Author's note: The songs for this chapter are Blue Oyster Cult - Veteran of the Psychic Wars and Lady Antebellum - Just a Kiss

Just a Kiss in the Moonlight

Harkness

What do you do with a crying woman? Maybe that was why I didn't have a wife anymore, because I didn't know how to comfort a crying woman. But no, I had to keep reminding myself, I never had a wife; those were someone else's memories fighting for space in my brain with the real memories, like trying to shove a ten pound sausage into a five pound casing.

Awkwardly, I put my arms around her, and murmured soothing noises in her ear as I held her against my chest, her tears soaking into my thin cotton shirt. I had never seen Elle lose control like this, and it worried me. She'd been so tough and ready for action since I'd known her, but it seemed her father's death had pushed her over the edge. I had been in the back room of the Muddy Rudder talking to Belle, and had come out just in time to see her confrontation with the other vault kid, Butch.

I really thought she was going to kill the little shit right then and there, had seen her palm the knife she carried, and then seen the conscious decision not to use it. He'd kissed her just long enough for me to get jealous, which was stupid because it wasn't like she'd had a chance to decide if she was my woman, and then she'd reacted with all the subtlety of a ton of bricks. She should have beat the shit out of him – I would have – but she confined herself to clocking him in the nose and kicking him in the nuts, which was no less than he deserved, and then rushed out of the bar before he could scrape himself off the ground. I left Belle to deal with the vault asshole and took off after Elle before she did something really stupid.

"Shhh, Elle, it'll be okay," I crooned, rocking her against me like a child. I was glad I had just gotten off duty and wasn't wearing my armor when she stormed into the bar, otherwise I couldn't have held her as close and it would have been mighty uncomfortable for her to be pressed up against armor plates. We stood like this for several long moments until her tears subsided and she pulled away from me to wipe her cheeks with her hands.

"Thanks, Harkness," she said shakily. "I'm okay now."

"I don't think so," I said. "I think you have a lot more you need to get off your chest before you're truly 'okay,' and I have just the thing for that. We're gonna get you drunk."

Not waiting for an answer on her part, I scooped her up and threw her over my shoulder, her head bouncing against the small of my back, her bottom right next to my face, and headed back inside with her.

"Put me down, Harkness! This is not dignified! I will not be carted around the ship over your shoulder like your doxy!"

"Shut up, Elle," I said as I smacked her hard on the ass. "The whole damned ship can hear your caterwauling." She gasped with fury and struggled in my grasp. "Quit it!" I barked, smacking her again. "You'll make me drop you, and then you'll fall down all these stairs and have nobody but yourself to blame." She subsided, but I heard her muttering under her breath, promising dire retribution for the humiliation.

"…get you later…you'll pay for this," drifted up from her, and I put my hand on her bottom again, partly to shut her up and partly because I'd probably never have her in this position again. I carried her up several flights of stairs, heading for the observation deck off the bridge, caressing and squeezing that glorious mass of flesh the whole way up. I could feel her seething with anger, but I was enjoying myself too much to care.

I opened the door to the observation deck and set her on her feet well away from the missing railing, ducking as her fist went whizzing by my head. I grabbed her by the shoulders and steered her to one of the chairs bolted to the deck plating.

"Sit!" I commanded, and something in my tone made her sit and not take another swing at me like she was no doubt itching to do. I went over to the refrigerator full of liquor we kept on deck for Security to drink when they were off duty, and opened it with the key that every officer was given along with their uniforms. I pulled out several bottles of whiskey and a couple of bottles of beer and carried them back to her. I popped the top off one of the beers, handed it to her, and sat down in the chair next to her.

"Blech," she said, making a face as she took her first swallow of beer. "This can't have been a good brew to begin with, and sitting around getting irradiated for two hundred years hasn't helped the taste any." She pitched the almost full bottle over the side, earning herself a nasty glare from me.

