Hallelujah: Blue Christmas (MacCready)
The Third Rail is busier than ever; those seeking a quiet drink are out of luck. In a town full of rejects and criminals, everyone is drinking away their loneliness together in the old metro station. In the corner, Magnolia is singing an old Christmas tune, her voice lingering sensually over the notes in that way she has. Around him is the crush of bodies; even people who don't come down here often are here now, creating the claustrophobic sensation of being pressed into the bar even though no one's actually touching him. Before him, resting on the scarred and stained wood, are a glass half-full of whiskey and a cigarette burning slowly in a pitted yellow ashtray.
In most places, a bar would be vacant on Christmas Eve. Everyone would be with their families, huddled around small fires and exchanging small gifts, like slightly singed toys scavenged from an old ruin or bottles of hooch squirreled away on the same trip. MacCready knows, because this time two years ago that's where he was, in a small shack he built himself with scavenged wood on a homestead far to the north of old DC, in the middle of fields of tatos and razorgrain.
When he'd lived in Little Lamplight, the kids would give each other favors for Christmas, a tradition held over from the first generation of Lamplighters. The best gift he got living there was the year he was fifteen, just months before before he left. Penny, recently rescued from Paradise Falls, let him touch her boobs. Let him? Asked him? As a parent himself, he sometimes wonders about it now, but then -
She'd offered and he was curious, so they'd retreated to a small shack in the main cavern. He'd pulled the curtain over the doorframe and she'd lifted her shirt with a timid grin. Her breasts were small, but then again he knew that; all the kids were all small and underfed anyway. He'd just stared at them for a moment, transfixed by the dark nipples standing up in the cold air of the cavern, then cupped them with both hands, fingering her nipples, and there'd been something that happened in his pants.
For a year after he left, he'd returned to that memory at night, when he couldn't sleep, and found touching himself and thinking of it brought him some relief.
And then he'd met Lucy.
He takes a drag on his cigarette and watches the slow exhalation of smoke waft towards the ceiling. On stage, Magnolia bows as the crowd cheers for her, then says she's going to take a break. There's some hoots and hollers but then the radio is turned up and Run Rudolph Run comes on, a little staticky but loud enough that some of the folks start dancing.
One year. Next week, at New Year's, it'll be one year since Lucy - since he failed her.
It's hard to imagine that he's lived an entire year of his life without her, or at least a year since that fateful day he met her. That it's been eight months since he last saw Duncan. He'll be four soon.
MacCready wonders if the boy even remembers him. Wonders if the other kids ever read him the letters he sends. He's safe down there, in the cavern, of that he has no doubt. And still, the worry nags at him.
He should be there, with his son. He and Lucy and Duncan - they should be together, a family. She should still be here.
The glass is heavy in his hand, and he downs the whiskey all at once with a wince at the warm, astringent taste of the alcohol. He signals to Charlie for another round, and the robot pours it sloppily into his glass before zipping back down to the other end of the bar with a whiff of fuel.
"Drinking alone on Christmas, huh?" Magnolia's voice is knowing, as always. She's on the stool next to him, and he wobbles a little when he turns to look at her. Perfect hair, perfect skin, perfect teeth. A little old for him, perhaps - she's got to be at least forty, right? - but when has that ever stopped him before. He thinks of the last time they -
No, not tonight. He can't, not when the image of Lucy is already starting to fade. Was her hair auburn or more brown? He can't remember and it kills him.
"I'm not the only one," he quips. Magnolia gives him a small smile, empathetic and alluring.
"You want to take this party somewhere else?" Her voice is a purr; she's a lion, or a tiger. She'll swallow him whole and he'll never know it was coming.
MacCready takes another drink of whiskey and tries to fix his eyes on Magnolia. Her dress glints and shimmers in the dim light, casting red glimmers across his legs and over the wooden structure of the bar. It'd be so easy to go home with her, to bury himself in her skin and let the whiskey and the heat between her legs wipe it all away.
But no; tonight he's not drinking to forget. He's drinking because there's no other choice. He's alone in the vast, wide world, when he thought he wouldn't be. He's alone and he was supposed to be with Lucy, and he failed her, and so he drinks to punish himself.
"Not tonight," he says, trying to imbue his words with some amount of regret but just sounding annoyed. He doesn't want to hurt her feelings, but he needs to remember.
Lucy, in the dark of the tunnel, her screams as she was torn apart by the ferals. The sound of flesh ripping, tearing; the feeling of Duncan's little body pressed to his chest and the wail of the baby, too young to understand why his mother was being left behind in that dark hole. The way the little guy wept and asked for mama over and over for days on end, until MacCready couldn't handle it anymore and, tears leaking from his eyes, began the journey back to the Capitol Wasteland, back to Little Lamplight.
Back to safety.
"That's fine, dear. Have yourself a Merry Christmas." Magnolia brushes one hand from his knee up towards his hip, fingers trailing along his inner thigh, and he feels a regretful twitch inside him, but MacCready knows he's made the right decision. He watches her walk across the room to another figure in red, king of the rejects: Mayor Hancock, resplendent and drunk, or perhaps high on mentants and Jet, laughing as she pulls him towards her, one hand spreading across her hip like a virus.
He takes another drink from his glass and then it's empty again. This year isn't what it was supposed to be; he should have been with Lucy, with Duncan. The three of them, in their small shack by the water, a happy family around a radio. A laughing child in his arms, perhaps a new baby on the way. No blue boils, no tribe of ferals biting into his wife's throat, strangling her with their teeth.
A wave to Charlie, the signal for another drink, for oblivion.