Author's note: The songs for this chapter are David Guetta - Alphabeat, Shakira feat Rhianna - Can't Remember to Forget You, Ellie Goulding - Burn, and Aviici - Fade Into Darkness.
There's about three quarters of a lemon in this chapter.
A Question of Humanity
Harkness
I had never before regretted taking the position of Rivet City security chief, despite the monumental problems I had to face nearly every day, but my chat with Madison had me seriously thinking about turning in my badge and running for the hills. She had worked herself into a state of unreasonableness by the time I arrived in my office, and persuading her to keep quiet about the incident in the lab was an exercise in the kind of teeth-grinding frustration that tried every ounce of my newly found android restraint in keeping my hand off my gun. I honestly did think about shooting her when she repeated her complaints for the fifth time, again insisting that she wanted to have Elle banned from Rivet City permanently for violating the sanctity of her lab, but I managed to resist the urge and maintain my outward calm. Something of my violent thoughts must have leaked onto my face though, because she finally subsided and agreed to keep anything but the official story to herself.
Despite my best efforts, I was briefly concerned that the real story might leak out through the grapevine as things tended to do on this boat, until Madison herself mentioned that any complications as a result of her involvement with the situation might affect her ability to do business with the few legitimate Commonwealth scientists who came through from time to time. I should have known that greed and scientific curiosity were the only things that could have persuaded her to see things my way, but by the time she left my office, Madison had already convinced herself that the official story was as likely to be true as what she had witnessed.
The smallest issue in this massive cluster-fuck having been dealt with, I quickly provisioned for several days, and loaded up on as much ammo and special weaponry as I could reasonably carry, trusting that Elle would do the same. We met at the entrance to the city at the appointed time, and she took one look at my face and wisely decided to leave me to my own thoughts while she tracked the assassins on her Pip-Boy. I wasn't really angry with her for her decision to forcibly recall my android memories, but I was so disoriented by the whole thing that I truly couldn't have predicted what would come out of my mouth if she'd engaged me in conversation.
I had plenty of time to brood about the day's unwelcome revelations while Elle and I headed in a roughly northeastern direction, toward the Capital Wasteland's unofficial border with the Commonwealth. My android brain obviously processed things much faster now that it was being allowed to operate at its full capacity, but I was still having trouble reconciling my memories of my life as android A3-21 in the Commonwealth with the implanted memories of the original Harkness, whoever he had been. I examined the memories carefully, attempting to fit them in amongst my own memories, subroutines, and programing, like trying to assemble one giant jigsaw puzzle from the pieces of two smaller ones. I wanted desperately to be able to think and act as one man, not two, and this occupied the part of my brain that wasn't on constant watch for trouble until we decided to stop for the night and set up camp. I found a nice, rocky cul-de-sac, easily defensible, and seeded the entrance with frag mines for good measure. It was secure enough that I felt comfortable removing my armor for the night, making up for the lack of protection by strapping my gun back on my hip over my civilian clothes. When Elle saw that I was relaxed enough to do without my armor, she followed suit, stripping down to the thin pants and camisole she wore under her armor.
Elle produced some dried Brahmin jerky and a small bag of flour from somewhere in her voluminous pack, and I had secured several of the dehydrated vegetable rations that were standard security force fare on the rare occasions when we had to leave the city.
"Can you do anything with these?" I asked, handing her a package of the rations. "I'm not the greatest cook in the world, and you might regret it if we have to eat my cooking."
She laughed at that. "And what were you going to do if I said I didn't know how to cook either?"
"Starve, most likely," I said lightly, "or be forced to eat whatever I could manage not to burn."
"Aren't you lucky then that I do know how to cook?" she chuckled.
"Wow, what a woman," I teased, trying for the same kind of easy camaraderie we had shared before the truth about my origins came out. "You can cook, you can shoot the wings off a bloatfly, you fix everyone's personal problems, and all the fuzzy little animals in the wasteland love you. And if we were near the ocean at this particular moment, you could launch a thousand ships."
"Really?" Elle asked archly. "Helen of Troy I'm not. No one's ever molded a goblet off of my breast, for one."
"Goblet…breast…what?" I shook my head. "That's a new one on me."
"Aha!" she said triumphantly. "You forgot to add 'crammed full of useless knowledge' to your list of attributes." She grimaced. "That's what comes of being raised in a vault where the citizens need to be distracted from what's really going on. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain," she intoned, waving her hands mystically.
"Now I'm really lost," I said, rolling my eyes. "Are you going to make dinner before I have to start functioning on backup power, or what?"
