Archive of Our Own ^beta

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. 

Chapter Text

It is the unfortunate truth that when you go above ground, you will be faced with many post-nuclear nuisances.
These frightening menaces will come in all different shapes and sizes, and pose an immediate threat to your survival.

Lucy had all but gone back to her curious, annoying self, yappin’ about one thing or another as the weeks passed slow. The forest they found themselves in had been enticing at first, a sweet relief from the blazing heat, but now as Cooper's boots still indented deep in the mud, dried thick up to his ankles, he wasn’t so sure which he’d preferred more. The foliage was dense, old world nature doing all she could to reclaim what had once been hers, though still just as tangled up and tainted by the end of the world as they all were. The trees bent at odd angles like ghostly specters throwing deep shadows all around them, pairing ominously with the thick smog and cloud cover overhead to turn the last few days of their travel into near night conditions. The ground was oversaturated, leaving thick mud traps and sporadic, gray puddles of liquid spread around that would send Vaultie’s Pip Boy into fits every time they passed too close. 

He was already on alert, keeping an eye out for the radhounds and rats and whole score of other beasts that were obliged to call the forest home. And while Dogmeat trailed ahead, nose to the ground and ever vigilant, he couldn’t help but keep an ear trained behind him in a new formed habit, listening for footsteps. Slowing his pace the slightest bit when she fell behind, still mastering a skill that, after so long, now came to him as easy as breathing. She kept gasping these small sounds whenever her boots squelched through the mud wrong or caught on a low lying limb, and he was grateful he walked ahead so he didn’t have to hear it about his expression.

One step in the wrong spot though and there was a high chance he’d never have to hear her complain again. Sinkholes and quicksand were as big a threat out here as the puddles and nearly impossible to see unless you knew what to look for. It was another of the many instances that made him wonder exactly what kind of education these Vaulties were fed because while she could spew on and on about world history (he’d had to correct her on a few ‘facts’ here and there as they’d strike him wrong) and science (he had no fucking idea what she was going on about), and whatever fuckin’ else pulled her attention, basic survival must have been a different animal entirely.    

He came to a sudden stop and she almost didn’t notice until it was too late, her focus drawn to the ground so harshly that it looked as if she believed she would float away should her attention lapse. He spoke up before she could run into his side.

“Ya’ll get any real military training down there in that vault of yours?” He asked. “You know, between the song circles and bakin'." 

Lucy wanted to roll her eyes, he could see it. But she only looked up at him through her lashes like it was a burden to. Like the dirt was worth more of her attention.

“I know how to use my gun if that’s what you’re asking.” She informed him, shifting the leather strap of her holster a touch higher across her shoulder. Her grip tightened around it as she took a look past him. “Why? Did you see something?”

“No,” he answered too quickly, watching as her whole silhouette relaxed a pinch. “But it sounds like you don’t really either. Unless it’s your goal to uproot every tree left standin’ in east Cali.” He sent her a look of forced woe. “Don’t you reckon they’ve been through enough?” 

“Just tell me what you want to tell me.” She said after a moment of glaring straight through him, and the tired way it sounded made him feel the slightest bit unsure-footed. As if he’d already won an argument that hadn’t yet been started. And that was just no fun.  

“Pardon?”

“You’re making fun of me. I’m trying.” Lucy informed the ground sharply before looking back up at him. “And I’ve already told you, just the basics. It’s all we needed to know in there. So I’m starting to think you just like hearing yourself talk.” 

He couldn’t stop the faint lift of his missing brows. The shit eating grin right in her face. “Funny, I was just thinkin' the same thing.”

“Kinda sweet really,” she tacked on, ignoring the feint. “Never took you for a nature lover.”

Much better. There she was. Cooper chuckled, a real, deep thing that he watched round her eyes. Vaultie was becoming downright entertaining over the last few weeks, but that one struck the slightest bit too close to home and he’d be damned if he didn’t let her know it. Festered memories darkened his gaze as he took an unnecessary step toward her, grabbing her roughly by the shoulders to spin her around just in front of him, so close that the holstered gun across her back bit into his ribs. She straightened in surprise against the sudden onslaught.

“My favorite thing about nature is gettin' the fuck out of it,” he drawled casually, just over her left shoulder, flicking his hat up an inch on his head to better see the stretch of earth before them. He pointed forward past her at her eye level. “See how the ground kinda waves there like in the open desert? Makes no sense right, here in the foliage? Quicksand. Quick death too, ‘specially for squirmy little things like you.” He whispered the last bit so close against her neck that his nose would have once caressed the skin there, just to prove a point. It worked like a charm and he hummed, satisfied. “Same goes for the puddles,” he continued, turning her to face one. “They may look shallow but I’ve seen whole radstags vanish before my eyes. So mind them for more than just the radiation.” He warned, brushing a handful of brown hair away from her shoulder as he drew his hand back and watched the gooseflesh rise across the back of her newly exposed neck. She’d taken to a habit of wearing it down when the air was cooler and something newfound in him wanted to snap through each of the few hair ties she had left.

Lucy didn’t help the rogue thought by only turning her head with the motion to meet his eye. Not flinching or cringing away. Just looking back at him, so close he could see the red of radiation burn starting beneath her eyes. The dry skin peeling away at the tip of her perfect little nose.

“So our options are either a fast death or a slow one. Very educational.” She finally concluded, and he decided with it that he didn’t like the jaded expression either of those options set on her features as she weighed them. What should have felt like victory felt more like being a jackass. But old habits really did die hard. 

“Well I wasn’t finished sweetheart, we have to talk about the roots next…”

“I don’t want to hear it anymore about the dam- darned roots.” She cut him off, finally pulling away and walking on, still careful with her steps but with more confidence than he’d seen from her since they’d entered the woods. The rare near-curse he’d earned from her tongue, though, was a treat he still savored far more than the small bite of pride at watching her take three solid steps without tripping. 

She was trying. He’d give her that. 

Their journey through the forest went a long time without trouble after that, apart from the bloatflies and bloodbugs smoothskins attracted like spotlights, but the bloodsucking vermin were prime targets for teaching how to throw a proper punch. A skill Vaultie wasn’t already half bad at. He’d almost asked why. But just as he was getting to the good part of explaining how a bloatfly kills if you were to let one too close, the threatening sky finally dropped out overhead, releasing rain in fat, heavy drops all around them. 

He’d instantly lost her attention as the static hum of it pelting against the thick leaf cover above livened the air, and while she looked up, he scouted with haste for shelter. Fucking humans and their frailty. Dogmeat barked up ahead of them in a way Cooper had come to read as found something, and he could only wish for all parties present to be as resourceful. 

“Woah,” Lucy breathed to the shadowed sky instead in awe. Still unmoving. “I’ve never seen real rain before. Only read about it.” And her eyes betrayed the truth of those words, capturing every bit of what was left of the light and still holding tightly to it as they turned over to find him. 

They hit him like buckshot, scattered and piercing, and he was suddenly blinded by the destroyed dream of a cattle ranch. Chickens. White picket fences. The chime of laughter. Horses grazing freely in an open field of green. Warm arms wrapped around his midsection as they watched the lazy rainfall from the safety of a covered front porch swing… Easy. Gentle. 

The anger came unbidden. The same one he’d spent two decades releasing freely upon those less fortunate to be near him, but the man he once was, the long dead Cooper fucking Howard buried somewhere deep beneath the cold blood and scar tissue, asked him not to. Just this once. So the Ghoul set his teeth and before he managed to do something he’d regret, shoved his hat down over Lucy’s head to cover those goddamn eyes.

“It’ll blind you and burn the skin from your bones.” He growled, grabbing her by the forearm. “C’mon.”

Their alcove was small, cratered unnaturally into the side of a jagged stone hill. The overhead lip protruded out just far enough to keep away the worst of the elements and Lucy leaned against the back wall to catch her breath. Her body ached from head to toe, stuck in what felt like a pre fever chill, though she couldn’t tell if it was any worse than what it had been since her first few days free of the vault or if it was just the added exertion. Adrenaline still sizzled in her veins from outrunning another new threat and she grabbed a scrap of cloth up from her pack to wipe the worst of it away from the leather over her arms. 

She snorted a choked laugh and though she couldn’t see the Ghoul from under the wide brim of his too-big hat, she imagined he looked at her like she was losing it. An expression from him that she’d been earning more and more often of late. Maybe she was.

“Could you imagine?” She asked, drying her hands, slowing over the one discolored finger that did not match the others. “All of this just to die to rain.”

