Chapter Text
Today we will focus on Strength.
In the wasteland, essential supplies will be scarce. When an item of value is found, keep it close, and away from bullies.
The flat, endless desert stretched for miles in every direction, their twin sets of footprints the only disturbances to be found in the wind-rippled sands. Sharp grains slashed hard against the leathers of his kit and Cooper tried his best not to wonder how it would feel against smooth human skin shielded only by a much thinner vault suit. He sneered at the thought instead. Emotions nearing anything human hadn’t plagued him in a long time until this spit polished, doe eyed vault girl had shown up to further fuck up his too-long life, wearing his own fucking colors of all things. And lord almighty how he hated them. Wanted to tear the skin tight suit from her perfect flesh and set it to flame the moment he got his hands on her; and that hate had instantly, indiscriminately bled over directly onto its wearer.
He remembered how easy the sell had been after that goddamned commercial. How fear-blinded Americans across the country had rushed to secure their 'radiation safety suits' that in reality amounted to expensive, useless dogshit, same as the dozens of other lies Vault Tec'd spoon fed the world. And he had just eaten that shit up right alongside.
She’d changed a bit though since he’d seen her last, little Lucy MacLean, since she’d left him sprawled on the ground at her mercy, deserving of none. But the pity in her eyes as she’d given him the meds anyway, as if those vials weren’t worth more than the liquid gold they resembled, was more confounding to him than the act itself. He had spent days in the desert trying to drive beneath her skin just how naive and downright stupid she could be. This topped it though. He thought it’d all been for naught.
Until she'd brained the ghoul that bitch Moldaver from whatever faction she headed now had called Rose. Rose MacLean. Lucy’s mother. Hank’s too-saccharine sweet of a wife that of course had ended up as a rotting, feral ghoul because that was just the nature of things now. A fitting name to boot, given that he hadn’t seen a single one flourish since fallout ate away at the earth. All that was once good would either fester, adapt, or die. Or some strange combination of the three, as it were. But Lucy had proven to him at that exact moment that she could at least be amenable to one.
And he’d wished for nothing more than for Hank to still be there to see it. To watch his sweet, innocent, wide-eyed daughter put an end to his own misgivings and have to bear their weight for the rest of her days, as clear on her brow as the fire a single trigger pull had ignited in her eyes. Tainting her more so than the Ghoul himself ever could. Poetry, in a way. Beautiful.
He’d walked away to find her father knowing she would follow. If only for the answers she was owed.
That had been nearing four days ago.
She hadn’t talked all that much since then and at first it was a blessing bestowed upon him as his own rage settled back into his bones. It took nearly the same amount of time for him to realize what was actually happening. She was grieving, just as he had when the one he'd trusted most in the world had shown their true colors, spending the days mostly silent until some human urgency or another arose, otherwise trudging along behind him as if the path his boots left was the only one she knew. As if his rope was still slipped tight around her throat.
It pisses him off, though he can't place a finger on why. The quiet was all well and fine. He knew that whatever they were now - travel companions? No. Partners? Definitely not.- was rocky at best, a death wish at worst, and still as difficult to traverse as the wasteland. But by god did he miss her fire, and that in itself was a frustrating thing.
Cooper came to a stop, turning to wait for her to catch up a few steps where she’d begun to fall behind.
“Keep up,” he bit out. “We ain’t ever gunna catch him at this rate.”
Lucy said nothing as she approached, giving him a shallow nod and growing still a few paces shy. Her shoulders were slumped, big blue eyes drawn as if her thoughts were hundreds of miles away, which he would bet caps they were, but in all the wrong directions.
“Hey,” he called, closing the space between them and grabbing her rough by the upper arm. He gave her a mean hearted shake and it was what finally earned him her eyes. “The fuck's wrong with you? You leave your brain back there at the observatory too?”
That brought her back to him. He watched the way her eyes cleared and turned murderous up at him, wild and searing, a little bit of killer coming out to play. The image of his own finger being bitten off flashed through his mind, his blood trailing hot and thick down her teeth and lips. His eyes traced them now, chapped but clean and plush in their small frown, and found they weren’t nearly as appealing. Her own finger, her own little repayment, closed a little tighter around her drawing arm. Just as a precaution.
But just as quickly as her eyes flashed, they fell flat again.
