1
"It amazes me, Blue.", Piper told her. The reporter was now a massuese, or at least she was following the other woman's instructions to attempt to rub the tension out of her. Even now, with her multiple century elder lying back in a reconstruction of her own bed, she pulled on the muscles in the woman's arms.
"What does?", the General asked.
"Your skin." she replied. "It's like mud before a mudslide. I've never seen anyone this smooth. Well, who didn't turn out to not be a person. Why don't you...oh."
The General smiled, but thinly. "Have any child hood scars? That grew and intermingled with the ones most everyone collects?
"Everyone knows the time I came from had better technology. What they don't understand is that, even in the middle of our war, we had all the fixes of that better technology. Namely, more technology. Enough for...well, well not everyone but a lot of us or at least the white and richer ones. And the war was far, far away - I hadn't so much as held a gun until basic training. The worst thing that happened to me as a kid was when my bike wheel was caught in between the lawn and the sidewalk and I was flung shoulder first into dog house. I cried and cried over something that would scare a child today into complete silence lest a monster or raider hear. And then an ambulance, with sirens blazing and filled with paramedics came and whisked me away to a hospital filled to the brim with doctors. 3D imaging to reset my not all that dislocated shoulder, muscle fiber and nerves and fascia and tendons carefully placed by surgeons, the stuff we not put in STIMPACKS painted onto my tissue every step of the way under a haze of anasthetics. It was summer vacation, so I had weeks to heal and pills to take and rehabilitation exercises to get back in shape before going back to a school where the biggest danger was a bully that only dared pick on the smallest kid.
"We can get those days back, Piper. I know it."
Piper kept to her work but asked another question. "That's another thing. You'll refer to some people as 'white' or Preston as 'black' and it seems to have something to do with our skin even if it isn't accurate, but never make mention of our hair color."
The General looked offended. Then she realized Piper's only curious expression, as if she was going to explain how the skyscraper ruins downtown were built. And then she laughed a dry, ironic laugh. "It was so damn important back then. Skin color, I mean. And it was only important because white people had made it so damn important for so long that everyone else had suffered for it for so long that we couldn't get around how it made our society or the fact that we had made it that way. Where you lived, how much money your school got, whether the cops felt duty bound to harass you or familial enough to let you get away with it 'just this once' and every time we thought we had it figured out racism - er, the treating people differently because of the color of their skin - would pop up somewhere else. Like mistrusting the practice of medicine because the practitioners of medicine and the industry at large had harmed people your color so many times in the past, and that mistrust being used as a justification and reason to do that harm."
Wright gave her a sympathetic look. "I'm so sorry."
The General smiled. "Don't be. The whiter you were, the longer end of the stick you got in that one. It was being a woman that brought me down the chain."
Piper furrowed her brow. "But we're the ones that give birth."
The General shrugged.
"That's stupid.", the woman stated. "I mean, if a settlement had like 2 men and thirty women...But the hair color?"
"But hair color...I mean there were what we thought of as jokes. Blondes were dumb, redheads had no soul...but they were just jokes and never really funny ones at that. I'm inclined to say it was because we all go gray in the end. But we all bleed red and it didn't stop the racism. As for eye color...hell, I don't know.
"People did everything imaginable upon each other over skin color or articles of faith or social pressure by others driven by something stupider. I suppose that I'm lucky: every war that I've led was against an actual threat and I'm not so far gone that I can't accept a surrender. Bridget. The Triggermen. I wonder where we'd be if the Brotherhood of Steel/"
"They nuked us, Blue.", Piper stated, stopping her movements. "They're not some suicider supermutant that doesn't know what it's doing. They chose to be people that knew of the Great War and walked in the same foot steps. You can't imagine how evil someone like that can be."
"No, I can't.", the General lied.
"And to blame you for it!", she continued. "Of all the...I'm sorry, I'm sorry. This is the Institute's 'vacation'. I'm supposed to be helping you relax and take your mind off of the war."
The General sighed. "You are. But it's more than that. It's getting distance from those responsibilities, not just enjoying oneself. And that's probably going to bother me. 'In the office', so to speak, I'm always on the move and thinking up how to accomplish the next on a list of goals or solve the crisis of the moment. But here, I'm away from all that. And it's beginning to sink in how many people aren't. There are a great many towns in the Capital Wastes that are completely outside the Spike. And not only do they have to deal with a wasteland the Minutemen don't patrol without our capacities for survival. They're under the thumb of a Brotherhood of Steel that grew desperate enough to fire off a nuke and now is even further pressed with us on their door step. They're exposed to terrorists like the Littlehorn & Associates, Talon Company, and the Regulators.
Our civilians are...civilians, at least. Maybe children can't play outside of security cordon and the work week is the whole week. But we're going to get there. Scientists instead of tinkerers and repair guys. Artists - can you imagine the progress we've made if a child can plan on honing a talent for entertainment so they can make themselves a celebrity instead of accidentally having just Magnolia?"
The General pulled Piper into the bed. She of course objected. "I'm not done with your message to your muscles."
"We'll worry about the rest tomorrow. Time for some sleep. Time to turn off for just a while."