“Shut up.” He grit out, and Lucy turned to find he wasn’t looking at her at all. The back of his scarred head was to her where he knelt and rifled around for something in his saddle bag. Anger radiated from him in waves, his movements too quick and sharp, as she was left to watch the tainted rain water drip down the back of his neck, sloughing from his shoulders, to halo a dark circle on the ground around him. The weight of his hat on her pounding head all of a sudden became too much to bear, so she removed it, clutching it in her hold near her thigh instead. And she waited. 

“Here,” he said after a moment when he found what he was looking for. He thrust the Radaway out to her like the thought of it scathed him. “You already look like shit and it’s just gunna get worse.”  

Lucy didn't move.

This was the second time now that the drug had been offered to her and though she didn't feel as near death as the first time, it took her a moment to trust that she wasn’t hallucinating. Or that he wasn't messing with her. The Ghoul had never offered anything apart from the bare necessities, and although that list seemed to grow a little longer each day, she could only imagine just how bad she must actually look. 

He had shown her how to better scavenge for herself though. How to look in places others may have missed. And though she hadn’t been lucky enough to score any Radaway of her own, she mentally tallied through her ever growing catalog of supplies for something to wipe that look of disgust from his face. He didn’t deserve it, deep down she knew that, however it was an ingrained eldest daughter response that had developed long before they’d crossed paths and would be unshakable still long after they parted.  

But if he was trying, she would too. 

Lucy pasted on a soft smile and reached back down into her pack. It took only seconds for her fingertips to bump against the distinctly smooth packaging of shrink wrapped cigarettes. She had lifted them from the ruins of the first small settlement they’d passed through, fully aware that she’d only be using them for some future bargain or another. She'd just never expected it to be with him.

Lucy swayed the slightest bit on her feet as she rose to stand, almost missing the look on his face as she offered him his hat back along with the stolen contraband. 

“Golden rule.” She reminded him, and blacked the fuck out.

Chapter Text

Our topic today is Endurance.
We will all be faced with many new and unfamiliar health risks, such as infection, sudden loss of limb, and above all, harmful radiation.

The first thing Lucy registered was something soft beneath her fingertips. Then a warm, comforting weight across her thighs. Odd sensations, in the grand scheme of things, to feel after so long without. So she panicked, blinking sleep-heavy eyes open and jolting up to her elbows. 

Golden sunlight streaked through the fractured windows of what looked like a once living room. She found herself sprawled across a dingy mattress in the corner, the springs popping up through the molded upholstery in scattered spots around her legs. The Ghoul’s dog (Lucy still refused to call her by her christened name) raised her head up from where she lay sprawled across her lap, no doubt trying to spot what had caused her to spook. 

“What happened?” Lucy asked, glancing around at the thrown shadows and peeling walls of the otherwise empty room and found she was alone.

Only the dog whimpered in answer, the sound a worried whine like she wanted to help but wasn’t sure how. Lucy reassured her with a pat to the head, but couldn’t quite manage the same for herself.

She could remember running through the rain. Being surrounded by trees and rock. The Ghoul’s surly eyes on her. Her stomach rolling as she fell forward. If biology served, she should have at least a mild concussion and bruised knees, but her head only ached angrily at the base of her skull and her entire body felt sore as if she’d been hit by a boulder instead of just falling down onto one. She shivered where she lay, a cold sweat slick across her forehead and a weakness to her muscles that she hadn’t felt since she was a child, sick with the flu in her father’s arms. 

And the memory stung straight through her other ailments, reinforcing just how alone she was in the world now. That’s when it hit her. The Ghoul was gone. She had been too sick to keep up and he’d left her behind just like he kept threatening to. The realization nearly sent the room spinning before her eyes. Navigating the wasteland alone was something Lucy was quickly coming to realize she never wanted to do again. Not after how poorly it had gone the first time. And she had been trying so hard to prove that to him. To show him that she could be a worthy travel companion and carry her own weight when push came to shove. That she wasn’t just some weak Vaultie side tracking and slowing him down. But it was as if the universe had to prove her wrong and pull the ground from beneath her feet again and again and again... 

“Well, look who’s rejoined the livin’.” 

Lucy’s eyes snapped to the open doorway at the same time the dog rose up from the bed, tail wagging to greet him. The Ghoul stopped just inside the doorframe, hat tipped sideways on his cocked head as he looked them over. Dust danced in the streams of sunlight that strayed in from behind him and the sight reminded Lucy of those old westerns she would watch with her dad. Where the brave cowboy would come back at the end and save the town from harm, just as you'd begun to think he wouldn't. But in those movies the heroes were heroes and the villains were villains, and the long shadow he threw across the room was a murky shade of gray. It made her wonder what he was like before all the meanness and manhandling. If there even was anything else left.

But the thought did nothing to curb the relief she felt at seeing him. She wasn’t sure what that said about her. Maybe the radiation sickness ate deeper this time. 

“What’s with the face?” He asked after a moment and Lucy realized she had been staring at him for too long in a developing habit she wanted no part in. She stuck to the safe questions.

“Where are we?” 

“Some shithole outside New Reno.” He answered, sauntering slow across the room nearer to her, and it was then she noticed he carried over his shoulder a stuffed knapsack that was not his own. His steps were wrong, weight falling heavier onto his right foot than they normally would. Smeared blood clung to the corner of his mouth and trailed down the side of his chin. He groaned a quiet sound as he released the bag to the floor. 

“What happened?”

“You passed the fuck out on me back in the swamp, that's what happened.” His hand fell to rest across his left set of ribs. His expression was unreadable. “Thought I’d have to make jerky of ya a few times there.” He tried a threatening smirk but it did not match the flat of his eyes. “But we made it to the border.” 

She heard him. Heard the taunt and dismissed it easily now after so much practice. But he’d misunderstood.

“No, I meant to you. You’re limping. And the bag?” Lucy nodded to the pile of new supplies on the ground at his feet. “What happened?” She asked again, the question careful on her tongue.

The Ghoul only looked at her for a moment, weighing something with the slight tilt of his head. His eyes thinned and it ended up with him sliding slowly down the wall to sit a few feet away from her bedside on the dusty wood floor. He reached inside a pocket of his coat, pulled out the carton of cigarettes she’d traded him, and patted it against the heel of his open palm a few times before eyeing her suspiciously again. 

“Worried about me, Vaultie?” He asked.

And everything in her asked her to lie. To not be vulnerable. To not give him a truth to taunt her with or to point out just how pathetic she was for clinging on to the mere scraps she’d been given. He’d abused her. Dragged her. Sold her…

But he had to have caught her back in the woods or her head would be split. Had to have given her the Radaway while she slept or she would be dead. He had kept them fed and somewhat hydrated through the blistering heat. He’d kept her alive and moving forward after her father tore her world apart…

“Yes,” she admitted and it ached. She took a steadying breath. “I thought you left.”

The Ghoul released a quick huff from between his maimed lips before lighting a cigarette and drawing a deep pull. He let his hat tip back against the wall and they watched together as smoke filtered up from his nasal cavity and curled in the sky above. The stark smell mixed in with the warm air drifting gently through the room and was becoming a comforting constant.

“Thought about it.” He finally admitted to what was left of the rotted ceiling before taking another long pull. “But I’m not in the habit of drawin’ first,” he flicked ash to the ground beside him and pointed at her with the glowing butt. “And if I were to let you keel over, I’d be in a heap of debt wouldn’t I? Golden rule and all.” He sneered.

Lucy couldn’t help but watch in fascination as the smoke billowed from the crater in his face as he spoke like some sort of demon of old, a monster from a precautionary tale meant to keep those who listened in line. But in those stories, the monsters always lied. Hell, in the real world everyone did. 

He didn’t. 

“Thank you,” she started, relaxing her back against the wall as his dark eyes drank her in. “For being honest.”

“Well now,” he drawled, straightening his spine a bit. “If that’s all it takes to get some goddamn gratitude around here, a couple assholes down at the trade hub didn’t take too kindly to a ghoul looking for supplies.” He took another small drag from his cig before wiping the back of his hand knowingly across the blood on his lips. “And a man’s gotta eat. Especially after carryin’ your ass around for days.” 

“Days?” Lucy echoed, embarrassment rising hot in her cheeks. “You carried me… for days?” 

“Naw, you fuckin’ floated here,” he bit out, looking away to the far wall. The dog used it as her queue to curl herself close near his side and Lucy watched as he stroked her neck absently, easily, his shoulders dropping the slightest bit. And she realized right then she should of known he hadn't left them behind the moment she woke with her across her lap. “You got one more night then we need to move. Before the pitchfork mob comes a knockin’ for me.” He hummed a low sound to himself and she knew there was probably a part of him that wished they would. But something about the way he sat, worn and tired over the ground, had her wondering if the additional night of reprieve was really just for her sake. She had seen the ways ghouls were treated in nearly all the settlements they passed through, ranging from snide remarks to outright torture. 

