A short chapter, with a straightforward purpose.
So last chapter was just as polarizing as I figured it would be. Several reviews of people saying they're done with the story for one reason or another. Oh well, not too surprised. I don't think last chapter really took a big turn, and I don't think that Bishop being as strong as he is somehow invalidates Jaune's achievements and abilities, let alone the tenacity and skill that got him through both this world and canon. It just presents a fresh challenge at a point where he'd seemingly surmounted most things (got his team, Ruby, training and doing better with his mental health) then suddenly his great enemy comes in.
Though some of the most critical reviews have given me new ideas, so I appreciate it, and I'm going to take this as an opportunity to improve. But, heh, not all the new ideas I've gotten are going to be very happy.
Fun fact: Bishop actually quoted Frank Horrigan at one point almost verbatim last chapter. "You've gotten a lot farther than you should have. But then, you haven't met Frank Horrigan, either. Your ride's over, mutie. Time to die." I took inspiration from Horrigan while creating Bishop, and plenty of reviews have pointed out the similarities.
But I also took inspiration from Achilles. A petty super soldier with serious anger issues out for revenge? Sounds about right. At least Bishop has more claim to the mantle than Pyrrha (who is far too nice to be Achilles).
"Will he be okay?"
"He'll live."
"That's not what I asked."
The two men stood in a dimly lit room, beside a large glass window that showed a broader room drenched in sterile white light which reflected off the polished surfaces of clean steel instruments and white floor tiles. On a table in the center of the room, a blond-haired young man lay, draped in a blanket. Wires wrapped around his arm kept track of his vitals, and the steady beeping let them know that nothing was awry.
"Listen… uh, Arthur, was it?"
"Yes," the gruff, older man replied. His voice came deep and coarse through a square, sturdy jaw.
Everything about him could be described as brawny, sturdy, tough and rigid, like an anvil. Dark eyes bore down into the diminutive man he spoke to, who looked up through huge round glasses with a gaze that seemed unconcerned and unafraid, despite the overall imposing demeanor of his counterpart.
"Well, Arthur, I'll be honest and say that your friend's condition is peculiar. Most of his aura is drained, but other than that, I didn't pick up much serious damage on him physically," the doctor said. "There's going to be a lot of bruising, a lot of soreness. He may tear something he exerts much. I knocked him out just so he'd shut up and stop moving around, making things harder."
Arthur scoffed. "He's like that."
"Well aside from that, he's utterly exhausted, to an extreme degree. What'd he do, run a hundred miles and jump off a bridge?"
"Our activities are of no concern to you," Arthur gruffly said.
"Ah yes, of course not," the doctor replied, shaking his head and adjusting his glasses as he looked back through the window. "I understand the need for discretion in this world of ours, just curious for more details to possibly key in on anything about his condition that I'm missing. But just from what I've seen, it seems he only needs plenty of rest."
"How long will his recovery be?"
"I don't know the full extent of that physical empowerment semblance you told me he has, so I can't say. Maybe a few days. Just make sure he drinks a lot of water and eats well. Keep him in bed."
Arthur sighed. "That last part will be hard for him."
"I have some opioids you can purchase, if you'd like."
"Not necessary."
The doctor just shrugged. "Well, aside from that, it seems like my work is done—"
The door to their small room opened.
A woman walked in, and Arthur had to look down to see meet her eyes. Neo stood with one arm in a sling and a bandage on her cheek. She tilted her head back to the door, and Arthur assumed she meant that their new ride was here.
He nodded and turned back to the doctor. "When can we take him away?"
"Whenever he wakes up."
"Which will be?"
"Sometime."
"What kind of doctor are you?" Arthur asked, scowling and crossing his arms.
The little man only laughed. "The kind that gets the job done."
Arthur said nothing.
He looked back through the window at the kid who was half his age but far stronger than he ever would be—in more ways than one. He sighed, and for just a moment, his stone posture and granite expression softened ever so slightly, trembled imperceptibly like a mountain in a thunderstorm.
He wondered what the kid was thinking about.
Rage. Even as he slept, the echoes of fury were in Bishop Beauvais's mind. They reached back through years of memories that wavered in his unconsciousness.
