(no subject)
It's been awhile but I wrote something. Call it in celebration of the end of a semester.
Title: Yet We Will Make Him Run
Pairing: slight Charon/FLW if you read into it
Rating: PG13 only for language
It's rather long. And I'm pretty rusty when it comes to writing.
Yet We Will Make Him Run
The bitch who bought my contract was like something I'd never seen before. That she'd come straight from a vault was little surprise - her skin was the color of skimmed Brahmin milk, like she'd never seen the light of the sun, and her eyes were that kind of wide, blank green where you know she wasn't old enough to be out on her own. Against the skin, her lips were bright. All in all, she was some kind of pristine porcelain doll that was going to break with the slightest handling.
I'd been sitting and molding in Ahzrukhal's hands for far too long to go straight out on the wastes with someone as helpless as she was. It was an absolute wonder that she'd actually made it that far into the ruins without ending up as a decoration in a raider's camp - or worse, a plaything for the same.
One thing I was thankful for was that I could trail behind her most of the time or lead, never looking into her unnatural eyes. Everyone has the look of the wastes in their eyes. The old, the young, all the same gaze that holds the knowledge of the harsh world. But hers; the kind of innocence you don't even see in children, and when she looked at me it gave me the sense she was seeing something I didn't want her to, but I didn't know what.
She was willowy and frail; the sniper rifle she had slung over her shoulder looked altogether too big for her, and her delicate, slender fingers that didn't look quite right around a gun. If she'd asked I would have told her to settle down in a town and never leave. That way she'd have a decent life and perhaps live to see twenty.
But the only thing she asked of me was to get her back out of D.C. with her life intact. That I couldn't promise, but I did what I could and with sheer blind luck on our side she was back in Megaton by the next sunfall.
I knew I was going to hate every moment of employment with her. Partially because it was going to be one of the tougher charges to keep alive for very long, and partially because some people are content to use my skills in a firefight and leave me alone the rest of the time, and she wasn't one of them.
She bought me and herself something to eat at the outdoor diner, and in the heat of the sun had her nose buried in a copy of Dean's Electronics. She chewed on her thumbnail as she read. Her nails were clean, and she had teeth were whiter than I'd ever seen.
The woman that owned the place leaned back when she slid my food toward me, as if I were going to bite her. The pale little girl with delicate, unnaturally clean fingers, turned the page, not noticing. She'd talked to me half the way back -- whispering when she should have been silent -- about where she'd come from and how she came to be in Underworld. I was glad to be free from the noise, and yet as I was thinking this, she gasped.
“Oh,” she said, in a very small voice. Looking up at me like a child, she gave a weak smile. From her bag, she extracted a bottle of Rad-X, glanced at the label for a moment, then popped a pill in her mouth. Then the girl took a pair of pliers and wandered to the edge of the pool of water around the bomb in the center of town. She took her boots and socks off, then rolled her pant legs up over her knees, as if she were going for an innocent dip. As she waded into the water, people started to stop and stare, and the half-whacked man that had been standing in the water shouting to passers-by stopped talking.
When she opened a hatch on the bomb, I near leapt from my seat.
“What are you doing?” My boots sunk into the damp dirt by the pool, slipping a just little.
“I think I know what to do,” she said, then put the pliers between her teeth so she could pick through the wires with both hands. I really didn't like the word think. After a moment that was long for more ways than one, she had one single wire between her small fingers.
She glanced back at me, unsure, and I gave her a look that said If you kill me, I'll kill you. She turned back to the bomb and clipped it. When nothing happened, her shoulders lowered with a loud exhalation and she turned back again, this time a smile stretching her dry lips. “That was it,” she said, her voice hoarse. “That was the right wire.”
She had her own house by sundown.
The shelves in the house were bare, the fridge empty, the rooms vacant. She had some lockers, a bed, and a sofa, but the most important part was that she had a roof. To me, she had a free shelter. To her, she had a home. I could have laughed. Home. Homes decay. You leave them. You move about. Live where you can. At the most, you have a place to store your stuff for a time. Perhaps she should have known that better than anyone.
She gave me the bed. Said she's shorter so the sofa wouldn't be as uncomfortable as it would be for me.
I discovered where Gob had gone off to all those years ago when she decided to get a little drunk. Although I shouldn't have, on the way there I told her she wasn't old enough to be drinking. Because I said this, she kept looking at me every time she ordered another, even when she seemed like she needed to stop.
Her eyes were still that kind of blank innocence. Still seeing something within me. Still searching. Even through the haze of booze, she was looking for something. Gob looked at me as he wiped up the bar, but neither of us said anything to each other.
She didn't leave her room the next morning. When I got up, I could hear her rolling around through the door. She wasn't sleeping and she wasn't getting up. She was moving something that sounded like a bucket.
After the sun had rose, then set again, and stayed that way for a while, I took it upon myself to go to bed again.
The next morning, she was the very same porcelain doll as the first day. Her fingernails were still clean, her teeth white, her hair combed and neat. Her eyes were blank. She asked me to take her to Rivet City.
Outside the gates, a man was nestled into the rocks. “Please,” he rasped when we walked by. “Please. Clean water.”