“You know,” she rolled to her shoulder to see him better, the movement painting discomfort on her brow. She waited a moment for the room to settle. “People look at me and assume I'm some dumb girl who doesn’t understand the way the world works. But I do.” The Ghoul’s cigarette hung limp in his lips as she earned his full attention. “And not just up here, even back in the vault. I was treated like some sort of problem that people needed to solve or wanted to be rid of. I’ve been lied to over and over again, molded into this - this shell of what I thought I was supposed to be… and it sucks doesn't it? The way it beats you down…” she paused at the growing weight in her chest, but the Ghoul didn’t so much as flinch. “All because of an upbringing in a world I had no control over… And I’m sorry people treat you that way too just because of what you are.” The honesty hung too heavy in the quiet air between them. Felt too real when she held his eyes. So she borrowed a page from his book and sent him a sad smile. "They should at least get to know you first."

With the admission, with the way he looked at her, as if he still awaited the punchline of some sick joke, she knew she’d struck a nerve that could go one of a handful of ways. So she willed her heart to slow and allowed herself a final, desperate question just in case. 

“What’s your name?”

It was not her first attempt at the information, though the few before had been fruitless piques of curiosity, but now she knew for certain there was more to him left than the radiation had burnt away. Thinking of him as just the Ghoul didn’t feel right - almost like being called Vaultie. He’d tipped his hand to her without meaning to, the evidence still lingering in the warmth and safety all around her. And that’s what she’d felt from the moment he walked back through the door, bloodied leathers draped in the warm sunlight. Safe. How terribly confusing. 

She watched in mild suspense as he bent forward to drag the bag up between his legs, pulling out an old torn blanket and a sealed plastic bottle of fresh water. Lucy hadn’t seen a single one since the vault and her dry mouth tried to mimic hunger but only tasted sour. 

“Cooper,” he rumbled low, eyeing her harshly as he handed over the supplies. “But don’t go yappin’ that to the wrong people or they’ll treat ya like a problem too.” 

She watched him, wide eyed and enraptured, just like she would the cowboy on her Radiation King television. The one who loved animals and always saved the damsels in distress. The one who shared the same name as the man before her now. With those same expressive eyes and drawl to his words… 

No. No no. It made no sense.

Those movies were hundreds of years old…

“And take it from me,” he continued, cutting effortlessly through the ringing in her ears. He ground his cigarette out on the floor at his side, drew his hat down to cover his eyes and slouched back against the wall. “It's the world that's the problem, MacLean.”

The words carried the weight of centuries.

Lucy couldn't sleep anymore even if she'd wanted to. 

Chapter Text

And now, Charisma, what is it made of?
Unlike the clean, wholesome America you may recall, the wasteland will be a distrustful place,
full of unsavory characters and few morals.
Earning the trust of your fellow man is an often-overlooked key to survival.

Well, the proverbial cat was out of the goddamn bag and Lucy just wouldn’t drop it. 

Of course Vault Tec had supplied old Cooper Howard movies to the vaults. Why wouldn’t they when it could be one final, glorious fuck you after stripping him of his entire life. A grand finale of sorts that still haunted him two hundred years later and had him wanting to wring Lucy’s neck every time she brought it up, with those stars in her eyes as if he were there to dole out autographs instead of picking through the mangled remains of what looked to be a gruesome firefight in an abandoned vault. But wherever there were units of dead army boys, there was bound to be liquor. He just had to hold out till he could find it. 

“Do horses still exist or were they a pre war only kinda’ deal? Oh, and were they as big as they looked on tv? I always wanted one when I was little,” she rambled on and on and on somewhere in the hall. “I would doodle her on my math homework all the time. I named her Clementine and she looked just like yours in -” 

“The fuck kinda name is Clementine?” He interrupted, annoyance causing him to flip over the knee-high bunk with a bit more force than strictly necessary. Of course she would name her fictional equine after a goddamn fruit.

“I was a kid.” She pointed out, sounding offended. “We were an agricultural vault. And I like the way it rolls from the tongue. Unlike ‘Dogmeat’.” She tacked on at the end in that tone she was developing specifically to piss him off. 

He stalled to look at her over his shoulder. 

“Strong, sensible name, Dogmeat.” And the dog in question perked up her ears at the attention. “Serves its purpose and is an apt description,” he snarled. “Unless you also planned on eatin’ your imaginary horse.”  

Lucy’s face scrunched up in disgust. 

“You wouldn’t.”

“Oh I absolutely would.” 

He wouldn’t. But the brief moment of silence while she gauged him was worth it. 

“I see why you don’t lie now.” Lucy decided, turning away from him and going back to picking through her own section of the room. “You kinda suck at it.” 

Cooper rolled his eyes beneath the brim of his hat and kicked a side table out and away from the wall. And finally, beauty to behold. Someone had dug out a small cavern into the back of the cheap wood and inside rested three shot sized bottles of trash variety vodka. It wasn’t enough to do shit except slow his thoughts a little, but by god he would take it. He unscrewed the top off one and shot it down without hesitation, humming as the burn slid down his throat. 

Lucy chose that exact moment to step around the turmoil he’d created and judge him for it. 

“Seriously? All this great stuff and that’s what you’ve been looking for?” 

Cooper twisted open the second bottle, met her eyes, and drained it into his mouth. 

“Ok then, I guess you don’t need this,” she shrugged, reaching into her bag to pull out a liter sized mason jar filled to the brim with golden liquor. He could feel his own eyes nearly leave his skull because he’d recognize that particular shade of corn-made sweetness anywhere and it made him choke on the shitty excuse for alcohol that coughed from his lips. He hadn’t seen the likes of it since he’d brewed his own in the storm shelter of his parent’s barn, long before showbiz and the selling of his soul. 

“How long,” he enunciated slow, clearing his throat to properly convey the severity of her sins, “have you had a fuckin’ jar of moonshine in your bag?”

Lucy had been beaming since she’d gagged him.

“A while. Agricultural vault.” She reminded him, giving the jar a teasing little shake. “I’ve just never felt…” and she paused, her mirth waning a bit, to send the floor an odd look before catching herself. “I’ve just never had the occasion to drink it up here.” 

Smart girl Cooper couldn’t help but think. The real world was already a dangerous place for a woman, especially one traveling alone. He’d seen so first hand, a few bounties here and there that even he wouldn’t further sully himself with. And though he’d done many things the old Coop would have belted him across the mouth for, there were lines he still would not cross, drawn through the muddied sands of his conscience in firm, permanent etches. 

But he had to admit, he hadn’t seen a sight quite as lovely as the one before him in a long long time, little Lucy standing before him, hair askew and baked with heat, chest puffed with pride at shocking the shit out of him. Not to mention the liquid gold sparkling in her hand like an open invitation.

“Well,” he quipped. “There is absolutely no time like the present.”

And before he knows it, he is lounged against the back of a fraying tweed couch, legs spread wide, in some less fortunate vault dweller’s old room with a proper buzz behind his eyes, the likes of which he hadn't felt since the chop shop. The memory has him looking over to Lucy where she sat opposite, pale neck arched back against the headrest, feet tucked up against her little ass, staring blankly up at the roof. Then to a single gray finger that glared back at him from around the now half full mason jar leaned precariously in her lap. His gloved trigger finger bent and straightened uncompelled over his thigh. 

Lucy’s Pip Boy lulled out that oldies station she favored from its position on the armrest beside her and hearing a few of those songs again after so long was like receiving a gift from a long dead friend; rancid and burning in his belly, more so than the shine, but this time he blamed the pleasant weight of it in his veins for not leaning over her and smashing the fuckin’ thing to bits. 

He was still gritting his teeth at it when Lucy rolled her neck to look at him. 

“I watched your movies with my family all the time.” She told him. Again. The words only slurring the slightest bit under the considerable amount of alcohol she’d put down. It was honestly a touch impressive. She had almost kept up. “I can’t believe it’s really you.” She mumbled a long moment later, and it further soured his mood.

“In the flesh.”

“I idolized you,” she pressed on, unprovoked, like the idea was a shock even to herself. “And now you - you eat people.”

Cooper reached over to remove the jar from her lax hold, lest it go to waste, because on second thought she’d had enough. 