"Anger is a good thing, Bishop. Hatred is a good thing." Old words. Very old words. He would never forget them. "Such emotions evolved naturally in man, to help him survive, to empower him."
A child with blue eyes and blonde hair sat on the floor of a large, dark, industrial kind of room and looked up to an immense computer screen. It had only a single green line that fluctuated whenever the great entity spoke.
Dad.
"We hate and we fear and we are angry, all for good reason," John Henry Eden said. "It is the nature of humanity, to hate and rage and act on it. History has been driven by that, the passion.
"It is just a matter of control, my son. Discipline. Americans from Washington to Lincoln to Eisenhower knew the value of it. They kept their heads cool, but their drive to fight was fueled by their hate."
The child's eyes were wide, enraptured by every word.
"We hated the British, so we killed them. We hated the French, so we killed them. We hated the Indians, so we killed them. We hated the Mexicans, so we killed them."
The child leaned in, becoming more absorbed with every enemy defeated.
"We hated the Spanish, so we killed them. We hated the Germans, so we killed them. We hated the Japs, so we killed them. We hated the Chinks, so we killed them."
The computer was silent then, quiet for a cold moment.
"But we were held back. The weak, ineffectual and dispassionate slowed us down. Communist sympathizers and slothful politicians."
The screen flashed: it showed stylized drawings of smiling couples, happy families, children playing with toys and dogs, handsome soldiers marching along.
The child looked in awe as the huge screen switched to black and white footage. It showed American men and women shuffling through packed streets, pledging allegiance in class, shopping at stocked grocery stores, watching movies at drive-ins, laughing, cheering, playing baseball.
"We must act, Bishop. We are the last bastion of true righteousness in the wasteland. We have the right vision, sail the right course. This is what we can restore."
The screen showed a family saluting an American flag.
"We can bring back law, happiness, the nuclear family and—of course—baseball."
The President was silent for a moment, during which the child did not dare breathe.
"You," Eden said. "You, Bishop, can lead the world to prosperity once more."
Such it went, for years and years. The child would train and be educated. His history classes treated the United States of America as the axis around which human civilization came top revolve. His biology lessons examined pure human bodies, untarnished by radiation. His physics lessons focused on the power of the atom, the power of energy weapons and how scientific principles lead straight to military triumph—of course, it also stressed how American thinking was responsible for the brunt of later human development. His math tests had questions asking him to multiply and add counts of ammunition and prisoners.
His training throughout his life was left to one of President Eden's Secret Service agents. The man would beat Bishop down, force him to get up, then beat him down again. Every day. Year after year. Until Bishop learned. Bishop learned to fight back, and he learned to aim, and he worked out ceaselessly every day. His diet and exercise was carefully calibrated since the moment he was brought into the Enclave as an infant, carefully calculated to make him perfect.
And at the end of every day, he went to sleep in a sleeping bag in a tight cement room, much like a prison. But he loved the room. It was a Spartan household, a warrior's domain. So his father told him. So he knew.
And at the end of every day, a microphone-camera in his grim cell let loose a voice. President John Henry Eden called him son, told him how proud he was of his progress, told him stories of old America and, in Bishop's younger years, told him bedtime stories and lullabies to deliver him to sleep.
Bishop worked his hardest every day in anticipation of bedtime, when he could converse with his father, make proud the man who cared for him, who believed in him, who had saved him. Eden's praise came to be as valuable to Bishop as gold. No, worth more than that. Bishop sought his father's praise as the dying man in the desert sought water.
One day, Bishop was told there would be no training or exercise. In fact, his father had something special planned for him. The agent came into his room and gave him a puppy, an adorable little creature that instantly hopped onto Bishop's lap, tail wagging, and scrambled up to lick his face. President Eden told him to name the puppy, and Bishop did so: Washington. Named for the greatest man, Bishop fell in love with dog, which he cuddled and played with for hours straight. He'd heard of dogs in his father's stories, but he'd never imagined he'd be so lucky as to—
"Now kill it." The order came from his father's microphone.
"What?" Bishop, still a child, at first didn't believe the words were real.
"Kill it. Prove you have the discipline and the will to overcome base human emotion."