"You wound me, sir!" She clutched her chest and pretended to stagger back from a mortal blow. "Is that all I am to you, a source of sustenance?"
In more ways than one, I thought to myself. "Not at all, sweetheart," I said out loud, "but you might recall what I mentioned about my cooking, specifically my propensity for burning food. So if you want to eat any time tonight, it behooves you to make sure it happens."
She burst out laughing. "Well," she said decisively, "I wouldn't want to see you forced to go to backups, so I'll make you a deal. You start the fire and I'll start the dinner."
"You don't do fires?" I asked mockingly.
"Oh, I do fires all right," she answered, "but unless you're looking for something in the range of a scorched-earth response, they're not really suitable for cooking on. You don't need my help to burn the dinner, so you'd better handle the fire."
Once I'd gotten the small and very containable fire lit, Elle took a large pot out of her pack and commenced the sort of domestic display that had always secretly fascinated me, the cooking of a meal in a proper fashion. For Elle, this seemed to involve spates of swearing violently at her utensils, the ingredients, water that wouldn't boil, and life in general, interspersed with humming and snatches of song. I found myself grinning at the endearing sight of the tough-as-balls Elle puttering around the campfire like a pre-war housewife while I set up our bedrolls. I enjoyed this demonstration of yet another of Elle's hidden talents even more when I realized that her camisole was virtually transparent in the firelight from certain angles, and she still hadn't managed to find a bra that fit under her armor.
I could get used to this, said the inner voice that hadn't gone away, despite the fact that talking to oneself was an entirely human trait, as far as I knew. I can see why this kind of life is so seductive to some people. Coming home to Elle every night…
"Dinner's ready," she called before I could get too wrapped up in this train of thought. Elle had produced some kind of stew with dumplings in it, which she sampled and pronounced edible.
"More than edible," I said through my first steaming mouthful. "It's delicious! The best food I've had while roughing it, by far. Where'd you learn to cook like this?"
"Old lady Palmer used to give me cooking lessons when I lived in the vault," she said. "I had to adapt my palate and my methods quite a bit when I left. Some of the things I had to eat when I first exited the vault…" She trailed off, shuddering at the thought. "But what are these orange bits?"
"Oh, come on," I scoffed. "I know you grew up in a vault, but you can't seriously tell me that you've never seen a carrot before. Didn't your vault have a hydroponics bay?"
"Carrot? Oh that's what it is!" she exclaimed. "Well sure, but it wasn't in chunks, it looked more like a vaguely orange paste by the time we got it. I have no idea what they look like in their natural state."
"How have you never seen a carrot growing before, if your vault had the capability to grow them?" I asked, sketching the rough shape of a carrot in the dirt with a stick.
"We had very limited seed stock after two hundred years as a closed system, and I was certainly never allowed in the hydroponics bay. None of us kids were, and since Dad nearly used Butch as a guinea pig for his latest experiment the one time Butch tried sneaking in, it kind of cured any of us of wanting to break that particular rule." She grinned. "Butch used to call Dad 'The Mad Scientist' and sometimes I think he wasn't too far off on that assessment of Dad's character."
"What happened to your seeds?" I questioned. "I thought all the vaults were provisioned for the long haul?" I had been reading what little I could find on the Vault Tec project, and some of it frankly scared the hell out of me.
"Some of the stock died off, some of it got too inbred or hybridized to be viable anymore. We didn't see fruits and vegetables as often as you might think, and they'd all been rendered into generic goo by the time they made it to the general populace of Vault 101. To hide any unsightly mutations or unseemly recycling that might have riled the natives, I presume. A lot of our stock was species that had been genetically modified to produce more fruit or be hardier and disease-resistant. Those did well in the vault environment, but they seemed to have had all the taste bred out of them as a tradeoff."
"I guess that explains why you stole that pear," I said ruefully.
"Pair of what?" She gave me a quizzical look.
"P-E-A-R," I emphasized. "That green fruit you took from Madison's lab."
"Oh, is that what that delicious thing was?" She licked her lips surreptitiously. "Yeah, we didn't have those at all in the vault. They're very finicky, from what I understand, and they'd all died off long before Dad brought me there."
"They're my favorite too," I said. "When I can get them."
"Oh, did I steal your ration?" she asked worriedly. "I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking too clearly then."
"Don't worry about it," I said. "You've paid for that particular crime already. Besides, Madison was just pissed because you stole one of her super-special, wiz-bang new crop of radiation-free fruit. I don't know what was so important about that harvest as opposed to all the other ones, but she was treating those plants like her babies. I had a hell of a time in the beginning, convincing her that Rivet City security deserved fresh fruits and vegetables in their rations more than all those upper deck assholes, like Bannon, who think they're king shit of fuck mountain."
