Bobbi No-Nose stomped up the State House stairs like a Deathclaw with a sore foot, and her eyes were also about as warm and friendly as a Deathclaw's. Of course, her eyes were always like that; when people turned into ghouls—. No, Hancock corrected himself, when they turned into irradiated citizens, or Lucids or whatever the hell people wanted to call them, their eyes changed too. The commonest changes were demon-style dark, no whites showing at all, or else fish-belly—dead fish belly, that is. Then there were people like Kent, where the whites of their eyes turned red, but the iris didn't change. That was rarer.
Nobody knew why some people got one kind of eye rather than another, because it didn't seem to matter what color your eyes were before. He and Daisy were lucky . They'd both gotten dark eyes, and whatever people said about them, at least they weren't creepy like fish-belly eyes.
Bobbi No-Nose had not been as lucky, let's put it that way. She had eyes that weren't just filmy white, it was like they belonged to some monster fish from so far down that the rads hadn't reached there yet.
Of course he never let on what he thought of her or her eyes, so when she gritted out, "Since when do you order me to come to your office like I was just some lackey, Hancock?", he turned on the charm.
"Hey, that was the furthest thing from my mind. Ya see, when I realized this called for somebody who can stick to a job an' keep a crew working, I said ta myself, this is for Bobbie. I know I ain't cut you in on anything for a while, so to make amends, this one is big. Real big. An' I asked Fahr to send somebody to ask ya—not order ya, just ask ya, to step to my office. If whoever she sent lacked what ya might call couth, then I'm sorry. Daisy here'll vouch for what I said to Fahrenheit. Right, Daisy?"
"Right," the shopkeeper confirmed. "Pull up a seat, Bobbi. You'll be kicking yourself if you pass this one up."
"First lemme introduce Raina Queen, because this is her baby. Raina, Bobbi No-nose, one of our most highly respected citizens in all of Goodneighbor."
"I'm glad to meet you," Raina said. "What I want to do, is make Goodneighbor the number one producer of hemp products in the whole Commonwealth, if not the world."
"Hemp?" Bobbi asked. "You can't mean marijuana. It's extinct."
"Not quite," Raina told her, holding out four joints. "Cannabis sativa is one of the most versatile and valuable plants known to humans, and one of the oldest cultivated crops as well. It can be used to make rope, clothes, food, plastics, paper, textiles, animal feed, paint, biofuel, cosmetics and toiletries. It has many therapeutic properties, it grows fast, it sucks radiation out of the soil and water—plus if all else fails, you can get really, really stoned on it."
That last statement was aimed at him and accompanied by a half smile and a flirtatious wink.
"Raina is gonna supply plants, seeds, and know-how. I'll provide buildings, power and water. Daisy is signed on as the wholesale distributor . An' you, Bobbi, if ya choose to sign on, will be in charge of physical production. Growing, curing, packaging—that kinda stuff. Plus supervising the folks who do the work, a course," Hancock offered. "We split the net profits four ways."
"Uh-uh," Bobbi said, choosing a joint and smelling it. "Not if you plan to split it evenly, four ways. I'd be doing more work than any of you."
"I feel ya," Hancock said. "You and Daisy would be active partners, Raina and me the more quiet ones. So—what do ya say to thirty percent each to you and Daisy, twenty percent each to me and Raina?"
"I'd say that's a start," Bobbi said. "Isn't anyone going to offer me a light?"
At the Memory Den, Deacon watched Dr. Amari fit the memory widget into Nick Valentine's head. Excitement and anticipation chased each other up and down his spine like tiny kittens romping in a hallway, and his blood was fizzing in his veins like ice cold Nuka Quantum. This was it, this would answer the mystery of where the Institute was, and how they could get in, and...
"I'm sorry, Doc. I'm not getting anything but flashes." Valentine looked at Amari and shrugged.
"I was afraid of that. All the code that comes out of the Institute is doubly encrypted," Amari said.
"Aw, no Doc, c'mon," Deacon coaxed. "We're this close to the answers." He held up his forefinger and thumb an inch apart. "You can't tell me there's nothing you can do."
Amari sighed. "There is perhaps one thing…Where one brain failed, two might succeed..." She explained.
"I'm willing," Nick Valentine said immediately. "When Raina's done talking to Hancock—."
"Why wait for her?" Deacon interjected. "I'm right here, ready, willing and able. I spent the last several days of Kellogg's life traveling with him, so I'll have a better handle on him. Besides, if he's done half of what he's rumored…does she really need that stuff in her head. Unless it's something personal you have against me…"
Nick and Amari regarded him for a moment. "I got nothing against you," Valentine said. "So, far you're all right in my book."
