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Stockholm yawned and slapped the gate trigger again, wincing slightly as the battered jet engine spooled up and started grinding the wing fragments that made it to a close. He had woken up twenty minutes earlier to what had been a series of steadily harder pokes in the ribs from Cort, who had somehow clambered up into his nest. She wouldn't tell him how she had managed it, and he was wondering if he was awake enough yet for it to drive him crazy. Thinking no, not quite, he lazily scratched his ribs and watched the three mismatched silhouettes disappear into a darker black than they were made of, muttering to himself.
"Didn't want to yell and wake everyone up, woke me the heck up so everyone else can be up right now. Why tell her the gates will do that, she was being thoughtful, I should be thought-" Another long, jaw-cracking yawn. "ful."
Why her and the ghoul wanted to set out in the middle of the night he figured was none of his business, but then he really couldn't blame them for wanting to avoid the press of people in the morning; both of them had obviously been getting antsy about it, what with their increased excursions outside the walls. They had been back close to three weeks this time, and Stockholm himself had been just about ready to slap half the town silly after a barely one cooped up with them. It had gone great at first, he had been able to talk to everyone, but somewhere around the second day they had all started carrying on conversations at a shout whenever he appeared, and wouldn't shut up for anything. All that inane chatter had driven him half batty; crawling back up into his dusty, humid little nest had almost been a blessing. It was quiet, he had a new mattress, it was quiet, and he didn't have to deal with anything but shooting things and being comfortable and drifting off to slee-
He jerked as a stone hit him in the back of the head. "OW! Jesus jumping fireants!" He whipped around, looking back into the inner corridor. "Nathan? What the hell are you-"
The old man standing below him dropped the rest of the little rocks he had clenched in one hand all over the tidy packed dirt. "Good, I got you up with one. Open the gates, boy, I want to go for a stroll."
"I was up, you dumb bugger!" Stockholm looked around for the rock to throw it back, then decided it wouldn't win him any points with Manya and settled for patting at the egg rising on his scalp. "What, now? Nathan, it's the middle of the damn-"
"Yes, now. I've got-got to get my exercise in, weather's better, and that, that monstrosity isn't going to be running idiot rings around the town now, messing things up. I'm itching to get back on track, with, with it."
Stockholm debated as Nathan fidgeted nervously. He'd get heat off of Simms and Manya for letting the oldster out this late, a lot of it, but it was bound to be far less than if the old crank started throwing a royal fit over being kept inside, even if the idiot got himself eaten by someone. Nathan going off really would wake half the town, and besides. Stockholm had liked watching Charon wander around, the big ghoul taking a new track every time, scouting, searching and cursing. It had been entertaining as hell. All Nathan ever did was circle twice and head off into the gully for a few minutes before heading back in. Let him go out and get his nuts nibbled off, why not. "Alright, fine. Your funeral if you go outside of Deputy Weld's sensors, I can't see to shoot father'n them right now."
"I'll be fine, just open up!"
Stockholm shrugged and did, Nathan shuffling out as fast as possible once the gates were wide enough to admit him. Triggering them closed again before they could get any farther, he turned around again to wait. The only reason Simms wouldn't be up and already putting his boots on at this point was if he had dropped stone dead, and-
Stockholm yelped and flicked the safety off his rifle as another rock beaned him in the noggin. That was it, he wasn't going to shoot Nathan but he sure as hell was going to make the cranky old bastard dance, tango his tits off, samba till he shat. Bent on retaliatory mayhem, he spun around and finally stood up. Instead of the oldster though, there was a ragged-looking Wastelander peering up from outside the wall, just far enough outside of Deputy Weld's greeting area to have kept Stockholm from noticing. "You want to get your ass shot? Or I suppose you want to get in instead of waiting for a nice, reasonable daylight hour."
"No. Sorry. I want to stay out here. Old guy told me to try that. Said it was the quietest way to get your attention." He glanced around, then back up. "Is Mister Burke in town?"