For a long moment, she paused, fingers opening and closing a few times. Then, she swung her pack off her shoulder and pulled out a bottle of water that her robot had filled. She handed it to the man then brushed the condensation on her hand off on her jacket. “Keep yourself alive a little longer,” she told him.
We walked for some time before either of us spoke.
“We could have used that water,” I said, not in an accusatory way, simply a reminder.
“He's dying,” she said, quietly.
Though I'm not one to talk back, I figured she'd let me get away with comments every now and then. “He's a beggar,” I told her. “The world is hard and you'll be better off worrying about your own survival.”
She glanced sideways at me, pursing her lips, perhaps in thought. And then she opened up that pretty little mouth and said, “Yeah, this world is a shithole, but that doesn't mean I have to make it worse.” Once she closed her mouth, it went right back to that small, innocent looking purse, as if she hadn't said anything at all, but the air hung heavier and it was just that little bit harder to turn my back.
The next time we were back in her house, we'd known each other nearly a month. I kept waiting for her eyes to get covered in the dirt and grime of this world, but they were still searching; still empty. When most people look at me, they see my skin, my armor, my gun; and I'm fine with that. She looks at me and doesn't see that, but something else, and yet still she's searching deeper.
She wasn't getting it. No matter how many times we got shot at, or people we killed, things in her head weren't lining up. If she wasn't dying inside yet, she must have been too stupid to understand.
From her pack and mine, she extracted things she had collected, stocking shelves with trinkets and stowing food in the fridge. After that, she gazed around her house, hands on her hips, and frowned.
“Empty,” she said. “Not cozy enough.”
From the Supply she and I brought furniture in after lunch. She bought me a pillow and a blanket that didn't have holes in it. For herself, the set in the second best condition.
For that day, at least, she was satisfied.
“A few days for rest,” she said. “Then off again.”
“If we must.” I regretted saying it at once because she turned back and stared at me.
“There's much work to do.” I didn't know exactly what she meant so I said nothing. “Are there no heroes in this world?” she asked.
“There are bastards and there are false hopes,” I replied. “That's all.”
“Have a little heart,” she said, smiling in an impish little way.
“I do,” I said. “It's the sack of meat that makes a thumping sound right here.” I poked myself in the chest with two fingers.
At that, the smile fell away from her face and she turned away, grabbing a rag and muttering that she was heading off to the bathroom to wash up. When the door shut behind her, I sat in the new chair by the coffee table, and took a look around the room. The shelves that had been empty when she moved in were filled with junk and old books.
I hadn't noticed it before, but there was a copy of Paradise Lost on the table, all beat to hell but readable. There was a bookmark in the pages and it opened to an underlined phrase; “The mind is its own place, and in it self can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” I set it back down and went to the fridge for a bottle of water. For the moment, I wasn't interested in thinking about anything.
“I'd never seen the sun before,” she'd said to Gob while slumped over the counter, not drunk, not even drinking. “It was... indescribable. I wouldn't know how to describe what it feels to see everything having never known it. It was impossible to imagine what the sun would look like, or the sky, the ruins of the world. It was so big, so open - so real.” She raised her head. “In the vault, it's just a handful of people and small, but stepping out here into a vast, open waste, it felt as if this place was looking at me. I had never felt that before. It was nature staring me down, standing higher, asking if I could conceive of it and survive here.” She scratched the bridge of her nose. “I fell to my knees when I found this world, not fully understanding why.” She squeezed her eyes shut as if recalling the impact. “Every day I understand better.”
“Why?” Gob asked, breathlessly. Too breathlessly.
She shrugged. “I guess there was a sense of all that I would do here; how this was the place where my life was. All the blood and tears. And the thousand tiny joys.” Though I had my back to her, watching for trouble, for a long moment I closed my eyes.
We stayed in the house anywhere from an hour to a few weeks depending on what she got it in her head to do. She didn't know the wastes like I did, so often she'd decide to do crazy things that no one else had tried, or had but died trying. Sheer blind luck. She was still alive.
We ate dinner silently, and the whole time she was staring off into the corner. Far be it from me to ask what she thinks in that little head of hers, I said nothing. After a long time, she said, “Charon, what do you think of clearing out Evergreen Mills?”
I almost laughed. She didn't.
“My true opinion?” I asked, and when she nodded, continued, “It's a terrible idea. You couldn't do it.”
She didn't truly react, only laid her fork down gently and clasped her hands together, elbows resting on the table. “There's a shitload of things I can't do, Charon,” she said, slowly, thoughtfully. “And in them, I am not interested. Tell me about what I can do.”
I said nothing.
“Sure, I probably won't make a difference,” she said, and I was glad she at least understood that. “But if I don't try, I definitely won't.”
After a time when we both realized we had nothing more to say to one another, she excused herself and went to her room.
Not three days later, she lay on her belly in the dirt, a deep canyon laid out before her. She inched along the ground, placed an eye to the sight on her rifle, made her minute adjustments and pressed her dry, cracked lips to the charm that hung around her neck.
I had ten pounds of explosives in the pack slung over my back.
Raiders scuttled like ants in the underbelly; sunken into the earth and hidden from the world. The only thing keeping a Behemoth in its pen was the electricity running though the fence. When she pulled the trigger, the shot echoed throughout the gulf and the generator went up in fire and sparks. If any of them had an inkling that the noise came from a rifle and wasn't just the sound of a haggard piece of ill-maintained equipment malfunctioning, they were more preoccupied by the mutant to do anything about it.
