This is not the last chapter of this - I'll be following it at least until the end of Take It Back! This is just to sort of... Get things moving, since my mother is now on bed rest and I don't know how often I will be able to work on chapters for the next six or so weeks. Not long after that, my first year of college starts, so... I'll be a little bit busy. Thanks for your patience, audience.
As usual, I would greatly appreciate reviews and art.
Ain't no sunshine when she's gone
It's not warm when she's away
For going just over a year now (thirteen months and counting), he's been fiddling with the radio, hoping that one day, the signal would clear up; He's nothing short of thrilled when he turns on the radio one day, and GNR actually comes in clear. What he's not expecting when it crackles to life is Three Dog's announcement.
"Good evening, listeners! That's right, from Megaton to Girdershade, Paradise Falls to the Republic of Dave, we're coming to you loud and proud! A while back, I reported about that cat James from vault one oh one makin' his way out of the vault, and his kid followin' him." Had Gob really missed that much? He'd already known about the vaulties - they had come through Megaton, after all - but he definitely hadn't heard about it on the radio, not even on the rare occasion that the radio had given him something other that white noise when it wasn't on the Enclave channel. "Well, his kid, bright little chick by the name of Joss, is the reason you can hear me way out in the ass-end of the wasteland! She made a little trip on over to the old tech museum to snag me a present - a present that so happened to be a dish that she used to repair our relay. You can't stop the signal, baby!"
That's why it's been so long since she's been in, then. Just roughly four months - she'd only stayed for one, last time she was in, and she'd come in every single day. How much other shit has he missed while the radio was out of commission? An announcement about the entire DC being completely emptied of super mutants?
"This just in, folks: my sources say that Tenpenny Tower has been taken over by ghouls! Now, I don't know how they got in there, but my guess is some inside help. But hey, long as they ain't feral, right? Remember, kids, regular ghouls are people just like you and me - but you kill all the ferals you want."
Yeah, that was really going to help the rest of the ghouls out; It was just going to have people scrambling for guns and shooting sentient ghouls, claiming they had gone feral. Humans just weren't particularly accepting of things that were different, he knew that full well - hell, he'd been the same way, way back when. Didn't make it any nicer, or any better, or any less shitty to live through. It made it worse, really, because you knew, you knew that you would do the same damn thing, even if you swore up and down that you wouldn't. The only people, smoothskins, that he'd met that seemed to be any different were Joss and Moira from Craterside Supply, and he's pretty sure Moira's just… A few dominoes short of a full set, so he doesn't count her. Joss, though… He's still not entirely sure what to make of her. When she's in town, she's… Different. Defends him. Doesn't make a fuss about touching him or him touching her - shit, he's pretty sure that she initiates most of the touching; just little brushes of her hand against his, or a pat on the arm and hugs. Before she came around, he hadn't had a hug since the day he left Underworld. If not for her, it would have been sixteen years, now.
When the door crashes open not ten minutes later, he's more than a little bit surprised. Not because it's opened (well, that is a part of it, a very, very small part of it), but because of what's going on. The vaultie has Jericho backing away from her at a surprising speed as she approaches him, her power fist creaking angrily when she clenches her fist. He's pretty sure he's never seen her this angry - he's seen her irritated with Moriarty, sure, and condescending when Lucy West asks her a question, but he's never seen her so pissed off that she's visibly shaking and actually going after someone. He doesn't know if it's making him nervous, seeing this side of her, or if he kind of likes it, in a sick, twisted sort of way; Probably the latter, rather than the former, seeing as it's been over two hundred years since the last time he…
"Listen here, you disgusting excuse for a man," she's snarling as Jericho stumbles backwards, his back finally hitting the bar with a painful-sounding 'thunk', "I put up with enough chauvinistic bullshit outside these walls. I don't care if Simms kicks me out - you try and touch me one more time, and I will not hesitate to turn you into paste, you got me?" When Jericho nods, she smiles brightly before plunking down in a seat beside Billy Creel. When she turns to look at him, Gob falters, swallowing nervously and beginning to polish a glass before he even realizes it. "Hey, Gob!"