“What was that speech a few days ago ‘bout not bein’ able to control your fate or some shit?” He asked, taking another deep swig from the glass. He remembered every word, never ending, like a broken record scratching brittle in his brain. It sucks. I’m sorry. “I don’t wanna hear it.” 

Lucy went quiet for such a confoundingly long while that he thought she may actually listen to him. She tucked her elbow up against the back of the couch to rest her head down against it, unhindered wonder still flashing like lightning in her blue eyes right back at him, near knifelike in the fluorescents, and he wasn’t sure how much more of remembering his own past he could take if she kept digging. Hell, she may as well just gut him now and get it over with because she’d said ‘idolized’ like it was a thing of the past but he hadn’t been looked at like that since he was surrounded by copious amounts of money and mixed agendas. 

“What happened to you?” She asked, soft against the bend of her arm, and it snapped something in him, worse than when she’d asked him something similar a long while ago, wrists bound and fear still potent in her eyes. Never once would he have coined himself a coward till that moment. 

Cooper pushed against the armrest to stand and leave, the ground wavering the slightest bit before him with the motion and a lot happened faster than his idled mind could process. Lucy’d tried to stop him. He could feel the too-quick grip of her hand around his forearm and in a reaction born of survival, the near-empty jar of moonshine shattered against the ground, raining in sharp splinters across their boots as he shoved her back against the wall, one hand around her offending wrist, the other rough around the base of her throat. 

He nearly snarled at her, right along with the voices in his head that beckoned him to tear the perceived threat apart. To rip all signs of life and fight away until there was nothing left to battle back. To kill or be killed. But the split second of feral adrenaline passed and this girl - this fucking insane woman came into focus before his eyes and just blinked leisurely up at him like he wasn’t considering grinding her carotid between his teeth. Looked at him as if he were no fucking threat to her at all. Fucking glazed over and gone with liquor and still sunlight incarnate and he couldn’t decide if he wanted to bask in it for the rest of his days or beat it out with his bare hands so that it couldn’t burn him anymore than he’d already suffered. 

“Cooper Howard is dead. So shut,” he leaned in and growled inches from the bow of her lips. Pressed his hand down the slightest bit harder, leathered fingers indenting deeper over the fragile tendons of her throat until he heard her breath catch beneath them, “the fuck up.” 

He released her with a final push, her shoulders sagging back against the slick metal of the wall, and then he left her there to wallow in her own foolish stubbornness and that goddamn jaunty music before he broke them both.

So Cooper Howard was an angry drunk. 

Made sense.

Lucy lounged on the sofa and mentally ticked that box on the ever growing list of traits she would have never come to expect from her childhood idol. When she was a kid, her father had always liked to say ‘never meet your heroes’ and back then it hadn’t made much sense because they were already the ones raising her. Now though, after his betrayal and real Cooper’s very real temper, she was beginning to understand. 

Lucy rubbed her throat and closed her eyes. 

It hadn’t hurt. Not really. And over time, somewhere during the long stretches of monotony in their travels, Lucy was beginning to find that a part of herself, something broken and withering deep beneath her ribs, enjoyed pissing him off. Gained something off of the thrill of gradually growing brave enough to finally push back. And she would keep pushing. At very least, to make him feel a shred of the same emotions he’d forced on her from the first time she’d been introduced to the barrel of his gun. 

She could only blame the moonshine that still warmed her skin as she let herself imagine that the hand on her throat was his again. It had been a long time since anyone apart from him had touched her, and no one had ever quite handled her the same. She tried to pull from her past experiences instead, her touch soothing and gentle over the ache at her neck, and found that it did absolutely nothing for her. So she gave up and opened her eyes. 

Lucy froze when she spotted two men donned in military grays watching her from just beyond the rings of shattered glass that littered the floor, guns in tense hands across their middle. Hers rested in its holster on the floor somewhere behind the couch, but there were half a dozen bodies dressed identically to the ones here now back near the entrance of the vault and Lucy could already guess how she must look to them as she lounged indifferently in the next room. 

“What happened here?” The broader one asked, taking another step closer, his boots crunching loud over the remains of the mason jar and Lucy tensed, hoping desperately that Cooper was somewhere near enough in the vault to hear it too. 

She sat up, head spinning with a mixture of embarrassment, drink, and surprise as two guns rose in tandem to aim at her chest. Lucy put her hands out before her, palms forward in placation. “It’s not what it looks like, I found them like that, I swear.” 

“So you’re alone?” The other one asked her before turning to his comrade. “There’s no way she managed that alone.” 

“I didn’t manage anything." She shot back, profoundly offended by the assumption. "But only because I didn’t have to. I was just looking for supplies.”

“Sure,” the broad one said and at his languid tone, she knew he didn’t believe her. “You’re coming with us.” 

“Look," she faltered, "it's been a long day, can we just please -”

They both descended on her, trapping each of her arms in their grasp to tow her up and out of the room. The main hall was empty, Dogmeat following Cooper a while ago to wherever he’d gone to sulk, and all she could think about at that moment was him, soft eyed in the quiet shadows of a nuclear sunset, asking her not to use his name around others. And fuck did she want to yell it at the top of her lungs. 

But if she did, they’d suspect him too. And she liked to think, hoped hysterically, that her chances were better if he remained free to do as he pleased.

As they dragged her out through the main door of the vault and back under the burning sun, she could only plead silently to whomever listened that he cared enough to return the favor.

Chapter Text

With all the talk of physical survival in the wasteland,
you may forget that sometimes it's survival of the smartest.
And when the tables are turned against you,
don't be afraid to set aside your refined Intelligence for the raw instincts of survival.
Just don't lose your head.

Cooper awoke with a gasp, his drunken stupor of a sleep interrupted by Dogmeat’s increasingly insistent whine. But by now he knew she was smart enough to handle just about any business she needed to without him there to babysit.

“Go on,” he grumbled, half dead. “You ain’t gotta wait for me.” 

Instead of listening, the usually keen creature just sat on her hind and stared at him like he was dense. And although he was getting so fucking tired of being on the receiving end of that look, it had been his first clue that something was wrong. 

He sped through the bare minimum of pulling himself together, wiping drool away on his sleeve and fetching his hat from where it’d fallen beneath the bunk. The music hit his ears first as he descended the hall and he expected to find Lucy passed out drunk somewhere near where he’d left her. His mutated metabolism burnt through liquor and its vices a lot quicker than a human’s could and he grew damn near giddy at the idea of getting to spend the day poking at a hungover goody girl. 

The room was empty. Her gun still lay on the floor where she'd set it. But most odd was her Pip Boy on the ground now too, a few feet away from the couch as if it’d fallen, still crackling out a static infested love song, the dial skewed just so. 

The scene awoke a cocktail of feelings in his chest that he hadn’t been plagued with in lifetimes. First and fastest came a confounding sense of betrayal, the rotten feeling of being lied to and sold out by someone he’d once have given the world to. Of lashing out too far and losing something he wasn’t sure he knew how to live without anymore. But no, that wasn’t quite right. So crept in instead the needling anger, simmering hot and well acquainted in his blood and it moved him. He swooped to grab up her effects from the ground, mashing off the radio, and continued his search to discern just what the fuck was going on.

Dogmeat led the charge before him as they made it to the vault’s control room where she sniffed around the bodies there with a renewed interest. And that’s when he spotted their vital mistake. The Brotherhood boy band’s dog tags were missing. A tradition he’d taken part in more times than he could count for his own fallen brothers and sisters. The sigil they adorned around their necks had mocked him just yesterday and now there were none to be found. And as the pieces began to fall into place, the sun drenched room went hazy and red right before his eyes, the silence deafening in his ears, and his incensed mind chose that moment to remind him of the way Lucy’d looked at him as he’d walked back into that rundown cabin after getting the shit beat out of him for supplies. The way her eyes had softened with relief as she'd confessed her fear of abandonment. And a long dead part of him remembered exactly what that felt like. Now, though, he'd gone and fucked up again and the last memory he had of her could not be him holding her down and stifling out her fire in a pattern that was beginning to feel like damnation.

If the Brotherhood had wanted her dead though, there'd be a body.

Cooper looked out the open door of the vault and found nothing more than tumbleweeds and sand. 

But upon further inspection, their fate was sealed the moment he stepped beyond the lip and saw three sets of tracks compacted over their own, two larger, one smaller and painfully familiar where one little foot dragged slightly heavier behind the other; and for a blinding, feral little while it felt like being stolen from. Twisted in his gut like hunger, but for flesh and blood and repayment for a debt long overdue. His reputation across the wasteland had been a righteously earned one and fuck if it had been a terribly long time since he’d been given a proper reason to demonstrate. 