Amongst all the gunfire, no once noticed three extra shots, or that three of the corpses had holes in their heads. What the ones underground noticed was when the explosions started.
In the Arlington Library, we sat; she, reading intently with the most serious of expressions painted on, me, bored out of my skull, shotgun resting across my lap. I'd already stripped down her rifle and replaced parts that were wearing. My shotgun was as good as it was going to get. There was nothing left to fix up. Nothing to kill.
She must have forgotten about me for it was over an hour before she looked up at me again.
“You're free to go where you want, Charon,” she said. “Explore, scavenge, go outside. You don't need to be near me at all times.” How I wished.
“I can wait.”
“I'll be here for some time,” she said. “Rest up. Anything you want.” She looked up at the terminal before her, her pale face tinted green with its glow. After a moment she began typing away again, glancing down at the book and up at the screen over and over, copying the contents into the database.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked in a low voice.
She looked startled, even though she'd just spoken to me a moment before. “Why?” Her voice was slow and she pushed her chair out, turning to face me while collecting herself. “So we don't lose it,” she said after a time. “All these books contain everything we knew before the war. Practical things. Esoteric things. The whole of human history and thought. The Brotherhood will keep it safe, safer than the frail pages it's on now.”
“Does it matter?” I asked. “You could get a bullet in the head tomorrow and it's not going to matter how much you know about history; you'll die just the same.”
She turned back to the screen with a sigh, obviously more than disappointed with my response. Quietly, so quiet that I almost didn't hear, she said, “How are we anything more than animals if we forsake our ability to think about ourselves?”
I felt something like anger in that she responded to me like that, but, strangely, also something like shame.
“I am not an animal,” I said, although she wasn't exactly calling me one.
“Well, that's your choice, isn't it?” she snapped, not looking away from the screen, and I took it to mean the conversation was over.
While she was sleeping, I picked up Paradise Lost again. The bookmark was quite a few pages deeper. Where she'd apparently left off was another penciled in line under, “Who overcomes, by force, hath overcome but half his foe.”
“Dead is dead,” I said to myself or the book, quietly, setting it back down, but for some reason I didn't quite believe myself.
I took the sofa when we stayed in her house after we had found her father. The two of them shared the bed. I could hear their murmuring voices through the sheet metal wall for half the night though I couldn't hear what they
were saying. Didn't care to hear what they were saying.
She had his eyes and his gait. His strong face and his cleanliness. The two of them; no dirt under their fingernails, white teeth, searching eyes. There was hardly a bit of her that didn't come from him.
He was on a mission. Though he took the time to sleep this one night, even staying too long with his daughter was a distraction. Although she wanted to stay for a few days, he insisted upon leaving the next morning. Dejectedly, she asked me to get my things ready.
“You kill Ahzrukhal for being an evil bastard, but mock me for showing compassion,” she mumbled, but since she didn't ask for an explanation, I didn't offer one.
“You think it doesn't matter if you go out of your way to help people,” she continued. “You don't get it.”
I don't get it. She's the one who's seen this world for months on end and hasn't died. Hasn't died on the inside. Hasn't lost that blank innocence in her eyes. Even when they darken in anger there's still that emptiness that's searching. She just won't accept that they're going to fill with despair, disappointment, loss. They're searching but missing it. Not getting it.
“The world's a shithole,” I said finally.
She sighed. “I wouldn't, couldn't, feel sorry for myself or curse what I have, because then it only gets worse and I fear I'll wish for what I once rejected.” She breathed deeply.
The last thing she had underlined, I had noted the night before, was “Long is the way, and hard, that out of Hell leads up to Light.”
“If I don't do anything, who will?” she asked, harshly, her brow tightened, her hands gripping the edge of the table. I felt something like panic; the overwhelming urge to answer, but there were no words, no answers.
She gave me more than enough time to respond, but I said nothing, so she got up and went to bed. There was an acute sense of loss lingering in her absence.
Project Purity. It was her father's dream, not hers, but that didn't stop her from returning to him not two weeks later, setting aside all the plans she had tried to walk away to.
Although I truly should not have said a word, I told her, “You don't have to go, you know.”
“I do,” she said. “I have a duty to him. And it is the right thing to do.”
“You make a decent living scavenging.” But she wasn't a scavenger. We scavenged; she could be one, easy. But she was something else, because she wanted to be more than that. Because she did far more than that.
She slipped on a long-sleeved shirt over her tanktop. “This isn't about money.”
“He said you don't have to help.”
“This isn't solely about him. This is about my mother, every single person in this world.” She turned back to me. “This is more important than anything else I could do with my time.”
While she was upstairs gathering more of her things, I flipped through Paradise Lost. “Now conscience wakes despair, that slumber’d,-wakes the bitter memory, of what he was, what is, and what must be, worse.”
Though I barely knew her and had not been with her for very much of her life, I watched her father die alongside her. The other things - her mother's death, her childhood, the day she left the vault - they were like breezes; distant, indistinct, impersonal. Yet the horror and tears on her face as she pounded on the glass was very real. I couldn't see the things she had done before in nearly the same way as she could. I could know every fact but I could never recall what it was like to be there.