For a moment, he just stares at her incredulously, as if, after what must have been a full year by now, he's still surprised she willingly speaks to him, then he cracks a smile. He still doesn't full understand why someone fresh from the vault is one of two, really, who doesn't treat him like he's shit. "Hey, smoothskin."
Over the past year (the past year where she has avoided any more hugging incidents), Gob has… Well, Gob's become nothing short of… She can't really call him her best friend (that had been Amata, initially, but now that she sat back and thought about it, she realized that the Overseer's daughter was sort of a shit friend), because, honestly, she thinks there might be more there. For her, at least, and that honestly worries her a bit at first, since she's technically only known him six months or something - however many months, collectively, she's spent in Megaton. There's not a single person in the wastes she'd go so far out of her way for, not that she can think of - sure, if someone asks her to do something and it's not far out of her way, or it'll earn her something, she'll do it, but… Well, when Gob's involved, she's willing to go traversing through the Mall to get to the museum of history, just to deliver a damn letter. He's sweet as pie, she reasons, he deserves it, especially with the way he gets treated around here. And hell, she doesn't care if he's a ghoul - he's still sweet and wonderful and she absolutely adores him. It helps that he's the only man besides Billy Creel to be genuinely kind to her (and don't get her wrong, Billy was great, but she was just not digging the eye patch, or the fact that he had, 'adopted' or not, a child); Other men just seemed to leer at her, make obscene comments and gestures. Being raised in a vault where your only potential mates are all part of a gang and less than charming, it makes you practically weep for anything resembling chivalry.
She spends almost all of her time in the saloon when she's in town, because she knows that, at least while she's in there, Moriarty will lay off Gob; When she returns to her house each night, she ends up wracking her brain for some way to get Gob out, safe, happy, free. If she talks to Moriarty about it, she knows he'll give her one price, but keep asking for more, more, more, so that's out of the question. If she kills Moriarty, then she'll probably end up losing her home here in Megaton because something tells her that if Simms hasn't done something about that asshole Irishman yet, he doesn't plan on it, and he won't be too happy when someone takes the law into their own hands, even if it's more than necessary. Fishing into her pocket, she pulls out two crumpled, folded envelopes and slides them across the bar with a sheepish smile. "Sorry they're so crumpled. Had a little run-in with some…" She pauses, frowns, runs her tongue over her lips sort of nervously. Telling the bartender that she had helped Roy Phillips into Tenpenny Tower, that she had helped slaughter the human inhabitants after gunning down Tenpenny himself, that wasn't in the cards. At least she'd talked Roy into letting Daring Dashwood - it made it seem less awful. "Unsavoury fellas on the way here."
And Gob, sweetheart that he is, just tells her it's okay, and she almost breaks right there and tells him about Tenpenny Tower and darting all over the wasteland for that jackass Crowley, doing his dirty work to earn some extra caps (she still needs to take all those damn keys back to him). He just doesn't need to know about that - she knows he's older than she is, knows he's seen more of how shitty people can be, knows he's not naïve, and she thinks he needs to hear the good when she can manage to tell him about it. It's not much, but it's all she can really offer. Unless he calls her on that sometime soon, tells her to stop cutting out all the bad bits, then she's going to keep telling him only what will brighten his day a bit; That would make her feel a little better until she managed to figure out some way to get him out. And if she wasn't able to do that before she found her father, then she was just going to spend as much time in the saloon as she could.
"You make sure you write her back, and I'll take the letter back when I go back to talk to Winthrop." Or, rather, when she takes the ever-growing stockpile of scrap metal in her pack back to Winthrop - you can never have too many stimpaks, and that's what she always trades for. Honestly, she's pretty sure she knows more helpful ghouls than she does helpful human, but at least she hasn't completely cut herself from her own kind. She likes some humans fine (not people like Jericho, and not children), so long as they can at least feign politeness: Billy Creel, Moira (she was a loon, but she meant well), Abraham Washington, Harkness, Seagrave Holmes… They were really the only humans that ever seemed to think she was something other than some pathetic little vaultie who couldn't handle herself if lives all around the world depended on it. Harkness may not have been particularly pleased about her showing up in Rivet City when she did, but he'd not treated her any different than anyone else, and she appreciated that; Flak just seemed to know her way around a gun (literally, not metaphorically); Abraham and Seagrave probably just liked her because she helped out, or offered to; Moira was nice to everyone, really, and… Well, she suspects that Billy might have a bit of a crush on her. Maybe she is misreading him, but it definitely comes off that way, with him trying to pay for all of her drinks while she is in town.
