A/N: Depression affects different people differently. Some people have nightmares. Some people stop having dreams that they remember at all. And some people, of course, have insomnia (although it's perfectly possible to have that and not be depressed, if I recall my college years correctly).

Chapter 40

Xen never did show a single symptom of radiation poisoning. She slept little, and poorly, and that night they started Southwest.

"We won't hit Northwest Seneca Station," Bell said. "That's where you said you came up, right?" She was still cheerfully hauling the net bundle on her back, though she'd managed to arrange the net into a couple of rough straps. They would have dug painfully into the flesh of an ordinary person, but Xen supposed (with an old flicker of curiosity) that DCUVRAP wasn't subject to the same discomforts.

"Yes," said Xen.

"We'll probably find another station, though," Bell said. "And in the Wasteland, all roads lead to D.C. That's where I ended up first, anyway."

"That's good," Xen said, because some response of the sort seemed appropriate. "But I'm not sure how to get back to the Lab."

I'm not sure I want to go back there, either. She had an irrational feeling that if she were again to enter that small, sanitary world, everything in it would shatter, fragments drifting down like snowflakes – that everything she touched would ruin. I just don't know where else to go, and we might as well go somewhere.

"Can you get back dere from Underworld?" Charon asked.

"Yes," Xen said. She remembered that route quite clearly. It had been ridiculously simple compared to the traveling they'd done after that.

"Den it will not be a problem," said Charon.

"Glad to hear it," said Bell.

They didn't talk much for the next while. Xen found it hard to walk as far or as fast as previously, partly from soreness and partly just because of the dragging weight. Her joints seemed to keep aching much longer than was reasonable.

It has to stop, she caught herself thinking once or twice. Then she would look up at Charon. Unfailingly, he would look down at her as if he knew exactly what she was thinking. Then he would shake his head. She was becoming very familiar with that stubborn twitch in the bare muscle by his temple. It happened whenever he clenched his jaw.

He did slough over the next couple of days, shaking off patches of his skin as they went. Xen remembered clearly one particular one of those jaw-clenching moments when most of his right cheek slid off. It hit his pauldron with a papery sound and he shrugged it off. She felt shame then, and tried hard to be more cheerful. This had no effect whatsoever on Charon, but Bell chatted with her happily when she made the effort.

"Are you feeling any better about things?" Bell asked her at sunset on the third evening. Xen swallowed a last drink of water, washing down the taste of dried apples from her breakfast.

"Sort of," Xen said.

Bell appeared to consider this, frowning slightly. "That means no, doesn't it?"

"Yes," said Charon.

Xen glared at him. "It means I'm working on it." The small, hot prickle of annoyance was almost a relief. It was something to be felt, not the endless dragging blankness. Even that made her knapsack a little lighter.

Charon flicked one of his fingernails off into the brush. He did not appear about to comment further. They walked along an expanse of pitted concrete that had once been a highway. Weeds grew up through the asphalt, greener than anything Xen had ever seen. A few even had small flowers. They were closed up, waiting for the sun to rise again.

They walked on. Charon killed another pair of yao guai, and at Xen's insistence they went around a colony of mirelurks that occupied the shallowest ford of a murky stream. She then had to listen to Charon grumble to himself as he carried her across a deeper area.

"Coulda got 'em, easy. Those were not our orders. Yeah, yeah. I'm startin' t'miss the damn Raiders."

Bell strode easily through the current, holding the baggage up over her head.

"You can tell that other one we'll probably run into Raiders soon enough," Xen said as Charon set her on her feet on the other bank.

Charon grunted noncommittally. He brushed a last patch of skin off his right arm. It drifted off on the current.

"I don't think I've ever seen a live one," Bell said thoughtfully. "When I left D.C. before, it was with a bunch of other people. Everything left us alone."

"They stink," Xen said. "And they're cannibals. They tend to keep parts of people around for later." She made a small moue, more from fastidious distaste than horror. She had not had a nightmare since the crash site. Every day's sleep was a black stretch of unremembered oblivion.