"Hey! Elle, stop littering! You're trashing my boat," I said sternly. "Besides, that's not the two hundred year old stuff; it's just not had long enough to lager in the fridge. Hell, we only bottled it yesterday."

She waved an expansive hand at the surrounding wasteland. "Calm down, Harkness. I don't think the environment's gonna give a fuck about a few beer bottles."

"I guess you're right," I conceded, "but it's not like we need to make it any worse, and the last thing we need on this boat is drunk mirelurks." She cracked a smile at that and stifled a hysterical giggle. Man, what I wouldn't give to see her smile for real. Little did she realize that drunken mirelurks were actually a real big problem. I wanted to tell her how the alcohol tended to put them in a spawning mood, but somehow I thought she had enough on her plate already.

We sat in companionable silence for several minutes, sipping our drinks and gazing out into the gathering darkness. Finally, I turned to Elle and tried to sound nonchalant as I asked, "So, you wanna talk about it?"

"No," she grimaced, then sighed. "But I guess I need to. Where do I start?"

"What happened after you left Rivet City?" I asked.

"I don't know," she said. "I just don't know. One minute, we were getting the systems up and running. Dad had me going all over the damned place fixing shit. The next minute, the Enclave showed up and everything went to hell. Dad locked himself in the control room with Colonel Autumn and released enough radiation to kill everyone in there, rather than turn over Project Purity." Her eyes filled with tears as she said, "Dad died right in front of me, and there wasn't anything I could do. My only consolation is that he took that bastard colonel with him when he went." She had pulled her plasma rifle into her lap while we spoke, the plasma rifle I had given her, and she sat cradling it like a teddy bear, unconsciously stroking it in a manner that made my pants not fit properly. She didn't seem to realize she was doing it, which made it worse, because I couldn't even call her on it.

"So your father sacrificed himself for the dream?" I asked. "A noble deed, but rather selfish of him, all things considered."

"I still can't believe he's gone!" she burst out, fresh tears streaking down her face. "We had so little time together. I rescued him from that damned simulation in Vault 112 and he didn't even have time to hug me before he was back in the saddle. Then we got back to Rivet City, and I thought for sure he'd make time for me. Just a little time," she sobbed, "that was all I wanted, but no. It's straight back to work for him, never mind the fact that I've spent six goddamned months getting into the worst sort of trouble while trying to find him. And now he's gone."

I poured her another shot of whiskey and pressed it into her hand while she cried. "C'mon, sweetheart, let it all out. It will only hurt worse the longer you keep it bottled up."

She wiped her tears again and downed the whiskey, holding out the glass for another shot. "So Dad's dead, and I had to drag that ungrateful bitch, Doctor Li, off to the Citadel to claim sanctuary with the Brotherhood of Steel."

"Did they let you in?" I asked.

"Yeah, they let us in." She sighed heavily. "And they made it very clear that I was only there on sufferance because I wasn't one of them. I'm so sick of everyone treating me like I don't belong!" she yelled. "I was allowed to trade with them, to learn how to use power armor, and still it was 'What aid can I provide, outsider?' Even after I helped them protect the GNR building, even after I fought a super mutant Behemoth to save their sorry asses, I'm still just the outsider. How many more times do I have to prove myself to them before they'll stop treating me like I don't know which end of the gun goes bang?"

"I had heard they were kind of…standoffish," I said, "but anyone that's seen you fight can tell that you know your business."

"Thanks," she sniffled. "It's nice to be appreciated by someone. At least they told me where to find what I'll need to get Project Purity up and running."

"You're still going to go through with it? Even after all its cost your family?"

"I have to, Harkness. For Dad, for Mom, hell, for the whole damned wasteland." There was a resolve in her voice that I didn't like, the kind that could get her killed for a lost cause.

"You won't be letting anyone down if you don't get the purifier running," I told her. "No one seriously expects you to finish what your parents started all those years ago."