Joss doesn't stay long this time - just over a week - and Gob finds himself disappointed when she comes in the last day of her stay to announce her departure. He's tempted to try and convince her to stay, but he knows that won't work - she's got things she wants to do, needs to do, and he doesn't want to stop her from getting those things finished. All he can do is shuffle his feet and polish glasses, occasionally glancing up to watch as the girl darts from person to person, saying her goodbyes. By the time she reaches him, he's not expecting it; He's been stuck in his own little world, polishing the same glass for five minutes straight.
"Oh, Gob!" she sings out, and as he spins around to stare at her, he nearly drops the glass in his hands. Joss is grinning at him like a damn Cheshire cat, and despite the frown on his ruined lips, the girl chuckles and pulls the glass from his hands to set it on the counter. The fact that this girl, this slight little vault dweller who's not even one quarter of his age, manages to him so damn nervous is nothing short of pathetic, in his mind - even if she doesn't seem to notice or care. And since the hugging incident hasn't been spoken about, or repeated, he doesn't expect it when she throws her arms around him and buries her face in the crook of his neck, nuzzling like a one of the cats he'd had as a kid. An uncomfortable heat flushes over the skin that remains on his face and the back of his neck, and he brings his hands up to awkwardly pat the girl on the back. "I don't know if - when I'm going to see you again, Gob."
Well, that's unexpected. Has she ever really known when she was going to come back? It never seemed like it to him; Her visits were never the same length, her forays into the outside world varied. If she had her time spent in Megaton planned out, then he really had to hand it to her for sticking to a schedule, regardless of if it was a schedule he liked. The only person he knew who seemed to have any sort of schedule was, well… Himself, and it was a sad-ass schedule if he'd ever seen one. Up at seven in the morning, bed at midnight after the saloon closed at ten; Repeat until you lose your mind. "Uh, that's okay…?" He is officially baffled by this situation. Nobody other than her ever tells him goodbye, let alone stands there and clings to him like he's the only reason they're still standing up. In fact, it sort of made him feel more than a little bit awkward - it didn't give him a boost of confidence like he'd half-expected, because he felt like he should feel guilty for letting the smoothskin hang on him like that.
Her grip on him tightens, and for a moment, he thinks she's going to start crying (and let's not even get on started how awful that would make him feel), but instead, she carefully detaches herself from him, sniffling. "No, Gob, it's not." His brows furrow. How is it not okay? Has he missed something here? "I don't know if I'm ever going to see you again, Gob. I… I'm here to say goodbye. I'm… I finally got a lead on my dad, when I went through Rivet City, and the Jefferson Memorial, and… I've been trying to work up the courage to follow it. If I don't go now, I'm never going to, and… I'll never… I'm never going to understand." Shoulders sagging with defeat, the girl sighs, and suddenly, he can't help feeling sorry for her, and he hasn't felt sorry for anyone in a long, long time. Before now, he hasn't noticed just how tired she looks (she's still a breath of fresh air around here): Her eyes don't look quite as bright as they used to - they look dull, blank, with dark, blue-black bruises smeared around them from lack of sleep; Her hair looks lank and he can really only tell because she's only just now pulling it back into a ponytail secured with a length of what looks to be twine; While she may have gained colour, it doesn't stop her from having the pallor that always seems to come with stress or sickness or insomnia. She looks the kind of awful he's only ever read about in books, the kind of awful that keeps people confined to their beds for huge lengths of time.