"Doctor Li didn't want to give you fresh munchies?" Elle asked in outrage. "But security does all the work around the city. It's only fair."
"Right," I said. "I finally had to put my foot down and pull rank as a council member. She doesn't seem to understand that the people who protect her need the best food to keep them in fighting trim. Plus, the promise of garden fresh fruits and veggies can go a long way toward recruiting people who wouldn't normally enlist in the guard. We don't have the room to store most of what we produce, so most of it is processed and preserved as soon as it comes out of the tank. That's why you couldn't find any pears in the market," I explained.
"That's too bad," she said mournfully. "I suppose that dehydrated is better than nothing though."
"Those ration packs are actually pretty rare as well," I said. "They're something I have made up special for my guys, so they'll always have something to eat in the field. Your average Rivet City citizen won't see truly fresh fruit more than a couple of times a year, unless they're prepared to shell out an exorbitant amount of caps and pry their bounty out of Madison's grasp."
"Yeesh," she scoffed. "Why grow them if you're not going to share them? Though I suppose that attitude isn't shared by most in the wasteland."
"Not hardly," I said, and went back for a second bowl of stew. Technically, I didn't need to eat, although a neat bit of Commonwealth tech did make eating a viable energizing strategy. I had, in fact, discovered in my files that I was able to plug myself into a power source to recharge my internal systems, but I still enjoyed food, and didn't see any reason to stop eating it now, especially when said food was so well made and so much better than what I normally had to eat.
Elle goggled at me as I finished the second bowl in record time and went in for a third. "Geez, Harkness," she teased, "I didn't know they made you guys with a hollow leg in the Commonwealth. Wouldn't that be, I don't know, a structural weakness or something?"
"Laugh it up, mere mortal," I sneered. "You're just jealous that you don't have one too." I laughed. "I bet you'd just keep a gun in it, or something, whereas I use mine for the much more practical purpose of filling it with food."
"Touché, sir!" She saluted me with two fingers. "You have my character pegged entirely too well. I would fill it full of guns…or Fancy Lads snack cakes. Those things are addictive. So addictive that I almost suspect pre-war manufacturers of filling them full of illegal chemicals…," she trailed off, shaking her head. "But no, that's crazy. They're just really, really good."
"Mmmhmm," I mumbled into my bowl, having just taken an extra-large mouthful of stew. "That's just crazy talk," I surfaced long enough to say, before diving back into my food with a will.
Elle threw a twig at me to get my attention. "Earth to Harkness," she uttered. "Slow down there, buddy. The stew's not going anywhere, and you'll give yourself a stomach ache if you keep doing your best vacuum cleaner impersonation."
"Sorry," I said, realizing that I really had been going at my food with a single-minded intensity. "It's just very good." She scoffed. "No, really," I said truthfully. "Just because I get fresh fruits and vegetables from the hydroponics lab doesn't mean I know what to do with them to turn them into something like this. So I mostly just eat them raw, and eat at Gary's the rest of the time. Most of the rest of the security guards have the same problem, except maybe Edwards, who's married." I scooted a little further away from her before continuing; no point in tempting fate. "If I didn't think you'd kick me somewhere universally painful for even suggesting it, I'd offer you a job cooking for Rivet City security." To my surprise, she actually seemed to be seriously considering my words.
"Maybe," she laughed. "If you asked me real sweet-like."
"Really?" I asked suspiciously. "The badass bloatfly killer wouldn't be offended if I asked her to come and cook for me and all the boys on a regular basis? Cause, you know, I would ask you real sweet-like, but I'd like to keep my testicles where they are."
"Really," she replied. "Contrary to popular belief, I don't enjoy always being on the run, guns blazing, in the middle of some firefight. I really don't like some of the things I've had to do to survive since I left the vault, and I'd like to leave that behind and be able to settle down somewhere stable, when all this mess with Dad and Project Purity is over. Rivet City seems like a nice place to live, and I have friends there."
"But I thought you lived in Megaton?" I said, secretly dreading what she might say. "I heard they gave you a house for disarming that giant atomic bomb in the middle of town."
"They did," she said ruefully, "and that is where I keep most of my stuff, but it gets…uncomfortable, living there sometimes."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Most of the people there treat me like some kind of saint since I disarmed the bomb. Except for Moira, who pumps me shamelessly for information and uses me to test her latest insane theories and gadgets, and Moriarty, who treats everyone like shit, most of the rest of the town have been listening to Three Dog's tales of my exploits a little too often." She scowled. "They don't treat me like a normal person anymore, and I've had quite enough of being regarded as a freak for one lifetime, thank you."