"What? No. Not for months." Stockholm made a shooing motion, if he wasn't coming in he wanted him gone, he couldn't let Mickey in but he could at least chase off competition, then belatedly recalled something Simms had told him. "And if you run into him out there, tell him his house is going up for grabs in a couple months if he doesn't resume tenancy or send word. He paid up, but if he's dead, well. Can't keep a house when you're dead."
The man nodded and trotted off. Stockholm flicked the safety on his rifle back on, collapsed on his bed and yanked a blanket over himself after there was no immediate sign of Simms, then sat up a second later. Jamming his cooking pot on his head, he thumped it to his ears and laid back down, getting as comfortable as possible under the stench of scorched molerat to wait. He didn't expect Lucas to chuck rocks, but he'd be damned if he got nailed a third time.
"I'm going crazy." Cort frowned thoughtfully, looking over her shoulder at the dim, silver Potomac. "Or am I already there?"
"No." Charon eyed her carefully as she continued walking up the riverbank and back onto the plain around it. Since the night the rain started, aside from a few stilted, uncomfortable and unfinished questions, he hadn't brought the subject up again. Until now, neither had she. "If you were there, I don't think you would be worrying about it."
"True. I feel better."
He looked at her hopefully. "Do you?"
"Yes. Ignoring instead of admitting only makes things worse. I'm going crazy and I know it. One less thing."
He held back a wince. That hadn't been quite the clarification he had been hoping for. It didn't keep any of it from being entirely correct, however.
"Ask me about it, if you want to. Maybe it'll help." Cort tilted her face up and added on an excuse for him to avoid the topic. "Or the stars. You could ask about those, instead."
A small part of him wanted to take the opening, but he forced it into silence. Not asking had brought him to this point, and information, no matter how uncomfortable, was still valuable. It meant he could plan an attack, a defense, something. "What...what's it like." Cort rattled off an answer much faster than he was prepared for.
"It's like I'm a bunch of different people, different people in my head but that's silly because I'm all one me, I'm whole, but the parts won't stop fighting because I'm keeping them apart. There's one who loves and one who hates and one doesn't care at all but they're all the same, they're all me and I don't know which one I'm supposed to be but I'm all of them and I'm trying to win." She drew in a ragged breath, continuing on in a tiny, quiet voice when she was finished. "How am I supposed to win against me?"
This time, Charon did take the excuse. He pointed to a small point of light that had shown up ahead. He shifted around and unslung the sniper rifle, gratfied for once to see a rabble of jury-rigged armour and flourescent hair at the other end of the scope, the rangy figures gyrating around another slumped in front of a flaming barrel. "Raiders." He raised his eyebrows briefly. "Fuck, haven't seen that in a while."
Cort pulled the spare scope from the rifle he had salvaged out of a pocket and held it up to see what had piqued his interest, frowning after a moment. "What the heck are they doing?"
"Initiation. If the one on the ground lives, they'll let him in."
"Oh. Crow told me about this." Her frown deepened as one of the figures started kicking. "We should save him."
"He doesn't need saving, Cort. He asked for it."
"Why?"
"Because they're fucking lunatics? If..." He hesitated briefly, supressing the desire to substitute something unflattering for the merchant's proper name. "Crow told you about this part, you damn well know he's already murdered someone somewhere to get to that point. They would have butchered him by now if he hadn't."
"Yeah." Cort worked her free hand into Dogmeat's ruff for a moment, then tucked the scope away and started walking in a direction that would give the group a wide berth, poking at her Pip-Boy. "C'mon, I want to see if we can get to the Scrapyard by midday. I think getting to Vault 92 might take as long as two, since we don't know what's going on out there." She spared another glance towards the point of light. "I enjoy killing them now. Is that alright?"
"So do I."
"That wasn't an answer."
"No."