Fidgeting under her gaze, the ghoul clears his throat. There's really not much he can tell her, besides 'good luck', which always feels forced, to him. "I, uh, I read in a book, back before the war… 'Never say goodbye, because goodbye means going away, and going away means forgetting'." This earns him a puzzled stare, and he almost snaps in defense before he remembers that most people nowadays, ghoul or otherwise, probably haven't read the book in question. "What I mean is, uh… I'm not saying goodbye to you…? No, that's not right. I mean…" Silence settles for a few seconds as he tries to piece together his meaning in his head. "I mean that this isn't goodbye," he finally says firmly. "It's just you leaving for a while. You'll come back, you always do. You promised." He feels so childish, clinging to that promise for all he's worth, but it's really all he's got - polishing glasses and speaking to her, holding tightly to the small scraps of hope he still has.
In order to maintain what little dignity remained in tact after her emotional little spectacle in the middle of Moriarty's, Joss had just about run out of town at full speed, pack secure and power fist safely enveloping her hand. She wasn't lying back in Megaton when she said that she didn't know when she'd be back - she doesn't know if she'll actually find her father in vault one hundred twelve, or if it'll just be more of the same old wild goose chase, and she's really not sure she can handle it if it's the latter. If it's just another brick in the goddamn road on the way to her father… She might just give up. All this chasing, with him always just out of reach, fingertips grasping blindly at the wind, it was wearing her down, and while she'd never been one of the kids in the vault to stay in their little cubby, preferring to wander the halls… She knew that if this was just another failure, she was probably just going to go back to Megaton and hope and pray that her father wandered through again. And in that time she'd grow angry, resentful, upset that she could have had a life, if her father hadn't decided to leave. A sheltered life, and one that probably would have been largely unhappy, but a life nonetheless. Swallowing the knot that had formed in her throat, she marched on, shoulders back, head up, trying to look proud and intimidating.
She wasn't sure what time it was when she finally reached the garage that supposedly housed vault one hundred twelve, since she refused to check her pip-boy, but she knew it wasn't as late as she had expected. After leaving town at some time around eleven in the morning, she was fairly sure that she hadn't been on the move for more than four or so hours. It was still light out, so unless she'd managed to wind up in Alaska (she'd read once that they had really long summers or something like that, that meant there would be constant sun for a period of six or so months), it wasn't too close to sunset.
The all too familiar snuffling of mole rats was present when she pushed the door open. She hated those things; Honestly, she hadn't been the slightest bit upset when Moira's mole rat repellant hadn't worked as intended. Hitting things and making them explode had been, simultaneously, the least dangerous and most exciting thing she'd done since falling ass backwards out of the vault. In fact, she had gone incredibly far out of her way to find more mole rats so she could make their heads explode - she just hadn't mentioned that to Moira. Now, she wasn't sure why she'd sold that thing back to Moira in the first place - it would have been much better than having to remember to clean the blood and mole rat guts out of the little nooks and crannies of the pneumatic gauntlet she wore, she decided as the rodents swarmed her and she took each one out with a swift punch right between the eyes. She scours the place for anything of use (finding a stimpak, a Nuka-Cola Quantum, and a copy of Tumblers Today), taking roughly forty-five minutes to do so, before she even thinks of looking for the vault entrance. She doesn't know if she'll actually need any of the things she's found, but better safe than sorry. On one of the walls in the room with the large doors, she finds a button; Upon pressing it, the floor opens up and nearly sends her sprawling backwards.
With a large intake of breath, she crosses herself, something she hasn't done in years, and descends the stairs, hoping desperately that this isn't the last thing she ever does.
Time seems to creep ("Movin' slower than molasses in January", as his grandma used to say) by as he waits for her return. It's only been three days, and he didn't ask about the location the vaultie was headed to - as far as he knows, she's only just gotten there - but thinking about that does nothing to calm his anxiety. When he's supposed to be cleaning the bar, after both Nova and Moriarty have gone to sleep, he spends a good portion of his time pacing the dirty, creaking floor, rag clenched in his fist. If Nova's noticed, heard the incessant creaks downstairs, she hasn't said anything; The fact that his owner hasn't him beaten the tar out of him is enough proof that he hasn't. Or maybe he'd be able to get away with it, just because, aside from the creaking at night, he's spoken less than normal since Joss left. He knows her coming back isn't something she can necessarily control - the wasteland can be a cruel place, and you can only do so much to survive in it before something gets you - but he just keeps telling himself that she promised. It's like a chant in his head, the one thing keeping him running without collapsing into a pile of worried mush. He's pretty sure Moriarty would find a way to beat him if he was mush, anyways; The man was trouble, and if he could have realized that fifteen years ago, he would have run, hidden, something when those slavers brought him out. The slave pens may have been hell, but this was worse.