His collapse and last words were very real - as real as watching a raider dying in a pool of his and someone else's blood. For the very first time, I saw her life before my eyes. Not the day to day, survival routine. The story; one apex of the major things you call up when recounting your life and the things that make you. For the first time, I was watching her be made.
You'd think that watching your father die would be that last breaking point. You would think that if watching a hundred strangers die in violence, or see a slave's head explode, or being shot in the shoulder didn't tear you up inside, then perhaps seeing the only person you had left in your life be killed would finally do it.
I was beginning to wonder if she was capable of falling. Her eyes still searched and still burrowed into me. Though she had thought she'd hidden her crying from me, I had heard her all night. But in the morning, her eyes were not darkened with despair. They latched onto me and burrowed deeper, looking for something and getting damn close.
The walk from the Citadel was slow, and though I thought she'd stop at nightfall, she kept walking. It was morning when we got to Megaton, and we spent only a few hours resting. When I went to wake her, she was already dressed and repairing her rifle. We left in the afternoon, and for a moment, she looked back in at her house as if memorizing it, before shutting the door behind herself.
We walked longer than we'd ever before, and when we found Little Lamplight, she only rested so that she'd have the strength for the vault that lay before us.
I had never seen her kill the way she did. Little caution, much anger. But her eyes were still blank and searching.
And I had spent so much time protecting her body from harm, but I never saw that concussion charge coming. Just before I blacked out, the last thought, which should have been that I hadn't protected her, was that we weren't getting back to the Citadel with the G.E.C.K.
“There are many more important things than living,” she said urgently, rushing to strap her things back on once they'd freed us. There were still Enclave everywhere. “That which we have and are is mortal. That which we experience is eternal. Our love, our friendships, our causes, virtues, deeds. So long as there is one person who is still human, we live.” There were tears in her eyes but she wiped them away, and looked up at me. For the first time ever, she placed a hand on the side of my face.
“I've done enough good in my life that I should be satisfied in death, but I'm not,” she whispered. “I've saved many lives, but you've never stopped believing I was wasting my time.”
I could not fathom why she chose this moment to say this to me. Though I hated her gaze, I couldn't look away. It struck me then that I could never recall a time when she had shrunk away from helping someone, nor a time she had complained or expected something out of it. What I did recall was telling her there are only bastards and false hopes in this world.
For the first time, she looked like a woman, not a girl.
She insisted that we keep walking, couldn't stop. Had to get there in time, but her feet were dragging and she tripped over rocks that she wasn't noticing. She hadn't slept for a full day and night. I lifted her up in my arms when she couldn't keep her rifle up anymore and carried her the last mile back to Megaton.
You can see it coming a mile away - I'm not so dumb that I don't know poetic justice.
Her mother lived and died for it. Her father lived and died for it. If she doesn't finish it, no one will. But what would be the cost? Briefly, I wondered if the only time I'd ever see her eyes glaze over with the grime of the wasteland was in her death. Briefly, I hoped that was the case.
In hindsight its a tragic thing; something you wish someone had stopped. Knowing it's going to happen you don't know if you have the heart to rob her of the thing that will immortalize her, or if you just can't live without her.
I don't get a whole lot of power, but when I do, it can be great. Because she doesn't see it coming and I have the power to choose what she is - give her the beatifying moment or pull her back into her humanity.
There's a whole sheet of metal between the rooms, but for the thoughts running through my head, she might have been sitting right next to me. After a while as sleep came on, it became hard to tell if she was there or not.
I had never seen her take any drugs before, but she had her
lips wrapped around a cannister of Jet so that she could keep herself going. I told her to rest another day, but she wouldn't. I wanted to tell her not to screw around with Jet but I didn't. Had it been a week earlier, I wouldn't have even thought it.
We ran into a hold out of raiders on the way there. She wasn't going to let anyone get between her and where she was going, and I wasn't going to let anyone lay a finger on her. We stopped only to loot what little they had.
Though she had been rushing to get to the Citadel, she stopped and stared at the corpses and the building that had been a raider den. After a time, she turned and looked at me but didn't say anything. She plunged her eyes into me and wrapped around something that held me there. They were searching for something. Though I had spent so much time hating her, I truly wanted to help her find what she'd been looking for.
For a time, it seemed like she was seeing something underneath what was in front of us. There was a dilapidated, rusted metal building, but she was seeing something beyond that. Perhaps the past, or the future, or both. I wanted to say something meaningful, but felt it would sound dumb.
“I don't think you're wasting your time,” I said, finally, pulling her from her reverie. I didn't elaborate, but she smiled anyway. Her pupils dilated, filling up with something; striking gold, finally latching on somewhere.
Somewhere amongst the rubble, there was a pile of half-spent cans of old spraypaint. She picked up a can and shook it. After tying a rag over her nose and mouth, she climbed the structure and painted over the entrance. Her handwriting was steady; not loopish or illegible. I held her rifle as she worked. It was still warm from her hands.
When she was done, she climbed down and looked up at her handywork. In bright blue paint and clear as day, shone the words, “Thus, though we cannot make our sun stand still, yet we will make him run.”
The last quote is from a great poem called 'To His Coy Mistress' by Andrew Marvell; though a serious point, also very funny. I have a Desmond story in the works. This one just decided it wanted to be finished first.