2
"To the Tunnel Snakes.", the Lone Wanderer exclaimed and then took a swig of the Vault-Tec recipe for the substitute for actual spirits.
She handed the bottle back to the woman she was lying in the marital bed of. "Good riddance and God damn.", Amata added.
"Hey, they weren't the ultimate villains.", the Lone Wanderer attempted to concede.
"Before those assholes left, they were responsible for at least a disorderly a month between the lot of them.", the overseer countered.
The woman who had been outside Vault 101 shrugged. "Out there, that's pretty polite. But between the entitlement and how conceited they were...yeah, they're probably rotting away after hiding in some other tunnels now."
"Don't call our vault 'tunnels'.", Amata objected.
The Lone Wanderer rolled over to her and started poking her. "Tunnels, tunnels, tunnels."
Amata frowned heavily.
The Lone Wanderer smiled comically. "Tunnels built with the pinnacle of human ingenuity and industry, with the most enticing inhabitants."
"Thank you."
She took back the bottle. "But tunnels none the less." She nearly choked on the swig she was taking when Amata poked her so hard she nearly fell off the bed and the two started laughing harder than they had since they last saw each other.
"Ah.", Amata sighed. "What happened to those two teens fretting about their G.O.A.T.s?"
"They got their asses kicked by the hellscape we call life.", the Lone Wanderer answered.
Amata poked her again. "I did not get my ass kicked. I grew up into a responsibility meeting, effectively married, upstanding member of the last remnants of society."
"And I grew these, Mrs. Right and Mrs. Left.", the Lone Wanderer stated while flexing her biceps.
Her bedmate drew her finger along the toned muscle.
"Best secretaries I ever had.", the Lone Wanderer explained. "Never failed to take names, send messages, and keep appointments."
Amata laid back with the bottle. "Is it really that bad out there?"
The Lone Wanderer turned to her. "Regretting it after all these years?"
"No.", she admitted. "It was the right move. But the world out there. It just seems like it couldn't be..."
The Lone Wanderer laid back with her, snuggling under Amata's arm. "Well it is. Can't walk a hundred meters without spotting some monster fully capable of eating you alive. Everything people calling a town is really a hollowed out remnant of a place that was. Folks hunkered down with the best they can find out of the worst circumstances imaginable. And then you have the assholes you can't even call fallen because they never held their head up except to look down their nose at somebody - Paradise Falls is full of actual slavers, Talon Company's committing things that'll hurt your ears and calling themselves a mercenary outfit, and now this colossal bitch the General/"
"I've heard.", the overseer informed.
The Lone Wanderer stared into her eyes. "How?"
"The radio.", Amata admitted. "Granted, we only have her one broadcast that night and Three Dogs take. Is it true that she set off a nuclear bomb?"
The Lone Wanderer took back the bottle and swallowed as heavily as she dared. "Yeah. Nuked a warlord she was vying for control with. Blamed it on the Brotherhood of Steel to convince people to keep a permanent war stance. Now she roams the land with an army at her back" and here came the finger quotes "'asking' people if they 'want' to 'join' the Commonwealth or else the won't have 'food' or 'water' or 'safety'."
"I thought James' work brought fresh water to the wasteland?", the other woman reminded.
"Exactly!", she exclaimed. "Dad died for that dream. Dr. Li gave her entire life to that project before she left for who knows where. I fought robots and mutated what-nots and random sickos and a legion of fucking scum draped in the flag to get water to the people. And here comes the General, cutting it all off and asking 'Don't you see how helpful we are?' with her fist drawn back ready to deliver a haymaker if we let her."
She curled in more to Amata. "Hey, don't spill!"
The Lone Wanderer corrected the bottle. "You know how I can always be honest with you in this bed?"
The other woman flashed back to a couple of their other conversations they had. About their father's deaths. About the people the Lone Wanderer had killed...a whole lot of people the Lone Wanderer had killed. The numbers still didn't feel real to her, but the break downs she comforted a crying woman through were all to visceral to deny. Softly, Amata replied. "Yeah."
"Don't let her in here.", the Lone Wanderer warned. "Even if I can never see you again. Or she has something, anything, on you. Don't let her in here. Vault 101 might be the only place that can keep her out."
"Fine, I won't.", Amata assured. "Besides, it's a Vault. She can't."
"She may have broken a vault before, I don't know.", the Lone Wanderer warned. "She's from one, you know. She's pre-war. Better educated that both of us, by the society that built these vaults. She's in command of some science brigade that can make people from scratch."
"Making people from scratch is something me and my husband that you hate/"
"Don't joke.", the Lone Wanderer pleaded. "I'm serious. I'm...scared. I don't know if I can stop her. Everything I've tried so far has fallen flat. And when her army starts shooting at the Brotherhood of Steel, a lot of people I know are going to just be collateral damage.
"Don't let her turn our Vault into another pit under her boot."
Amata took the bottle from the Lone Wanderer and replaced its lip with two of her own against the other woman. "I won't. You don't have to worry about us. Even if you're going to go charging out those doors again and save the world. I...we won't let it happen.
"Get some rest."
