"Jesus, you don't have to be a psycho bitch about it!" Jericho, sick of having a knife waved in his face, turned around and stalked back up the stairwell, heavy boots leaving a trail of dust and radroach guts behind.
It was too much to handle—being underground again, standing at a vault door, everything smothered in a false florescent glow, with Jericho mouthing off at my side. He wouldn't shut the fuck up, and only the very real threat of me carving out his tongue convinced him to go keep watch at the top entrance—a secret hatch in the oil-stained floor of a husk of an auto repair shop.
Vault 112 was all kinds of fucked up. Pristine pure and perfectly preserved, in this vault the machines roamed the halls while the handful of residents lay dormant in tranquility loungers. Damn—we should've let the machines sort it all out, rather than try to make the decisions ourselves. At least the world would still be clean.
I wandered through the empty rooms, a disorienting feeling of familiar strangeness making my skin crawl. I'd been here before—lived in it, suffered in it, lost my mind in it—except instead of decades worth of humanity staining the walls and rusting the gears, everything still sparkled with the factory polish.
It didn't take long to find my father, all roads leading to the tranquility lounge. Life sustaining pods with mind suppressing devices held everyone in stasis—those who'd placed their lives in the machine's tender care never let loose, reduced through decades of lounging to withered strips of meat and square wave forms echoing in the vault's mainframe. Maybe the robots knew if they let the masters out again, they'd fuck the tidy rooms up with their simian-style two-fisted shit-flinging ways.
It took several sub-routines, a corrupt database, and an authority override before I managed to shut the merry-go-round off. Only one pod housed a human still within his lifespan, the hatch cracking open to reveal my father, coughing and spluttering as he tore tubes and electrodes from his body.
It took him a while to get his bearings, trusting his senses again for the first time in days. "Seleste?" he croaked, trying to make me out through mis-dilated, unfocused eyes. "It's good to see you, sweetie."
Fuck. All my waste-forged hardass defenses flaked off like paint in a dust storm. I broke down and cried like a baby, snotting all over him as we got him out of his virtual prison.
He babbled while I bawled, something about doctors and geckos and water, none of it mattering to me. I'd found my father, and I was under the quaint delusion he'd somehow make things better. After all, a dad is supposed to look out for his kid, right?
"But enough of that," he stated, feeling well enough to pry me off and hold me at arm's length for a good look. "What are you doing out here? You were supposed to stay put. You could've had a good life in the Vault."
"What?" I jerked my arms away so fast I smashed an elbow into the side of the pod. Breathing became difficult, a heavy feeling I didn't want to acknowledge slamming into my stomach. "No, no I couldn't. It was killing me, and you knew it." The leaden emotions in my guts kindled with a sudden spurt of sticky fire. "You knew it, and you left me there. You abandoned me down there—"
"I didn't see it as abandoning you. I saw it as moving on, knowing you were safe." Oh, Christ, his denial was like all my bad memories rolled into one. The scientifically scrutinizing eyes, looking at me like a specimen rather than a person; the creep of command in his voice, annoyed at having his decisions questioned; and the slight twist of his shoulders, as if primed to duck out as soon he could, already set to forget this conversation ever happened because God knows it sure as fuck didn't matter to him.
"Cut the bullshit. I know you lied to me—about being born in the vault, about the outside world, about everything!" I had to find out my own history from Three Dog, learn my past from an asshole with a transmitter and a stack of lousy songs. That had fucking stung.
"I wanted a different life for you." He sighed, the same damn dismissive sigh he always used, the one he trotted out whenever Seleste was being difficult again. "It might mean you spent the rest of your life hating me, but... your well-being was worth that chance. I had hoped the Overseer would seal the Vault, making it impossible for you to leave."
My brain stopped when he said that. It shut down, turned the lights off, sent the workers home, and sold the machines. White hot fury and icy cold denial rampaged like heavily armed toddlers through my veins, without the watchful nanny of sanity to hold them in check.
"But I suppose it's too late to go back now, isn't it? The Overseer would likely have us shot on sight." Oblivious to my suffering, he just kept on talking, making things worse. "Well, then you'll just have to come with me to Rivet City. You've certainly proven yourself capable enough."
