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Charon stood by the Tranquility Lounger and watched Cort and her father, unsure of what to do. She hadn't even looked at him or the dog since reemerging from it, and while she was winding herself up again to a dangerous level, he was extremely hesitant to interrupt. Whatever he had expected to come out of his employer, it hadn't quite been this. Hearing her shriek out her admission of sterility, he had suppressed a wince, doing it again when she voiced the opinion she had of herself. The first statement made perfect sense, thinking about the type of mutation she had acquired. Ghouls were completely sterile, and it was not a surprise that Cort would be either considering what she could now do. He could accept her displeasure over losing the ability to procreate as normal, since most of the ghouls in Underworld seemed to share the same opinion at one time or another. What he couldn't understand for the life of him was her second declaration.

Watching both of the smoothskins collapse onto the floor, James holding Cort and rocking her as she cried, he puzzled over it as the dog sat next to both of them and whined. Messed up was probably a reasonable assessment, considering her emotional instabilities, but nothing that couldn't be remedied with the appropriate response. Also, he cynically mused, who wasn't messed up out here. On a sliding scale of all the screwed up people he had met in his long life, Cort wasn't even close to being near the top of it. Previous employers and the people who had brainwashed him for instance, were-

Unexpectedly thinking back to that early period of his life, Charon firmly slammed the door on it and refocused on Cort, who was still making incredibly distressing noises. He kept suppressing the urge to go over and pick her up, and went back to thinking things out. It did not matter if she was messed up. The ugly statement made even less sense. She was an entirely whole person, if you didn't count the missing part of her ear, and while interestingly scarred, her skin was smooth and complete. Well, until we get into another fucking mess. Then she's just going to grow it the hell back anyway once we're through. Charon frowned. Even her insane hair was perfect when he thought about it. Her father's correction to her claim had been entirely accurate; she was beautiful.

He held back a snort, not wanting either of the two in front of him to interpret it the wrong way. The last part of her claim had been the most ludicrous. People wanted Cort. Admittedly, some of those people wanted to kill her, but not all of them. Her father was obviously happy to see her again, even with both of them being emotionally upset at the moment, and there were people in Underworld and Megaton who always wanted her to come back. The damned bartender had practically looked at her like the mutt did. Absently adding the dog to the list of things he was tallying up, he continued with his line of thought. The insufferable merchant they had met outside of Rivet City had also appeared to want her, and most of all, Charon himself definitely wanted her. He wanted her more than anything else he had ever had in his life, and-

His mental processes ground to a halt, completely poleaxed by the revelation that had just struck him like a baton to the face. He wanted her. He wasn't entirely sure in just what capacity, but knew that it definitely involved more touching and something else, something deep in the back of his mind that he couldn't identify yet. Something warm and painful, but somehow good at the same time. Charon closed his eyes, exhaling slowly. Fuck. What did she fucking do to me? What the flying fuck do I do now.

Emotional attachment of this type was something that was never supposed to happen to him. A need to feel loyalty towards his employers had always been one of the tenets of his contract, as well as receiving pleasure from directing aggression towards a designated target and its subsequent annihilation. Anything else had been thoroughly and brutally stamped out through harsh and repetitive training. Charon had not been designed to be a caring or sexual animal, both being considered unacceptable and distracting operational flaws by his makers.

Cort's unorthodox behaviour had undermined the strict borders laid down within him almost a century before, worn thin by her unflinching loyalty and blind acceptance along with Charon's growing desire to adapt his own behaviour to serve her better. Ahzrukhal's restrictive methods straining him to the breaking point for more than half of his life had also helped to pave the way for Cort's actions, sleep deprivation having been one of the tools used to make him what he was in the first place. He had been frustrated, battered and empty for decades. What he was now was changing, because of her.

No one involved with making him could have predicted a future employer needing to be held while they cried, and to look to him for that comfort, or expect the employer to give it back in return. For that matter, ending up with a lonely nineteen year old girl as an employer had probably been outside of their purview as well. One that was viciously protective to the exclusion of her own safety, and chose to engage him in silly, liberating play. That had taken it upon herself to place the most important thing in his life inside of her to protect him, and become an embodiment of it as a result. If Charon had known enough about psychology to ask Cort what a comfort object was, he would have latched onto the concept immediately as the correct designation for her, albeit on a much more mature and complicated level. As for the rest of his feelings and impulses, it was simple enough. The ghoul was still male, and he found Cort attractive. He would eventually figure it out.

"Charon?" He snapped his eyes open and instantly focused his full attention back towards Cort who had come up and patted him on the chest, her father standing behind her and looking at him speculatively. As earth-shattering as his realization had been, it hadn't had quite the same totally disconnecting effect that previous shocks had given him. For one, he had gone through large enough ones already to be more flexible, more willing to bend. For another, he couldn't find a reason to be as upset with this particular schism as with the others. Even with the nauseating uneasiness he was now suffering, Charon felt like he was getting something important back, not losing it.

