He didn't know why he came back here. He knew it just made everything worse. But it was like an itchy rash you just couldn't help but scratch until it was bloody and raw. Like a scab you couldn't prevent yourself from picking at until it peeled away. Not in one piece, not even smoothly as it did when the new layer of epidermis was mostly finished growing beneath. But piece by piece, exposing the cut it concealed to the open air. Bleeding all across stark white fabric, irrevocably staining it beyond even the hardiest of cleaning fluids or powders. Not unless you wanted to use that heavy duty stuff. The cleaner that would leave a permanent mark of a different kind. Chemicals were tricky like that. Just ask his brain.
Sometimes Chance wondered if it would ever be the same again. Whether he would ever be normal. Not even happy. Happy was for chumps, he decided. Fools spent their entire lives searching for happiness. He never realised how much he had taken it for granted. Simply being.
Feeling normal. Baseline. Nothing right, but definitely nothing wrong.
You only realised what you had when it was gone.
It was becoming clearer by the second that feeling normal was a thing of the past. It was never going back to the way things were, he decided, looking out over the bombed out wastes he now called his home. Nothing was ever going to be okay, ever again. He took another swig from his bottle, half way through polishing off a quart of neat vodka. This too he knew to be bad for him. Intellectually, he knew without a shadow of a doubt that the liquor was killing him, just as being here at the top of Tenpenny Tower was also killing him.
Making him dwell on the past. But what did you have left when you couldn't envision a future you wished to live through, but the past? The past, where you could dwell on every mistake that led you to where you currently were and couldn't escape.
Slipping further and further down into oblivion with each passing moment, but stubbornly looking away and distracting yourself from the reality; of what was happening to you, and what you were doing to yourself.
He reached up and touched the scar on the side of his skull, feeling the remnants of the incision from which everything he ever had been, or ever would have been, was being taken from him. Slopping out of his skull like so much spilled gruel.
When he closed his eyes he could still see Roy Phillip's leering face, burnt and rotten, like the faces of those residents of the Tower he had found in the basement, being gnawed on by hungry Ferals. It wasn't his fault. He didn't mean for it to be that way! He had meant for there to be peace, for there to be unity: But all there ever was, all there ever would be, was entropy.
Nothing would ever just be okay. And hopelessness drowned him, constricting his chest like a steel cable, tightening, and binding him tighter and tighter, crushing his heart in its coils. He felt like screaming. His teeth grit themselves, his cybernetic hand constricted in sympathy with the steel around his chest, and the glass cracked and crumbled, spilling vodka all across the balcony.
Chance looked at his now empty hand, feeling the liquid soak into his combat pants from the rapidly expanding puddle forming beneath the shattered bottle. Anger blossomed in his breast, threatening to break free. His breathing became short and shallow with the force of the emotion within.
"Chance?"
Trapezoid-muscles already so tightly-wound that they practically vibrated with the tension creaked around to the source of the voice. Butch stood there, Tunnel Snake jacket open down the front, one hand buried in the pocket and the other hanging loosely by his side.
"You okay, buddy?"
Chance briefly considered lying, but he could tell his eyes were wild and his breathing not yet stable. He looked a mess. Clothing dishevelled, reeking of liquor, sitting alone at the top of a mostly-deserted Tenpenny Tower, a broken bottle of vodka soaking through the seat of his pants.
"No, Butch," he said in a voice that sounded a hairs-breadth from absolute mania, "I'm not okay."
Butch glanced around at the balcony, from Chance's weapons propped up against the marble bench, to the dead or dying plants in their decorative pots, to his friend's upturned face and the coal black orbs that gazed back at him. He grimaced and sighed, "Man, you need to stop thinking about this stuff. It's not good for you, you know?"
Chance laughed. Not a pleasant sound to hear from the throat of a man that close to madness. It sounded more like the cackling of the damned than an expression of amusement. "What you think I don't know that? You think I don't fucking know that?"
