Guide Her Through the Night

Synopsis: An Enclave soldier survives a battle with the Lone Wanderer. She's still not convinced she shouldn't kill him. (T)


Capital Wasteland, June 2278.

Sergeant Jim Monroe, frantically reloading, watched the Hellfire trooper on his 10 line up a shot. Before he could fire more than once, the helmet disconnected from the rest of the trooper's body, taking his head with it. Monroe moved automatically to get him to cover, but his brain caught up with him. No medic could fix that.

"Delaney..." he muttered senselessly.

A dog came flying at him, all snarls and wild eyes. He batted it off with the butt of his plasma rifle, but it was barely deterred. The enemy was shouting to one another, and suddenly a harsh whistle rose into the midnight air signaling the dog to scamper back to its master.

The Captain shouted "Monroe, cover me!" as she prepared to dart over to see if battlefield repairs could get the sentry bot functioning again. A last-ditch effort, but their only hope.

Monroe had set his stance to cover fire when a frag grenade flew in an arc above his head. Right to the Captain. Shrapnel peppered her officer's uniform, but Jim breathed a sigh of relief to see that she was alive. That was, until...

A man appeared, as if he'd been there all along. He wore a fedora and trench coat, and held some sort of high-caliber handgun. Monroe was frozen, as if in a dream, or else he would've moved quickly to take the man down. The stranger fired five consecutive shots into the Captain, disappearing in another blink of the eye. Jim didn't make a sound. Suddenly, he was alone on the battlefield. He aimed at the hostiles. And then didn't.

Jim was confused. And terrified. And exhausted. He was a loyal soldier of the Enclave. And yet somehow, he hesitated. The barrel of his rifle tipped toward the ground.

The leader — the Lone Wanderer — threw her arm up to signal to her follower to pause. The guy behind her stopped too. Both took quick glances at the Pip-Boys fit snugly around their combat armor.

"Your indicator is green," the woman remarked. "That means you're not actively about to kill me." Her voice was an odd mix of stern and friendly. Monroe figured he should choose his next actions very carefully.

He shrugged slowly. "I don't see how I could if I tried."

"Aniss, did you forget two seconds ago when he was tryin' to shoot our brains out?" snapped the man behind her. The dog, no longer looking like a beast from the underworld, panted contentedly next to his leg.

She waved flippantly without looking at her friend. "Well," she said to Monroe, "you made a good decision. We don't go down easily."

"I'm not a coward," Monroe spat, face reddening under the helmet.

"Then why'd you lower your weapon?" Aniss interrogated him. The demand in her voice reminded him of his kid sister. She frowned petulantly at him through the murky Wasteland moonlight. The guy at her side rolled his eyes, and Jim saw that he was just as much of a child as she was.

"You're... a girl," he said slowly.

"So was your officer over there," Aniss snapped.

Thinking of the Captain's sudden and mystifying death clenched his gut. "I mean a kid."

"I'm nineteen."

"What's a teenager doing making herself an enemy of the state?"

"I DIDN— ugh." She took an angry breath. The dog cocked his head at her raised voice. "I didn't - do - anything. Your people attacked me. You attacked Project Purity. Your colonel killed my dad!"

"The Jefferson Memorial is property of the U.S. government," Monroe argued. "Your father died in a suicide attack on Enclave personnel."

"What are you talkin' about, man? The Doc's never hurt anybody," argued the other guy.

"Who are you, anyway?"

"I'm Butch, punk! I'm surprised you haven't heard of—"

"Not now, Butch," said Aniss in an undertone.

Monroe sighed sharply. "Look, I'm — none of us are winning, here. I don't want to fight with teenagers—"

"Hey, punk, I'm twenty!" Butch called.

Monroe ignored him. "And you don't seem to want me dead."

"Yeah," said Aniss. "But your Enclave keeps attacking me, is the problem." She took the ammo out of her combat shotgun and switched weapons as they spoke.

"What am I supposed to do about that?" Monroe growled.

Her jaw twitched. "I'm looting your camp now." She rounded him, then made a beeline for the encampment supplies.

"Uh, I don't think so," He protested, and made a move toward her, but the dog didn't look so friendly all of a sudden, and he backed down.

She rifled through an ammo crate as Butch scrutinized their rations.

"So you're just gonna steal all this valuable equipment for your little crusade?" Monroe muttered, ticked at being unable to do anything about it.

"If it means less of it for your people to use again us," she said, smirking into the crate.

"Wouldn't take these if you put a gun to my head," Butch said, dangling a ration packet in front of his face.

A pause, filled with the sounds of the camp being looted. Jim sat down on a portable bench to wait it out, strategically ignoring the bodies and focusing on his new involuntary acquaintances.

"What's your name, Enclave?" Aniss asked, strategically tearing scrap out of the busted sentry bot.

"Sergeant Jim Monroe." The dog ventured up to his knee, looking curious. Jim frowned, then cautiously reached down to pat his head. The dog flinched, ready to get aggressive again, but luckily, it seemed to accept his friendly intent. There were no pets in the Enclave, so Jim wasn't really sure how to act around an animal. Experimentally, he tried petting with a bit more vigor, and the dog pranced in place. Jim assumed this meant they were friends.

"Is this a campfire?" Butch asked, poking the portable bonfire.

"Start a fire for us, Monroe," Aniss ordered.