"I had no idea," I said. "Well, you definitely won't be getting the 'saint' treatment from Rivet City residents any time soon. I think you'd actually have to turn water into wine, or beer in this case, to get any kind of awe out of any of them. And then, it'd mostly just be from people like Trinnie and Tammy Hargrave, and maybe Paulie Cantelli and Ted Strayer." I laughed. "That would only last until the beer ran out, then they'd be right back to hating your guts."
"I know," she sighed happily. "Isn't it great?"
"If you say so," I said dubiously, finishing the last of my stew and rinsing the bowl out with some of my stock of purified water. "For now, let's just get the rest of dinner packed up so we don't attract the wrong kind of attention from the local wildlife. I know, I know," I said, holding up my hands placatingly, "you have some kind of strange rapport with the little fuzzies…and some of the big ones, but the smell of your delicious stew might just be enough to make them think about raiding our campsite, regardless of how they feel about you." I smirked at her. "I don't know about you, but I'm much too pretty to end up as a yao guai appetizer, and I'm sure you don't want my circuits to give some poor mole rat indigestion."
She laughed as she put the lid on the stew pot and stowed the cooking gear. "Harkness, you ham. I had no idea when I met you that you would turn out to have a sarcastic streak a mile wide. You hide it so well under your gruff, don't-fuck-with-me-or-I'll-throw-you-off-the-observation-deck, security chief exterior. I like it," she said wickedly.
"You bring out the worst in me," I deadpanned.
"Do I?" She gave a pleased smile at the idea. "What else do I bring out in you?" she purred suggestively, deliberately bending over to lay out her bedroll in front of the fire, affording me an excellent view of her luscious backside in the tight, clinging pants she wore under her armor.
"I…um…" I swallowed hard, trying to get some moisture back into my mouth, which had suddenly gone dry as a bone. "I think you should bend over a little further and add another log to the fire," I breathed, not really intending her to hear me, but her hearing was evidently better than I thought. She leaned over even further to toss a log onto the fire, and that was it. I ghosted over to stand behind her, putting my hands on her waist to keep her from face planting into the fire, and rubbing my burgeoning erection against her ass. When she straightened up, gasping at the sudden contact, I moved my hands from her waist to her breasts, caressing them through her thin shirt and teasing her nipples with my thumbs.
"Harkness," she moaned, her head falling back against my shoulder. I took this opportunity to taste the creamy skin on the side of her neck, running my tongue over the racing pulse point at the base of her throat and nipping at it with my teeth, just to hear her squeal with pleasure. Squeal she did, and retaliated by bending her knees ever so slightly and grinding her ass against my groin. I grunted at the acutely pleasurable sensation and shoved my left leg between her thighs, determined to have her at my mercy for at least a few minutes. Positioned as she was, I could reach every sensitive spot on her body, and she couldn't touch me, couldn't force me to take this any faster than I planned. The last time we had come together like this, her clever hands had made me lose my self-control far too soon, and I resolved that I would make her squirm for a while before I let her take the lead again. I flexed my leg, rubbing my thigh against her sex, the friction making her moan again and melt against me. After the briefest of moments I was rewarded for my efforts with the sensation of heat and moisture seeping through her panties. I slipped my hands under the threadbare cotton camisole she wore, and she shivered as the calluses on my palms and fingers rasped against her sensitive skin. She twisted in my grasp, trembling as one hand meandered down her belly and into the waistband of her trousers.
"Damnit, Harkness!" she cursed me. "Let me touch you too!"
"Oh no, sweetheart," I laughed wickedly. "It's my turn to drive you wild. You get me worked up way too easily, and if I let you get your hands on me, it'll be over before it's begun. There's no one here to interrupt us, so I'm gonna take my sweet time with you."
I had reached my goal while she was distracted, and she moaned again as I rubbed the folds of her womanhood, then inserted one finger to test her wetness.
"Harkness," she gasped, tensing up around my finger. "What are you…?"
"Shhh," I whispered, "you'll like this." I lightly pinched one nipple and circled her nub with my thumb. She made a noise that was somewhere between a gasp and a moan, and was utterly arousing. I was already hard as a rock, and even the vague awareness in the back of my mind that we weren't exactly private wasn't enough to dampen my passion. My human memories were a treasure trove of exactly what to do to make Elle scream, filling in the gaps from my rather limited sexual experience during my years working for the Synth Retention Bureau, and I ruthlessly plundered that knowledge to keep the advantage over the woman writhing in my arms.