He levered himself up, droplets of vodka spilling out of the folds of his pants and running down his legs where they had soaked through the pants to the skin beneath. What skin left that wasn't replaced by synthetic muscle fibres. "You think if I knew a way to make it stop that I wouldn't do it in a heartbeat?" He hissed, half-crazed by the sudden wash of emotion welling up like the depths of some massive, subterranean reservoir.
"I can't fucking make it stop, Butch. I fucking can't make it stop. I've tried. It's either Roy I see when I close my eyes, or its Ashur, or its Eulogy, or Werner, or Autumn, or fucking Tobar! It never ends! I've tried everything, Butch."
The Lone Wanderer crossed over to the lonely table, at which Alister Tenpenny used to spent hours picking off passing wastelanders from atop his lofty perch. He picked up an unopened bottle, this time of whiskey, and twisted off the metallic cap. He held it in his metal hand, glaring at it as if the innocuous bottle had wrong him with its very existence. Then in a sudden scream of furious anger he pitched it out into the void and watched as it plummeted down into the wasteland beyond like a descending meteor, trailing a glittering stream of amber liquid.
Butch had his own hands up, miming surrender at the sudden cry and the distant shattering of glass. He stared after the bottle before licking his lips and eying Chance cautiously as he ambled towards him, at an extremely slow pace. "I was just about to say you probably shouldn't drink that. Good place to start," he quipped with a half-hearted attempt at levity.
His blood ran cold however, when he notice what else was sitting on the table.
A loaded plasma pistol, its soft green glow exposed with the absence of the bottle.
The Novasurge.
One shot was enough to put a hole in the side of a Vertibird's armoured exterior. Or put a nice big hole where someones head used to be.
Chance followed his friends gaze, his own black cybernetics drilling a hole through the advanced plasma weapon. His breathing with erratic and his eyelids were twitching, the underside eternally rubbed raw by the unnatural surface of his eyes. They both looked at one another, and both knew exactly what was running through the others mind.
It wasn't how he had intended it to happen, Chance thought. But Butch always had known when he wasn't in a good way. It was fitting though, for Butch to be here.
"I know one thing…" Chance murmured
"No," Butch warned, his knees curling involuntarily as his hands splayed themselves out in a warning gesture.
"… that'll definitely work."
"Chance!"
The Wanderer lunged for the weapon with all the speed his cybernetic limbs could muster, which was entirely too fast for Butch to counter. The metallic hand closed around the handle and flicked on the charging switch in the same blur of movement. He brought it to the side of his cranium, finger tightening on the trigger. But the plasma weapon had a long charging period. It was made to dump half of an entire cell charge into one massive output of energy, after all. It required time to build the charge once the safety was removed.
Time that Butch, charging like an enraged bull, gave no time to facilitate. His hand clamped around Chance's cybernetic arm, wrenching it away as he drove his shoulder like a line-backer into Chance's sternum. Both of them were thrown to the ground in a tangle of limbs, and the Novasurge discharged into a wall with a crack of discharged plasma and a boom of crumbling masonry.
Chance struck Butch in the ribs, cracking several as the metallic cybernetics did what they were designed to, generating shocking amounts of physical force with each blow. Butch cried out in pain, but clung grimly on with both hands, keeping the muzzle of the weapon away from Chance's head at any cost.
The next blow caught him in the side of the face and fractured his jaw.
He flattened himself against Chance to minimise the amount of space his suicidal friend had to throw punches, putting his back to him and both hands about the gun to try and wrestle it away. But giving a man like the Wanderer your back was like giving a radscorpion a free sting.
One cybernetic fist clutched the weapon as the other closed around Butch's throat from behind and jostling his broken jaw, cutting off his air-supply and constricting his windpipe. Butch gasped, realising the position he had placed himself in, in his desperation to take the weapon away from him.
The fist tightened, as Chance's lips peeled back from his gritted teeth. "Go to sleep," he growled in Butch's ear, "Go to sleep, and when you wake up it'll all be over."
Blackness began closing in on the edges of Butch's vision, specks of darkness that multiplied and spread across his eyes as kaleidoscopes of light began flashing in the centre of his sight.
