Piper was sitting up in bed and absently nibbling on a mutfruit when Nora came in and checked on her the next morning. "Hey, Piper, how are you doing?" she asked.
Piper gave her a small smile. "I'm doing okay, Blue. Not the first time I've been shot at, or shot." She looked down at the mutfruit in her hand and took another small bite. "First time I've had a nuke lobbed at me, I have to admit."
"Yeah, it's never fun," Nora admitted. "At least this one was a lot smaller than the last one." That made Piper involuntarily snort with laughter, despite how dark the joke was. A resigned look came across Nora's face as she took a deep breath before speaking again. "Look — if you want to head back to Diamond City, I understand. I was gonna head back there myself today, then work my way east through the city to see if I can find that old vault Nick Valentine's supposed to be locked up in. I get that what you do is already dangerous, and I respect that, but my running around the ruins of Boston is almost certainly an order of magnitude more dangerous, and I fully understand if that's nothing you want to involve yourself with anymore. I can just ask Codsworth or Preston to watch my back again —"
"Didn't you and Preston get in a big fight last night?" Piper asked. "I heard some of the settlers here talking about it when I woke up to get breakfast."
"Oh, that," Nora said dismissively. "After I scolded him in front of everyone we went back to my room and… uh… he helped apply some first aid." She broke eye contact with Piper as she said that last bit.
Piper crossed her arms. "Oh, is that what they called fucking back in the day?" she asked archly.
"Shut UP!" Nora said, stamping her foot and crossing her own arms. "It's not… the healthiest relationship, but sex is the best therapy I can get that doesn't involve time travel or… well, someone reinventing the entire practice of therapy."
"You know, Doctor Sun in Diamond City does therapy," Piper said.
Nora was intrigued. "Oh yeah?"
"Yeah," Piper said. "You tell him all your problems, and he tells you to stop whining, buy something, or stop bothering him."
"Ah, good ol' retail therapy," Nora said wistfully. "Too bad Fallon's went along with the actual therapists."
Piper wrinkled her eyebrows. "Blue, there's a Fallon's in Diamond City. Fallon's Basement. Big sign, you couldn't miss it."
Nora's eyes widened. "…Really? Fallon's Basement, huh?"
Piper nodded. "Run by Becky Fallon, who says she's descended from the original store's owners. Don't really know how much truth there is to that claim, but the store seems decent enough, for a place that deals in ancient clothing looted from ruins."
"Hmm…" Nora stroked her chin. "I wonder if she'd accept my store card…" She instinctively reached for her wallet in her pocket, before remembering the last time she'd seen it was before the bombs had dropped. "Bah, it's in my wallet, which is, uh, God knows where. Either I left it in the house, which means it was probably swiped by looters sometime… probably well before the birth of your grandparents, or it's with the things I brought into the vault with me, and…" She involuntarily let out a little shudder. "Yeah, not going back there. Not for a long time, if not ever."
They stayed silent for a few moments, Nora leaning against the door frame, and Piper taking the occasional bite of her mutfruit. Finally, Piper finished eating and tossed the core out through the window. "Look, Blue, going back to your original point, I'm not planning on shirking away from following you around. To be honest, it's not that much more dangerous gallivanting throughout the Commonwealth as it is to just hunker down inside Diamond City. I'm most worried about the Institute, and they can get in and out of the old stadium with no problem anyway, so why bother hiding?" She got up and began to get dressed, stopping to give Nora a look. "Well, didn't you say we were gonna go look for Nicky today?"
Nora grinned and left to tend to her own preparations. "That I did," she said. "That I did."
XXX
Nora and Piper had stopped in at Diamond City to rest and peruse the shops, but stopped short when they stumbled across a family argument in progress. One man had another at gunpoint, and just as the two women got within earshot, he bellowed "Don't move, you fucking synth! What have you done with my brother?"
"I'm not a synth, I swear to God!" the second man pled, hands held high.
The suspicious brother didn't buy it. "He's a synth!" he raved. "He's going to kill us all!" He raised his gun to shoot, but one of the security officers was faster on the draw — the man was cut down in a hail of gunfire.
The crowd which had gathered to watch the little drama began to disperse, and Piper turned to remark on the death to Nora — but Nora had already made it to the dead man, rifling through his pockets and grabbing anything she found of interest. "Free ammo," she muttered, making Piper's hair stand on end.
"Uh, Blue, you maybe wanna wait to do that until his body starts cooling?" Piper asked.
Nora looked up at Piper, a 'kid caught with his hand in the candy jar' look on her face. "What? I thought it was the Law of the Wasteland or something, you can freely loot dead people."
"Well, yeah," Piper admitted. "But that's not an actual codified law! And there's, uh… decorum!" Piper said, snapping her finger upon remembering the word. "His brother's still right there!" she pointed out, gesturing to the man still standing there with a shell-shocked look on his face.
"Oh my God, you're right," Nora said. She turned to the poor man. "Hey, you want any of this? You're the brother, so I figure you get first pick."
"N-no, that's okay," he said, barely having even heard her. "I still can't believe he wouldn't listen to me… I kept trying to tell him, I'm not a synth!"
"Hey, it's okay," Nora said, patting his foot reassuringly (since she was still squatting by his dead brother and looting his corpse).
"I… I just need a minute." He wandered off, and Nora proceeded to finish looting the corpse.