"But—"
"Prove that you hold my word above all else."
"I—"
"Do it!"
Bishop shook. The puppy sensed his anxiety and pressed its snout into his hand, comforting.
Bishop looked down into its eyes, then looked back up to the camera jutting out the wall; it stared back.
He wrapped his hands around the dog's neck, and then he squeezed.
The puppy squirmed in his grip for a moment, then panicked when it realized what was happening. It writhed desperately and whined. Bishop tightened his grip, looked away.
"Look at it," Eden said. "Look at it, Bishop. Prove yourself."
Bishop started crying. But he kept his grip tight.
"Look at it!"
Bishop forced him to look down at Washington, which stared back at him with large, horrified, wet eyes.
"Stop crying!" Eden ordered. "To cry is to be weak!"
Bishop hyperventilated, trying desperately to hold back his tears. His eyes were rimmed with a burning sensation, a pain worse than any of the bruises he'd gotten in training.
After a little while, the puppy stopped moving.
Bishop let go. It slumped to the floor beside him, limp and lifeless.
"Good," Eden said. "Very good."
Bishop sniffled, and he wiped away the stray tears that he couldn't force back.
"Don't cry, Bishop. Never cry."
The child nodded.
"You did well. You have discipline, loyalty, enough to overcome petty empathy.
"And do you feel it? Do you feel angry?"
Bishop felt some of it. Angry at his father, at himself, at the dog. Angry at something. But over that, he was scared, and he felt a heavy, guilty weight in his stomach—
"Feel it. Lean on it. Don't be sad. Don't be guilty. Tap into your anger and transfer your other weak emotions into it. That will empower you, free you of any effeminate feelings."
Bishop closed his eyes.
"Breathe deep, Bishop."
Breathe deep.
"Hold it."
Hold.
"Release."
Release.
Bishop followed his father's instructions.
"Tap into your anger, channel it, feed it, let it become you."
The child clenched his fists. The sadness, the guilt and the ugly feeling he couldn't quite name… it slid away. Growing by the moment was, instead, hate. Hate and anger. At what? At something. It didn't matter what he was angry at, only that he felt it.
"Good, Bishop. Very good. Be angry."
Training continued from there. Every day, Bishop felt anger, felt hate, and he nursed it, because he knew it was good.
Within a few years, he was brought along on a raid. They were getting subhumans for a work camp, and Bishop kept pace with a plasma rifle and modified suit of power armor that fit his 12-year-old frame. He did well, killing one of the guards of the savage little village.
The able-bodied men were put in chains and dragged back to the vertibirds, while the women and children were forced to huddle up in a group.
"Take this," his trainer said, giving Bishop a gatling laser. "Take this and end it. Your father wants it."
Bishop looked at the desperate, tear-stained faces of the dirty subhuman survivors. His mind flashed back to memories of Washington, his puppy years before. And he felt anger.
He pulled the trigger.
By the time he was fifteen, Bishop could easily best the agent who trained him in their sparring matches. He could throw the man over his shoulder with one arm and block a punch by catching it in his hand. He had the strength of two men, the speed of a leopard. Other recruits and soldiers looked in awe whenever he went to the gym and outdid them all without breaking a sweat. They gasped when he scored perfect accuracy tests in the simulations. None were surprised when he became a fully-fledged secret service agent by the time he was sixteen, having by then eclipsed the rest in ability.
"You're a freak of nature," the man snarled. "No better than a super mutant!"
One of the captains in the Enclave army had cornered him, alone, in his room. He let Bishop know just what he thought about him and his forced evolution.
Bishop beat him to death right there and then.
No one else ever knew, except for one person.
"I understand you were angry," his father had told him, "but you have to understand that anger is but a fuel. It is like the atom splitting, a thing capable of great power. But you, Bishop, you are the reactor. You contain, control and utilize that energy. Don't melt down. Don't explode. When you face adversity, control yourself. In fact, smile in the face of opposition, because facing enemies is a challenge to grow, to overcome, to better yourself."
He would take that advice to heart. Actually, he would take it quite literally. Whenever he encountered an enemy without his helmet, he kept up a smile. When he surveyed a mission in his officer's uniform or if he happened to take off his helmet after a battle, he smiled. He smiled to keep his enemies from knowing the volatile hate inside of him, to control it and himself. He smiled to scare them, almost as if the grin was a form of war paint.