And then Paul Hannon's sweaty face in the Vault infirmary as he died, Butch hand clutching at his own as if his grip alone could keep his friend from slipping down into the death below. Paul, the friend he had failed. That showed him up for what he really was. Just some kid who had never grown out of his delusions, playing at being in a real gang. Playing at being a leader. Some leader he had been. When his friends needed him he couldn't do a damn thing.
"Because he's my pal. My brother. All us Tunnel Snakes are brothers. Birth to earth. Womb to tomb. Mostly because Tunnel Snakes rule!"
Paul's voice, from a simpler time. A happier time. When they all believed the bullshit he shovelled about himself. About brotherhood. About the Tunnel Snakes.
And Butch drove his elbow deep into Chance's belly, cracking his bone against the sub-dermal plating. He did it again, eyes wide open but staring at nothing, grimly holding onto consciousness with every last vestiges of his willpower. And Chance's grip gave just an inch.
And that was all Butch needed to struggle free as he had so many times before, when the two of them fought tooth a nail for dominance. He blocked the expected counter-jab with his broken elbow, forcing it down and to the side with all his weight, before butting his friend in the head and smashing the hand holding the gun against the stonework.
As he intended, the motion caused the gun to discharge, expending the last shot into the wall where it blew another gaping hole in the intricate masonry. The smoke curled outwards as the plasma cooled, stone fracturing from the heat shock alone.
His triumph was immediately and violently crushed as Chance's hand closed around his windpipe once more, coal black eyes staring like the void from within his skull, face twisted with despair; madness and hatred, and….
He felt something soak his shirt. Suddenly, everything was so very far away. Noise was muted. His neck felt strange. His breath was filled with wetness.
Dimly, as he knelt over Chance's recumbent form, he noticed the first glistening red droplet fall onto Chance's face, which was suddenly contorted in alarm and horror.
"Ohh, fuck! BUTCH!"
The sound of his friends voice felt like a murmur from half-a-world away as he tumbled sideways off of his friend and tried to draw in a breath, but all the met his lungs was a flood of crimson. He coughed, sending a spray of blood skywards to rain down on his face and the stone ground beneath him. His hand went to the holes in his throat, severing the artery and cutting a wide gash in his windpipe.
Chance's razor nails. They deployed themselves in response to the flexing of certain synthetic muscle fibres. Sometimes, he knew, Chance deployed them accidentally. It was easy to do. Cats sometimes extended their claws when they stretched. He'd seen it in a comic book, once.
"Ohh god! Butch, hold on!"
He smiled as the blood bubbled up through his teeth and soaked his cheeks.
It should have been him that died that day, in the Vault, like a real leader should.
Not Paul.
Not Chance.
But today it would be his turn. Birth to earth, womb to tomb. Because Tunnel Snakes are brothers. And maybe, in his final moment, he could finally be the man he always dreamed he could be. Maybe his brothers could actually be proud of him. Their fool. The screwup.
But maybe a noble fool, at least. Not completely worthless. He'd given this one thing back to the world. The one thing he ever managed to do right.
His heart slowed.
His breaths bubbled.
His guilt faded into the calming waters of his soul.
Then the stimpacks needle jammed itself between his ribs and directly into his heart and hissed as the pneumatic syringe forced its contents into his bloodstream. He jerked as the fast-acting medicine rushed to the affected area and began pulling skin and muscle and sinew back together at a pace that only Chance's specially enhanced supply could manage.
His next breath was blood, the next after that was laced with oxygen, then he was coughing up gobbets of blood as his airways cleared just in time to banish the darkness from the corners of his gaze before it closed in forever.
Butch's hand found Chance's as vision faded back into comprehensible order. "Ohh god, Butch! Butch, you're going to be okay man! Butch!"
He wheezed and hacked up blood as Chance clutched at the front of his jacket, shattered, and destroyed by the adrenaline dump. His cybernetic hands uncurled from Butch's jacket and he stared, horrified at the blood that soaked the synthetic fibres.
"What the fuck," he moaned as he backed away from his friends body and against the railing of Tenpenny Tower, "What is happening to me?"
The blood glistened in the sun and dried in the breeze.
"What the fuck is happening to me?!"