People always like to claim they can change.
Don't listen to them, 'cause they're fucking liars. Nobody ever changes.
I only wish I'd known that from the start. Things might have ended differently...
Everything sped up after I emerged from the second vault, time running bullet fast and twice as brutal. Walking out on my terms, I felt powerful enough to destroy the moon if I wanted. But the only thing I really wanted—had ever wanted—lay trapped underneath layers of lies, rocks, bullshit, and blastproof metal.
I could dig through the first three, but you can't shovel reinforced steel.
Jericho, never fond of waiting around, bitched constantly about my newfound obsession. Instead of raiding and drinking, all I wanted was to sit in front of that vault door and burn my way through. He'd get bored before I even got the blowtorch fired up, drifting outside to entertain himself by pissing his name on the ground. Eventually he stopped waiting and started wandering, spending more and more time hanging around his buddies in Paradise Falls. When he did come back, it'd be for a screw and a smoke, carrying with him rumours about some powerful soldiers supposedly setting up shop in the north.
For all the shit we'd been through, neither of us really cared when the knots binding us together began to unravel. It'd been fun while it lasted, but we weren't exactly sentimental over our arrangement. I still liked the asshole, and he never tried to sell me into slavery, so I'd say we considered each other friends when the whirlwind of our raiding days finally spun itself out.
Silence, once my loathed childhood tormentor, became my new friend. I worked for hours with nothing but the sparking hiss of melting steel to mark the passage of time. Each new journey to the Vault earned one small chunk less of door standing between me and my Amata. I would have whittled that metal away even if it took the rest of my life, so long as it meant I could see her again.
It happened far sooner than that.
I arrived at the tunnel to the vault, having dragged another round of supplies back from Tenpenny Tower. Instead of the usual companionable silence, I heard someone whispering up ahead. Dropping everything, I readied my rifle and crept into the thick gloom of the rocky passage.
I didn't use a light, and the weak glow of the moon barely extended more than a few yards down. My feet stepped by blind familiarity, having spent so long in front of the door I could see it down to the last pebble whenever I closed my eyes. Halfway through, the voice grew loud enough to hear.
I recognized it.
"Amata!" I screamed out to her, hands suddenly clumsy with a half dozen oiled thumbs as I grabbed for, dropped, found, fumbled, then finally lit up my flashlight. I shone it all over the place, hearing echoes of her voice bouncing off the rocks, but finding nothing. I finally calmed down enough to realize I heard a recording, whispered in an urgent rush and slipped half-finished into the vault door PA to loop endlessly around my ears.
They say you're out there. If you are, and you still remember me, we need your help. I changed the door password to my name and...damn! Nothing, father! No, I wasn't—
I punched her name so hard into that console my knuckles ached. Still remember me...goddamn the Overseer! What had he told her, to make her even question that?
The first massive clang of the door shifting out of place almost made me piss myself in excitement. My hands shook like a junkie's readying another hit when I caught a glimpse of the vault entryway. It was just as I remembered it—which was all wrong. The red emergency lights still flickered, and a thick haze hung in the acrid air. It stung to breathe, a noxious concoction of oxygen and recycled smoke.
I marched in there, holding up my all access pass, fully prepared to take back what was mine. No guards ran in, nobody there to see my triumphant return decked out as a walking bomb.
No way would I let the Overseer kill me easily. All the explosives I'd brought, intending to jam into the holes I'd burnt in the steel door, lay strapped tightly to me in a parody of armour. In my hand I waved around a primed grenade.
If I went down, the ceiling would go with me.
I stepped loudly through the long hallway to the atrium, abandoning surprise in favour of explosive might. Instead of residents milling about in their pointless daily routines, I found nothing but a security officer standing sentry behind a makeshift barricade.
"Seleste?" Officer Gomez, lifting up his visor to reveal a face aged rapidly with stress, called out to me. "Is that you—holy shit!"
He damn near ran off at the sight of my grenade. I shouted him back, demanding he take me to Amata, threat of detonation convincing him to listen.
The trek through the vault revealed it to be even more fucked up than I'd last seen. Barricades and broken furniture littered the rooms, with dark unsavoury stains spattered over everything. Officer Gomez nervously filled me in on the news.
The amount of crazy in the vault reached critical mass the night my father got out, and hadn't gone down since. The fragile vault equipment the Overseer turned off, still in use decades past its best before dates, didn't want to come back online, while the other systems—like the air purifier—struggled and choked on the increased burden. The vault lifestyle, always flawed and broken underneath, had finally shattered, its rotten insides plain for all to see.
The residents turned on each other rather than try to fix it, fighting over the issue of opening the door. I beamed with pride when I learned Amata argued the loudest of all those in favour of getting out.
"The rebels are holed up in the medical labs. I can't take you any closer than this. Besides, I think you know the way." Officer Gomez managed a weak smile at me, eyes fixated on the grenade my thin fingers clutched together as he edged away.
The casual walk down the hallway turned into a trot, then a full out run. "Amata!" I bellowed for her as I worked the pin back into the grenade, afraid I'd lose control and blow the both of us up at first sight. Exhausted 'rebels' turned their bitter faces towards me as I bolted by, their eyes bugging out at the ghost of vaulties past.
They were nothing but shades to me, inconsequential faded memories compared to the brilliant beacon of hope poking her head out of the lab. "You came back—oof!" I grabbed Amata, clutching her in a remorseless embrace as momentum and balance tilted us about, two crazy dancers spinning in the hallway to the strains of the reunion waltz.