"What." He looked down at her. Enough time had passed for her to calm down while he had been occupied inside himself, and she had pulled her Vault suit closed again.

"I'm going upstairs with Dad, I need to talk to him for a while alone. Can you keep Dogmeat with you for a little bit?"

"As you wish." Giving him an odd look, she left the large room and disappeared, surfacing on the catwalk a moment later. After ducking into the place they had camped in to change back into the black shirt and cargos that usually went with their armour, she rejoined her father outside and went into the second room down the wall with him, presumably so Charon could access their supplies without causing an interruption. He looked down at Dogmeat, who was staring questioningly up at him. "Hungry?" The dog whuffed. "Yeah. Me too." Charon went upstairs to feed the dog and wait. For what, he wasn't sure.


"There's chairs in this one. We can sit down." Calmer if not any cleaner, aside from where the tears had wiped the dirt from her face, Cort slumped into a seat at the table in the second room and wearily watched James sit in one across from her. Fishing in a pocket, she pulled out a bottle of purified water and an apple and rolled them across to him, and then crossed her arms. "You're probably hungry for real food, it's been about four months since you left."

"That long. Thank you, honey." James caught the items and started eating them in slowly in turn, waiting for his stomach to wake up from weeks of emptiness. "So do you want to start or shall I?"

Cort smiled and let out a small snort. "Well it'd be nice to know why I had to go through all of this in the first place, Dad."

James matched her smile and looked at her. "I suppose it would be. If you've found me, you've probably found either Project Purity itself or Madison Li."

Cort nodded, screwing up her face in memory of the encounter. "Both. Li was less than forthcoming. All I got from her was the location of the lab, and a nice fat bundle of blame for ruining 'your' work. I found most of your Project Purity journals there, then came here." She watched her father frown for a moment before replying.

"Madison was very...attached to the project, and probably found it very difficult to continue without me there to convince everyone to proceed. But it certainly wasn't your fault, none of it. With the increasing Super Mutant attacks and the waning of support from the Brotherhood, it was only a matter of time before we would have been driven out. That is especially clear now with what I know about our needing the G.E.C.K." James sighed and folded his hands on the table. "Project Purity was your mother's dream, her life's work. Remember her favourite Bible passage? Free, pure, clean water for everyone in the Capital Wasteland. Do you understand how important that would be?" He smiled as she nodded silently. "My smart girl, I knew you would. Everyone could really begin to start over, to rebuild. Think of the purifier back in the Vault, then imagine if it could purify millions of gallons of water at once. Humanity could start to recover, and eventually the rest of the Wasteland as the clean water spread. And now it's just waiting to be revived, which is why I came back out of the Vault once you had grown. I have to finish it, for you and your mother. For everyone."

Frowning at him, Cort snapped out a question. "Then why couldn't you bring me with you? I could help with this, Dad. Seriously, as much as I wanted a family, I mean who couldn't, what with the emphasis placed on having children in the Vault, but could you honestly have pictured me settling down with one of the other kids in there after you left without warning? Or at all?"

James mouth quirked before returning to a more serious expression as he responded to her. "You could have found someone eventually, Cort. People change as they get older." She glared over the table at him, completely non-plussed.

"Freddie's got raging VDS, Wally's just plain nuts, not surprising considering his brother's a sadist who tried to beat me to death after he finished with Jonas, by the way, and I shot Paul's dad on the way out because he was trying to do the same thing, so that kinda takes him out of the 'likes me' category. And I know exactly what you thought of Butch. Who, also by the way, tried to help me, even if it was only by giving me his damned jacket." Cort bit her lip. "Officer Gomez and Stanley are the only other ones I saw who didn't attack me. I don't even know what happened to Mister Brotch."

James rubbed a hand over his face and sighed, scratching at his beard. Cort blinked, looking at her father, wondering when it and his hair had managed to get so white before he spoke and pulled her attention back.

"I can't say sorry enough, sweetheart. It's obvious you could have handled yourself enough to come with me, you got this far, and I do want your help now that you're here. It would be good to work with you on your mother's dream, fitting. But you'll just have to believe me when I say I thought I was doing the right thing for you. I thought you could make it without me there."

"Could you have made it in that hole if Mom was still alive and then just disappeared on you one morning, telling you to stay behind?" He looked at her, momentarily shocked before a sad look came over his face.

"No, I don't suppose I could have. Now. Why don't you tell me what you've been going through to get to me. I think I need to hear it."