Guilty as charged he mentally slithered to himself as he clicked his tongue to Dogmeat.

“Track.” He commanded.

And track they did. 

Lucy had already suspected it was a branch of the Brotherhood, but something about this one seemed wrong. Max had told her that the faction’s purpose was to keep control of the world placed safely in the correct hands and to dispense justice accordingly, but she had come to learn since then that the thinnest slice of power could turn even the gentlest hands into savage weapons. Proven further to her from the moment she’d unwillingly arrived at the military compound. 

When they’d presented her like an offering to the High Elder there was no energy or desire left within her to people-please through it, earning herself a wicked slap across the mouth for the lack of effort. And it was the taste of her own blood that sealed her resolve.

The prison cell they threw her in had remained locked for all of about forty minutes before she’d successfully picked it open. Cooper had taught and critiqued her harshly in the skill ever since they’d started scavenging together and she could still hear the “easy vaultie, lock pickin’s a delicate fuckin’ artform” whispered in her ear every time the pin had slipped wrong against the tumblers. But she was getting better at it and the lessons only continued to prove invaluable. She would never be trapped behind a locked door again.

Even so, Lucy waited for the cover of nightfall. 

The compound itself felt hastily built inside of a rundown hanger, housing a few of the flying machines she’d seen leaving Filly and a handful of younger men that could nearly be clones of one another, apart from a few dull distinct features here and there. Most of them had already turned in to their barracks for the night, leaving the common areas silent and all but empty.

She just had to make it through the mess hall, past the kitchens, and out the back of the hanger doors. The Brother’s who had captured her had cut around a small bed of swampy tree cover to get her here and if she could just make it that far back, even their fancy tech wouldn’t be able to follow her through the thick mud. 

And she felt the absence of her own fancy tech around her arm like the loss of a limb. 

Lucy kept low, ducking under cabinets topped with various weapons and explosives and things that shined, and a freshly trained part of her wanted to collect everything she could carry in her arms before she made a quick exit, but there in the corner of the shelf, right before her eyes, tucked cozily between an empty gin bottle and a broken desk lamp, was a blonde haired bobblehead staring back at her. The kind smile and thumbs-up salute asked her to do the right thing. Tried to convince her that maybe, just maybe, Max was right. Maybe she’d just been dealt with a few bad apples and these weapons actually were being put to good use and helping to better the world for those without the power to do so themselves. 

And just as the thought was beginning to settle, forced and skewed in her tired mind, it was deemed utter bullshit as a quick burst of movement near her side led her to stare up and into a pair of assault rifle barrels for the second time in less than twenty-four hours. The High Elder who centered them, a dark robed middle aged man with dusky bronzed skin and tired eyes, wrenched her up from her haunches by the scruff of her vault suit. 

“What a waste of ambition,” he scowled, shaking his head faintly at the notion as if truly reproached. His hold went lax as she rose fully to her feet and he loomed before her. “Final chance citizen." He warned. "What happened to our Brothers in the vault?” 

Lucy relaxed her shoulders in submission, already giving him all the information she knew and accepting the fact that it wasn’t ever going to be enough. That he'd already made a decision long before she'd escaped her cell. She drew a long breath through her nose in a feigned attempt to try once more and bolted, putting her agility training to use as she weaved through and over the appliances of the kitchen and finally out the rear into the crisp night air. 

Bullets ricochet off metal behind her, loud and echoing, as she cut a curved pattern in the direction of where she hoped she remembered the tree line being. The waning moon overhead cast just enough light to see her footfalls, a few feet ahead of her at most but nothing more, and she automatically lifted her arm to check her Pip Boy again before remembering it wasn’t there.

Lucy ran and ran, kicking up dust and pleading to the stars for a glimpse of the woods as her lungs began to ache.

And then she heard it, cutting over the layered gunfire behind her like a bright burst of salvation. 

A dog barked ahead in the blackness.

She adjusted her course to make a beeline in the direction it’d come from, boots slipping through the loose sand as she sprinted harder, and finally, finally she spotted real, actual salvation in the form of a moon draped cowboy, his trusted canine companion at his heels. He wore the darkness around him like a second cloak, the pale light from above reaching just beneath his hat and glowing like wrath in his eyes, molten hot and fanning only brighter as she grew nearer. The phantom like shadow of his duster billowed out behind him in the night, skewing the lines of where he ended and it began, and again, she was reminded of a scene in a movie, but of the ones that would have once left her with nightmares in the late hours of evening instead of the relief the sight now doused thick through her straining muscles.

And when Lucy fell against his chest, panting hard and glossed with sweat, he caught her with one arm around the small of her back in a hold she could only describe as possessive, his other hand already firm around the grip of his gun, unholstered and aimed over her shoulder. 

His eyes turned down to her, raking over every inch of exposed skin above the collar of her vault suit. They paused over her split lip, softening with something too near to regret to be correct before hardening just as quickly into a frenzy she’d only ever seen in the eyes of ghouls past saving. 

“What,” he released her slow to tilt her face up higher and into the light, “the fuck happened to you, sweetheart.” And the moniker dripped from him like the moonlight, free of its usual scorn.

He was entirely too unconcerned about the encroaching danger, his gun still pointed resolutely over her, but his focus was wholly consumed by the blood sliding hot down her chin. His eyes trailed a languid path down and back up it, to her lips, then her eyes. And something about the starlight sparking in his own - the burning ire still there, fiercely dancing with a growing concern for what had to be her sake and nothing else; like he absolutely needed her to answer the question, like the erratic gunfire behind her was nothing more than rolling thunder in the distance - was beautiful.

“Brotherhood,” she gasped, pressing a palm against his chest to catch herself. “Three of them.” She confirmed and he nodded down at her as if he’d already made the connection himself.

"Figured as much." 

But then his jaw set. Dogmeat growled. And Lucy was promptly shoved behind him.

“Why don’t we all just take a big breath, nice and slow,” Cooper demonstrated to the darkness, free hand across his chest while simultaneously cocking the hammer of his pistol, “and see how much better we all feel afterward, hm?” He hummed, and it dripped with that sweet taunting tang that had Lucy wide eyed and searching over his shoulder. 

“Quiet ghoul,” one of the two recruits cursed out as they approached first, close enough now that even Lucy could see the beginnings of their shapes. The silhouettes of their raised guns. “That woman is under the detainment of the Brotherhood and will be returning with us.”

“Or- or we will be forced to take action.” The other added, younger and unsure, as if he hadn’t had time to fully browse over his conscription script on the way here.

“Like hell.” Cooper said simply, almost polite, and Lucy pressed what she hoped was a consoling hand against the back of his left arm because all she wanted at that moment was for them to leave. To get back on the trail with him and far away from here... 

Until the High Elder appeared and Lucy's split lip curled in revulsion. Cooper's aim shifted with her attention.

“She is still facing trial for crimes committed against us.” The Elder spoke in that greater than thou tone he possessed and her fingers tightened into the leather of Cooper’s trench coat as rage rose hot and sudden in her throat. "Interfering in a civil matter is against the laws of the new land. Which don't account for ghouls I might add."

And Lucy fucking snapped.

“Civil?! There wasn't even a real trial, just punishment.” She spat, moving a step out to the side to send the leader of the brainwash brigade a proper glare. Their weapons ticked over to her and Cooper shifted again on his feet. “You cowards hide in your metal suits while the world you claim to protect goes to shit." Lucy continued. "Then you beat on the innocent like it’s justified.” And she wiped some of the blood from her mouth with the back of her hand as proof, holding it out as if in offering. But Cooper moved firmly back between them and spoke up before she could press on.

“Ya know, I think she might be onto somethin’.” He pondered aloud, successfully recapturing their attention with the renewed fervor of his tone. He acknowledged each of the three men with the short rise and drop of his pistol barrel and Lucy knew from witnessing firsthand that, in a truly fucked up sense, he was playing with his food. This time though, she was partially responsible, having been the one to sign their death sentence the very moment he'd made the connection, her fresh blood darkening his eyes. “Back in my day,” Cooper goaded on, tipping his head to the side in memoriam, “us boy scouts were taught some manners alongside the copious amounts of bullshit. And I gotta say I am truly, deeply disappointed in what ya’ll’ve become since then. Shame, really.”

Two shots fired out very nearly in unison, both gun-wielding recruits falling to the ground to choke on their new lack of lungs. And almost immediately the Elder showed his true colors, clear as day in his immediate, pleading cowardice, that he’d made the critical mistake of not bringing along a weapon of his own, too trusting still in barely-adult boys to continue carrying out his dirty work. 