He had smiled at Maxwell Noble.
The cockroach. The greatest mistake of his life was allowing that smarmy insect to live when they first met at the purifier. He had him as a hostage. He could have pulled the trigger and ended that subhuman degenerate right there and then.
But he did not. And from there, Maxwell's undoubtedly warped genes and certainly communistic thoughts had lead him on a crusade for anarchy.
A crusade that had succeeded.
Bishop had failed, because Maxwell was like the cockroach. You stomp on it, but it can still scurry away. Its filthy little mandibles would spread disease and rot after it got away. And slowly, everything that Bishop had built, everything he knew, was brought down around him in part because of that cockroach. That lucky insect with the ability and tenacity to survive, to slowly sap away at the righteous.
"You're like Goliath," his father had told him. "You're a triumph."
Well, if I am Goliath, then it seems that Maxwell is my David. He has a sling and cunning plans. He beguiles fools into being allies, and they die for him and fight for him. He is a monster, that David.
After the disastrous loss at the Jefferson Memorial, his father had tasked him with plunging into the ruins of a government facility that held the codes to the old Orbital Satellite Bombardment system, the weapon they needed to defeat Liberty Prime and win the war. He'd agreed without protest, swearing to go as fast as he could and return. They would win, and Bishop would be the hero.
He succeeded. At first. He fought through a dilapidated old military research station infested with radroaches and super mutants. It was a horrid, awful mission, but he succeeded. Then they got back in their vertibird and headed straight to Raven Rock—
Their vertibird's radio crackled on. It garbled static for a few seconds, before finally:
"B-Bishop?"
He perked up at the sound of his father's voice.
"Bishop, are you there?"
"Father?" He stood shakily in the turbulent vertibird and neared the cabin. "What—"
"Bishop…"
Something was wrong. Something was very wrong. He'd never heard his father sound despondent like that, tired. Defeated.
"Relocate to Adams Air Force Base," Eden said. "That is my last command."
What?
"Be well, my son."
Suddenly, the radio died, reduced to static.
Bishop's heart felt heavy, and it began to beat as fast as a minigun could shoot. A horrible dread filled him, and when he saw smoke on the horizon…
The vertibird touched down, and the men got out and observed. They looked into the distance, watched as Liberty Prime stood triumphant beside the smoldering ruins of Raven Rock. He saw movement, undoubtedly the Brotherhood's forces. Undoubtedly, Maxwell was among them.
His father's mainframe was centralized in Raven Rock. His father was dead.
He stood there, on a hill overlooking the destruction of his home, his family, his life. He looked out over the vista and felt weak in his legs. His stomach turned, and vomit threatened to well up in his throat. He clenched his fists, which shuddered. He felt that old pain around the rims of his eyes.
Don't cry, Bishop. Never cry.
He opened his eyes. And he was angry.
"Bishop? Commander?"
He heard the voice, a familiar tone. He blinked the haze from his eyes and looked up, saw Arthur, his ever loyal lieutenant. The sight of his companion tempered his anger somewhat; and the sensation of intense, pained soreness all over his body also distracted him.
But that moment passed, and he scowled.
He looked around, saw he was in a sterile, white room. He heard Arthur explain they'd brought him to an underworld doctor, but Bishop only growled and ground his teeth together.
He also felt a dull ache behind his eyes, but it had faded a good amount by then.
He tried to sit up, but his muscles screamed and tensed. It hurt just to move.
The pain made him only angrier, and the anger made him all the more determined. He grit his teeth and forced himself up, arms shaking as he propped himself in a sitting position.
"Don't push too hard," Arthur said.
"Shut up," Bishop said, voice hoarse.
He looked down at his hands; they quivered. He looked down at the plain white robe that he wore. He closed his eyes and felt the burn in every fiber of every muscle in his body.
"What did she do to me…"
"We don't know," Arthur replied.
Bishop screwed his eyes shut.
Breathe deep. Hold. Release.
He shook, in part from anger, in part from exhaustion.
"They die," he said.