"That's why I shouldn't go over there, anyway. Not right now." Flicking her hand in a dismissive gesture, Cort made one of her hairpin conversational turns. "Have you met any before? Vault dwellers. Are they like me?"
Charon held back another wince. He had, not counting the corpses he had run into, on four separate occasions. All of them had been complete fruitcakes, to one degree or another. "Yes."
"Which Vault were they from?"
"I don't know; none of them ever gave up a number. One didn't have his suit anymore, and the three who did were so badly worn you couldn't tell what was printed on them any longer. Only the first still had a Pip-Boy."
"Did the others still have their arms?"
"Yes."
Cort screwed her face up, sounding doubtful. "Then how did you know those three were even from a Vault?"
They were dysfunctional raving lunatics who couldn't stop screaming about it. "They talked about it well enough and at such length that I doubt they were lying." She fell silent, thinking, and Charon joined her. He hadn't said anything, hadn't really thought of it after hearing her talk about them for months, but his encounter with the people from 101 had surprised him. While most of them had been naive, incompetent or downright deluded, none seemed to be even close to insane. He hadn't had that much opportunity to observe them all, but still. None he had spent a protracted length of time with had given him the same feeling of something being unhinged, the sense that something wasn't quite laying true inside of them that Cort had when he first met her. That she definitely gave him now. It was troubling. He looked over as she bent to dig in the dirt.
"I don't know why I keep saying 'other'. I'm not one of them."
"You were raised there."
Cort snorted. "Yeah, well throwing chickens in a pond doesn't turn them into ducks. Dad should have known that."
She fell silent again, and still Charon did nothing to fill it, catching his mind up in reexamining every interaction and observation he had had or made of James, searching for any indication that her instability had been an inherited trait. The man had had a ruthless streak a mile wide, something he had carefully screened behind a mantle of gentle civility until circumstances got sufficiently dirty enough to require him to drop it, and the ghoul could grudgingly admit to himself that he would've liked to have seen Cort's father in his fighting prime, would've liked having another insight into her. They were alike in so many ways.
Trailing after Cort as she picked her way through the handful of pebbles she had scooped up for anything she thought might be pretty enough to keep, Charon mulled over their similarities. Along with the obvious genetic traits and personality quirks, there were also formative events. Both had lost someone important and been powerless to prevent it, and both had dealt with living in the Wasteland and the Vault. But she had been so young, and grown up the other way round. He thought briefly of a tiny little face in a picture, and then an older one with long hair, the same guileless eyes in both, then of the haunted ones that were looking at him now.
"It's so hard to see things in the dark." She held up a knobbled pebble and smiled slightly. "This one feels like it might turn out to be nice. Something good inside."
Charon took it when she held it out and wordlessly tucked it away like he always did with the little baubles she had started gathering up to decorate the house, wedging them into cracks and corners where she thought they would shine, saying she wanted to fill up the holes around her; she didn't like them being there. He had griped loudly about her making him rattle like a bag of shell casings, she had her own fucking pockets to stuff with crap, then put extra pouches on his belt for the things when she wasn't around to notice. He hadn't noticed anything decorating her room in the Vault, aside from those pictures.
Perhaps the Vault was to blame for how batshit the people in them were, but only after they were exposed to the outside world. It was entirely possible that being raised in the confines of one damaged a person irreparably once they were removed from it, like a crutch being yanked away. Something that could do that to a growing mind, shape it in such a way that it could crumble without the support it was conditioned to need, wasn't exactly a far-fetched concept with everything he had personally gone through, although that was far from a comforting thought. Once he was able to observe people actually residing in another Vault, he could confirm the theory. Until then, he supposed it was just as well Cort had bound herself to him, and took comfort in the security of both their contracts. She had taken away one crutch and replaced it with another. Eventually, he or it(he wasn't quite sure on the correct distinction, or if there even was one) would suffice. I can do for her as she does for me. I always do.