James remained silent throughout Cort's story, listening and taking it as his punishment for leaving his daughter behind. Still hurt and wanting to return the favour, she left almost nothing out, from Moriarty and Gob, to the circumstances surrounding finding Dogmeat(she absently tugged at what remained of her ear during this, delivering this particular anecdote in a matter of fact tone of voice that left him cold). She laughed about losing her hair, talked about Three Dog and his incessant blabbing, the bomb at Megaton and the current contract on her head for refusing to help murder the town, her helping the Rangers and about Moira and Barrows and Crow, and the blood. The endless trail of blood. The only things she held back were what she had done in the Springvale school to keep from being discovered, and the more salient details concerning Charon's employment, deciding it was a private matter of the ghoul's and not her place to air it out in front of her father. She finished by telling him about the Deathclaw, and how useful her mutation was, even with the drawbacks.

"Honey, are you sure about..." James rolled his shoulders uncomfortably, thinning his mouth into a line.

"About what, being sterile? You can say it Dad, I've had time to come to terms with it, at least a bit. Yes I'm sure. It hit me when I was at the Monument and I put my Vault suit away. When I broke my nose getting Dogmeat, I bled all over the crotch of it, and I was thinking how nice it was Wadsworth got all the stains out of it for me, and well." Cort coughed politely. "One thought led to another. And since I hadn't done that with anyone, uhm. I knew I wasn't pregnant." Another cough, and her looking away while her face flushed. "I had Barrows confirm it for me. If I was looking for a doctor experienced enough to be able to tell, he'd certainly fit the bill. And had first-hand knowledge with this particular cause of it. And I trusted him. He and a lot of the other people in Underworld were really good to me." She turned her face back to the table and frowned. "Better than normal ones."

"And that's where you hired Charon. He's a mercenary, yes?"

Cort cocked an eyebrow, not liking the disapproving look his face was getting. "Yeees."

"I think he's dangerous, sweetie."

Cort barked out a laugh. "Well yeah, he's actually extremely dangerous, and I'm lucky he is, Dad. He's the only reason I've been able to make it this far." Cort frowned, firmly continuing on. "I'm not firing him, and he ca-won't quit. He's my friend and he won't leave me. Ever. We take care of each other, him and me and Dogmeat."

James looked at her skeptically, not particularly reassured by her answer on more than one level. "I know you must have been lonely, Cort, but he doesn't seem very friendly. He wouldn't even talk to me when I tried, just said to talk to you, and would only repeat that."

"Oh. Well. He was probably just waiting for orders since I didn't tell him what to do if you came out first. He doesn't really talk that much to other people anyway, it took him a while to warm up to me."

Still not feeling settled about her explanations, James left it for the time being, unwilling to start a fight over it while out in the Wasteland. Detaching Cort from what was clearly a surrogate family she had built for herself, no matter how strange, would not help to mend the instabilities he was currently seeing in his beloved daughter. All he could do for now was get her somewhere safer and keep her involved in work with him, hoping that it would eventually shift her back to a more even keel.

"I know it's a lot to ask honey, but we should get moving back to Rivet City. We'll need to enlist Doctor Li's help to get the project up and running again, and I can't do it without all of her people coming with me. It will take a lot of work and time to get it ready again and we need to get started." James pushed against the table and stood up, pausing when Cort goggled at him.

"You just spent months playing a boat in Braun's bottle and you want to run out there right now?" He frowned back at her.

"Too much time has passed already. The sooner we get to Rivet City, the sooner we can get to work."

"The sooner you walk out the door, the better a chance you have of being killed." Cort kicked back from her chair and leaned on the table, gesturing towards him. "Look, I know you're better at running around out there than I am, it's obvious. You got here alone with a freaking .32 and your Vault suit. I mean, how do you even DO that?"

James quirked his mouth. "I know my way around out here, honey."

"Yeah, must be nice." Cort muttered before continuing. "Still. You just had to push yourself up to even stand easily, you've spent months stressed to hell, all you've eaten is one apple, the raiders from Evergreen Mills have all been running around with their panties in a twist for days, and it's..." Cort fiddled with her Pip-Boy. "...now completely dark out. I don't know about you, but I don't particularly like fighting Radscorpions in the dark, and even if we're quiet the bastards will notice four of us a lot easier. If there's one thing I've learned from being out here, it's a very, very bad idea to go haring off when you're not really ready." She sighed and dropped her arms. "Tell me one more night would hurt a nineteen year wait. Don't even try to tell me you're not tired."

He shook his head at her, defeated. "No, I suppose it won't hurt, and yes I am." Cort came around the table and hugged him.

"Good. We can leave first thing in the morning. Charon and I can go up top and make sure it's clear while you conk out." James kissed the top of her head and shook his own.

"Where did you learn how to convince people like that?"

She smiled. "Oh, just guess."