A/N: No, Jay is not Jericho. He's an OC, just like Thistle. Thanks much to those who have already left reviews.

6

I stopped on our way back by the pond for another mudpack and a quick refill of my water bottle. Fawkes stood at the top of the hollow and looked around as I did so. Sometimes he would shade his eyes with his hand again. I wondered why super mutants never wore sunglasses. Surely someone must have made some that large sometime. But then, a lot of the shades you see around are made from durable prewar stuff, and there were no super mutants to fit the glasses to back then.

I'd seen one or two of them wearing rough visors they'd obviously made themselves. Fawkes didn't have one of those. Just his old Vault 87 uniform, complete with original boots. I climbed up out of the hollow slowly. I had to stop to catch my breath up at the top. Yeah. This is going to be a fun trip, I can tell already.

"Fawkes," I said as we started off. Fawkes had my rucksack. He hadn't asked me if I wanted him to carry it. He'd taken it gently out of my hands about three steps out of the gas station.

"Yes, Thistle," he said now.

"Why do you wear that old suit?"

"It's the only thing I've ever owned," he said. "Other than this weapon, of course."

"Do you miss the Vault?" I asked.

Fawkes snorted. "No. My brethren could tell I was different, you see. All my life that I remember was inside one small room until my friend came and released me."

"So how'd you learn to talk like that?" I said. I waved a hand vaguely. "With all the big words."

"There was a functioning computer terminal inside the chamber," said Fawkes. "I had access to the Vault's databases. They were fairly extensive."

I thought about this for a bit. "So you taught yourself to use the computer and how to read."

"I suppose I did," said Fawkes.

I thought about him kneeling there in front of the terminal, poking at the inputs with his huge hands. (And he had to have knelt. No chair would hold him.) It must have taken years, taken patience like a stone. I couldn't think of a way to put that into words, so what I said was, "That must've been really hard."

"You mean for a super mutant?" said Fawkes. His voice was still sort of hard for me to read, but he didn't sound angry. That surprised me.

"No," I said. "I mean I couldn't have done it. I don't know many people that could." I thought about it. "Maybe Carol."

"Who is Carol?" asked Fawkes.

I told him about Carol, and her partner Greta, and how they asked me to look in on Gob every time they knew I was headed past Megaton. How they saw him as a son even though Ghouls can't have children.

"There's people who won't tolerate that, women who love women," I said. "Even some Ghouls. Carol and Greta have outlasted them all."

"I've sometimes been puzzled by the way humans arrange these things," said Fawkes.

"We all are," I said, thinking about Jay. If he'd been ugly as me, I'd probably have shot him. (My commentator says that can't be true, or I'd have tried to shoot Fawkes the first time I saw him. I think I've got a better sense of self-preservation than that.) "Although it's kind of funny to hear you call us human. Smoothskins don't call us that."

"Nor do you call them human," said Fawkes.

"Yeah," I said. "That's true. It's a tricky word. What was it you called yourself before? A Meta-Human? Did you get that from the Vault database?"

"Yes," said Fawkes. "I first heard the term super mutant after I left." We walked for a little while. Presently he said, "I didn't want to identify myself with those who made me what I am."

"I understand," I said. And I did understand. And so should you, by the number of times I've called myself Ghoul so far. Sometimes it hurts me to remember what I used to look like, that I could've had children of my own if I'd wanted. Sometimes I'm grateful that I didn't know very many people back when I was Connie Garcia, so they won't recognize me and be horrified at seeing me this way. Sometimes I wish I'd known more, so they would miss me. And sometimes I just get angry at the way smoothskins will treat a Ghoul for being what we are.

I thought about that without talking for a while. It was better to use their name for me, even if it was an ugly one, than act like I wanted to be one of them. Me and them. That's how it's going to be, I thought glumly. Maybe if I was a little more social it'd be us and them. Maybe I shouldn't spend so much time away from Underworld.

But I couldn't stay there all the time. I'd get lonely for the sky over my head. It wasn't very pretty out here, even with the greening in progress like it was supposed to be, but it was more home to me than Underworld was.

"It's not useful to hate," said Fawkes, breaking in on these thoughts. "However easy it might be."

"What?" I said.

"One of the things I read said we should hold nothing," said Fawkes. "If you meet a god, kill him rather than reverence him, because reverence ties you to something else. Love and hate are alike in this way. They bind you to others."

"True," I said. "If you don't love anything, you can't lose anything."

"It's a lesson I might have been wiser to learn from the start," said Fawkes, quietly for him.

"You mean because of your friend?" I said.

"Yes."

I'd never loved anybody. I'd liked a couple of people enough that I was sorry when bad things happened to them, but not like you would a brother or sister. Or a husband or child. "Maybe it's the only way," I said. "But if there's nobody else, what the Hell keeps you going?"