Her knees buckled as I continued to tease her moist bud, and I let her momentum draw us both down onto her bedroll, flipping her over onto her back and tugging both her pants and underwear off in one swift move. She protested weakly, clearly unhappy that I wasn't letting her reciprocate, but I was so keyed up by then that it wouldn't take much to make me completely lose control, and I wanted to see how far I could push her first. I yanked her camisole up, trapping her arms above her head and exposing her breasts. She was absolute perfection, the firelight licking over her skin and outlining her deliciously curvy form, the shadows pooling in the hollows of her body like water, recalling the first time I had seen her naked. She flinched away from my regard, obviously uncomfortable to be so exposed in front of me, hands attempting to cover not, as I would have expected, her womanhood, but the scars on her shoulders and torso.
"No, sweetheart." I pulled her hands away and kissed the nastiest scar, a puckered stab mark on her left shoulder. "Don't ever be ashamed of those. They just make me want you more."
I heard her mutter something like "finally," but I was too distracted by the appeal of her candy pink nipples, so alluring that I had to taste them again, despite my plans for the rest of her. I latched onto one and delighted to hear her breath catch as I sucked on first one, and then the other, until she was mewling with pleasure. When I judged that I had sufficiently tortured those portions of her anatomy, I decided to move on to the main course, kissing and licking my way down her belly to the patch of vibrantly purple hair that covered my prize. She gasped again as I nudged her legs apart, intent on pushing her over the edge at least once before I let her have her way with me.
She whimpered at the first touch of my mouth on her most sensitive area, and tried to wriggle out of my grasp, but I was having none of it and, wrapping my arms around her thighs to cup her ass, I proceeded to lick, nibble, tease, and torment her until she was thrashing and making desperate noises, so close to bliss that it would take very little to send her over the precipice. I had intended to take her all the way, then let her return the favor if she was so inclined, but one glimpse of her desire-flushed face when I came up for air, and my resolve was completely eroded. I had to finish this quickly, or I would quite literally explode.
I fumbled with the fastenings of my pants, hands shaking so hard that I could barely get them unbuttoned, much less take them all the way off or remove my boots. Deciding that I would just have to make it up to her later, I pulled them down just far enough to let my erection spring free, spreading her legs even further apart and positioning the tip at the entrance to her moist heat.
"You ready, sweetheart?" I rasped.
"Harkness." She looked up at me with that dreamy, passion-glazed look in her eyes, and I almost pounced on her without getting the go-ahead. "Are we actually going to do this?"
"You bet!" I growled, and I was on the verge of thrusting myself into heaven…
…when the goddamned frag mines I had placed across the only entrance to our campsite blew up with the force of the mutual orgasm we had been mere minutes away from, and a mole rat being chased by a mangy dog crashed into our clearing, both being chased by a yao guai. I swore luridly, at the universe for continually interfering in my attempts to bed Elle, and at myself for getting so damned distracted on an op that I let danger walk right up to us, Elle's magnificent ass notwithstanding. Scrambling to get myself tucked away, I reached for my gun, which was still strapped to my leg, but I needn't have bothered, because the animals clearly weren't interested in us, chasing each other around our campfire a couple of times before exiting as quickly as they had entered.
I heard a wheezing noise from below me, and looked down to see Elle convulsed in silent, hysterical laughter, one hand holding her abdomen, the other on her own gun, which lay by the side of her bedroll.
"Jesus Christ!" she gasped when she could speak through the laughter. "Well, at least it wasn't Commander Danvers this time," she giggled. "The messed up part is, I can still hear the blood rushing through my ears, and I can't decide if that's hotter than it is funny. We have the most rotten timing, don't we?"
"That we do," I said wryly, still cursing myself for letting my guard down in the field, but able to see the humor in the situation. I couldn't believe that I'd let myself get so preoccupied, especially while we were out here to intercept three android assassins that, even now, were heading for Rivet City and all the people I had sworn to protect. "I'm going to go reconnoiter and put out some more frag mines," I said wearily, "make sure there isn't anything nastier out there just waiting for us to fall asleep."
Elle nodded silently, very much subdued now from the temptress of a few minutes ago, and started to pull her clothes back on. I used the excuse of patrolling the area to go behind a rock and quietly take care of myself, one hand on my erection and one on my gun the entire time. It wasn't the most satisfying release, but it took the edge off, and I needed to be clear-headed for the conversation I was about to have with Elle, a conversation I was dreading.