She took the lead, guiding us to my father's old office for a private chat. I fucking trembled those first few moments, petting her and laughing wildly and leaking tears the entire time. She'd grown leaner, stronger, in our time apart, her experience with command and faint brush with conflict bringing out that spark of life of hers I loved the most.
I was so goddamn proud of her, I could've burst.
I almost did, my tongue clicking off faster than a Geiger counter in the ruins of Megaton. My torrent of words collided in a junk heap of half-finished ideas—telling her to pack, about our place waiting out in the wastes, trying to explain how damn much I missed her, and how good she looked.
"No, Seleste, no. Stop." Amata pushed me into a chair, her hands holding my mouth shut. "Listen to me."
I did, my happy shivers turning into shakes of fury. Her father—that fucking egotistical maniac—still managed to screw up my life, despite the fact he couldn't even hold his vault together. Mr. Brotch, escaping detention in the security cells, brought back the plans of some renegade security goons. They intended to end the rebel threat—permanently.
And the Overseer, smug on his throne with his multi-lensed eyes, didn't know a damn thing about it.
At least, that's what Amata swore, despite the fact I didn't believe it for a second. "He's behind it," I told her, trying my best not to shout the truth. "Have you forgotten what he did to you? What he made you do?"
"No. That was...that was an accident. I never meant to..." Amata crumpled, eyes overbrimming with bad memories. I hugged her to me, hating her father more with every hot tear spattering on my shirt—every single one of them his fucking fault. "He's not like that," she sobbed to me, still refusing to see reason. "I just need to see him, talk to him, but the guards..."
Delicate fingertips traced over the powder keg strapped to my chest, Amata's sniffles slowing to a halt. "Wait...how did you get past the guards?"
I didn't want to do it. I hated it—the idea, the danger, the ways it could get really fucking ugly really fucking fast. But when Amata turned those wet eyes on me, begging me to do this one last thing for her, how could I possibly say no?
We moved through the vault like a mutated brahmin made out of friendship and decorated in nitroglycerin. I clutched that grenade so tightly I worried I'd detonate the damn thing by crushing it, while Amata held onto my other hand so hard I swore I felt my joints snap. The air stank with crazy, every breath reminding me of the worst of my paranoia and claustrophobia, raising the hairs on the back of my neck as the old familiar feeling of thousands of watching eyes settled onto my skin.
One pair of eyes had been watching, the Overseer waiting for us in the empty atrium, an escort of his toughest thugs at his side. It was my turn to squeeze Amata's hand so hard she whimpered. No way would I let her out of my grasp, grenade or no. She was my talisman, my prize, my reward and my reason all bundled in one beautiful girl. She was literally the only fucking thing left I had worth living for, and the only reason I bothered staying alive.
The Overseer didn't even bother talking to me, just shooting me with a hate-filled laser beam of a glare. I matched it right back, flicking the tab of the grenade with my thumb to spell it out for him—he would not win this time. He looked away to Amata, beads of sweat dotting his brow as he realized what he was dealing with.
She lay it out for him as I kept watch, shocked by the size of her courage. Amata spoke loud and proud, pointing out his failings as an Overseer, the dissension within his own security force, the dwindling, inbred future awaiting the residents unless the door finally opened.
"Damnit, I told them I won't let this degenerate into violence again! The Vault simply can't take the instability anymore," he finally croaked, all crocodile tears and bullshit. "Perhaps...perhaps the vault does need new leadership." Oh, he pretended to be weak, lulling his daughter with another thick smear of manipulative lies. I know, because his eyes flickered to me for one brief, telling instant, right before he set off an entirely different sort of chain reaction. "Amata, I hereby appoint you the new Overseer, effective immediately."
I almost dropped the fucking grenade.
I distinctly remember it, the sick slick feeling of it slipping from my sweaty palm. I recall the stomach drop of fear when gravity tugged at it, trying to pull it free. I can still hear Amata's terrified scream when I let go of her, yanking my other hand up to slam it back into place.
As for what happened next, the memories...
They only come to me in silent dreams, waiting for closed eyes and darkness to creep out, flickering flashes of things I don't want to remember and don't want to believe.
Amata, mouth moving too fast and head shaking too hard, shrinking back in the half shadowed darkness of the maintenance room, the whirling lights of the generators spinning blood-red light over the knife in my hands...
Green text on a black background, the plain language of the console confirming alarm systems offline, water systems offline, camera systems offline, while a blinking cursor awaited an answer to disable air purifier, Y/N?...
The vault controls on the outside, dark red smears discolouring three of the keys—A, M, T—coal black smoke billowing out from cracks between the cog shaped door as it shudders shut one final time...
Flakes—lying in the middle of the parched wasteland, ground so dry it looks flaked like giant scales. Lying under the searing sun, my skin charring into burnt flakes. Watching dull red flakes fall from my hands, the gritty winds stealing away dried blood that was not my own...
And at the end of the nightmares, just when it seems it couldn't hurt any worse, the barbed whispers of echoes begin. Just because you hate your father, doesn't mean I feel the same...It's not just him who needs me, they all need me...Don't you get it? I don't want to abandon the Vault. I only wanted to open it...I'm sorry, but no...Don't be gross—that wasn't for real...
Each time I awake with the same horrid shock I received as I lay in the molten deserts of the wastes, memory charring into flakes of ash, covered in the blood of the only thing that ever mattered. A flash of nuclear bright light blinds my eyes, ears ringing with the sickening high pitch of her pained screams.
The only difference is the first time that happened, my ears cleared to hear a warm southern accent ordering someone to prepare her for transport immediately.