"You don't have to stay."
He does not bother looking in her direction as she speaks. He figures if he stays silent, she will eventually leave him be and he will be able to return to his work. He finds that he is not so lucky, and Elena continues to stand at the bottom the stairwell, her eyes, cold as ice, watching him for any sign of what he is thinking. They both know she will not be able to figure it out, Charon has years on her, almost two hundred of them, and each one has granted him more and more time to perfect his expressionless façade.
She watches him for another long moment before sighing and resting her head against the rusted, metal walls of her Megaton home. They are perfectly silent for just as long and if it was not for the mutt sitting at his feet, snoring, content after his evening meal, Charon would think that another bomb had dropped and finished the outside world off. "Elena," he finally mutters, finally looking at her, "My contract—"
"Stop, Charon, just stop." She looks tired, older; she is not the same girl that stepped out of the vault a few weeks before, she has matured and seen things no one her age should ever have to see. Charon is not a sentimental man though, and he regards her like any other Wastelander. It was either kill, or be killed, that is the way the world is not and she had to learn. There is no time to wish for better things. "You are my employer. If you wish for me to leave your service, than I shall return to—"
"I said stop!"
She is crying now, though he knows she is trying to hold it back. She wants to be strong, especially around him, she always has. Her hand reaches up to wipe at her eyes, but instead slowly, shakily, moves to run her fingers through her golden locks. She snags herself on tangles and he watches as she forcefully rips her hand away, taking chunks with her. She is breaking, she probably has been for a long time, but this is not his job. He is not there to fix her. "Elena."
"What?"
"I am sorry."
She looks away form him and towards the folded jumpsuit that sits on a bookshelf nearby. He wonders why she kept it after they banished her, why it means so much to her after everyone inside had either abandoned or forsaken her. When everyone else had left her to fend for herself in such a cruel world, why would she want to remind herself each day of what she had lost? He thinks it may be the same reason he keeps his worn tags around his neck; the history of it all is something you cannot forget, something you do not want to forget because it reminds you of different times.
"Do you want to stay?" Her voice is barely above a whisper now and he considers telling her the truth, but a smoothskin girl like her has more important things to worry about than the feelings of an old and grumpy ghoul like himself. So instead, he only tells her what she needs to hear.
"Yes."
"Because of the contract?"
"Yes and no."
She nods a bit and sighs. Dogmeat looks up at her, half interested in his master's current actions, but quickly becomes bored and scurries off to look for food. Charon grumbles about the mutt's sense of timing, but otherwise does nothing.
"I also stay because I care for you, Elena," he adds, sighing a bit when she does not respond for several more moments, "You are… good for this world. You are a good person. Your father would be proud."
She smiles, just a bit, but she does, "Thank you, Charon."
She slowly turns to head back up the stairs and he returns to his previous occupation, trying to forget the awkwardness of the entire situation. She is not half way to her room when she stops and turns to him once more, "You matter too, Charon. Not just cause some paper says you work for me either. You just matter… to me."
He pauses, letting the words sit as he savors them, "Thank you."
"Goodnight."
"Goodnight."
She is gone in an instant, returned to the safety and lonely walls of her bedroom and Charon is left there, sitting in the living room with his gun, as if nothing had ever happened.
A/N:
i) Not sure how I feel about this one, but overall it is an okay piece. I might write another one sometime cause about halfway through I had another idea for this prompt that might work better. It's very vaguely Charon/Elena, more of Charon trying to find the words to comfort her than anything. Very much a non-canon piece to my WIP multichapter story as a whole, but still probably a good idea of Elena's situation and Charon's thoughts about her as he comes to terms with his own feelings…? We'll see. Prompt given: "You don't have to stay."
ii) Written in 2014.