The following week or so that passed by were a little different in the sense that Charon was uncharacteristically tolerant of my bullshit. It seemed like he was trying to be deliberately kind to the stupid girl who was confused enough to have a stupid crush on him of all people.

For the first time ever he tried to make me laugh. He knows I am utterly disgusted by centaurs and after blowing one away he nudged it over to the mutie and made it look like they died like lovers in each other's arms and when I accidentally touched him, he didn't pull away as he had before.

In later days I noticed him looking at me a few times with a tinge of pity in his eyes.
This man, who went through god knows what horrors looking at me with pity.

It was enough to make me want to take a long walk off a short bridge.
It was a nice change of pace though and an invitation to push the envelope.

I began to get sloppy with concealing my tendencies and it wasn't until I shot some woman wandering the Wastes that I realized what shaky ground I was on with him.

"Murderer!" He hissed as her body hit the ground, blood gushing from where her head had once been and then came silence different from his usual silence.

When he was sore about something, the muscles on his gaunt face would almost imperceptibly contract as he ground his jaw and what few things he said sounded as if he were saying them through a squeezed throat, his words coming out sounding tight and thin like he was speaking on the edge of his voice. When he was pleased with me he'd stand a little taller and a little closer when I spoke to him and his voice would drop to a husky growl that emanated from his chest rather than his throat. I found myself learning how to differentiate between his moods through these subtleties and I'd gage where we stood each night as we cleaned our weapons by whatever squat we were to inhabit for the night.

People tended to be much less friendly towards me when I proved to be more or less inseparable from my large, ghoulified, stony-eyed companion and the shotgun he was quick to reach for. This in itself was a fringe benefit of traveling with Charon. People started treating me like less of a child. Men stopped assuming I had come to their town just for them to clumsily hit on me. Children were practically the only ones who didn't show some kind of veiled intolerance towards Charon. I'd give the little buggers a bubblegum and watch them run off to to have the opposite kind of childhood I had.

But I digress.

Charon and I ended up shooting all of Reilly's Rangers because they had the audacity to shoot at him after we schlepped up endless stairs and killed like 50 muties to save their sorry asses. They shot at him, he shot at them, I shot at them and the little misunderstanding ended up costing them their lives.
This was a running theme and if anything it just pushed me closer to him and further away from everyone else.

On the rare occasion that I "parked" Charon, telling him to wait for me until I finished whatever business I didn't want him to see, I comprehended more and more why he was so asocial.
Without him standing behind me giving anyone who approached me the evil eye, people apparently assumed that it was perfectly fine to try to use me as their therapists or own personal errand girl and frankly, they were beginning to piss me off to the point that it was becoming a chore even to expend the energy to put a bullet in their skulls just so they wouldn't be able to tell me their sob stories and ask me to take care of their shit for them because they were too weak, stupid or whatever to take care of their own shit. Evidently, the answer to staying on Charon's good side and no having to deal with people's shit was just to avoid them as much as possible. Nobody annoys me, nobody loses their brains on the ground, nobody gets pissy and cleans his gun twice in a row.
The two things I determined I needed
were people to leave me the fuck alone and Charon's approval.
And more drugs because mine were wearing off.