A/N: This is probably the third notice that this chapter is up for those of you subscribing. I wanted to make sure nobody missed it, and I apologize for any inconvenience. I hope I've explored relevant issues here in a way that works and makes sense. And thanks again for being positive and helpful with your criticism – I want to improve at the craft of writing whether it's in an original novel, a fanfic, or a blog entry, and you're helping me tremendously with that process.

Oh, and the anti-mutagen is not something I pulled out of my hat this chapter, for those who objected to that. Its origin and effects, which have nothing to do with the canonical modified FEV, are explored at length in TFW: Thistle (my only other Fallout 3 story).

Chapter 42

"Yes," said Xen. It wasn't technically a lie, and she suspected the full correct answer was not a good idea. "I've just soaked up too many rads, is all." She ignored Bell's snicker behind her. It was too dark for the man to see her eyes clearly, so even with her goggles off and her black lids open, he wouldn't be bothered by her oddly-colored irises.

"What about that other one?" the man asked. He was staring past her at Bell.

"She's a lot stronger than I am," Xen said. "Do you want those things off your wrists, or not?"

"Hell, yes." The man staggered upright and turned around to present his bleeding hands. Bell unwound the wires carefully. She stepped back and tossed them aside as the man turned, rubbing his hands on his pants.

"Charon," Xen said as she stood up. "Did you find any stimpaks?"

"Yes," said Charon from behind her.

"Give me one," Xen said. She held out her hand. Nothing happened. She turned to glare at him. "Charon. I want this man to live, do you understand?"

He handed over a stim. Xen chose to ignore the stubborn set to his jaw.

"Do you want to do this, or are your fingers too numb?" she asked the man.

"Uh, you do it," he said. "God, I'm dying for a drink."

Xen stepped forward and injected the stim into the man's forearm. He watched her closely as she did it, but made no move to attack or flee.

"Charon," she said. "Did you find any water?"

"Dere is a working sink in t'back," he said.

"Can you get there on your own?" Xen asked the man.

"Oh, sure." He looked around a little dazedly. The wounds on his hands had dried up, and the bruises on his chest were fading rapidly. "Um, if that's okay. I guess your Ghoul friend won't want it." He looked warily past her. "Not if he's one of the old ones, anyway."

"What?" Xen said.

He stared at her. "Didn't you hear? It's been on the radio."

"I don't have one," Xen said.

"Where've you been, girl? Underground?" He looked at Xen's long fingers and her greenish complexion. "Don't answer that. Anyhow, the Brotherhood of Steel has been putting stuff in the water. Turns Ghouls back into normal people. The old ones don't want it 'cause it'll make them die younger. At least, that's what people were saying before these things caught me." He waved a hand at the dead super mutants. "Mutants can't drink the water without adding rads to it, or it kills them."

Xen looked at him blankly for a moment. Then she said, "Do you need food or anything?"

"No, I live close to here," the man said. "Thanks a lot. You mind if I - ?"

"Go ahead," Xen said. The man stumbled off toward the back of the building. Xen turned to look up at Charon. "You didn't drink anything here, did you?"

"No," Charon said.

Xen let out the breath she had been holding. "Good." She looked at him. "I mean – unless you wanted to..."

Though his facial expression did not overtly change, Charon grew subtly tenser. Xen watched small muscles draw up tight around his eyes.

"Is dat your wish?" Charon asked.

"Is it my wish?"

He hadn't asked is that your order. Xen stared at Charon's face. The band of muscle across his forehead shrank and pulled, knotting up in the center. In the dark his heat signature was the clearest thing about him, so the subtle shift upwards was not easy to miss. Then, in that moment, Xen experienced the closest thing to telepathy she had ever known.

He knows. Xen turned away from the other two, feeling her hands clench at her sides. Her face was hot with anger and embarrassment. I didn't know myself, and he knew. She had always been aware of Charon as a body, a large and male thing in her world of sexless robotic presence. Warm shoulder when he carried her; warm hands when he picked her up and set her down; and the feverish, radiating heat when he was feeling whatever strange and fractured form of emotional distress Charon could allow himself to feel.

She hadn't associated that with sex.

And why should she? She had no context for it.

"Xen? What is it?" Bell was asking behind her.

Xen shook her head. "I can't..."

Whatever maybe-menstrual, maybe-estrus, maybe-neither kind of cycle her body had set itself into, she had never been unable to ignore it. Once she was past thirteen or so, she had taught herself not to fantasize, except during those few and private moments when it would not interfere with what she had thought of as her real life. Certainly there was nothing about old Masterson, the only other living male of her long-term acquaintance to this point, that would remind her of it. But even so, she had never had any father or brothers in her life. Dr. Montalban was gone so soon, and she never had known her third contributor. All the bots had had female names, female voices.

