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"Do not think about sin, he thought. There are enough problems now without sin. Also I have no understanding of it."
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
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Nora raised her hands, heart thundering, as the front door slammed shut behind the men. They looked around the room in morbid fascination at all of the slaughtered super mutants before their eyes fell back on her.
The man who held her at gunpoint had a deep scar that ran from his right eye down to his cheek, and he wasn't subtle as his eyes took in her figure.
"Take her weapons," he jerked his chin towards her.
"Sure thing, boss," the man to his right walked over and relieved her of her 10 mm pistol, as well as the hunting knife that was holstered at her hip.
He shoved the weapons into his coat pocket and yanked her hands down in front of her to bind them together, and she winced as the rough rope dug into her skin.
The leader walked over to her and pinched her face between his fingers, tilting her head from side to side to get a better look at her.
"You look like one of those juicy sluts from the pre-war mags," he released her and she wrenched her head back, cold adrenaline shooting through her. "What're you doing here?"
"I-" she swallowed hard and tried to think of a response, but couldn't seem to find the right words.
"What's the matter, sweetheart? You had such a big smile for us when we walked in," he chuckled, and the other two men followed suit. "Are you expecting someone?"
"Yes, my friend, and he'll be back any second so you better just let me go."
The leader smirked at her, watching her chest rise and fall with her growing fear.
"Is that right? But it's three against one, so you better pray he has more than a shitty 10 mm pistol and a knife."
"He's a super mutant, he'll rip you all limb from limb."
The leader bent over with a surprised laugh and wiped a tear from his eye.
"Lady, you've got to be fucking crazy to think I'd believe that."
All the humor faded from his face and he backhanded her, and she cried out as she felt her bottom lip split.
Nora glared at him through tears but blinked them back, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of seeing her cry.
"That's for lying to me," he tore his eyes away from her and glanced around the room before pointing to something behind her. "Tie her down to that."
She was dragged to the side of the room and watched in despair as the rope that bound her wrists was wrapped around a thick pipe that was anchored to the wall.
"All right boys, you know the drill. Strip this place bare and dump all the loot in the pile our little scavver here has already started."
The men split up and searched the hospital with military precision, and Nora watched in awe as her pile soon morphed into a huge stack of looted goods.
Fifteen minutes later the men returned to the lobby, wiping sweat from their brow.
"Did anyone find the chems?" The leader asked, scrutinizing the heap of supplies.
"There was a storage room I couldn't pick, the lock was unlike anything I've ever seen."
"Well, we aren't leaving 'til we have the chems. Look everywhere, there has to be a key."
Nora watched the men grumble and disappear again before she flexed her numb fingers. She had been trying her best to loosen the rope whenever the men were out of sight, but it wouldn't budge.
She jerked her hands away from the pipe in a fit of frustration and hissed as the rope cut into her wrists.
"Found it, boss!" One of the men shouted out, and footsteps pounded down the hall.
Nora worried her lip as she stared at the front door, willing Strong to appear.
Strong, where are you?
What if he thought that she no longer wanted him around and had decided to leave without a messy goodbye? At the thought of never seeing him again pain lanced through her chest.
She was pulled from her musings when the men came back to the lobby carrying crates of chems, rowdy grins on their faces.
The leader righted a toppled metal desk and directed the men to set the crates on top of it.
"Good job boys, lotta waiting around, but it all paid off in the end, didn't it?" The men muttered their agreement and clapped each other on the back. "All right, Kent and I will organize the loot, Cliff, lay out the bedrolls and get some food cookin'."
They nodded and got to work, and Cliff leered at Nora as he laid out their bedrolls close to the pipe she was tied to.
He flicked a hot plate on and pulled out three cans of Pork N' Beans, hacking open the lids with her pilfered hunting knife.
He licked some sauce off of the tip of the knife and she wrinkled her nose in disgust.