Cooper holstered his own pistol deliberately, slow and languorous as he drew his hunting knife from its sheath instead and kicked the Elder hard between the apex of his thighs. Using the man's forward momentum, Cooper shoved him the rest of the way flat onto his belly and ground a knee down between his shoulder blades with a growl. 

Then he stilled and looked right up at her. Knelt amidst the gore spread all around her feet as if he aimed to return the earlier offer of her blood with something a bit more permanent, an undead executioner, bowed and in wait for his orders. And when she didn’t move, didn’t so much as blink, he took one last look at her mouth and proceeded to unburden the Elder of his hands, the serrated edge of his blade sawing slow and sloppy through marrow and bone as pained screams bellowed out into the open, uncaring wasteland. 

And this was what justice actually was, Lucy decided, watching transfixed as a corrupted person was absolved of their power by a being corrupted because of it. Equal and unprejudiced. Swift and fair. 

“What a waste, indeed.” She nodded, recalling the Elder’s words to her earlier just as Cooper finished the lesson with a deep slit across the man’s wrinkled throat. And as always, she watched and learned until there was nothing left to gain from it.

Then Cooper rose to his feet in a fluid motion, dropped his bloodied knife carelessly into the dirt and descended upon her, his mouth crashing painfully hard against the slit across her lower lip. He kissed her like he spoke to her, rude and rough and overwhelming, as he walked her backwards until her spine pressed flush against the rigid trunk of a tree. And Lucy couldn’t stop the gasp against his mouth. She had been so fucking close to reaching the woods that the sudden awareness of it, right now, while being devoured by a ghoul as if he starved for only the curve of her mouth left her feeling like something cracked irreparably in her brain. So she chased the heady sensation and kissed him back, curling the lapels of his coat in a white knuckle grip to hold him closer and let him take as he needed. 

Gore stained hands gripped tight over either of her hips, sliding too easily up along the curve of her waist, and stilling again to press deep between the lines of her ribs as his lips dipped just beneath hers to kiss the blood from her chin and neck, and when she lifted her head obediently to oblige him, a sound tore from his chest that she’d never heard before, deep and pained and wanting, but the growl it steadily cascaded into had her pressing her palms insistently against his chest just incase he actually was about to start eating her. 

He relented with a scowl, drawing back just enough to look her in the eye, and the expression in his was wild. 

“Listen to me,” he began, strained, drawing air into his lungs as if convinced he’d drowned and fought to cling to life, all the while looking at her as if she’d been the one to hold him under. His hand curled light against her throat, an anchoring weight as she begun to grow unsteady on her feet, and he merely held her there as she too fought for her own breath. “I gotta go clean out the hive or else they’ll just keep comin’.” Cooper paused, golden eyes darting across her features like he was unsure of which one to focus on. “But when I get back, you are never ,” and he re-bristled, “never leavin’ my sight again, you understand me?” 

And Lucy, adrenaline drunk and descending into something not unlike shock, only stared back at him brazenly, lips swollen and throbbing.

“Now who gives too much of a fuck?" She asked looking past him, and Cooper, to his credit, ignored the venomless jab in favor of grabbing her arm up to latch her Pip Boy securely around her wrist. Then looped the harness of her gun holster across her middle and drew the buckle tight before securing it there. 

“Stay put.” He commanded, directed down to Dogmeat at his heels, but she was unable to go on much farther right now even if she wanted to. 

Lucy had just begun to doze where she rested in wait at the base of the tree, Dogmeat a soft, warm comfort against her thigh, as the distant explosion sent the Brotherhood compound up in all consuming flame. She watched, sated, as the plume curled high and bright into the night sky.

And it felt a lot like power. 

Chapter Text

A nuclear blast, and the subsequent fallout, will have many adverse effects on life as we know it.
Intensive prolonged radioactive exposure may transform those above ground into decrepit, rotting, beings, that have lost their ability to reason.
They will likely be without manners, and quick to anger.
Your agility can help you out in these difficult moments.

Cooper Howard would have never considered himself to be a possessive man. 

An asshole, sure, on occasion before the burns and flaying. A loving father once. A doting, devoted sack of sap husband as well. Nurturing, he liked to think, where it counted; in the way one would care for a beloved pet or a sweat-fed garden, the only goal being to watch them grow and flourish without need for much else in repayment.

But he had discovered more about himself since that night with Lucy at the compound and over the last few weeks than in over two fucking decades, thanks mostly to the copious amounts of drugs he’d grown real good at earning to drown any and all self reflection away. But also because if he looked or even thought too long about everything he’d done and the things he would still be willing to do, he couldn’t be sure there’d be anyone left alive to dig him up from a second shallow grave. And it had been going so goddamn splendidly until Lucy, pale faced and bloodied, dark hair flowing out long behind her like a mourning veil, had run back to him, quite fucking literally into his arms, fitting against him too well and looking at him as if he’d hung the stars that shone in her panicked eyes. Even after he'd kissed her.

Not even the shittiest whiskey would drown away the taste of her mouth, a heady mix of stale moonshine and her own hot blood, and with every drink closer to what should have been a semblance of tranquility, he already knew it was a high he was likely never to reach again. Should’ve never reached for the first time… fuckin' dumbass. 

Cooper now sat at a splintering wooden table in a mongrel infested bar, his back close against the wall. The air was thick with smoke and the foul smell of rot, and he watched Lucy through it from over the rim of his glass as she sweetened up the barkeep and a few other miscreants at the counter across the room. He could make a great deal of caps off the sheer amount of open bounties in the establishment, but right now the information they could possibly provide would ideally prove much more valuable. They’d arrived separately at his suggestion, Lucy first, a fresh-eyed placating front, to follow the rumors they’d been trailing of a meched-up smoothskin with a weeping gash across his cheek passing through the back water outpost they now found themselves in. A place where a pure looking vault dweller would shine through the piss and shit like a honing beacon. But he knew better now. And just as Cooper had hoped, they flocked like lambs to slaughter and he would never again be far behind. 

Had she been born at the right time, Lucy could have been a Hollywood star with her feinted, sharp toothed smiles and soft hands on shoulders as she bent the room to her will, and it was one of her few survival skills that he could take no credit for, developing it like a weapon all on her own. He too studied her closely, hat dipped low so as not to be recognized. And every few minutes she would glance over to him as if to check in. To make sure he was still sitting there, watching. It left him wondering if the pull she had on those around her was even done on purpose or if it came as naturally as the mask she wore while away from him. Because he could read the foul intentions like the lines of a book in the eyes of everyone before him. Apart from hers. 

Then she said something to the man closest to her with a wicked smile. Leaned her elbow against the bar, slow and easy to accentuate her curves. Winked a blue eye at the other guy further to his right. One solid shove between two lustful suitors. And the fists started flying. 

Cooper grinned and shot down the last of his drink. 

It took all of about five seconds for the full on brawl to break out, glasses being shattered over skulls and stools flying across the air in wild thrown arches, and Lucy stood still, back to the bar, looking at only him with that your turn look, a calm eye in the storm as Cooper shoved through the madness to drag the flabbergasted barkeep away and into the back room for an interrogation proper. 

Just gunna talk it out, he’d promised her well before, still in the planning stage. Unless he says some shit I don’t like. 

And whether she had taken him at his word or not, Lucy had only grinned.

Cooper tells her what he knows about his family. 

He’d had absolutely no intention to. Not even an inkling of the desire. But she’d sat across from him on the floor that night, watching attentively as he used his own pistol to show her how to take hers apart for cleaning. Then slid right up beside him and pressed her shoulder against his to 'see better’ as he got down to the slide, and pins, and finer bits. 

Then she’d looked at him like he was Cooper Howard again, mixed with that too-knowing sharpness that'd taken to her eyes of late, and he was starting to wonder if she did that on purpose too.

She'd only had to ask.

The barkeep’s information led them to the outskirts of Jacobstown, Nevada. 

From where they stood on the steep embankment of the cliffside, Lucy could just make out the distant hazy towers of what Cooper claimed was the New Vegas skyline, and something like resolution burned bright in her belly. 

Her mind had been buzzing since they’d caught her father’s fresh trail, the inevitability of coming face to face with him again growing nearer every day, and all she kept seeing was the faint memory of her so very alive mother’s face fading and rotting before her eyes into the empty shell Lucy would carry with her in her mind forever. And it was still so fucking unfair.

“I think I’m going to kill my dad.” Lucy’d said to the breeze and Cooper had been in an even fouler mood than usual ever since. 