Title: Yet We Will Make Him Run
Pairing: slight Charon/FLW if you read into it
Rating: PG13 only for language
It's rather long. And I'm pretty rusty when it comes to writing.
Yet We Will Make Him Run
The bitch who bought my contract was like something I'd never seen before. That she'd come straight from a vault was little surprise - her skin was the color of skimmed Brahmin milk, like she'd never seen the light of the sun, and her eyes were that kind of wide, blank green where you know she wasn't old enough to be out on her own. Against the skin, her lips were bright. All in all, she was some kind of pristine porcelain doll that was going to break with the slightest handling.
I'd been sitting and molding in Ahzrukhal's hands for far too long to go straight out on the wastes with someone as helpless as she was. It was an absolute wonder that she'd actually made it that far into the ruins without ending up as a decoration in a raider's camp - or worse, a plaything for the same.
One thing I was thankful for was that I could trail behind her most of the time or lead, never looking into her unnatural eyes. Everyone has the look of the wastes in their eyes. The old, the young, all the same gaze that holds the knowledge of the harsh world. But hers; the kind of innocence you don't even see in children, and when she looked at me it gave me the sense she was seeing something I didn't want her to, but I didn't know what.
She was willowy and frail; the sniper rifle she had slung over her shoulder looked altogether too big for her, and her delicate, slender fingers that didn't look quite right around a gun. If she'd asked I would have told her to settle down in a town and never leave. That way she'd have a decent life and perhaps live to see twenty.
But the only thing she asked of me was to get her back out of D.C. with her life intact. That I couldn't promise, but I did what I could and with sheer blind luck on our side she was back in Megaton by the next sunfall.
I knew I was going to hate every moment of employment with her. Partially because it was going to be one of the tougher charges to keep alive for very long, and partially because some people are content to use my skills in a firefight and leave me alone the rest of the time, and she wasn't one of them.
She bought me and herself something to eat at the outdoor diner, and in the heat of the sun had her nose buried in a copy of Dean's Electronics. She chewed on her thumbnail as she read. Her nails were clean, and she had teeth were whiter than I'd ever seen.
The woman that owned the place leaned back when she slid my food toward me, as if I were going to bite her. The pale little girl with delicate, unnaturally clean fingers, turned the page, not noticing. She'd talked to me half the way back -- whispering when she should have been silent -- about where she'd come from and how she came to be in Underworld. I was glad to be free from the noise, and yet as I was thinking this, she gasped.
“Oh,” she said, in a very small voice. Looking up at me like a child, she gave a weak smile. From her bag, she extracted a bottle of Rad-X, glanced at the label for a moment, then popped a pill in her mouth. Then the girl took a pair of pliers and wandered to the edge of the pool of water around the bomb in the center of town. She took her boots and socks off, then rolled her pant legs up over her knees, as if she were going for an innocent dip. As she waded into the water, people started to stop and stare, and the half-whacked man that had been standing in the water shouting to passers-by stopped talking.
When she opened a hatch on the bomb, I near leapt from my seat.
“What are you doing?” My boots sunk into the damp dirt by the pool, slipping a just little.
“I think I know what to do,” she said, then put the pliers between her teeth so she could pick through the wires with both hands. I really didn't like the word think. After a moment that was long for more ways than one, she had one single wire between her small fingers.
She glanced back at me, unsure, and I gave her a look that said If you kill me, I'll kill you. She turned back to the bomb and clipped it. When nothing happened, her shoulders lowered with a loud exhalation and she turned back again, this time a smile stretching her dry lips. “That was it,” she said, her voice hoarse. “That was the right wire.”
She had her own house by sundown.
The shelves in the house were bare, the fridge empty, the rooms vacant. She had some lockers, a bed, and a sofa, but the most important part was that she had a roof. To me, she had a free shelter. To her, she had a home. I could have laughed. Home. Homes decay. You leave them. You move about. Live where you can. At the most, you have a place to store your stuff for a time. Perhaps she should have known that better than anyone.
She gave me the bed. Said she's shorter so the sofa wouldn't be as uncomfortable as it would be for me.
I discovered where Gob had gone off to all those years ago when she decided to get a little drunk. Although I shouldn't have, on the way there I told her she wasn't old enough to be drinking. Because I said this, she kept looking at me every time she ordered another, even when she seemed like she needed to stop.
Her eyes were still that kind of blank innocence. Still seeing something within me. Still searching. Even through the haze of booze, she was looking for something. Gob looked at me as he wiped up the bar, but neither of us said anything to each other.
She didn't leave her room the next morning. When I got up, I could hear her rolling around through the door. She wasn't sleeping and she wasn't getting up. She was moving something that sounded like a bucket.
After the sun had rose, then set again, and stayed that way for a while, I took it upon myself to go to bed again.
The next morning, she was the very same porcelain doll as the first day. Her fingernails were still clean, her teeth white, her hair combed and neat. Her eyes were blank. She asked me to take her to Rivet City.
Outside the gates, a man was nestled into the rocks. “Please,” he rasped when we walked by. “Please. Clean water.”
For a long moment, she paused, fingers opening and closing a few times. Then, she swung her pack off her shoulder and pulled out a bottle of water that her robot had filled. She handed it to the man then brushed the condensation on her hand off on her jacket. “Keep yourself alive a little longer,” she told him.