"Eugh," said Bell. "I don't know how I'll do with that now."

"Me, neither," Xen said. "Good thing we've got Charon."

"He's certainly looking scary enough," Bell said. Charon's exposed muscle glistened dull, dark red beneath a few shreds of mesentery. Xen could see the individual bundles of fiber bunch and stretch as he moved.

"You shouldn't worry so much," Xen told him.

"The Hell wit' dat," said Charon, calmly but distinctly.

"Can't argue with that one," said Bell. "You want to fill your bottles here, Xen? I'm getting about twenty clicks off the water. And we're upstream of the mirelurks."

"I might as well," Xen said. "Rads kill germs."

And they apparently can't kill me. Whereas germs can. And diarrheal illness is definitely not the way I want to go.

She stopped to dig out all the empty bottles from the bundle and her pack. Bell helped her fill them at the stream. Xen held one up to the light of the stars, observing the very faint purple glow of gamma. The water was only a little turbid.

There was a time when I wouldn't dream of washing with this, let alone drinking it, she thought. It seemed unimaginably long ago and far away.

"You know," Bell said, when they'd been walking for a while. "I think Charon might be mad at you." They proceeded down a long defile under the moon, walking to either side of a thin trickle that no doubt joined the larger stream they had left. Bushes sprang up on either side, but the bottom was sandy. Charon had not drawn the shotgun, so Xen supposed they were not about to be ambushed.

"Probably," Xen said. "He's got a right, I guess."

Charon, walking on her other side and surveying the surrounding brush and rocks, appeared not to hear this.

"Maybe you should apologize," Bell said.

"What good will that do?" Xen asked. "It'll look kind of stupid if I – if I change my mind later."

"I don't think that will be a problem," Bell said. "It's not like I'm going to fall for the same thing twice, and you can't just use a command override on me. Now that Changeling's gone, you obviously need an inorganic to keep an eye on you."

"It sounds to me like you're the one who owes Charon an apology, not me," Xen said dryly.

"Charon's job is to kill things that try to kill you. He knows that. I know that. Right, Charon?"

"Dat is correct," Charon said.

"So somebody else is needed to prevent anything else from killing you. Including you. You're clearly a two-person job."

"You're making me sound childish," Xen said. She was aware that she sounded sulky, which tended to confirm this rather than refute it.

"I wouldn't know. I haven't been around kids." Bell considered for a moment, walking easily along with the cargo net on her back. She had to stoop slightly to prevent the weight from unbalancing her. "Although I probably should apologize for letting you get away from me. Which I do, Charon. It won't happen again."

"Accepted," Charon said.

Xen frowned as she walked, tightening her long fingers on the straps of her knapsack. She found herself increasingly angry at this byplay and, being herself, was trying to figure out why.

The answer hit like a fist in her gut.

Because it's a situation I'm not in control of.

Xen bit her lip, although even now she was careful not to draw blood.

"Damn it," she said to herself, quietly. Neither of the others seemed likely to reply.

Servants and protectors. I made them and bought them for myself. Remember that thought? You let go of it pretty quickly, didn't you. The second it seemed like Changeling might be trying to set herself in charge of you, you shot her down hard and fast. But you thought Charon would never try it, didn't you? And Bell seemed too stuck in her own little Hell to contradict anyone about anything.

True, she'd felt horrid at the moment when she decided to end it all. But the important thing was that she had decided that. She had dismissed everyone else's right to argue against it, immediately and almost without question. And now that she was simply being told you can't, it infuriated her.

How incredibly self-centered I am. And the fact that I can see myself clearly enough to know that doesn't change a single damned thing.

It just deprived her of easy targets. And that left her chasing herself in smaller and smaller circles again. Xen sighed deeply, letting her shoulders slump a little.

"Well, if anybody ever needed a keeper, I guess it's me," she said.

"That's right," Bell said encouragingly. "You just keep at it with the internal reprogramming. The damn subroutines will fall in sooner or later."

"Oh, shut up," said Xen.