So, after a long, long wait, I'm back. Sadly, the chapter is much shorter than it normally would have been, but no matter how many times I tried to rewrite it, it always came out feelings like I was, well, babbling.
i've seen many things so beautiful, it's true
but i've never seen nothing like you
It's been months since they've left Megaton – Sallie's fairly certain that they've hit the eight month mark, if she's going to be honest. She's been trying to work up to going to meet her father in Rivet City since before the Pitt, and the longer she stays, the more sure she is that it's never going to happen. It's not that she doesn't want to help her father – his goal is a noble one, for sure – but rather, she knows that they still have issues to work through and she doesn't want to deal with those issues. She loves her father, she does, because he's been there for her entire life and he's always been supportive; that doesn't make her less frustrated with him having left her in a hole in the ground with a bunch of psychos with some weird mental problems. Day in and day out, it's been her and Charon, patrolling around Megaton for something to do (which effectively eliminated Stockholm's purpose, meaning he could venture down from his post high above the city more than once or twice a month), or sitting up in Gob's saloon, slinging back beers and whiskey, with her laughing drunkenly, long and loud, and him at her side, shaking his head at her.
Except for last night, when she had ended up slung over Charon's shoulder the moment she'd asked Gob for a drink. The bartender had chuckled and bid them good night, ignoring her as she half-screeched, half-laughed, calling out for him to make Charon put her down. She hadn't succeeded in anything more than drawing the attention of the bomb worshippers as they left the building, the lot of them gaping openly as the massive ghoul smiled and hauled the woman higher up on his shoulder. She'd flipped them off, laughing loudly as she returned her attention to breaking free from her … Well, she's still not sure what to call him aside from 'Charon' and 'ghoul', to be honest. If the world were different, normal, she's sure it'd be 'boyfriend' or 'lover' or any of a multitude of other words that mean the exact same things, but neither of those things seems to fit what Charon is (on top of that, if the world were normal, she wouldn't even have Charon, but that was a whole other crate of things she didn't want to think about).
And this morning, she's tired and refusing to get up, rolling over and burying her face in her pillow as she tugs the sheets up to her shoulders. Charon's already up – she can hear him moving around a few feet away in the kitchen – but he's not trying to wake her, for which she is grateful. It isn't as though she didn't sleep well; she just doesn't want to get up. She's not a morning person like she was before she left the vault (then again, as far as she knew, the time was all sorts of fucked up in the vault, and what they were told was day was really night out here), and most days in Megaton, it takes her at least half an hour to actually drag herself out of bed and get things done. Most of the time, it's not that she's actually tired, but that she just doesn't want to peel her eyes open and greet the day, realize that, yes, she is living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and yes, her house is made of pieced together scraps of metal, and yes, she was raised in a hole in the ground.
"I know you are awake, smoothskin," Charon says from the kitchen, and she doesn't need to roll over and squint at him from the heart-shaped bed to know that he is rolling his eyes and smirking as he looks at her. The thought almost makes her smile. Almost.
Instead, she groans and burrows deeper into the bed. "No'm not, Charon. Don't make things up," she mumbles into the pillow, squeezing her eyes shut tighter, like she thinks that maybe, if she can't see anything, she won't have to get up, she'll just be able to lay here for the rest of her life. She hasn't thought that way since her tenth birthday – boy, was that ever a shitty party. It was also the last time she'd felt genuinely close to Amata, like they really were friends (she's a bit ashamed to admit that, when she started feeling like they weren't anymore, that's around the time that they're meant to take the G.O.A.T., and instead of getting the Tunnel Snakes to leave the other girl alone, she tells them that's she's insecure about her weight and then fucks off to class – she can hear Amata crying softly for the duration of the test and feels a twinge of guilt in her chest. She stops feeling guilty about that altogether when, at eighteen, Amata starts teasing her about the crush she'd had on Freddie "the Freak" Gomez back in the day, and the crush she now harbors on Butch DeLoria, and goes onto say that nobody in the vault wants anything to do with the "prematurely white-haired nerdy vault doctor's daughter"; that's a comment that earns her a snappy comment about being the overseer's daughter and a stern 'fuck you'). It's strange thinking about the vault now, now that she has no real ties to it. Sure, she's sort of-kind of- not really friends with Butch and Freddie and even Paul Hannon, but nobody else. Amata may have helped her get out of the vault, but she's pretty sure that was more because she didn't want the blood on her hands than because they were friends.