“I’m not sure what you mean, my head’s fine,” Lucy answered, voice rasping dry with sand and something heavier. She tipped her head with a sweet little tight lipped smile that he guessed was supposed to be reassuring, glanced down to where he held her, then back up. “I’m fine,” she repeated. “Can we keep going now?”
He eyed her a moment, still not sure what she was trying to prove, before taking a step back to reach behind him in his saddle bag for the canteen. He pressed it forward to her. “Drink.”
She only stared at it a moment, pressed her lips together, swallowed with such an effort that he would swear he heard her muscles work.
“I said I’m fine.”
And now he knew for certain she was lying right to his fucking face. He glared down at her.
“You can drink or I can make ya. Your choice girlie,” he sneered. “But you’re no fuckin’ good to me drag assin’ behind like you got lead in ya boots.”
Her brow pinched and it was nice to see that his threats still held somewhat of an effect. He favored frustration over fear on her anyhow.
“Is that why you asked me to come?” She shot back with more gusto than he’d gotten from her in days. “To be good to you?” She asked and his mind most certainly went in a direction that hers did not, innocent thing that she was, because she still held his gaze nonplussed. His shell shocked expression must have answered for him. “Exactly. So, shall we,” she made a noncommittal gesture forward and stepped to pass him, pushing the canteen back into his chest with her shoulder as she moved.
He was left standing alone in the sand for a moment and used it to take his own swig of water, offering a lid full down to Dogmeat at his heels, who accepted it eagerly. He watched Lucy’s spine sway back and forth for a few steps through the hazy heat ahead and bared his teeth to nothing in particular. The blue of her suit glared at him in the sun like a taunt. She favored her left leg. And he hadn’t asked her to join him. He’d offered, knowing too well what a deprived hivemind of power hungry tin-can boys was capable of had he left her behind.
There was a distinct difference. Ungrateful bitch.
He spit the foul taste in his mouth to the ground and trailed in her footprints.
They had finally found shelter near an hour after sunset, the sun itself always seeming to cower away too quickly from the wasteland nights and the horrors they held. It was interesting to Lucy, how she could spend the long hours of the day cursing up at it while it seared her skin, only to miss its warmth terribly in the deep hours of the freezing desert nights, wide awake and staring at nothing but empty darkness. She would sometimes spend them trying to focus on such mundane topics as the science of it. She’d always loved science. For example, how could such a place exist with no average temperature? Only searing hot or freezing cold. How long could the human body persist without ample food and water in such a climate, radiation aside? How long until exposure to the latter in pursuit of her father would leave nothing human left in her at all?
Hey.
Lucy couldn’t stop seeing her mother’s face every time she closed her eyes. Well, not her face, but where it should have been, the wasteland eating away at her until she was nothing more than a hollowed out shell. The gurgled growls of air as her dilapidated corpse lunged against her shackles for sustenance in any form, stripped of everything apart from baser instincts.
The cold weight of the gun in her hand as Lucy had raised it and took aim. She couldn’t help but think of her brother back in the vault. About all the lies they’d been fed. About all she'd done in her hunt for the truth. What the heck was she supposed to say to him now?
Hey!
Lucy felt the air shift somewhere in the dark near her and focused enough to realize she was hyperventilating so hard her teeth were chattering, cold air filling her lungs in no short supply though she would swear that she was drowning beneath the dusty sand. Their makeshift shelter did nothing to keep either out, four walls and a roof rusted with holes that the Ghoul had claimed was once a freightcar, though she had no idea what that meant.
No matter where they stopped to rest, Lucy always tried to keep a respectful distance, but here in such a tight space it proved a challenge. She could feel his presence like a weight in the air as he stirred somewhere behind her back from where she lay on her side, face pressed so close to the rear wall of their shelter that she could smell the faint, comforting tang of metal. Or at least she could when she remembered how to breathe properly.
“Hey, you keep making noises like that, every baddie in the wasteland’s gunna show up on our doorstep expectin’ a free meal.” His anger stabbed at her through the blackness like a hot iron, just behind her neck. Her shoulders rose an inch on instinct alone, but she otherwise ignored him, focusing instead on drawing deep breaths of air, in the nose out the mouth, in the nose out the mouth, until the ringing in her ears slowly began to dull and the weight in her chest didn’t feel as suffocating. “You hear me vaultie?”