"You better watch the way you look at me, girl, won't take but a second to pluck those pretty green eyes out of your head." She gasped and he grinned as he set the cans of beans to warm on the hot plate, "slavers don't mind blind girls."
"Slavers?" She fought to steady her voice, but it shook regardless.
"You vaulties really are sheltered," Cliff snickered and dragged his eyes over the curves hidden beneath her blue vault-suit. "A prime piece like you is gonna get us enough caps to last the next couple of months, and that's not countin' all these chems."
Her head swam and Nora found it hard to catch her breath.
Stay calm Nora, don't antagonize them. Your best chance of getting out of this is to reason with them.
"Please, take everything in my pack and let me go. I have caps and medical supplies, take them, they're all yours. Just please, let me go."
"Not a chance."
Cliff laughed at her crestfallen expression as Kent and the boss came over, now finished with organizing the loot.
They sank onto their bedrolls and Cliff passed around the warmed-up cans of Pork N' Beans, and they groaned and shoveled the steaming food into their mouths.
The men ate without saying a word, and once the cans were empty they tossed them into the corner with a loud clang. Nora tried her best to curl up and keep her eyes trained on the floor so as to not attract attention to herself, but she soon felt the leader's gaze settle on her.
"Tell me scavver, how'd you hear about this score?" He picked his teeth with a dirty fingernail and she fought the urge to gag.
"Score?"
His eyes narrowed and he pulled his hand away from his mouth.
"Yeah, score. The chems. Are you a fucking idiot? How many times do I have to repeat myself with you?"
She swallowed hard and felt a lump form in her throat.
"My friend and I were looking for a missing settler who came here in search of antibiotics, but the settler had been killed before we arrived."
"That's a funny coincidence, 'cause we've been camped around the block for a week, trying to figure out how to take out the super mutants that were infesting this hospital," he dug out a bottle of Uisce Beatha Whiskey from his pack and took a healthy swig before handing it over to Kent, "and the second the dumb bastards blow themselves up and the coast is clear, you slip in to rescue someone looking for antibiotics?"
Nora frowned and watched the bottle being passed around, and shuddered at the dark look that Cliff shot her.
"They didn't blow themselves up, my friend killed them."
The boss barked out a laugh and took another sip of the whiskey when it was handed back to him.
"Oh really? Well, where the hell is this friend of yours then? 'Cause he ain't here and it's been well over an hour. Sounds to me like maybe he left you, that is if you aren't completely full of shit."
Nora fought the panic that crept up her throat, frantic to think of something.
A plan, anything, but with her hands bound and her weapons gone, she struggled to think beyond the mounting fear clouding her mind.
"I'm not lying," she tried to assert in a firm voice.
"Sure, not like you'd say just about anything in your position." He smirked and stood up, and she flinched, "grab her legs."
She screamed and kicked as Cliff and Kent pinned her legs down, and the leader knelt between them.
"That's all right, scream your little head off, there ain't no one around to hear it. It's just gonna get Cliff going anyway, sick fuck that he is."
He grinned over his shoulder and Cliff laughed and tightened his grip on her ankle.
The leader pulled her vault-suit zipper down and his greedy eyes ate up every inch of her soft skin.
"No harm in getting a taste before we sell her off tomorrow."
The other men agreed and she yelped as he pinched her nipple hard.
"Cliff, pass me that knife."
Cliff was quick to hand it over, eyes bright and excited as his boss began to hack away at her vault-suit.
Nora writhed against the rope that bound her wrists to the pipe, twisting her hips away in an attempt to dislodge herself from their grip. With each careful slash of the knife, her suit fell away in tatters, and soon enough her bra and underwear were cut away and she was nude before their eyes.
"Goddamn, would you look at that," the leader whistled, eyes dancing over her curves.
He squeezed her breast and she whimpered and closed her eyes, trying to be anywhere but the hospital lobby. "Who says we sell her tomorrow, maybe we keep her to ourselves for a few days? We're not gonna come across something like this again anytime soon."