Charon smiles wryly, rolling his eyes. "I am hardly 'making things up', smoothskin. You have been awake for nearly fifteen minutes now; are you planning on never getting up?"
Sallie turns her head slightly to squint at Charon, making a face. "And what if I am, you big lug?" She knows he won't do much more than take her blankets away, which is more than enough to get her up, but she's hoping that, against all odds, he won't do that today, he'll just let her lounge about.
Two weeks from that day, and they're finally leaving Megaton (and Sallie is pleased to report that Charon did let her lounge around like a lazy teenager that day). Sallie has bought every stimpak and box of bandages in town, along with any ammunition available for the guns she and Charon have. She's picked through the array of food offered at all the shops (she only ends up buying a few boxes of InstaMash, and she and Charon decide they'll hunt for the rest of their food – not like that will be too difficult).
For the first time in a long time, she's wearing her merc charmer outfit - it may not offer her much protection, but it allows her a fairly good range of motion and it doesn't make the heat outside any worse. Within city limits, she generally keeps to dresses she's found in old suitcases or sewn together from old scraps of fabric - things that make it clear she has no desire to fight - and she should probably wear pants outside of town, but all the pants she owns are leather. While she appreciates the look of leather pants - and she does keep a pair with her in case - she has no desire to tromp around in them most of the time; she'd much rather watch Charon tromp around in his leathers (and she is not ashamed to admit that, thank you - she spent the first nineteen years of her life minding her manners and being, for the most part, the well-behaved child she was expected to be, and she wasn't doing it anymore).
"Ready to go, Charon?" Sallie is met with a nod, one that makes her nervous only because it means that this is really happening. She's found her father, sure, but she's leaving her new home - possibly for the last time, because who knows anything out here? - to go and help him; she knows it's for the good of the wasteland... But that doesn't make the tasks that lie ahead any less daunting.
She just hopes this isn't the last time she sees Megaton fading into the distance when she turns around.
When they finally reach Rivet City, Sallie is dead tired. Months spent in Megaton have spoiled her, gotten her used to having a bed to curl up in every night - makes a bed roll or a crappy cot found in an old shack seem really lackluster. Charon doesn't seem to be sharing the same issue, but he's trained for this sort of thing, sleeping on the go or hardly at all; she isn't. Sure, she had her fair share of sleepless nights back in the vault, but that was another thing entirely: studying for tests all night and drinking half her father's coffee in the morning so she could actually stay awake through the damn thing, or giggling late into the night during sleepovers with Amata.
She decides against going straight to the lab where she assumes where father will be, instead renting out a room at the Weatherly so she can sleep. Without a second thought, she's shuffling into the room, dropping things and plucking an old pair of pajamas out of her pack and changing into them. "You can go do... Whatever you want, Charon, if you aren't tired," she tells her ghoul through a yawn as she falls back onto the bed, wriggling beneath the covers.
Charon shakes his head, peels off his armor (okay, more like 'meticulously removes it', because that armor is not easy to get out of or help someone out of) until he stands in his underthings and nudges her over. "Not many here are fond of ghouls," he reminds her gently, "so there would not be much for me to do, smoothskin. No, I will sleep now. No one will go anywhere just because they have to wait a few more hours for you."
It's the last thing Sallie hears before she falls asleep that night, and when she wakes the next morning, she's vaguely confused by that, because she's not entirely sure the conversation actually happened. She shrugs it off, though, notes that Charon has just returned with breakfast - or rather, what constitutes breakfast out here, which seems to be two bowls of noodles - so he's probably been awake for a while.
"Good morning, smoothskin."
"G'mornin', Cha-" she pauses, yawning widely, "-ron. Been up long."
The massive ghoul shakes his head, handing her one of the bowls in his hands. "Only an hour or so, smoothskin. Now eat."