Lucy knew he could see her. He tracked through the darkness as easily as day. So instead of answering aloud, she raised her right thumb in the air to him over her back. A common hand signal back in the vault that relayed a clear headed affirmative. That everything was A-okay. Peachy even.
Up here it must mean something different.
He was on her before she could lower her hand, one of his grabbing her harshly under the jaw and dragging her up to a sitting position. The other fisted her upstretched thumb in crushing force and held it there.
“Now I am about gettin' sick and fuckin' tired of this moping business darlin’.” He drawled low, so close she could feel his warm breath wash down across her face. His voice dripped of honey and sincerity and this is when she would have once feared him most, back when he was the scariest thing in her world. “You do that again,” he continued, and she felt the brim of his hat brush her fringe as he must have looked down, “and you’ll be missin' another finger. We clear?” He placed a bit more pressure against the digit in question, bending it backward just till it ached. “And use your goddamn words.”
Oddly enough, the bit of physical pain was a lovely distraction. Just enough for her to focus.
“I killed her,” Lucy breathed instead, and it was as if saying it aloud unstoppered the guilt and tears she’d fought for days not to shed in fear of present company and the unwise waste of water. She would thirst either way if she made it through the night. She deserved to. That is, if he didn't kill her right now for breaking down less than a week in. For not being more like him and leaving destruction in her wake without care or remorse. For being too human. And gosh she’d tried so hard not to be. She just wanted to sleep. To not think. To keep moving forward.
Gloved fingers shifted against her neck as she fought to swallow the sob that built beneath them. They moved higher to tilt her chin and the slight movement freed the moisture from the pools of her eyes, cutting in twin lines down her sunburned cheeks. Lucy could just make out his expression in the spotty moonlight from above, setting his scarred features in sharp relief against the darkness. Unmoored hatred glistened in the yellow of his eyes as they followed them down her face and Lucy waited, resigned, for his next blow.
It’s why she flinched as he released her thumb to bring his other hand up, thick fingers splaying against the opposite side of her neck. She tensed at the trapped feeling it wrought. Of being caged by hands that held violence as if all else had slipped from his grasp. His thumb swiped against one of her tears, then plucked up the other, and was promptly flush against her pursed lips. He pushed past them easily, her soft gasp of surprise allowing his thumb to slide straight through her teeth to her tongue. He pressed the pad of it flat against her and she tasted salted leather and dry earth, the weight of it all rushing straight down from her mouth to the core of her where it settled and burned something like shame.
It only took a glance up to see that he was mocking her, a wicked turn of his lip giving away that this was another one of his deranged lessons. She briefly considered teaching him one as well under the scrutiny, wanting to return his threat of losing another appendage with swift, rabid action rather than words. Wanting to clench her jaw and scream her rage to the wind and claw the raw feeling out from her gut so she never shed a tear in front of him or anyone again. But he looked at her like he wanted her to and the wasteland could not drag her any lower than she’d already allowed. It could not win. He could not win.
So instead Lucy took a steadying breath past his intrusion, rose both hands to his chest, and shoved him hard backwards to the ground.
The force sent him somewhere into the shadows before her. She could hear his spurs jangle as they dug into the dirt. His bullet-lined bandolier clanged against the wall, echoing all around them. After though, the silence stretched so long it rose static in her ears. Long enough that her revulsion was slowly traded in for anxiety at the idea of an unseen, pissed off predator somewhere before her in the enclosed space. But as she thought about it a second longer, she realized she’d seen real, bona fide predators at hunt now. Had even been a victim of their single minded ambitions. Of their need to hunt, destroy, feed, repeat for survival.
Lucy wasn’t so sure in what regard to hold the man who sat somewhere across from her now.
“If you’re going to kill me, just do it already.” She bid the darkness anyway, gathering herself and ignoring the purely instinctual fear that urged her not to. She’d questioned his motives from the moment she’d spotted him actually waiting for her just outside Moldaver’s lair, a snake coiled and eager for the ideal moment to strike. Even so, she’d walked right into it. “Quickly please though, because I’m tired of the power play bullshit.” And she was. For days he’s done nothing but berate her about her emotions as she’d clutched to them harder than she ever had to in her life.