"Mr. Deacon is, all appearances aside, a very trustworthy individual," Amari reassured the detective. "Very well. Please take a seat in the Memory Lounger and relax. You know how it is done."
He did. The man who called himself Deacon was a long-standing customer of the Memory Den. How often had he come there to relive all the reasons why he was with the Railroad? Swinging his legs into place, he laid back and waited for the sharp, stinging kiss of the neural interface. When it came, it seemed even chillier than normal.
The test pattern on the vid fogged, then coalesced into a pulsating web of neurons. "Whoa…I haven't seen anything like this since…the last time I ate raw mirelurk meat right before I went to sleep."
"A moment, Mr. Deacon, while I try to find the strongest intact memories," Amari's voice sounded like it came from very far away. "Here is the earliest I can find—follow the brightest pathway."
"Okay—."
Then Kellogg spoke to him.
"I should have known. You were too helpful, too damn cheerful all the time. I was planning on killing you afterward anyway, but I guess the joke was on me."
"Holy shit!" He kicked out, cracked both the seal and the dome on the Memory Lounger. If he weren't a long-term, frequent user of Dr. Amari's services, he wouldn't have been able to wrench his mind free like that.
"Deacon!" Amari cried out. "That's dangerous!"
"Sorry, Doc. I'll pay for the damage. I—he spoke to me. He may be dead, but he's still in there—and he knows what's going on."
"I meant, dangerous to you. It isn't Kellogg," she explained. "Not in the way you think. At the moment, it's as though he were a holotape and Mr. Valentine, a terminal. Truly. Perhaps we should have waited for Ms. Queen after all."
"No, I can take it." Deacon eyed the Lounger. "Guess I'm going to owe you for repairs…Sorry about that. Okay. Let me sit back down again…"
Neurons linked and lit up with a pinkish-orangeish hue as he walked them, and he stepped onto a splintered wood floor. It was a child's bedroom, he realized, and the child on the bed was Kellogg himself. His mother sat in the chair next to the bed, and even in the half-light from the bedside lamp, he could see the bruises on her face. In the next room, a bear of a man blundered about drunkenly, trumpeting a half-coherent rant at his wife and son through the walls.
As he always did, Deacon wondered why the Memory Loungers showed things as if you were witnessing them, an invisible observer hovering above the action, rather than reliving them. A psychological defense mechanism, so you didn't get lost in memories, maybe. Memories...
Deacon really had read Proust and Shakespeare, which was why he liked to refer to them from time to time. Proust especially was a workout for the intellect, the triathlon of literature. In Search of Lost Time, aka Remembrance of Things Past, was in its deepest essence all about memory. What we think we remember is not what really happened, Proust wrote, explaining over the course of seven volumes and well over a million words. Time and ego work on our memories like wind and weather on a marble headstone, softening it, changing it. Yet the memory of the senses is deeper and truer. The past is there, as incisive and immediate as the moment it happened, if we can only find the key to unlock it. The taste of a fragment of cake soaked in tea brings back afternoons taking tea with an aunt; the soft, heavy kiss a lover bestows on a cheek brings back being tucked into bed by Mother as a child. Involuntary recollections are the only ones which matter.
The Memory Loungers were a shortcut to those Proustian moments, or so Deacon had thought. Now he knew that reliving his past was like eating the meat and vegetables left over from making broth; the vitality was boiled out of them. That was how real, how visceral Kellogg's memories were.
Leaving a childhood shadowed and tainted by an abusive alcoholic, Deacon trod the narrow path to a happier time, with Kellogg wiping dishes as his wife washed them. It was so like times he'd had with Barbara that Deacon's heart hurt, and then, too, a baby cooed and gurgled in a crib. The child he and Barbara had wanted...the child that never could have been born, because synths were turned out into the world fully functional but sterile.
The next scene was all too familiar, because Deacon had attacked the U. P. Deathclaws in that same deadening mixture of grief and rage, when Barbara lay dead.
From there, Kellogg drifted, a rootless man who would do anything for the caps, who didn't care who he killed. Then the Institute found him...
Back in the Mayor's office, the party was about to wrap up. After much discussion, the split had been settled: thirty-five percent to Bobbie, thirty to Daisy, twenty to Hancock, and fifteen to Raina. She herself had pointed out that after her initial contribution, she would have little to do with running things. Then they'd started trying out the samples, which led to devouring pretzels and candy, which of course made them thirsty as well. After mixing up a batch of Clean Wastelanders (the difference between Dirty and Clean Wastelanders was that you used Nuka Cola Quantum and vodka instead of regular Nuka Cola and whisky) everybody was extra happy.