"Who goes after you, boss?" Cliff asked.
"I call second since I found the keys to the safe," Kent replied.
"Fine," the leader's tone brooked no argument, and Cliff grit his teeth and twisted her ankle between his hands. Her eyes flew open and she cried out and tried to wrench her leg away but it was useless.
Mother have mercy on me.
Nora screwed her eyes shut and attempted to imagine herself far away.
She was back home and it was before the bombs had dropped, and everything was vibrant and safe again. She and Nate were having a picnic, and Codsworth was handing her a fizzing gin and tonic with an ungodly amount of sticky sweet grenadine.
No, not Nate, Strong was with her.
They were lying together in the grass with the cool spring breeze blowing by, tousling her hair. She slipped her hand into his and the corner of his lips tipped up into a smile.
Nora screamed in pain as a rough finger was shoved inside of her.
"Fuck, she's drier than the Mojave."
...
Strong shut the hospital door behind him and scanned the perimeter, but nothing moved aside from the bloodied bags of meat that swayed in the breeze.
The area was deserted, the front of this building clearly marked as super mutant territory, an obvious sign to anyone to stay away.
Well, all except Nora, who had trusted him and followed him inside without question.
He stepped away from the door and walked around the block at a casual pace, wondering how much time she needed to be alone.
He'd gotten used to her looking at him with nothing but kindness and trust, so when her face had twisted in fear at his approach it had cut him straight to the bone.
Made him feel like the monster everyone else knew him to be.
Blood dripped into his eye and he wiped it away with the back of his hand, annoyed. Strong ripped the cloth off of a human skeleton and pressed it to his split brow.
"You've got a nasty cut above your eye, you should let me take a look at it."
He grit his teeth as his chest squeezed, remembering how she'd yelped and pushed against him, trying to get away.
Just last night she had crawled into his arms, warm and willing and soft.
Strong growled low at the memory of her hand pushing his lower armor aside to take him into her hot, wet mouth. He felt himself start to harden and he shook his head to clear the fog that had settled over him.
"Traitor."
Strong stopped dead in his tracks, the word a brand that seared into his skin.
He thought of the way the eyes of the leader had widened in disbelief as he fired that shot at the mini-nuke, damning them all to death.
But he had to do it, there was no other way she would have walked back out of that hospital alive.
You could have just killed her and joined their pack, been with your own kind where you belong.
Strong shuddered to imagine firing that shot at her instead, sparing her the pain of being torn to pieces by his brothers. Joining their ranks, being second-in-command again as he ought to be.
That leader hadn't been much stronger than him, and with some work, he would have taken over that pack and led them to glory.
Driven by the overwhelming yearning to crush the weak under his heel and tear the meat from his enemies, to satisfy that endless instinct to dominate, but to what end?
What was the point?
Strong frowned, these thoughts had plagued him ever since that human had come to Trinity Tower, and had only gotten more insistent the longer he spent with Nora.
"Strong has become infected with weakness from the humans! He is useless now and no brother of yours."
Perhaps Fist had been right, because were he given the choice between his brothers and saving Nora again, he'd pick her in a heartbeat.
He wanted to feel stunned at the admission, but deep down knew it had been true for a long time.
His foot bumped into a tin can and sent it rattling across the street, and he looked up to find himself farther from the hospital than he had intended to go.
Strong started to turn back when he caught the smell of gunmetal and unwashed humans.
He followed it around the corner and found a haphazard shelter set up in the crumbling remains of an abandoned shop, empty food cans and beer bottles littered across the floor.
The smell was fresh, he must have just missed them.
Strong made his way back towards the hospital and frowned as a bad feeling settled in his stomach. He had left her all alone, assumed that she would be safe while he gave her some space.
But he had lost track of time.
As he rounded the block he heard a faint scream and his blood ran cold. Strong broke into a sprint, nostrils flaring wide as the stink of the unwashed humans got closer to the hospital entrance.