"For the record, Blue, if I do bite it out there, please bring all my things back to Nat," Piper said. "And, uh, take care of her for me." Her voice had suddenly, unexpectedly, thickened with emotion in the middle of that last sentence, and she clamped her mouth shut.
"Hey, I'll be glad to do so, but it's nothing you have to worry about happening, okay?" Nora said, standing up and giving Piper a side hug. "Besides, don't you know anybody around here you'd rather have Nat taken in by?"
Piper snorted (forced herself to snort). "What, one of these assholes?" she murmured, flippant. She and Nora both laughed. "If it came down to it, MAYBE Nicky, and who knows if he'd want the job in the first place."
"Guess we should make sure to find him, then," Nora said. "In case both of us step on the same land mine, or something."
"How would we even do that?" Piper questioned.
"I dunno, maybe if we wanted to start up three-legged races again?" Nora suggested.
"Wouldn't we have to go swimming around in radioactive waste to grow the third leg?" Piper asked. "And that still doesn't explain how we'd both step on the same land mine."
Nora sighed. "Okay, history lesson time again…" Piper listened with interest as Nora gave her a rundown of the extinct sport.
XXX
"So, does Diamond City or, uh, anyplace, really, have a legal system?" Nora asked over noodles. They'd done their shopping, and stopped in at Power Noodles before venturing back out.
Piper considered the question. "Well, no. Nothing formal, anyway." Piper smirked. "I've been tossed into the clink more than a few times, usually under some bullshit 'disturbing the peace' charge, but they always let me out after a day or two. There aren't any judges or trials, like the old days."
"So, that's what justice has come to these days?" Nora asked, disturbed. "A few days in jail to appease a corrupt fucknugget, or summary execution in the street?" She gestured to the bloodstained ground a little ways off, where the paranoid nut who'd tried to off his brother was gunned down. (Piper was a little surprised, since sometimes a dead body would go several days laying in the dirt of Diamond City before the smell got to be too much and someone dragged it out of town).
"Pretty much," Piper said, resigned. "It bothers me too, but there's only so much injustice in the world that I have the energy to try and fight, you know?"
"Oh, I get it, trust me," Nora said. They ate silently for a few minutes. "You know, I was a lawyer. Had a degree and everything." She shook her head. "Didn't fucking see it when I went back to my house after waking up — I figure some fucking asshole burned it for warmth or wiped his ass with it, God knows how long ago." She sighed. "I was a public defender, and there are some stories I could tell you from my time in front of the bench that would make you fall on your knees and thank God the old world was smashed to pieces. The system was fucked in a lot of ways, but…" She looked over at the bloodstain herself and grimaced. "I can't say that 'no system' is working out any better. I fought as hard as I could for those people back then. Who fought for that guy?" She wished she hadn't been so shocked by the suddenness of the encounter. Could she have saved his life if she'd intervened? Not wanting to be burdened by the what if, she turned to Piper and pivoted the subject. "Hey, what if I did a legal column for your paper? Talk up the merits of a judicial system and all that?"
Piper looked very intrigued. "I think I'd love that, Nora. Hey, do you have time to bang out a column before we leave?"
XXX
Excerpt from "I am the Law!" news column, by Nora Jones
Residents of Diamond City, what right does the security force that protects our town have to gun a man down in cold blood? I observed it happen earlier today along with many of you, and did security try to deescalate the situation? Not even once, friends, not even once. Will that officer face any repercussions for doing so? Will the sun rise in the west tomorrow morning?
Diamond City NEEDS a proper justice system. Do any of you think it's fair to be shot dead without any recourse? Imagine, if you will, your fate being decided by a man of law, backed up by a jury of your peers, instead of any one of a dozen hotheads whose only concept of justice is shooting anything they personally feel is a threat.
Don't get me wrong, these men (and does Diamond City Security even have any female officers?) do a fine job defending Diamond City from outside aggressors, but their 'Every nail gets a hammer' approach breaks down when they're dealing with, not a charge of crazed raiders, but a scared, confused man who just needed some reassurance that his brother had no plans on snapping and killing us all. Indeed, we all witnessed that it was most assuredly not his brother from which he needed to fear being summarily murdered.
The bombs fell generations ago. We're long past due to move past this frontier barbarism.
XXXXXXXXXX
It really is wild that you can loot that guy's dead brother right in front of him and he doesn't even blink an eye. It does make sense that the legal system is in the shitter, since we know that the Institute's been fucking shit up for surface people for decades, but Nora doesn't really know any of that (yet).
Would Piper really trust anyone besides Nick in Diamond City to take care of Nat if she died? I highly doubt it. Were any other residents clamoring to Mayor McDonut to open the gate and let Piper back in? If none of them cared enough about Piper to do that, she wouldn't trust them with Nat. She's known Nora what, a week? And already trusts her with her little sister's care.
(Intriguing AU idea free for adoption: Piper dies and Nat has to make it on her own).
Nora being a lawyer is interesting stuff that (here we go again) Bethesda just didn't bother doing anything with. Fortunately I'm not Bethesda, so I will be doing stuff with it here and there, hahaha.
Oh yeah, apologies for going a few weeks without an update. I let myself slack off during the holidays, and IRL distractions and obligations kept popping up until I finally made myself sit down and get another chapter ready for publication. Hope I can get back to the once-ish a week 'schedule' I had before!