"No, wait...what? Rivet City? What the fuck does Rivet City have to do with this?" I couldn't process it, couldn't handle the mere idea of it, didn't want to admit the possibility of it—not even when the hard reality stood right in front of me, greatly annoyed by my filthy mouth.
"Coming all this way after me... I'd have thought you'd want to help with Project Purity." There—he tugged his lapels straight, prelude to another departure, yet another discussion cut short. "I have to keep going; I can't stop now."
"No." Desperate, deep in a deluded world of denial, I grabbed tightly onto his forearms to keep him from leaving. "You're going to stay here, and we're going to talk about—"
"There isn't time for this." With the reluctant patience of a self-appointed martyr, he tried to 'reason' with me. His work was so important, so close to being finished, a breakthrough so near...I'd heard the lines a thousand times before, excuses tossed at me to keep the tangled mess of my life out of his hair, flimsy trifles waved in front of my eyes to distract me from too many lonely nights of solitary dinners and silence.
"I'm going back to Rivet City." He'd made the decision long ago, the unexpected addition of his own daughter changing nothing about the overall equation. It, did, however prompt him into his version of paternal charity—a laughably false lie. "It would be good to work with you, honey."
My anger overboiled, the claw of a hand yanking on his wrist suddenly flying off to slap him across the face. "Stop lying to me!" I shrieked at him, voice high-pitched and shrill. "If I ever mattered to you, your secret experiments wouldn't be secrets to me. You wouldn't have left me to rot in that hellhole. You wouldn't try to lock your daughter away, try to bury me underground like a fucking corpse!"
He just rubbed his cheek and stared at me, eyes impassive as a stranger's as he watched his only child crumbling to pieces. "I'm afraid there's nothing else I can offer. When Project Purity is finished, we can sit down and really talk—"
"Talk? Talk?! Why the fuck would you want to do that?" My heart exploded into a thousand jagged shards of shrapnel as I finally accepted what I'd known all along—I'd never mattered to my father. All those years spent wanting his affection—hell, just his attention—nothing but wasted time and pointless emotions. I was nothing more to him than another checkmark on his to-do list. He'd checked that box by shoving me in the vault to wither and die, then I'd gone and fucked up his plans by getting out and saving his life.
Goddamn, how the irony burned.
"Keep your lies to yourself. I don't want to hear it anymore. I...I'm done." My heart had shattered in a supernova of emotion and feeling, leaving only an empty numbness in its place. I felt like a little meat-covered robot, with nothing but bloody circuits misfiring inside my cold, hollow shell. "I finally know who you are, and I don't want a damn thing to do with it."
"I'm sorry you feel that way." He couldn't stop himself, getting in one last dig. It's probably the only honest thing he ever said to me—I'm sure he was sorry as hell I never felt, behaved, or fucking danced to his tune the way he wanted me to. In his eyes I was always the problem, with my emotions and questions and troubles, something he didn't know how to handle and something he didn't care enough about to learn how.
"You know what? Fuck you, James."
I left the man I'd once called father standing between the tranquility pods. I turned on my heel and stalked away with an odd sense of lightness washing over my skin. It didn't feel like loss—how can you lose what you never had?
It felt more like relief.
Whatever it was, Jericho jerked away so quickly at the sight of me striding up the stairs the cigarette fell from his lips. "Jesus, what the fuck happened to you? What'd you find down there?"
"Nothing that matters," I answered, walking straight out of that place with Jericho hot on my heels, mistrusting every word coming out of my mouth, but too savvy to call me on it. Only thing he later said about my return was you still had that goddamn knife in your pocket.
I entered that vault a confused child seeking answers, and emerged from it a determined woman who knew the answers made no difference. It didn't matter where I came from, or how I got there—out in the blank slate of humanity's greatest fuck up, you write your own story.
And I was damn well going to do just that, starting with another pilgrimage to Vault 101, and a brand new sign. It had no name on it, because it said everything I needed to say to both my bitterest enemy and my sweetest companion.
I'm coming for you.