"I would like to see what happens next," said Fawkes.

That struck me as a good answer. I thought about it for the rest of the day's walk, until we came to the next water hole I knew. I judged at that point that I was about out of steam for the day. My belly hurt me a little bit and I didn't want to open it up further again. And the water ran down out of a high shoulder of rock, a place you could only get to from one direction. Fawkes seemed to like that. I went to sleep with my back to the wall of rock and Fawkes looming up between me and the rising moon.

I woke up late, and Fawkes was in the exact same place. That day I did my best to wash my clothes and all of my body except for the two small wounds. Fawkes took up a position with his back to me, scanning the horizon. He stood like that while I wrung the clothes out and put them back on, too. I let them steam dry as we walked on into the sun of the early afternoon. Damp clothes are uncomfortable, and I'd washed off maybe a square yard of myself, including almost all the surface of my right arm and hand, but I felt better for it anyway.

I'd heard somebody say once that wanting to be clean is what separates humans from animals. I don't think that's quite right, being as how I've met some humans who stayed filthy voluntarily. And mirelurks are pretty clean. Maybe it was just what separated me from yao guai.

We saw a couple of radscorpions that day. They sized us up and left us alone. Fawkes and me watched them scuttle off into the rocks. (Yeah, yeah, I know it's Fawkes and I.) They were each about four feet long. I lowered the plasma rifle when they were gone. Fawkes's gat was still hung up.

"You're not a real nervous person, are you," I said.

"Worry is unprofitable," said Fawkes. "And radscorpions very seldom attack anything so much larger than themselves as I am."

"Un huh," I said. "Probably not a lot of things do."

"You might be surprised," said Fawkes.

"I doubt it," I said, thinking about the nose of the gatling laser coming up over the edge of the hollow.

We walked some more. I did better that day, but I'd wasted enough daylight that morning that we still didn't get too far. I made a dry camp next to some radioactive rocks and ate the last of my jerky. Fawkes disappeared for an hour or so. I didn't ask, but I also didn't go to sleep until he came back. It was nice having a large, armed and sleepless person around. I'd have to watch that I didn't get too used to it.

It took us two more days to get to Megaton. I killed a wild dog and roasted the edible parts of it, such as they were. We talked a little sometimes, but not very much. I think we were both thinking about what we'd said before, about not getting too attached to people. I know I was. Fawkes, for all he was big and dangerous and his containment was frightening, was not hard to like. He gave you the impression that he knew exactly what he was going to do and when he would do it. If something came along and changed his plan, he would know what to do about that, too. People like that generally end up in charge of a lot of other people. If Fawkes had been an ordinary smoothskinned human, he could've written his own ticket. But then, if he'd been that, he would never have had to become what he was.

By the time we got to Megaton, I was completely healed up, just a couple of scars and a tender spot to show for it. We had to climb a rocky path to get to the town. Megaton was built in a steep crater in the middle of a ring of hills, walled up with bullet-pocked sheets of corrugated steel and pieces of the giant machines people used to build. There used to be beggars sitting around outside asking for clean water or caps to buy it with. Now there were people selling things. One tall, thin lady with her white nose sunburned red came up to us with a tray around her neck. I opened my mouth to tell her I didn't need any cigarettes, but she was looking at Fawkes.

"You could have saved him," she said, and she spat on him. Just like that. She couldn't reach high enough to spit in his face, but it made a small blotch on his torn jacket. I looked at Fawkes to see if he was going to take that. He just looked down at his jacket, then over at me.

"I'm glad we met, Thistle," he said. "But I must leave you now."

"I'm glad, too," I said. "Goodbye, Fawkes."

"Goodbye," he said, and turned away. I watched him go. He'd never acted as if the gatling laser weighed much of anything, but now he seemed to be carrying something heavy.

The thin lady had lost herself in the group of people when I turned back. Most of them didn't seem discouraged by the fact that I was a Ghoul, and certainly not by my stained clothes. One of them tried to sell me some slightly newer ones. I ignored him as I went up to the robot deputy and waited for him to trigger the big sliding door open so I could go into town.

There were still big rusty pipes all over the ground, parallel to the steep walkways. The water might not be radioactive any more, but it was a tradeoff. Irradiation kills germs. Now they didn't have the radiation to cleanse out, but they did have to worry about the bacteria. That wasn't a worry for me, but then, me and Gob were the only Ghouls in town as far as I knew.

I knew of one person in Megaton who would sell to me and wouldn't cheat me. At least, not on purpose. She tended to be absentminded. Once she'd sold me a stimpak for one cap and then tried to charge me a hundred for a lead pipe.

But then, that's Moira for you.