Chapter 32: Sky Dick

I woke up the next morning to my Pipboy screen showing the end credits over and over again. Charon had drifted off before me during the movie.

I listened to him breathe steadily for the time being. The movie had restarted automatically and I stared at the screen mindlessly. Thirty minutes had passed by and I didn't feel stomach pains.

The fear of losing the baby had renewed itself at the thought of yesterday. The familiar lump formed in my throat. A woman in the movie screamed, causing Charon to jump awake. He reflexively held me tight, restricting my breath.

"The movie started over." I said flatly.

He loosened his grip on me and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. "I see."

"Sorry the volume is so loud. I should have set it lower."

"It is fine. I needed to wake up anyway. How are you feeling today?"

I breathed in deeply as I tried to focus on one specific feeling. "Empty mostly."

"Empty emotionally? Or-"

"Charon, I really don't want to hear jokes like that."

"I apologize. I was unaware that was a joke."

I settled back down and turned off the movie. The following silence was also deafening. "Do you know how long we have to wait?"

"The doctor only said to look for bleeding or pain. I am to accompany you to the restroom and wait outside of the door in case of emergency. I will bring you to him any time you feel necessary."

I couldn't speak. My mouth felt dry. I only nodded.

"Let's do something today." Charon sat up with new found enthusiasm.

"Like what? There's not that much in the entertainment department in Megaton."

He held his hand out for me. "I got an idea."

I looked at his hand, then back to his face. "Alright."

I took his hand and he led me out of the room. He took time to make sure I was careful moving around and getting down the stairs. He took me outside of the gates and into Springvale. Dogmeat yapped behind us.

"Why are we here?"

"Just trust me. It's something a lot of people did before the war."

He linked his fingers together to boost me up on top of a house roof. He jumped up on a car and pulled himself up the rest of the way. Dogmeat whined at the front steps of the house.

Charon tossed down a Salisbury steak and he shut up. "Lay down on the roof. It should be fine."

I looked at him with skepticism but did as told. My head rested uncomfortably on the shingles. "Now what?"

He laid down next to me. "Look up. What do you see?"

I squinted up at the sky to look for anything. "Nothing."

"There's definitely something. I sure as hell see them." Charon grinned at me.

I looked back to the sky and shielded my eyes from the sun. "Clouds. That's it."

"What do the clouds look like?"

"Like fucking clouds. Charon, I don't get the point of this."

He swatted at my arm. "You don't see anything like a flower or some shit?"

"I've only seen flowers in books."

He shook his head. "I'm gonna change that some time. I will definitely find you some flowers."

A hint of a smile ghosted my lips. I looked back at the sky. "A horse."

Charon looked for a cloud horse. "Looks like a lion to me."

"What's a lion?"

"You know what a horse is, but not a lion?"

I looked down in shame. "No. I don't."

"I don't know why I expected you to know. They were like really big cats with a lot of fur around their necks and big teeth."

I recalled looking through old childrens books in the vault about animals and remembered seeing a cat. I always wanted one but Dad had always shut that down really fast. He never told me why he didn't like cats. "Charon?"

"Yeah, smoothskin?" He looked over.

"Are there still cats around the wasteland?"

He chuckled lightly, the first time in a long time. "Yeah, but you don't want to get near them if you see them. The bombs weren't as kind to them as they were dogs."

Dogmeat barked in the distance at the bottom of the house.

I tilted my head towards him. "Why did we have to destroy all the good things?"

He let out a long sigh. "I used to wonder the same thing and then I realized that things actually got better if you think hard enough. Raiders rape, steal, kill, and toke. They had people doing that before the war. Now that I think about it, things do seem a lot better now."

"That's pretty hard to believe," I said with a frown.

"You didn't see how people acted back then. You've only seen movies and magazines. That was just pretend. The best way I can explain is by compare and contrast," he paused. "What do people do when a loved one is raped or killed?"

"You make them pay." I said bluntly.

"Not back then. They either got away with it or just went to jail. Jail was sort of a safe haven for those kinds of people unless you were a child molester. Next question, what do people do when you see a man holding hands with another man?"

I thought about the question thoroughly. "Well, we don't do anything. What did they do before?"

He was silent for a moment. "Those two men were either forced to keep that a secret or they could be killed by some assholes. That happened quite often. Next, what do you do when you see a white woman married to someone who isn't white? Specifically someone with African decent."

"What the hell does that have to do with anything?" These questions were getting more and more ridiculous.

"That was frowned upon deeply. The woman was usually disowned by her family and the man was either hanged or beaten." He shook his head slightly. "I remember an old friend of mine, Tyrone. He asked a white girl out for dinner. Turns out she was the sheriff's daughter. He was sprayed with a fire hose."

"That's disgusting." I thought back to the time Paul and I had messed around in the vault's supply closets before Butch had come into the picture.

"It didn't stop there. The neighbor's had started burning crosses in his yard. He had come to me on multiple occasions asking what he was supposed to do. That was the first time I had felt useless. It wasn't like he could call the cops."

The tremble in his voice had assured me that he was indeed not making this up. The old world had a lot of shit. "What happened to him?"

"Well, he started seeing the girl behind her dad's back and when the dad found out, the asshole had found a way to frame him for a murder. No one saw much of the daughter after that."

"I think I've heard enough of the old world for today." I threw my arm over my face to cover my eyes.

"I didn't want you getting the wrong image of the times before." He muttered as he settled back onto the roof.

I shifted to look back at the clouds. "Dick."

"Excuse me fo-"

"I'm talking about the cloud. It looks like a dick." I smiled at him.

He stopped and looked at the sky. "I'll be damned. That's a pretty big sky dick."