"But I'm still going to," Elle said firmly. "I heard my mother's voice for the first time when I was looking for Dad in the Jefferson Memorial." Her eyes grew misty again. "Dad had left behind a holotape of him and Mom before I was born." She blushed slightly. "In fact, based on the contents of the tape, it might be the moment of my conception. They sounded so happy then, so in love. I wish they could have stayed that way."

"Me too," I murmured, "but I am curious why you didn't go straight after whatever it is you need for the purifier."

"I would have, but the minute I left the Citadel, I picked up a transmission from my old friend Amata in Vault 101, imploring me to come home and straighten out the mess they had made of things since I left. I was always a sucker for Amata's bullshit schemes. She came up with the bad ideas, and I took the heat for them when they went wrong."

"Why were you still friends with her if she was always getting you into trouble?" I asked.

"She was the only person in the vault who didn't treat me like a freak. We were best friends, or so I thought."

"What happened in the vault?"

"Amata and some of the younger generation had rebelled against their parents and the overseer. I found out that the overseers, all of them since the first one, had been engaged in a plot to keep us all in the dark about what was really going on outside the vault. According to their orders from Vault Tec, Vault 101 was never supposed to be opened, even when the world outside was safe to live in again. They faked radio broadcasts to make it sound like no one could survive out of the vault, and the current overseer, Amata's father, had enlisted the help of all the adults in the vault to perpetuate the myth. The previous overseer had sent out a scouting party to assess the situation outside. They reported back that they had found a settlement, Megaton, and that it was possible to survive in the wasteland."

"Why would they do that, keep you inside if they knew it was safe to go out?" I asked, confused at the motives of what passed for authority in Elle's vault.

She shook her head. "As near as I could tell, each vault was used as a testing ground for different experiments, with humans as the test subjects. Vault 92 was experimenting on musicians with white noise post hypnotic suggestions. They were trying to create super soldiers who would do only as they were told. Vault 108 was experimenting with cloning. When I visited, the only people in there were clones, all of a man named Gary, and all barking mad. Vault 106 was releasing psychoactive drugs into the air filtration systems." She grimaced. "I had some…interesting hallucinations in there, and all the remaining residents had gone insane and tried to kill me."

"My god!" I exclaimed. "And they were ordered by Vault Tec to conduct these experiments?"

"That's not the half of it," she said. "Vault 112, where I found Dad, was home to a set of virtual reality simulators. The people in there were all the original inhabitants from two hundred years ago, including their puppet master, one Doctor Stanislaus Braun."

"Why does that name sound familiar?"

"He's the one that Pinkerton got your memories from, your 'Harkness' memories, and before you ask, no, I don't know anything about them. Pinkerton mentioned that he'd stolen them from Braun, but didn't know who the memories belonged to, and Braun wasn't in a very cooperative mood by the time I was done with him."

"You met Doctor Braun?" I asked excitedly.

"Trust me," she said, "you're better off not knowing what became of your…predecessor, just based on what he'd done to the other residents of that vault. He had them trapped in various simulations throughout the two hundred years since the vault doors closed, and he was torturing them in a variety of ways, just to assuage his boredom. I ended his simulation, which had the unfortunate effect of killing everyone in it except me, Dad, and Doctor Braun, but I suspect they're better off dead than in the hands of that madman. It also trapped Doctor Braun in the simulation, so now he's all by himself with no one to play with. Such a shame," she said, sarcastically.

"What was your vault testing," I wondered, "aside from never opening to the outside world?"

"Vault 101 was testing how people would function in a closed society with an overseer who acted more like a dictator and seemed to see everything that went on in the vault. That was its official mission, to see how we would deal with eventual, inevitable inbreeding, and to see how we would collapse in the end."

"That's cold," I said.

