FIC: Flawed Assumptions
Title: Flawed Assumptions
Author: Cyprith
Pairing: Charon/LW
Rating: PG-for-now-but-with-bad-language
Summary: Charon is used to his employers taking him for granted, but somewhere along the line, he's become the very people he so hates.
None of his employers had ever given a damn about him. He was what he was and they took it for granted. All of them had assumed he would be there when they needed him, carrying stimpacks or ammo or just fucking eager to play living-shield. They never asked what he needed and those that knew didn’t care. Over the years he learned to scavenge for himself, quietly, without seeming to-picking through corpses in the heat of battles that weren’t his to fight.
The kid isn’t like that.
She doesn’t say much, which suits Charon fine. She doesn’t pry into his history or leave him straining at the tethers of his contract like a too-short leash. They communicate in grunts and nods and vague gestures reminiscent of the sign language he remembers seeing as a kid. Novels could be written in the silent, unspoken conversations that sprawl between them. She takes nothing for granted. Every bullet is precious, every cap hoarded close to the vest. She fights every raider side by side with that goddamned dog, tooth and nail and beat-up old rifle like she has nothing in the world to live for.
Like there isn’t anyone watching her back.
And at the end of the fight, when everything that even twitched in her direction is laying dead at her feet, she’ll strip them and sort the leavings into two painfully even piles in the dust. Charon accepts it like everything else, adding his half to what he’s managed to steal from the pockets of those dying men without a thought or twinge of fraying conscience. If giving him some sort of payment is what she desired, then it is his duty to obey.
If she has noticed his knapsack is heavier than hers, she doesn’t say.
She never says much of anything.
They’ve traveled together for months. Maybe a year. Time has stopped meaning all that much somewhere along the way. He understands her habits, anticipates her routines, but somehow fails to see she isn’t like every other goddamned scum of the earth bastard who’s ever laid hands on his contract. She is his employer, for good or ill, but there are scraps of himself Charon has managed to hoard over time. Loopholes in his contract. Blessed freedom.
By the time he realizes she is different, it is too late.
Sarah Lyons looks between them, delivering bad news with a pointed look that neither human will have to die if only Charon is a good boy and slips the switch inside. That look-the knowledge that if she were to phrase the order right, he’ll be feral by morning-infuriates him. He sets his jaw, fights against the tether of his contract, and waits for his employer to turn and ask.
But the order never comes. She turns to look at him, big brown eyes haunted and blank, and only hands him her pack.
“If somehow I make it out of there alive,” she says, their eyes meeting, her fingertips barely kissing at the tattered edges of his skin. “Shoot me.”
Charon watches as she turns and steps inside the chamber without so much as a backward glance and realizes suddenly he’s been waiting for an order his employer would sooner die than give.
She believes she’ll die alone, that his stimpacks and ammo are his own and that this fight-that every fight-is hers and hers alone. She’s given him what he needed without being asked, barely scraping by on what leavings she has left and he’d known.
He’d known and hadn’t cared.
The knowledge hits him like a sledgehammer in the gut and he stands there, sick and somehow numb, watching as she slams her fist into the numbers, choking in the swell of radiation. He wants to go to her. Wants to save her somehow. Wants to change everything, trade places, or hold her at least-anything to let her know she’s not alone when it’s so damn obvious she is and has been since the day her mother died.
He watches, feeling broken as she staggers towards the glass, despite what she’s said desperate to live. It’s ghoulfication she’s afraid of, he knows. But faced with that or death it’s suddenly the lesser evil and she’s swinging the rifle down from her back, bringing the butt with all her strength into the glass door that separates her from clean air…
And he’s been given orders.
Charon grits his teeth, radiation buffeting against his skin like sunlight, fighting against the contract as Lyons screams and launches from the room
Shoot me, she’d said. It was an order. The only order she’s ever given him.
He can’t do it. There’s a pain building in his head, every muscle in his body screaming, trying to force him into moving, into pulling the trigger-an order, his first and last order. But she’s moving towards him, blindly and he wants her with the same urgency his contract drives him to.
“Charon?” she croaks, weak and falling and he knows her vision’s failing. He knows somehow it’s not an order. She’s not asking him to come to her-only asking if he’s there. And she can’t see him, but he can see the look in her eyes and his employer knows she’s dying, fading away as alone as she’s always been. Charon knows she believes he’s left her, abandoned her in the face of danger and he’s been given orders but he cannot prove her right.
Charon holsters the gun he hadn’t realized he’d been holding, crosses the chasm between them, and lifts her in his arms. They’ll make it out of here, he tells her, silently.
He won’t let her die.