After a week, he's starting to have a bit of trouble concentrating. This isn't too unusual - there have been times where he just completely spaces out, everything about the current time and place, and he's usually transported to a time when he's with Fiona. Recently, it's different: always here, but free, and always with Joss. 'Worrisome' might be the word he would use to describe this; He still has Fiona's ring at his neck and he hasn't told anyone about her in years. Sometimes, he wonders if people know, realize he wasn't always this way and that once, he had been a man trying to start a family with the woman he thought he'd spend the rest of his life with. If they realize that once, he'd been just like them. He doubts it with every fiber of his being. Two weeks later, he finds himself snapping to attention, staring at the door, every time it swings open. It's never Joss, never someone coming to say they've found her (really, it could only be Jericho or Billy Creel, since they were the only ones who had left recently), never anyone who matters. It's the same old crowd, day in and day out.
By the time she's back, with her father in tow, it's been three full weeks. He doesn't even know she's back in town for a day and a half after she returns, but he can't be mad - after nearly a month of whatever she'd had to do to get to her dad back, she deserved the rest and catch up time.
"Sweetheart, you've saved me! Don't get me wrong, I'm thrilled to see you," James says lightly, tugging Joss into a tight hug that she's surprised he can manage, after who knows how long stuck in that tranquility lounger, "but what are you doing out here?"
For a brief moment, Joss looks extremely unimpressed and James can't help but be shocked at how much she reminds him of Catherine. "Good ol' Alphonse went crazy on toast when you left, Dad." He blinks, not really having much time to formulate a response before the girl is speaking again. "He killed Jonas. He tried to kill me. I bailed, Amata helped." Her tone is clipped, and he winces. It's more than obvious that she's not pleased with him, and hasn't been since the beginning of this conversation.
"I meant for you to be safe. If I had known that this would have happened -"
"You probably still would have left." Joss interrupts, shaking her head. "I listened to the… The holotapes from the memorial. It's about Mom, isn't it? You… You want to get the purifier running for her."
He wants to tell her no, that he's doing this because he wants to and the world needs it, but that's not true. He's doing this solely because this was Catherine's life work, the one thing she was devoted to more than making sure that when the baby came, it would be healthy. "Yes, honey." For a moment, his shoulders sag, and it seems like everything is bleak and this will happen. "You can help me! Come to Rivet City with me, we'll talk to Madison, and-"
At the mention of the scientist, Joss visibly cringes, wrinkling her nose. "I hate her." The woman hadn't exactly been kind when she had gone to Rivet City, to put things simply. If she hadn't had so much to do in the city at the time, she probably would have clocked the woman and stomped off to find her father on her own. "And I can't just pack up and go, Dad. I've got a life here… And I have to go back to Megaton," She goes quiet, smiling slightly, "I promised someone I'd come back, and you know how I am about keeping promises."
James raises an eyebrow. "So you've found yourself a beau, then? Go on, you can tell me - who is he? What's he like?"
"Oh, no, no, no, no!" Her face flushing an unnatural shade of red, she tries to cover herself. This is not the sort thing Joss wants to speak to her father about. "It's not- We're not- We don't- Can't even- He's my best friend. He works at Moriarty's." she finishes lamely, feeling distinctly more embarrassed about that statement the moment her father gives her that look - the one parents always give when they don't believe you but aren't going to press the issue.
Obviously, despite the fact that he'd gone through Megaton first and knew the limited number of people employed at the saloon, Gob was not the person James had expected her to be talking about, she can see it on his face. He's just standing there awkwardly, just inside Moriarty's, as she shoves by Jericho and around Billy Creel, and slides to a stop at the end of the counter, grinning broadly at the bartender who looks like he's torn between yelling at her and hugging her. To help him make the decision, she holds her arms out, continuing to grin until the ghoul sheepishly shuffles closer and rasps out, "You came back."
"Ye of little faith," she mumbles, hugging him tight and laughing, "I promised I always would, didn't I?"