“You ain’t doin’ shit till I get my answers,” he fumed later in the dark safety of another rundown shack, the same rotten wood walls and molded ceilings that were beginning to feel like their own personal sanctuaries. “And besides, puttin’ a bullet in em ain’t gunna change the past girl.” He said, bolting the door, and the thick weight of his judgment struck her wrong, especially now with all she knew. And the fighting still came easier than the truth.

“Is that what you were doing when you shot him in the face?” She asked. “Trying to change the past?”

He rounded on her with a growl. “Don’t start.” And she knew she was reaching for buttons she had no right to push. Not with how vulnerable he’d been when he’d unearthed them to her, divulging his once wife’s betrayal and the chain of sorrow it’d unleashed. She could almost relate. But it’s not like he would have given a shit had the roles been reversed. 

“I think I will,” Lucy said. “You can’t just -” kill for me her mind prompted unbidden and she faltered, reminding her again as it had too often that he killed for me, “just kiss me one day then talk to me like I’m a child the next.” 

“Oh can’t I now?” Cooper leered, closing in. 

“No, you can’t!” She shook, holding her ground. “You’re not the only one who lost people so quit acting like you are. At least you have a chance of getting them back because…” and she watched in a perplexed haze as he took a final, dangerous step closer to remove his gloves in the faint streaks of light just before her, tugging them by the black fingertips until they were bared. He held his right hand up for her to see. The skin of his first finger was paler against the scarred skin of the others, smaller and softer, and recognition dropped like a stone in her gut, roiled and dizzying. She remembered the way his tasted. “...I don’t.”

“Don’t flatter yourself sweetie,” he drawled, curling and straightening her once finger right in front of her eyes. “And don’t make the mistake of thinkin’ I give a shit about the past,” he sneered, leaning into her space like he always did when she was right. “I just wanna be the one to put the bullet in ole Hanky’s brain myself.” He tilted his head and looked at her like one of those studies he’d talked about. Like she was something to be sliced open and solved. “It ain’t often I miss.” 

With how close he'd grown, she could still smell the faint scent of smoke that clung to his clothes. Could still feel the heat of the flame as it rose high into the night sky. The way he’d looked at her… Killed for me, her mind confirmed once more, sated. Certain now that he was going to try to do so again. And she burned.

Lucy lunged at him. 

Cooper was braced for the attack.

What he had not expected was the way Lucy kissed him, forceful and hungry like she’d been doing nothing but thinking of the first one too, and it made not a single goddamn lick of sense. She pushed against him, hands insistent on his shoulders, but he stood firm, unmoving, waiting for the other shoe to drop. For a knife to twist between his ribs or a mocking glare when she drew back to meet his eye, but all he saw in hers were untamed seas, violent and beckoning. 

“I am so fucking tired of thinking about my father,” she hissed, fumbling with the buckles of his belts and successfully unlatching his gun holster with those nimble fucking fingers of hers before he got enough of his wits about him to reach down and still her hands, his own wrapping firm around her wrists, and her butter soft skin beneath his calloused palms was like touching a bit of nirvana. “Please Cooper,” she begged soft and pretty, and he could only guess that the radiation was eating away at her brain worse than he’d thought. 

“The hell’s gotten into you girl?” He asked, incensed, pushing her hands down and away from him. “One fuck up and you think I’m some fuck toy to grind on whenever daddy’s got ya down? Bit sad ain’t it, sweetheart?”

“Lucy.” She snarled right back at him. “My name is Lucy. And the only sad one here is you.” She shoved him across the shoulders again with a rough twist of her torso, blue eyes nearly glowing feral and enflamed, and Cooper had never seen anything more beautiful in his goddamned life. “I saw the way you looked at me in the bar. You hated it,” she said and he grimaced. Perception and its double edged fuckin’ blade. “Can’t keep your filthy fucking hands off me for months and now you’re too much of a coward to do anything about it.”

It was not often anymore that Cooper was provoked by a fearless opponent and the novelty rose a grin to his mouth, slow and scathing, centuries of built up poison rage urging him to move and show her just how much of a mistake she was making, poking the proverbial bull. To shut her the fuck up permanently by leaving her worn and screamed out, limp across the floor. But that other pathetic voice in his head, the one that was starting to sound a bit too much like her, reminded him of just why it would not be in his best interest. How it would push him over a line he wasn’t sure he could come back from again. 

It had almost won out until Lucy’s brow lifted in the stretching silence, a mean hearted sneer of her own tainting her lush lips. She stuck her thumb up in the air between them with a single shallow nod. “Okey dokey then,” she said. “Loud and clear.” 

And he held it together for a second longer, watching the rounding of her eyes as the low aimed taunt struck home deep in his gut and silenced every ounce of his better judgment. “Okay, Lucy,” he growled, and she gasped as he spun her quick to shove her face first against the wall. He held her there with his body, hand splayed heavy across the back of her neck and Lucy’s whole being grew lax beneath it. His other hand gripped her ponytail, turning her neck just enough to see the side of her face and the expression there left him wondering who exactly was winning. It was always the fucking goody girls. “Ah, I see. You get me all wound up because you fuckin’ like it.” He hissed against her ear, giving her entire frame a violent shake with both hands. “And I’m the filthy one.”  

Lucy only confirmed by shifting far enough back from the wall to fumble over the zipper of her vault suit and, if this was actually happening, it was a long awaited pleasure he would not be robbed of. Not after the hundreds of ways he’d pictured himself relieving it from her skin. He shoved her hands away, clawing at the metal himself, every bit a savage ghoul, as he faced her and peeled the leather from her shoulders and down her hips, pausing just long enough to not rip her feet out from under her, her small hand steadying herself against his shoulder as he discarded the offending garment into the darkest corner of the room. 

And then there was just Lucy left standing before him, paler where the suit once was than what had baked beneath the sun. Hair falling scattered around her shoulders from the loose tie where his hand had dipped and distressed it. A tiny white tank top and matching panties. “Take em off,” he nodded forward, and she complied as if she still stood down range of his revolver. 

It felt, to him, like standing on a precipice, the last of her layers falling to the ground around her feet in a halo of white. Like wanting to dive off the edge into an abyss that offered everything he ever wanted, while also wanting to climb up and out and far far away. 

But then she was on him again, her naked body so soft and so alive, flush against his chest, hands digging beneath his coat to clasp into the thinner material of the worn shirt over his ribs and holding onto him like it would pain her to let him go. 

And she fucking won.

He dropped his hat to the ground, tore the ribbon from her hair, and sunk his hand back into the depths of its softness. She tasted like sweat and salvation and he sampled every part of her he could, nipping down the side of her throat, the juncture of her shoulder, dipping lower to graze his teeth over the palatable swell of her breasts, and the way she moaned at the attention made him want to bury himself there beneath her skin, to tear a home into the cavity of her chest and never be freed from it again.

“Harder,” she gasped above him, dull nails dragging against the back of his neck. I can’t, he wanted to curse back, because if he did he wasn’t sure he’d be able to stop, and he was anything but a goddamn quitter. “Be rough with me like you used to,” she asked again of him then, as if she knew, as if it was nothing more than a normal fucking suggestion, and it stilled him over her skin like death. “I can take it. I miss it.” She breathed, drawing his hand into hers to press the one with her own fucking finger attached against the yeilding flesh of her throat, heart racing beneath her skin, and at her command it was as if he were a marine again, bound and willing to serve. 

“You’re fuckin’ insane, you know that?” He warned, breathless.

Pot, kettle.

Then he kissed her to stop her from saying any more, certain it would be the death of him. Put his weight against his hand and sunk his teeth back into the shallow divots already along her shoulder and it was the release of tension in the muscle there that locked his jaw. And that drive to destroy was still there, a burning desire to gnaw and dive further and further into the blood that pooled in his mouth, but he wasn’t sure if he could wake up without the heat of her beside him anymore. Looked forward to the wavering of her eyes in the morning sunlight when she realized the mistakes they were making now. The way his marks would age across her skin before he had to let her go…

And though Cooper Howard would have once never considered himself to be a possessive man, he pressed her down to ground beneath him and took everything she asked him to, deep into the late hours of the night. Memorized her breathy gasps and pretty moans and the sound of his name on her lips like a prayer as he dug his boots against the grain and gave her everything he had left. Every ounce of his own anguish. And he waited for her to break beneath it. For realization to come crashing down around them like the rest of the world. For his own guilt to creep around what was left of his mangled heart and put it all to an end…

But it didn’t.