"Yeah, I don't think so. I'm not your slave, missy," Monroe snapped, taking off his helmet to glare at her.

"Would you like to be?" Aniss asked, swinging a stubby, wide-muzzled energy gun.

"Whatever that is, you'd better not be about to point it at me." But Jim could recognize a threat when he heard one, so he started on the fire. In a minute, the youths were pacified and eating happily. They even shared with Monroe, who got to taste mutfruit and Yao guai for the first time. He watched them as they ate. Multiple times, they exchanged small blows at the slightest provocation, then went back to eating once the score was settled. It was less of a savagery and more of an irreverent familiarity. Like two kids pulling hair or shoving dirt in each other's face. Butch would say something piggish, the Wanderer would punch his shoulder, he would kick her knee, and it was over. It was a weird sort of trust, almost.

"Can't tell if you two are siblings, lovers, or lifelong enemies."

Aniss made a sound somewhere between a huff and a scoff. It wasn't childishness, Jim realized, but strain piercing her voice. The Brotherhood were savages playing with toys of a forgotten age, and the vaults, as far as he knew, had a pretty chilling failure rate. Her support structure was one of bloodthirst and survival. To be fatherless, in a place like this, couldn't be an easy life.

And he'd feel bad, if she hadn't just made Delaney's kid fatherless.

His mood darkened, but he extended an olive branch. "You can end this. Colonel Autumn wants you alive," he offered. "I can bring you in, and you'll be treated as a prisoner of war."

"Is that supposed to be enticing?"

"It can't be worse than living out here," Monroe muttered distastefully, watching a radscorpion disembowel something a few hundred yards away.

"Hold the phone, Buster," Butch snapped. "That's my city you're talking about."

"Maybe you could throw a few dollars toward urban development, then?"

Aniss was angry again. "Unlike the Enclave, we've done everything to make this place better. We're the ones pacifying cannibals, hauling scrap for infrastructure, recovering lost knowledge."

"Yeah!" agreed Butch. "I got athlete's foot, man!"

Jim propped his chin on his fist. "The Enclave will get around to that, but we have to get our foot in the door as soon as possible. We're the only ones with the legal authority and the genetic purity to remake America. You're just impeding our progress for when the time comes."

"You tried to KILL ME!" she shouted. Her voice echoed in the darkness.

"You don't have to keep fighting! Even if you won't come with me, you have the means to leave. The Capital Wasteland isn't the only place that's populated, you know."

"I'm not gonna get chased out and let Eden have his way with DC. I haven't been here long, but it's all I've got for a home, and it falls to me to protect it."

"That's not the job of a teenager."

"It's the job of someone who cares! The Enclave's idea of helping is to invade a humanitarian project that was running perfectly well without its help and then kill all the scientists!"

"Those scientists only died because your father decided to be a terrorist and p—" Jim's voice faltered as Aniss raised her weapon and fired between his eyes.


Eden's smooth southern drawl projected over the persistent buzz of an eyebot's propulsor. He droned pleasantly about his childhood, his dog Honey. The way things once were.

In his mind's eye, Jim saw Honey as a knee-high mongrel with mismatched irises.

He realized suddenly that he was conscious. Less suddenly, that he was alive. The eyebot closed in on his face as if studying him, and he waved it off.

Soldiers in power armor approached, and he turned to them, shaking the blurriness out of his vision. He didn't know if he'd been out for sixty seconds or six hours, but the sky hadn't yet lightened.

"You're alive," a Tesla-armored man commented pleasantly. "And Eyebot Duraframe Subject C's facial recognition software is working. What happened, soldier?"

"Mm," said Monroe. Thoughts churned and broke like waves in his mind, and he took a moment to solidify them. "The Wanderer was here. She shot me with some sort of neurological dampener. I don't think I passed out, but I don't remember what happened."

"You're lucky," the soldier nodded grimly. He surveyed the destruction around him. "Let's get you back to Raven Rock for psych eval." He felt Monroe's forehead, quickly checked his eye movements, and handed him his discarded weapon.

"Did you... know?" Jim's voice still felt uncertain and off in the distance. "That she's just a kid?"

"She's a killing machine," he said, glaring in disgust at the Captain's body. Monroe's heart twinged again at her loss.

"She didn't kill me."

"Come on, Soldier. We're getting out of here." His comrade pulled him up. He could see that Jim was still off-balance, or maybe he was concerned about the rapid-onset Stockholm Syndrome, because he held tightly onto his shoulders.

Jim started to walk, then stopped. Scratched in the dirt next to his feet were five block letters: S-O-R-R-Y

Yeah. Me too, kid.


2266-
January - Distance, No More
2267-2276 -
2277-
January - Sage destroys the Divide
February - First Battle of Hoover Dam
July - The Mummy Returns
August 17 - Aniss leaves Vault 101
The Prodigal Son
September - To Set the Record Straight
November - The Burned Man Walks
2278-
April - James dies (Purity War begins)
June - Guide Her Through the Night
Bitter Springs
September - Project Purity activates
2279-
Adams Air Force Base (Purity War ends)
2280-
May - Dogmeat's Vacation
August - Boones are married
2281-
New Canaan is destroyed
October 11 - Sage is shot in the head
October 19 - Sage wakes up
2282-
ED-E, My Bud
2283-
January - Second Battle of Hoover Dam
February - To Have and To Hold
April - Awake, O Sleeper