"Of course, that was just the official mission. The current overseer took it upon himself to engage in his own vault-wide breeding program on top of that. I stole his journal on the way out of the vault the first time," Elle smirked. "It was all the really personal stuff, all the things he couldn't trust to the computer network in case someone hacked into his files, and you wouldn't believe some of the things I read. I always wondered why he had such a problem with my friendship with Amata, and now I think I know why. The reason that the vault needed a new doctor when Dad showed up was because the old doctor had just died. She and Amata's mother had been having an affair right under the noses of everyone in the vault. The doctor's husband found out and poisoned Amata's mother, who died shortly after Dad and I came to Vault 101, and then shot himself and his wife. This left the vault minus a doctor just when Amata's mother needed one the most. Dad did the best he could to keep her alive, but the poison was just too virulent, and the overseer always blamed Dad for not saving her."

"Wow," I said. "So the overseer saw his daughter hanging out with another female, an outsider at that, and maybe thought his little girl might share her mother's tendencies?"

"That's what I thought," Elle said. "It only makes sense, though only an idiot would think that Amata would ever be interested in girls that way. It was obvious to anyone with half a brain that she only liked boys."

"Ah, so you're partial to the fairer sex," I teased. "That explains why none of the men in the wasteland have managed to catch your eye – they have too much…equipment."

"You're hilarious," she grumped. "Not me. I only go for those with outside plumbing. Amata might have wished she was playing for the other team if she'd known that her father planned to artificially inseminate her with an amalgam of several different sets of DNA, his own featuring quite heavily in the mix. You wouldn't believe some of the things he wrote about her in his journal. He saw her as a combination substitute for his dead wife and brood mare for the next generation of overseers."

"What a sick fuck!" I snarled, outraged that anyone would do that to his own daughter. "What was the purpose of his breeding program?"

"The overseer had decided that we vault dwellers were getting much too stubborn, too hard to control, so he decided to breed a more docile subject. The only exception would have been his daughter's offspring, who was destined to be an overseer."

"That's awful," I breathed.

"I know," she replied. "I figure that's part of the reason why he hated me so much, apart from the taint of the outside. I was always too smart for my own good, and he didn't want smart people in his vault, just good little sheep who'd do what he told them and not make a fuss about going outside. He used to pair people off according to some formula known only to him, and we all used to bitch that romance was dead in Vault 101 and we were being bred like cattle. How right we were, though we didn't know it at the time. I read it all in his journal. He kept track of his progress very carefully, very scientifically for someone who wasn't a scientist. He even had future pairings listed, all the kids my age and younger, and I wasn't anywhere on his list, which I guess is a blessing. I can only hope that I derailed his plans when I convinced him to step down in favor of Amata and make her the new overseer."

"When did that happen?"

"When I went back to the vault in response to Amata's message. I almost didn't, but like I said, I never could tell Amata no. She and the other kids, a couple of the grownups too, had barricaded themselves in the school room and infirmary. They were demanding that the overseer open the vault door and let them go outside to see the wasteland for themselves. He had no intention of giving in to their demands, but wasn't prepared to use violence against his own daughter, a small point in his favor, but others weren't so tolerant. Some of the security guards were planning an ambush that would have ended in bloodshed. So I went to Amata's dad and persuaded him that it was time to let the younger generation take command, that it was useless to try and continue the experiments now. The rebels were getting out of the vault, one way or another."

"So all's well that ends well, right?" I asked.

"I suppose," Elle sighed. "I should never have gone back in the first place. Everyone still thought I was to blame for what had happened the night Dad escaped. A lot of people died that night, some in the general chaos of the escape and the radroach attack, some by my hand when they tried to kill me first. So Amata asked me to leave and not come back, for the good of the vault because I'd always be a thorn in some people's sides if I stayed." Elle screwed up her face, biting her lip to push past the pain this memory brought to the surface. The look on her face said it all – she might act tough, but it was eating her up inside that she'd been treated like that.

"Ungrateful bastards," I growled, "kicking you out again after you saved them from themselves."