They reached the Scrapyard in the early afternoon, making good time the entire way. They hadn't run into anything aside from a few scattered animals since spotting the raiders on the outskirts of Bethesda, the dearth of life paridoxically making them jumpier. In Charon's experience, a lack of smaller things generally meant something bigger was getting ready to 'napalm your calm', as a fellow merc had colourfully put it to him long ago, and his unease was telegraphing to Cort through the dog. It was almost a relief to get into the confines of the wrecked cars, even with the heat baking off of them so hard the tangy smell of hot metal felt like a punch to his exposed sinuses.
"Here. Just exactly here." Cort pointed a few feet away, past a half-rotted body they had just stepped over. "This is where I met Dogmeat." She pointed back. "And that's the fucking jerkface who ran into me and broke my nose." Staring at the dessicated corpse, she nervously ran her fingers over her clipped ear a few times, then kissed the tips and darted over to pat them against the cratered skull. Giving her surroundings a scattered look as she stood up, she headed deeper into the Scrapyard. "I liked this place, the first time I was here. Reminded me of home."
Cort slowly worked her way into a clearing at the center, then started shucking out of her pack, stretching when it thumped to the ground. "I really must be nuts, wanting to go back into a damn pit in the ground. I need to get up higher, out of this, just for a minute, and look around." She approached one of the stacks of crushed, jagged lumps, looking up at it doubtfully, and he called over as she started to reach out.
"No, you'll cut yourself to shit. Try this instead." Charon laced his fingers together and held them out in a wide cup for her. Brightening, Cort came over and pushed herself up from his hands to his shoulders, standing up slowly on top of them after he straightened. He reached up to brace her ankles as she wobbled for balance. "Good?"
"Good? This is fantastic. I'm huge! Look at you, making me fly!" Spreading her arms out, she grinned and glanced down. "We can make Minefield before midnight, I bet. Don't ever say that I don't take you anywhere decent."
Cort ducked and Charon cursed as another slug whanged into the concrete next to their heads, followed by a reedy screech.
"You'll never take Arkansas alive!"
"I don't want to take you anywhere!" Cort scrubbed cement chips off of her neck, widened her eyes and screwed her mouth up into a tight pinch as she noted her fingertips were bloody, then flat-out screamed back. "WE DIDN'T EVEN BORDER ON ARKANSAS HERE! WE DIDN'T EVEN BORDER ON THE FREAKING TEXAS COMMONWEALTH, I AM UNABLE TO TAKE YOU TO ANYTHING! IT IS A GEOGRAPHICAL IMPOSSIBILITY!" She huffed and let out another indignant scream.
They had reached Minefield when she had wanted to, and had spent close to an hour disarming and stockpiling mines, her treating it as a game and the ghoul making dark, well stocked plans in his head(he had noted far too many tracks around Megaton that did nothing but approach to an observable distance and then retreat, and while he wasn't positive he could swing the idea of planting some strategic offences around the town to Cort, he would damn well be ready to do so if he did). Following them by the light of her Pip-Boy, the sniper at the center of the town had waited until Cort was close enough to notice him on her screen, and by then they were too far in to make an unscathed escape in the dark.
Judging the wall they were behind to be sturdy enough to withstand the onslaught, Charon settled himself down to wait for daybreak when their assailant would be partially blinded by it and the munitions around them would be easier to avoid. "I don't think he's listening."
"I don't think I care." Both of them looked over as shots started pinging off of a car to their left. "Uuuh, does that one still have its react-" She blinked as the underside let out a quiet whump and started smoking.
"Ah fuck." Charon picked her up by the waist and ran to the lee of the next house just as the car exploded, then tossed her several rather unceremonious feet into a pile of rotting brickwork to give himself enough time to disarm the mine now beeping away at his feet. "Cort. Stop taking me anywhere decent."