We walked for some time before either of us spoke.
“We could have used that water,” I said, not in an accusatory way, simply a reminder.
“He's dying,” she said, quietly.
Though I'm not one to talk back, I figured she'd let me get away with comments every now and then. “He's a beggar,” I told her. “The world is hard and you'll be better off worrying about your own survival.”
She glanced sideways at me, pursing her lips, perhaps in thought. And then she opened up that pretty little mouth and said, “Yeah, this world is a shithole, but that doesn't mean I have to make it worse.” Once she closed her mouth, it went right back to that small, innocent looking purse, as if she hadn't said anything at all, but the air hung heavier and it was just that little bit harder to turn my back.
The next time we were back in her house, we'd known each other nearly a month. I kept waiting for her eyes to get covered in the dirt and grime of this world, but they were still searching; still empty. When most people look at me, they see my skin, my armor, my gun; and I'm fine with that. She looks at me and doesn't see that, but something else, and yet still she's searching deeper.
She wasn't getting it. No matter how many times we got shot at, or people we killed, things in her head weren't lining up. If she wasn't dying inside yet, she must have been too stupid to understand.
From her pack and mine, she extracted things she had collected, stocking shelves with trinkets and stowing food in the fridge. After that, she gazed around her house, hands on her hips, and frowned.
“Empty,” she said. “Not cozy enough.”
From the Supply she and I brought furniture in after lunch. She bought me a pillow and a blanket that didn't have holes in it. For herself, the set in the second best condition.
For that day, at least, she was satisfied.
“A few days for rest,” she said. “Then off again.”
“If we must.” I regretted saying it at once because she turned back and stared at me.
“There's much work to do.” I didn't know exactly what she meant so I said nothing. “Are there no heroes in this world?” she asked.
“There are bastards and there are false hopes,” I replied. “That's all.”
“Have a little heart,” she said, smiling in an impish little way.
“I do,” I said. “It's the sack of meat that makes a thumping sound right here.” I poked myself in the chest with two fingers.
At that, the smile fell away from her face and she turned away, grabbing a rag and muttering that she was heading off to the bathroom to wash up. When the door shut behind her, I sat in the new chair by the coffee table, and took a look around the room. The shelves that had been empty when she moved in were filled with junk and old books.
I hadn't noticed it before, but there was a copy of Paradise Lost on the table, all beat to hell but readable. There was a bookmark in the pages and it opened to an underlined phrase; “The mind is its own place, and in it self can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” I set it back down and went to the fridge for a bottle of water. For the moment, I wasn't interested in thinking about anything.
“I'd never seen the sun before,” she'd said to Gob while slumped over the counter, not drunk, not even drinking. “It was... indescribable. I wouldn't know how to describe what it feels to see everything having never known it. It was impossible to imagine what the sun would look like, or the sky, the ruins of the world. It was so big, so open - so real.” She raised her head. “In the vault, it's just a handful of people and small, but stepping out here into a vast, open waste, it felt as if this place was looking at me. I had never felt that before. It was nature staring me down, standing higher, asking if I could conceive of it and survive here.” She scratched the bridge of her nose. “I fell to my knees when I found this world, not fully understanding why.” She squeezed her eyes shut as if recalling the impact. “Every day I understand better.”
“Why?” Gob asked, breathlessly. Too breathlessly.
She shrugged. “I guess there was a sense of all that I would do here; how this was the place where my life was. All the blood and tears. And the thousand tiny joys.” Though I had my back to her, watching for trouble, for a long moment I closed my eyes.
We stayed in the house anywhere from an hour to a few weeks depending on what she got it in her head to do. She didn't know the wastes like I did, so often she'd decide to do crazy things that no one else had tried, or had but died trying. Sheer blind luck. She was still alive.
We ate dinner silently, and the whole time she was staring off into the corner. Far be it from me to ask what she thinks in that little head of hers, I said nothing. After a long time, she said, “Charon, what do you think of clearing out Evergreen Mills?”
I almost laughed. She didn't.
“My true opinion?” I asked, and when she nodded, continued, “It's a terrible idea. You couldn't do it.”
She didn't truly react, only laid her fork down gently and clasped her hands together, elbows resting on the table. “There's a shitload of things I can't do, Charon,” she said, slowly, thoughtfully. “And in them, I am not interested. Tell me about what I can do.”
I said nothing.
“Sure, I probably won't make a difference,” she said, and I was glad she at least understood that. “But if I don't try, I definitely won't.”
After a time when we both realized we had nothing more to say to one another, she excused herself and went to her room.
Not three days later, she lay on her belly in the dirt, a deep canyon laid out before her. She inched along the ground, placed an eye to the sight on her rifle, made her minute adjustments and pressed her dry, cracked lips to the charm that hung around her neck.
I had ten pounds of explosives in the pack slung over my back.
Raiders scuttled like ants in the underbelly; sunken into the earth and hidden from the world. The only thing keeping a Behemoth in its pen was the electricity running though the fence. When she pulled the trigger, the shot echoed throughout the gulf and the generator went up in fire and sparks. If any of them had an inkling that the noise came from a rifle and wasn't just the sound of a haggard piece of ill-maintained equipment malfunctioning, they were more preoccupied by the mutant to do anything about it.