"It really hurt, you know?" she cried. "Nobody wanted me there, even the ones who said they were glad to see me. Stanley, who gave me my Pip Boy when I turned ten, told me that I didn't belong there and needed to leave. I thought they were my friends." Tears rolled down her cheeks anew, making me want to march up to her old vault and kick the ass of every single person who'd made her cry, both now and during her childhood. Mei had told me some stories while Elle was gone, and frankly, I was surprised she was still as nice a person after what she'd gone through in that damned vault.

We'd gone through a couple bottles by this time, with me drinking more than my fair share, and I could tell that Elle was feeling a little better now, though still far from perfect. She still held the plasma rifle in her lap, and the way she'd been fondling it all night was driving me crazy.

"Damn, Elle!" I said before I could stop myself. "Your technique really gives a guy ideas."

"What?" she said, then realized what she was doing. "If you like this, then you'll love what I can do with a gun," she said in a sultry tone, wiggling her eyebrows on the word 'gun' so that I had no doubt what she was referring to, then she ruined the effect by laughing hysterically.

"Mission accomplished," I muttered to myself. "Elle's drunk and Harkness has a hard on. Just another wonderful night in Rivet City." I put the remaining bottle of whiskey back in the fridge and turned back to her. "I think we've both had enough, sweetheart. Time to call it a night."

Elle stumbled as she got up, not surprising considering how much whiskey she'd downed. Not wanting her to fall off the edge of the observation deck, no matter how many times I'd thought about pitching her off it myself, I snaked an arm around her waist and pulled her roughly against me. She tilted her head up, eyes bright with the remnants of tears for her father and her lost innocence, face awash in bright moonlight, and I lost what little composure I had left. Tangling my free hand in her hair, I crushed my lips down on hers in a brutal, frustrated kiss. She'd been teasing me all night, hell, been teasing me since she stepped foot on my boat, and I just couldn't take any more. Half expecting to feel her push me away after the emotional shitstorm I'd put her through while sorting myself out, I was shocked when she opened her lips to my assault, letting my tongue curl around hers in a way that left me breathless. Even through the whiskey and tears, she still tasted like heaven. She moaned as I deepened the kiss, and my meager grasp on sanity snapped. I pinned her to the bulkhead and ground my growing erection against her in a move that sent all the synthetic blood in my body rushing downward, its sudden departure from my brain removing all forms of common sense. She rubbed her hand over the bulge in my pants, and then I was the one moaning. I retained just enough presence of mind to tear my lips from hers before this went any farther.

"Why'd you stop, Harkness?" she slurred, fighting to catch her breath just as I was. Even in the moonlight, I could see the flush on her cheeks, see that her lips were swollen from my kiss, and I almost went in for another until I remembered why I had stopped.

"You're drunk, Elle." Why couldn't I get my heart to stop racing? "And I…am way too horny to take this slow. I may be an asshole, but I'm not going to take advantage of you while you're drunk and broken up over your dad. Okay? So I need a rain check here, gorgeous. I need to do this right, you understand?"

"Oh," she said carefully. "I thought maybe you didn't want me."

"Not want you?" I said crazily. "I want you so bad it hurts, but you're three sheets to the wind and thanks to my android metabolism, I'm not. I don't want you to regret anything in the morning. So we'll wait."

I swung her up in my arms, her head cradled against my chest, and carried her down all those flights of stairs to her room at the Weatherly. I made her drink some water, left a few more bottles next to her bed for later, helped her strip off her boots, and tucked her into bed. I leaned down and kissed her tenderly on the forehead, brushing her hair off her face. "Good night, Elle."

"Thanks, Harkness," she whispered. "For, you know, everything." She slowly tilted her head to one side, and before I knew what happened, we were kissing again. As exciting as it was, it felt as though nothing could be more natural than her lips on mine. She leaned back with a satisfied grin and said, "Yep, rain check gonna be a hell of a storm, handsome," and then she was asleep with a small smile on her face.

"It sure as hell is," I whispered, and closed the door quietly behind me as I left her room.