"Charon." She sneezed violently, sending up a puff of powdery red dust. "No." Another sneeze. "I'm sorry. It's been a long day and I just wanted to sleep here. Well not here, somewhere that doesn't make me look like a lump of tuberculoidal mucus. I thought nobody would bother us here, Moira said everyone thinks it's haunted by a vengeful ghost, GEE I WONDER WHY." Cort twisted and pressed her hand against her nose, snorted one side clear, then the other before turning back. "Can we get a clear shot at him?"
He gently tucked the new mine into his pack with the others. "A clear shot at him means a clear shot at us, he's a fucking whackjob but he's good. We could split up, one of us draws fire, the other takes him out."
"I don't know if I like that...wait, does that truck behind you-" A ping and a whump from behind him.
"Ah fuck."
"RUN!"
Dogmeat tore around the corner of a house and whirled, kicking up a scree of pebbles as his claws dug in to propel him forward again. He stopped with his nose twitching at the edge of shelter, darting out the instant another part of the landscape had finished blowing itself to hell to take stock.
His first was stuck in the crumbling remains of a house's foundation. The big world was behind another pile of brickwork a good distance from her, so insufficiently small for his bulk that he had flattened himself to the ground. Neither were close to any other shelter, and both looked completely disgusted with their current state of affairs, a sentiment Dogmeat found himself entirely in line with. Every time one of the two twitched an inch, another shot tore out, driving them back. He almost missed it when a bullet smacked into the big world's leg; the only sign of it was a quiet grunt, a slight shuffling to the right, and the sudden reek of copper. That made sense enough, it was something the dog could get behind, hiding it when you were hurt. Showing you had somewhere soft to tear into was never a prudent thing, especially when the bastard doing the tearing was still about. Unfortunately, his first would go silly as soon as she scented it. She always did. He dug his claws into the earth and thought.
He didn't so much plan his course of action as discover it, the decisions he made coming to him so fully formed after his simple deliberations it was if they appeared from nowhere instead of making an expected arrival, clicking into the problem-hole he had mentally sniffed out the shape of. Right now the hole was shaped from impatience and walled with frustration, a void made appropriately enough of having had quite enough of nothing. They had spent close to an hour of spinning and running and spinning and running and he hadn't caught anything but scorching heat up his tail. And now one of his worlds, his centers of being had a soft spot to tear. Definitely enough.
Breaking out, he made his way to the center of the town, darting from shelter to shelter, detouring only when he scented the mines sprinkled over it like antagonistic thorns, filling his head with chalk and burnt paper and bad eggs.
Getting up to the sniper was simple. Finishing him off quietly was simple and satisfying. Dropping the warm rifle into his first's lap, getting the startled, tight hug and sharing the blood on his face with her, feeling her hands smearing it to his soft ears? Absolutely sublime. It was best.
And wooo, I got my computer fixed finally! So you all get a treat.
She was sat there in the corner of the barn, all battered leather and wicked knives, a long collection of limbs and death, slumped and forgotten in the gloom like a deadly scarecrow. The muttering noise she was making wasn't doing anything to dispel the macabre impression for him, but he felt too old for shadow-jumping crap like that, and filed it away. Raul walked up to her, and the unintelligible susurrus of her voice rose as her head did, her slack face tightening into a grim mask. "Well, go on and take a look. Did I do them all right?"
She was balancing a faded primer on one knee, a pile of labels stripped from old liquor bottles on the other, painstakingly childish scribbles covering both front and back. Today they were working up to the letter 'K'.
"You're still mixing up the little d and b, and your j is backwards."
The eye he could see ticced alarmingly at this, but her voice came out smooth and collected. "Show me again, if you please."
Raul hunkered down and wrapped his hand around hers, drawing the pencil over a fresh label. She had begun by mirroring every letter he wrote out for her, and it had taken him a full two nights of effort and frustration before he had realized that Charlie's left-handedness was fouling her perception up. "Look, boss, see? The 'd" gives you something to grab, the 'b' jumps away, and you have to be careful with the 'j' because it can hook you."
She snorted. "'J' is a jerk."