Especially Raina. She had shed first her chestpiece, then her shoes, and was curled up in the corner of the one sofa. She didn't look like she was planning on going anywhere anytime soon, either. Maybe that was why, when Daisy was leaving, she reminded him, "Remember what Nick said? Be a gentleman, Hancock."
"Yeah, yeah. Scout's honor," he said, because he'd read the phrase somewhere and it had kinda stuck with him.
"Heh," she snorted. "Just remember, that's all."
Bobbi was the next out the door, "And here I'd been thinking you were shutting me out in the cold. Well, this more than makes up for neglecting me all these years. If it flies, anyway. I'll give you this, Hancock—you're one shrewd son of a bitch."
"Thanks," he waved. "That's how I stay mayor. So, uh, are the mole rats I've been hearin' out your way gonna stop tunneling, or what?"
Bobbi froze. "That's- -um. A renovation project of mine. I didn't realize anyone else could hear it."
"It's not a problem most places, but when I swing by my warehouse, it's like something's gonna break through the floor, ya dig?"
"Sorry. Well, with my new venture, I doubt I'll have time for much more renovating." Bobbie regarded him with a very calculating look: the prehistoric monster whose eyes hers looked like was trying to decide whether he was edible.
He gave her a level look back, not smiling. "That's good. Ya start getting carried away with projects like that, ya dunno where to stop."
Bobbie nodded, a quick, terse gesture, and left.
"You're not happy with her," Raina observed.
"I ain't unhappy either," he told her. "Just givin her a warning, that's all. So..." Hancock let the word trail off while looking at Raina, and then made an observation. "Y'know, you got funny feet. Your second toes are longer than the big ones."
Raina frowned thoughtfully at her own feet for a moment. "Yes...You mean not everybody's toes are like this?" Then she giggled. "Sorry-I think the drinks are a little stronger than I'm sued to-I mean, used to. Do you, um, mind if I ask you a question?"
"S'alright. Ask away," he replied, waving a hand airily, sending strata of smoke swirling in its wake. Maybe it was a hallucination, not smoke. Right now it was hard to tell. "What do ya wanna know?"
"Would you have sex with me?" Raina asked. "You see, I've never had sex with anyone, and you seem like you'd be a fun person to have sex with. So...would you?"
The Mayor of Goodneighbor was rarely at a loss for words but that question seized his tongue and tied it in a big old knot. "Uhhh... Lemme get this straight. You want ta punch your V-card, an' you're asking me to help ya." It wasn't the first time a lovely virgin had asked him to deflower her, but it was the first time in a very long time since it happened anywhere but in his memories or his imagination.
"I'm sorry. Did I ask wrong?" Raina hitched herself up a little further on the sofa. "I put it wrong, didn't I?"
"Nah, it's okay," he said, because she looked like she could get real upset, which was the last thing he wanted. "Not wrong so much as movin' kinda fast. I mean, I ain't much of a reader but I know ya don't read the end of the book first."
"I'm sorry," she apologized again. "I just don't know how to go about-."
She looked like she was about to cry, so he said, "Hey, hey, hey. I ain't sayin' no. I'm just sayin' let's pretend you said, 'Would you kiss me?' And the answer is yes, I'd be happy to kiss you. Wanna give it a shot?"
"Okay..." She leaned forward, he met her halfway, and she brushed her lips against his. He demonstrated how it was supposed to be done, and the next thing he knew, he had an armful of warm girl. Raina picked up new skills fast, it seemed, and her mouth was sweet and soft. It also tasted of what she'd been drinking and smoking.
"Look," he said when they came up for air. "That was...nice. Real nice. Yeah, I'd like to go further. But you been drinkin' and you're high. What you want ta do now, and what you're gonna want when you're sober are two different things. No, don't go tryin' ta kiss me again, not right now. Ya see, this is...I don't want ya to have any regrets, ya feel me? Not in the morning, not ever. So right now, this is what's gonna happen. You're gonna put your chestpiece and your shoes back on, you're gonna splash some water on your face, and then I'm gonna walk you back to your hotel room and kiss ya good night at the door. If you wanna revisit the topic sometime when you're clean and sober, you know where to find me."
"Oh," Raina said, her pupils dark and dilated. "Are you sure?" She was speaking in the very careful manner of someone who knows they are drunk but don't want it to show."
"No. Which is why we're gonna do this now before I make a liar outta Nick." At her puzzled look, he explained. "He said I was gonna be the perfect gentleman. I know I ain't that-but I can at least try ta be an imperfect one."
A/N: So...been a long time since I updated this. Reason being, I had a chance to pick up more hours at work in August, and I really needed them. But here it is, and now that school is back on, I think I should be able to go back to a more regular schedule in terms of updates. knock on wood.