Amongst all the gunfire, no once noticed three extra shots, or that three of the corpses had holes in their heads. What the ones underground noticed was when the explosions started.
In the Arlington Library, we sat; she, reading intently with the most serious of expressions painted on, me, bored out of my skull, shotgun resting across my lap. I'd already stripped down her rifle and replaced parts that were wearing. My shotgun was as good as it was going to get. There was nothing left to fix up. Nothing to kill.
She must have forgotten about me for it was over an hour before she looked up at me again.
“You're free to go where you want, Charon,” she said. “Explore, scavenge, go outside. You don't need to be near me at all times.” How I wished.
“I can wait.”
“I'll be here for some time,” she said. “Rest up. Anything you want.” She looked up at the terminal before her, her pale face tinted green with its glow. After a moment she began typing away again, glancing down at the book and up at the screen over and over, copying the contents into the database.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked in a low voice.
She looked startled, even though she'd just spoken to me a moment before. “Why?” Her voice was slow and she pushed her chair out, turning to face me while collecting herself. “So we don't lose it,” she said after a time. “All these books contain everything we knew before the war. Practical things. Esoteric things. The whole of human history and thought. The Brotherhood will keep it safe, safer than the frail pages it's on now.”
“Does it matter?” I asked. “You could get a bullet in the head tomorrow and it's not going to matter how much you know about history; you'll die just the same.”
She turned back to the screen with a sigh, obviously more than disappointed with my response. Quietly, so quiet that I almost didn't hear, she said, “How are we anything more than animals if we forsake our ability to think about ourselves?”
I felt something like anger in that she responded to me like that, but, strangely, also something like shame.
“I am not an animal,” I said, although she wasn't exactly calling me one.
“Well, that's your choice, isn't it?” she snapped, not looking away from the screen, and I took it to mean the conversation was over.
While she was sleeping, I picked up Paradise Lost again. The bookmark was quite a few pages deeper. Where she'd apparently left off was another penciled in line under, “Who overcomes, by force, hath overcome but half his foe.”
“Dead is dead,” I said to myself or the book, quietly, setting it back down, but for some reason I didn't quite believe myself.
I took the sofa when we stayed in her house after we had found her father. The two of them shared the bed. I could hear their murmuring voices through the sheet metal wall for half the night though I couldn't hear what they
were saying. Didn't care to hear what they were saying.
She had his eyes and his gait. His strong face and his cleanliness. The two of them; no dirt under their fingernails, white teeth, searching eyes. There was hardly a bit of her that didn't come from him.
He was on a mission. Though he took the time to sleep this one night, even staying too long with his daughter was a distraction. Although she wanted to stay for a few days, he insisted upon leaving the next morning. Dejectedly, she asked me to get my things ready.
“You kill Ahzrukhal for being an evil bastard, but mock me for showing compassion,” she mumbled, but since she didn't ask for an explanation, I didn't offer one.
“You think it doesn't matter if you go out of your way to help people,” she continued. “You don't get it.”
I don't get it. She's the one who's seen this world for months on end and hasn't died. Hasn't died on the inside. Hasn't lost that blank innocence in her eyes. Even when they darken in anger there's still that emptiness that's searching. She just won't accept that they're going to fill with despair, disappointment, loss. They're searching but missing it. Not getting it.
“The world's a shithole,” I said finally.
She sighed. “I wouldn't, couldn't, feel sorry for myself or curse what I have, because then it only gets worse and I fear I'll wish for what I once rejected.” She breathed deeply.
The last thing she had underlined, I had noted the night before, was “Long is the way, and hard, that out of Hell leads up to Light.”
“If I don't do anything, who will?” she asked, harshly, her brow tightened, her hands gripping the edge of the table. I felt something like panic; the overwhelming urge to answer, but there were no words, no answers.
She gave me more than enough time to respond, but I said nothing, so she got up and went to bed. There was an acute sense of loss lingering in her absence.
Project Purity. It was her father's dream, not hers, but that didn't stop her from returning to him not two weeks later, setting aside all the plans she had tried to walk away to.
Although I truly should not have said a word, I told her, “You don't have to go, you know.”
“I do,” she said. “I have a duty to him. And it is the right thing to do.”
“You make a decent living scavenging.” But she wasn't a scavenger. We scavenged; she could be one, easy. But she was something else, because she wanted to be more than that. Because she did far more than that.
She slipped on a long-sleeved shirt over her tanktop. “This isn't about money.”
“He said you don't have to help.”
“This isn't solely about him. This is about my mother, every single person in this world.” She turned back to me. “This is more important than anything else I could do with my time.”
While she was upstairs gathering more of her things, I flipped through Paradise Lost. “Now conscience wakes despair, that slumber’d,-wakes the bitter memory, of what he was, what is, and what must be, worse.”
Though I barely knew her and had not been with her for very much of her life, I watched her father die alongside her. The other things - her mother's death, her childhood, the day she left the vault - they were like breezes; distant, indistinct, impersonal. Yet the horror and tears on her face as she pounded on the glass was very real. I couldn't see the things she had done before in nearly the same way as she could. I could know every fact but I could never recall what it was like to be there.
