"Nifty! So, do you remember cows-" Anything else she might have been inclined to say about unmutated bovines was cut off by a disgruntled set of thumps followed by an indignant, high-pitched yell.

"Why the FUCK am I tied up?"

Cort groaned and rolled her head towards Sam, somewhat regretting that she had left a rag soaked in glowing water sitting on his head. "Why the fuck aren't you gagged, there's a better question."

"Fuck you! Eddie, get over here and let me loose!"

"Uuuh..." The small ghoul looked up from where he had been riffling around in his pack as Sam flipped around like an epileptic pillbug, obviously trying to keep from making eye contact with anyone in an effort to keep himself from having to do something. He didn't particularly want to let Sam loose. When he wasn't getting yelled at or whacked, he was having a good time here, Cort being the closest person to his own age he had met in months. She also wasn't screaming at him, or looking away, or doing anything else mean, and as much as he worshipped Sam, he didn't want him to screw it up, either, since she was a she. He had just started getting interested in those, and wasn't so naive that he didn't know his opportunities for meeting them had been severely curtailed. "Rufus told me to make supper. Or something. Mm-maybe after that."

"EDDIE!" Sam blinked and then squinted, finally noting that Cort was curled up against Charon's legs. "What the fuck is this? You're with that smoothskin?"

"He's extremely with her Sam, so I'd watch your mouth." Rufus shook his head and mumbled, exasperated. If he wanted to get technical, Sam was older than he was, not that he acted like it. "Christ, it's like having the kids I never wanted."

Sam stared at them with a mix of disgust and horror. "With her? Her with him?"

"Yes, Sam, with, as in with him, as in involved, together, etcetera and soforth."

Thumping around further, he looked at Cort accusingly. "Sure you are. You're probably stringing him along like a dog. Manipulative slick."

Cort raised her eyebrows before working them together. Well, that's a new one. Brows scrunching together far enough for the little line to pop up between them as Rufus slapped a hand over his face, Cort turned and tilted her head up to Charon. "Am I stringing you along?"

Charon tilted his head down, replying in a completely deadpan tone of voice. "Is that another phrase for 'going at me like a damned rabbit'?"

"Apparently?"

"Do it more then, please."

Eddie called over to Rufus, who was now rubbing a hand vigorously over his mouth, sounding sweetly confused. "What's a rabbit?"

"Ah, I'll tell you later."

"Everything's always later."

Cort looked up at Charon and giggled, who glared back at her. Sam, finally realizing he was on the losing side and staying there, retreated into a morose silence and flipped himself over as Cort went back to asking about cows, fuming to himself and swearing that at some point, he would get the little bitch back.

The storm ended somewhere around mid-afternoon, and the two groups parted in the rubble-strewn parking lot outside, the sunlight still hazy with dust and the three ghouls firmly swaddled up in their rags again.

"We can come with you, if you want. Make sure you get there." Cort tried to keep herself from sounding too reluctant. The last thing she wanted to do was an about face, but she genuinely liked Rufus and Eddie, the former of which was now holding onto two hunting rifles.

Sam, sans one rifle and rubbing his wrists exaggeratedly, snapped out at her from several feet away, Charon having made it clear that he wasn't getting any closer without losing anything. "We don't need your damn company!"

Rufus looked skyward briefly as if searching for some kind of existential aid, and then shook his head. "We'll be fine. You two have already cleared everything out for us, more or less, and there won't be much moving around right now. We'll see you if you get down there again." He turned without another word, Sam immediately laying into him. Eddie fell in behind as Rufus looked up again, walking backwards, flapping an arm, and nearly falling over his own feet.

"Bye Cort!"

Smiling, Cort flapped her own arm back. "Bye! See you later!" She let the smile fall off as he stumbled around, and pressed against Charon, one hand reaching down for Dogmeat's ears. "Will he get older? Bigger, I mean."

Charon looked down to her, and then back up, replying a moment later. "No."

Cort watched as they slipped from sight entirely, Sam turning to give her one final dirty look and Eddie one last goofy wave before they disappeared around the side of a hill, then spoke again. "I've never seen a ghoul that young before. Like, younger than me, I mean."

"They don't generally last very long."

"Do I want to know why?"

Charon looked at her, considering. Many were killed by smoothskins or even some ghouls, too horrified to accept them. Most killed themselves, the usual resiliency of childhood somehow not quite as capable of dealing with the idea of being a living monster as apathetic adult resignation was. Adults were better at finding a way to cope, could find a why and take it like a bitter pill with a 'well, that figures' attitude to wash it down with. Children, for the most part, could not, and the inability drove some of them insane.

Then there were the physical issues. If the little squirt had aged enough beforehand, he would simply stay as he was, anatomically frozen but his mind maturing as he grew more experienced. If it was too early, if he had had too much growing left to do, he would simply burn out as it tried to finish, eventually falling apart entirely as his body ate itself to death. He would make Patchwork look like a prime specimen in comparison. It was something all ghouls eventually found out about or knew already, either directly or by overhearing as he had, and never, ever spoke of again if they could help it. If Cort had asked questions-

He gave a mental snort. When she had asked questions about being ghoulified, she either hadn't thought to ask about this, or had been tactful enough not to. Apparently, no one else had mentioned it either, which made sense considering the people she would have felt comfortable about asking. He couldn't have seen any of them being cruel enough to say anything to her. He decided he wouldn't be the one to speak about it now. If Eddie wasn't there when they returned to Underworld because of any of those reasons, well. He could explain it then, and have the rest of the others there to help, not begrudging their involvement in her care for this particular matter. Reaching up, he tugged on a tuft of her hair, slid his fingertips behind her clipped ear. "No."

"Will he..." She trailed off.

"Better chance than most. Carol'll probably latch onto him as soon as she spots him. Drive that witch of hers fucking nuts." Cort brightened visibly at this, and he nudged her into motion. "Come on. We need to go visit that idiot bartender, unless you need to try poisoning yourself again."

"Why, you want your boots painted?"

"See if I help you again." He frowned, watching her slow down nearly to the point of stopping as she began to berate him.

"That was helping me? I'd hate to see what your Goddamn idea of hindrance would be, I bet it's fabul-"

Wanting to kill two birds with one stone, Charon rolled his eyes skyward and made the hurking noise again, this time jerking his shoulders spastically along with it. Face blanching, Cort immediately shut up, gripped her repeater tighter and increased her speed towards Megaton. Gratified, the ghoul lengthened his stride accordingly, and followed contentedly behind.