A deep, scathing chuckle came from a few feet in front of her.
“Bout time.” He said. “Coulda’ done without the waterworks though,” he added as if critiquing her performance, leaning in just enough for her to see the curve of his hat, the small shift of his jaw. “But you make one hell of a picture with tears in those wild does.”
The comment made her bristle just as it was intended to.
“Because you just love making people miserable, right? Dragging them down to your level?”
“Oh no sweetheart, not people,” he corrected. “Just you.”
She scoffed at that, taking a beat to wipe beneath her eyes with the back of her hands. The drag of dry skin over her sunburnt cheeks ached and not for the first time, she questioned her own sanity for finding herself where she was now. Here, alone, in the middle of nowhere with a ghoul she knew next to nothing about. Apart from -
“Why do you hate me so much?”
The question earned her a few more seconds of silence. She watched his eyes thin to shadows in the moonlight as he considered her.
“Y’know I’m still sortin’ that out myself. But that question right there,” he said, pointing a finger in her direction. Gritting his teeth. “You give too much of a fuck. About everything. That thing strapped in the chair back there wasn’t ya ma. Not anymore.” He continued carelessly as though he hadn’t just robbed the breath from her. “Just another sack of stripped bones turned pet. If anything, it was a mercy killin’.”
“A mercy killing?” Lucy repeated, rattled. “How could you say that being… what you are?” she asked, waving a hand at all of him and wondering if there was still an actual heart beating somewhere beneath such thick layers of asshole.
“It’s why I can say it, darlin’.” He corrected, and his voice was a warm rumble just over the soft wind. “Because I’d want someone to do it for me.”
Lucy only watched him for a long moment after that, remembering the similar violent favor he'd done for Roger, and she wasn't sure where to place the feeling it wrought in her chest. It dulled the frustration he’d bloomed there at an alarming speed. He was getting good at that though, winding her up to her limit just to see how far she would bend for him. Straightening her out when she lost her way. It was complex, comforting and terrifying in equal measure how much she’d come to rely on it as she navigated through a world so different from her own; where killing, in any respect, would never have been considered a good thing. A final gift. A last bit of love shown in the only way this place would allow.
She spoke her next words very carefully.
"Well, hopefully it doesn't come to that." And Lucy tried to blink away the various worst case scenarious her mind played out before realizing she’d been staring at him in silent dread for far too long. As always, he looked back. “And careful,” she cautioned, turning her back to him to shift the dirt flat behind her and rest in her original spot across the ground. “That was almost an emotion.”
Then it was quiet for a long time. So much so that her thoughts began to wander again, far from their shelter and back into the shadows. The cold crept in through her skin, tingling her bare fingers and nose, reaching deep through her vault suit with such an ease that should have been impossible. In habit, she shifted to grab her Pip Boy to turn on some music, just as she would have during sleepless nights on her own. It would at very least conceal the chattering of her teeth. But she paused mid motion, imagining it being slung and destroyed in the desert sand for the intrusion.
“No.” He said as if he’d heard her intentions, but it came from directly behind her, just above her ear. Before she had time to flinch she was drawn back against him, his arm slung heavy around her waist. He was a wall of warmth, almost too hot where her back pressed directly against his chest. He slid his other arm beneath her head and she was slow to relax her weight down against it, not quite sure what to make of his drastic mood swings or how to handle them in a way that didn't get her into a somehow more precarious position.
“You would do it though wouldn't ya? Little killer.” He whispered after she'd settled, right into her ear, and she almost shivered as his warmth bled through her.
She did not dignify that with an answer, though something about the sincerity in his question had her turning her head the slightest bit back over her shoulder to meet his eye. He smelt of gun oil and smoke. His fingers slid light against her ribs as he let her turn. She ran her eyes over the hollow of his cheek, cut sharper by the dim light. The shadowed, empty crater just beneath the bridge of his nose. Looking every bit the walking death he was. But she could feel it, just beneath the press of her ear. His heart beat out a slow, steady rhythm against her and her own had not faltered at the sight.
He didn't scare her anymore, she realized right then. And it was a freeing, frightening thing.
Lucy laid her head back down against him, closed her eyes, and continued to take all he offered.
"Thought so." He said soft in her hair, but she was already drifting away.