His collapse and last words were very real - as real as watching a raider dying in a pool of his and someone else's blood. For the very first time, I saw her life before my eyes. Not the day to day, survival routine. The story; one apex of the major things you call up when recounting your life and the things that make you. For the first time, I was watching her be made.
You'd think that watching your father die would be that last breaking point. You would think that if watching a hundred strangers die in violence, or see a slave's head explode, or being shot in the shoulder didn't tear you up inside, then perhaps seeing the only person you had left in your life be killed would finally do it.
I was beginning to wonder if she was capable of falling. Her eyes still searched and still burrowed into me. Though she had thought she'd hidden her crying from me, I had heard her all night. But in the morning, her eyes were not darkened with despair. They latched onto me and burrowed deeper, looking for something and getting damn close.
The walk from the Citadel was slow, and though I thought she'd stop at nightfall, she kept walking. It was morning when we got to Megaton, and we spent only a few hours resting. When I went to wake her, she was already dressed and repairing her rifle. We left in the afternoon, and for a moment, she looked back in at her house as if memorizing it, before shutting the door behind herself.
We walked longer than we'd ever before, and when we found Little Lamplight, she only rested so that she'd have the strength for the vault that lay before us.
I had never seen her kill the way she did. Little caution, much anger. But her eyes were still blank and searching.
And I had spent so much time protecting her body from harm, but I never saw that concussion charge coming. Just before I blacked out, the last thought, which should have been that I hadn't protected her, was that we weren't getting back to the Citadel with the G.E.C.K.
“There are many more important things than living,” she said urgently, rushing to strap her things back on once they'd freed us. There were still Enclave everywhere. “That which we have and are is mortal. That which we experience is eternal. Our love, our friendships, our causes, virtues, deeds. So long as there is one person who is still human, we live.” There were tears in her eyes but she wiped them away, and looked up at me. For the first time ever, she placed a hand on the side of my face.
“I've done enough good in my life that I should be satisfied in death, but I'm not,” she whispered. “I've saved many lives, but you've never stopped believing I was wasting my time.”
I could not fathom why she chose this moment to say this to me. Though I hated her gaze, I couldn't look away. It struck me then that I could never recall a time when she had shrunk away from helping someone, nor a time she had complained or expected something out of it. What I did recall was telling her there are only bastards and false hopes in this world.
For the first time, she looked like a woman, not a girl.
She insisted that we keep walking, couldn't stop. Had to get there in time, but her feet were dragging and she tripped over rocks that she wasn't noticing. She hadn't slept for a full day and night. I lifted her up in my arms when she couldn't keep her rifle up anymore and carried her the last mile back to Megaton.
You can see it coming a mile away - I'm not so dumb that I don't know poetic justice.
Her mother lived and died for it. Her father lived and died for it. If she doesn't finish it, no one will. But what would be the cost? Briefly, I wondered if the only time I'd ever see her eyes glaze over with the grime of the wasteland was in her death. Briefly, I hoped that was the case.
In hindsight its a tragic thing; something you wish someone had stopped. Knowing it's going to happen you don't know if you have the heart to rob her of the thing that will immortalize her, or if you just can't live without her.
I don't get a whole lot of power, but when I do, it can be great. Because she doesn't see it coming and I have the power to choose what she is - give her the beatifying moment or pull her back into her humanity.
There's a whole sheet of metal between the rooms, but for the thoughts running through my head, she might have been sitting right next to me. After a while as sleep came on, it became hard to tell if she was there or not.
I had never seen her take any drugs before, but she had her
lips wrapped around a cannister of Jet so that she could keep herself going. I told her to rest another day, but she wouldn't. I wanted to tell her not to screw around with Jet but I didn't. Had it been a week earlier, I wouldn't have even thought it.
We ran into a hold out of raiders on the way there. She wasn't going to let anyone get between her and where she was going, and I wasn't going to let anyone lay a finger on her. We stopped only to loot what little they had.
Though she had been rushing to get to the Citadel, she stopped and stared at the corpses and the building that had been a raider den. After a time, she turned and looked at me but didn't say anything. She plunged her eyes into me and wrapped around something that held me there. They were searching for something. Though I had spent so much time hating her, I truly wanted to help her find what she'd been looking for.
For a time, it seemed like she was seeing something underneath what was in front of us. There was a dilapidated, rusted metal building, but she was seeing something beyond that. Perhaps the past, or the future, or both. I wanted to say something meaningful, but felt it would sound dumb.
“I don't think you're wasting your time,” I said, finally, pulling her from her reverie. I didn't elaborate, but she smiled anyway. Her pupils dilated, filling up with something; striking gold, finally latching on somewhere.
Somewhere amongst the rubble, there was a pile of half-spent cans of old spraypaint. She picked up a can and shook it. After tying a rag over her nose and mouth, she climbed the structure and painted over the entrance. Her handwriting was steady; not loopish or illegible. I held her rifle as she worked. It was still warm from her hands.
When she was done, she climbed down and looked up at her handywork. In bright blue paint and clear as day, shone the words, “Thus, though we cannot make our sun stand still, yet we will make him run.”
The last quote is from a great poem called 'To His Coy Mistress' by Andrew Marvell; though a serious point, also very funny. I have a Desmond story in the works. This one just decided it wanted to be finished first.