Another cry rang out and rage as he had never felt swept through him as he barreled through the front door to find two humans pinning Nora down while a third pushed its pathetic, disgusting fingers between her legs.
Her face was twisted in pain and her plump bottom lip was split open and bleeding down her chin.
They froze and stared at Strong in shock before they jerked away from her with a shout, scrambling for their guns.
Strong snarled and reached for the closest human, who squealed as he lifted it up and snapped its spine across the back of his knee. He let the body drop to the floor and regretted ending its life before he could make the human suffer longer.
The second human had managed to get a hold of its gun and fired off a shot before Strong wrapped his hand around its arm and ripped it off like a branch from a tree.
The human screamed and piss ran down its leg and Strong laughed, eyes wild as he tore the other arm off just for the hell of it. The human collapsed and began to convulse and Strong lifted his foot to crush its head beneath his heel.
"Strong, behind you!"
Nora's shout cut through the fog of his rage and he turned around to find the third human with its arm raised, her hunting knife clutched in its grip. The human plunged the knife into Strong's chest with a savage desperation, but Strong only laughed at the tickle and the human went white as a sheet when Strong yanked the knife back out.
Strong recognized it as the human that had shoved its fingers inside of Nora, and his grin turned feral.
He dragged the human off its feet and sank his teeth into its neck with a vicious crunch.
Its agonized scream morphed into a wet gurgle as Strong jerked his head back and tore the human's throat out. He dropped the human to the floor and watched in satisfaction as it choked on its own blood, hands scrabbling at its ruined throat.
Make the meat suffer until its last breath.
Strong knelt beside the human and shoved his hands into its soft belly, pulling entrails out by the handful. The human's eyes rolled back as Strong wrapped his fingers around the stuttering heart and ripped it right out of its chest.
He snarled and bit into the hot, bloodied muscle as he watched the light fade from the human's eyes.
The stench of death clouded his senses, his body primed to shed more blood when he heard a whimper.
His head whipped to the sound and his pupils blew wide at the sight of Nora nude and writhing against her bound hands.
The mangled heart dropped from his hand with a wet plop and he was by her side in an instant. He crouched over her and felt himself harden at the display of her trembling flesh beneath him.
She opened her eyes, red and brimming with tears, and he froze.
"Please, my hands," she yanked them and winced as the rope bit into her skin.
He dragged his eyes away from her body and reached out, ripping the pipe from the wall and tossing it back over his shoulder. With a tug, the rope split and fell to the ground, and Nora sucked in a pained breath at the red welts that wrapped around her wrists.
Strong flinched as she launched herself at him and threw her arms around his neck.
She sobbed against him and he melted under her touch. He wrapped his arms around her and held her tight as her tears soaked his neck, and the remnants of his rage faded away as he pressed his nose to her hair and breathed in her scent.
Nora shuddered as the screams of the dead men continued to ring in her head, grateful that she had at least kept her eyes shut for the majority of the slaughter.
And that's what it had been, a slaughter so brutal and ruthless it was beyond a shadow of a doubt nothing more than desecration. An ending of life that transcended self-defense to the savage domination of bloodsport.
For the first time, Nora truly understood why people feared super mutants. Why they looked at her, confused and afraid, when Strong stood by her side.
She should end what they had before it got too late, before her heart got too wrapped up and it would hurt too much to leave. Any person with a shred of morality would be repulsed by him, hate him, but she didn't.
Goddamit, she knew she couldn't leave him, knew that it was too late.
I love him.
He had swept in, in all of his vicious beauty, and saved her as he had done time and time again. It was ugly and sadistic, and it was him. The same him who could be so selfless and kind that it took her breath away.
There comes a time in every person's life when they must make the decision to live with themselves and their choices, and she had made hers.
"Don't leave, I don't care about your past. I don't give a damn about anything, I just want you here, with me," she whispered, and he growled deep in his chest and dug his fingers into her soft skin.
"Never gonna leave, promise."
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