And then there had been Charon. Charon was big, and dangerous, and sometimes frightening, but – most damaging – he was hers to command. Hadn't he told her so? There was and always had been something peculiarly fascinating about that suggestion of the mechanical wed to the unmistakably biological. The animate anatomy lesson that was his face, the one arm that he left exposed to view – the very moving cords of naked tendon that should shock and horrify an ordinary woman - those things would not let her forget how very organic, how very much a living thing he was.

Because Tori had been right about something. Xen needed to be around someone who was biologically alive. Someone who could remind her that wetware wasn't the malfunction in her, it was what she was designed to be. And Charon was the embodiment of her weakness. Every bad judgment she made would send him out as her destroying hand, or would show its marks of punishment on his impassive and unlovely face.

My very own monster. Xen moved her hands up to the straps of her knapsack, forcing the fingers to unclench.

He must see some of that. The Tactician certainly had. You used Charon to fill a relational need, that was what he had said. Did he suppose, then, that it was no more than pheremonal? That she was so mixed up in her seventeen-year-old mind that she had latched onto the only adult male in her immediate environment? Or that she had just responded to her proximity to him through all of this trauma with the wrong kind of bonding? That certainly seemed plausible enough. It would explain why he thought she would be so libidinously desperate that she would sacrifice his chance at immortality to make him ordinary, human and touchable, never mind that then he would still be forty years old and she would be seventeen.

Damn, damn, damn.

"Xen?" Bell was saying.

"Charon thinks I want him to be human because I find him attractive," Xen said, stating things in the baldest way possible. She flexed her shoulders slightly, but couldn't budge the weight. "And he's afraid that I'd kill myself if he did it, because I wouldn't be happy with the result."

"Oh," Bell said. "Fuck. And I thought we were actually doing better."

Xen turned slowly to look at them again. Bell stood with her arms tightly folded, as if she were cold, but the light in her eyes was steady. She was looking from Charon to Xen with a small frown.

"How can I explain so that you'll understand?" Xen asked Charon. "How can I avoid the i/o error?"

"Then explain so that I'll understand, please," Bell said. "What's the interactional model? Isn't it sort of unusual for people who aren't Ghouls to, you know, like Ghouls?"

"I wouldn't know," Xen said. "I spent the first sixteen years of my life in a set of maybe five rooms with two robots. Robots with female voices, even. The Doctors died when I was four. Dr. Graber killed Dr. Montalban, and then Tori killed her. I haven't experienced much social disapproval."

"It doesn't bother you on a visceral level?" Bell asked. "Most humans find Ghouls to be, you know, corpselike."

Xen smiled sadly, not at Bell but at Charon. He looked back without expression, but his temperature was still above normal. "Maybe I'm a necrophile, then. Both my male genetic contributors have been floating preserved in field stations for most of my life, you know. And isn't how you relate to your father supposed to affect how you relate to other men? I'm sure that was in my psychology reading."

"Dunno. I don't have much in the way of psych files," Bell said.

"Anyway, it's probably more important that I don't have a niche for him," Xen said. "I've planned for him to be around for a long time, and I'm still trying to find a context for him. I wouldn't wish being my father on anyone – not with all that means to me - and I never had a brother or an uncle. So yes, I have sometimes thought about him as a man and myself as a woman. But that's part of the negotiation process, it's not a destination, do you understand? That part of it he has wrong."

She looked up at Charon. "And no matter what, I would never want you to die sooner if I could prevent it. Whether your Hayflick limit says you're getting old or not, there is no part of me that wants you to be dead in twenty years." She took a deep breath. "Even if I am. And I do understand that you probably couldn't see me as an adult even if you wanted to. You've got some processing problems of your own."

"Dat may be some'ting of an understatement," Charon said. Xen was relieved to hear him speak. "You must unnerstand, Xen. I cannot t'ink of anyone in t'way you describe. For me to explain to you why would..." he stopped, his jaw muscle working. "It would be difficult."

"Is this a conditioning problem?" Xen asked.

"Yes," Charon said, with evident difficulty.

"You get a bad headache when you try to talk about it," Xen guessed. Charon nodded once. "Then don't. I don't need to know the details to understand." She sighed. "And I don't need for you to be different from what you are. I'd be dead several times over if you were. I never forget that."

"Good," Bell said. "Because I don't think there is anybody who could do what Charon's been doing for you, not as well as he's been doing it. And if there was, you wouldn't be able to trust them."

"No, I wouldn't, would I?" Xen smiled. Charon's face had smoothed out again, and she thought his temperature was declining a little. "Charon, for what it's worth, I'm sorry I tried to kill myself. I apologize."

"Accepted," Charon said promptly. "Alt'ough I would greatly appreciate it if you did not try it again."

"I think I can safely promise you that I won't," Xen said. She looked around them. There was no sign of the man she had freed. "We just met someone who didn't get killed, did you notice? Maybe I've broken the chain."

That thought gave her some modicum of hope. The sensation was so unfamiliar that it almost hurt.