And later he watched through the rolling smoke of a dwindling cigarette as the hand-shaped welts rose and set across her throat and hips and thighs in the faint morning light where she still slept boneless against his side, and he realized then that, just maybe, blue really was her color. 

Chapter Text

The difference between whether you live or die in the
post-nuclear world may depend on the flip of a coin.
Luck is a mysterious source of curiosity. See here?
Your well-placed shot may not always do the trick.
If Lady Luck favors you though, you'll find those critical moments a breeze.

The deathclaw had come out of nowhere.

Lucy had seen the remains they’d left behind a few times during their travels and heard the roughly strewn lectures about just how thoroughly the name was earned, (Cooper having gave in after only a few weeks worth of questions about the ragged scars across his ear), but it did absolutely nothing to prepare her for the terror of walking up on one up close. Even on all fours it towered over them, scenting their approach through the underbrush in complete silence and rearing up in a buckled hunch to its hind legs with a deafening roar. The monster’s great horns curled wide on either side of its crown like the mythical beasts she would once have read aloud about to the children in her classroom, attempting to promote a sense of creativity in their ever inquisitive minds, but now the behemoth’s very real jagged teeth and razor sharp claws froze her in her tracks as she gaped up at it.

She heard the quick thump thump of Cooper’s pistol go off beside her before a sharply ordered: 

“Run.”

The pair of explosive shots only seemed to piss the deathclaw off further and Lucy’s last sight of it before the word registered in her ears was it walking on two legs in Cooper’s direction with a very much too human-like gait, reminding her of the gulper in a way that twisted her stomach even more now after her rousing time in vault four. She turned and sprinted, pushing her sore muscles forward and driving her soles into the sand to get as far away as fast as possible as shots kept cutting through the air behind her. 

Lucy looked back just as it swung a gigantic set of claws down at Dogmeat’s advances. The dog dodged smartly to the side and lunged for its ankle just in time to miss being minced. Lucy stopped to unholster her own pistol, lined up the iron sights, and fired at the beast’s massive paw. Cooper matched her shot for shot over his shoulder as he sped toward her, maneuvering quick through the desert’s hindrances like they were extensions of his own boots. The chorus of gunfire earned the deathclaw’s full attention and the ground trembled beneath her feet as the great beast honed in and took chase. 

“Belly!” Cooper shouted the reminder near her side, holstering his revolver mid stride to unwind his lasso between his hands, and something about observing his mastery of the skill while now knowing how those same hands felt against every inch of her skin was fascinating. A thought to be tucked away and explored when their lives were a little less in danger. So she blinked the dust and distractions from her eyes and watched between paces as he spun the lasso over his head and looped it effortlessly around one of the deathclaw’s devilesque horns. At the success, Cooper planted his feet, wound the rope tight around his knuckles, and pulled, the beast rocking off center just a bit from its hellbent trajectory. But it only fell to all fours to correct itself, snarling at the interruption and Lucy swore she could taste her own heartbeat in the back of her throat as it galloped at them once more, enlivened.

The monster used Cooper’s own plan against him, reaching him first where he still wrangled against the rope for control and Lucy watched, stunned still, as he was backhanded across the side of the head and sent flying face first into a dune of sand. The muffled curses she heard let loose into the dirt let her know he still breathed and with the confirmation she sprung back into action. 

Lucy fired another shot into the side of the monster’s ribs, made open and available to her as it turned to finish the job on Cooper, and when the first shot didn’t work as a worthy distraction she added three more in quick succession for good measure. On the fourth pull of the trigger the cylinder clicked empty. 

“Hey - hey over here!” She screamed, throat raw, waving her arms in the air as if to take flight, and Dogmeat seemed to sense the rising hysteria, aiding by repeating a pattern of barking, biting, and tearing and Lucy used the brief moment of chaos to shakily reload her gun. Until a pair of murderous too-intelligent eyes finally focused intently, entirely on her. 

“That’s right, c’mon.” She beckoned, stepping back and squaring her shoulders, because if this was where it ended, then so be it. Cooper had saved her life more times than she could count now and their golden rule was steadily diluting to unlacquered, jaundiced yellow. On a more selfish note, not having to look her own father in the eye or think ever again about the thousands of senseless deaths caused by his need for control was almost equally as compelling. Cooper would still have his chance at his answers and the shot he didn’t want her to take. And in the split second she had to react, it was the best way she could think of to repay him. 

Just as quickly, she was being charged, a growing heat at the back of her neck where razor edged teeth spat and snapped in the air just behind her, rancid breath blowing hot through her billowing hair… Until she heard a strangled yelp then a thundering crack as the beast fell to its side across the ground near her heels. In the borrowed time, Cooper had anchored the rope around a decaying tree trunk and sat, back sagging in pain against it, clutching the end of the rope with such a force that it nearly pulled his hands over and behind his shoulder. 

The deathclaw flailed against its binding, kicking up a copper dust cloud in the air. Lucy squinted and took aim. It took only seconds for the beast to maneuver just so, its spine uncurling flat against the dirt in its struggle, and Lucy unloaded her clip into its soft underbelly, shot after shot, even long after the corpse had finally withered and gone still. 

Dogmeat confirmed the job done by instantly starting in on her dinner and Lucy ran with all she had left to slide into a kneel at Cooper’s side.

“We did it!” Lucy boasted between ragged breaths, drawing his face up between her hands to scope out the damage and it was legion. His browline was busted open, oozing near black blood down the bridge of his decayed nose and beneath the rims of distant eyes. His jaw was dislocated, hanging wrongly off to the left of his usually symmetrical face. A trait considered handsome statistically, when in the pursuit of favorable offspring, but not when paired with the scars or burns or the weight of the world. Lucy had never cared for statistics. “Cooper, did you see that? We killed it. Hey -” she gave him a small shake, shifted him to a more secure position against the tree, and slowly he seemed to come back to himself, eyes clearing and focusing on her face. His gaze hardened. His skewed lips tried to scowl. There he was. And the creeping dread in her belly finally let up some.

“I know this is going to be an impossible ask,” she said, resting her fingertips lightly on either side of his jaw and walking them until they met the hinges. “But don’t talk for a second. I was taught how to fix this in medical training. Open.” She instructed and at first he just stared at her, stubborn or still shaken she couldn’t know. But she could guess. “You can cuss me when I’m done, I promise.” And with the huff of air from his nasal cavity, she knew he was just itching to have his mouth back.

He conceded, slowly relaxing and opening his jaw until, with just the right amount of pressure, she felt the bone shift back into place with a satisfying pop under her careful ministrations.

“I can set my own damn jaw.” Cooper groaned, almost as soon as it was back in place. 

It made her smile. Lucy let him go and settled onto her calves.

“Ya, but you didn’t have to.”

“Why the hell didn’t you keep runnin’?” He asked, spitting blood to the ground beside him and looking her over while he rubbed at the side of his mouth. And though he was thankfully still alive and well enough to talk shit again till the sun set, much like the man, his eyes never lied. The concern there was touching.

“I’m fine Cooper. Thanks to you.” She said, before taking offense. “Do you really still think that low of me?” Lucy unwound the bit of rope from around his still clenched fists resting lax in his lap and slowly they opened at her coaxing. His effort had tore straight through his gloves, shredding the skin in thick lines across the meat of his palms and the backs of his knuckles. Lucy ran the tip of her finger along them, down the digit that had once been her own, and met his eye again. “You got us this far. What kind of partner would I be if I let you get eaten before the job’s done.” 

The new title tightened his expression. He leaned his head back against the tree trunk.

“Partners huh?” He looked over to Dogmeat, bloody jawed and oblivious in her own personal heaven. “Partners she says, after lettin’ me get my ass handed to me on a sliver fuckin’ platter.” And with the bit of light that returned to his eyes, Lucy felt as if she’d said the first right thing to him since they’d met. “And no,” he added soft a moment later, swiping a hand across his battered forehead and looking past her. “I don’t.”

“Well if you’ve decided then so have I.” Lucy agreed easily, because she’d known that Cooper hadn’t really hated her for a debatably long time, try as he might’ve, but now she had the skills and sense and delicious lingering aches and the Radaway needle tracks to prove it. She stood to retrieve his hat from the dirt, dusted it off and dropped it crooked on his head. “Yeah. Partners.” Lucy nodded, liking the sound of it, and reached out a hand to him. “Now let’s get you cleaned up, you look like shit.”

The sun hung low against the dotted decaying ruins that lined the wasteland horizon. They could have traveled another half dozen miles before they lost the light, but Cooper had decided them done for the day in the first somewhat protected hole in the wall they’d come across. 

Lucy basked near the ring of their makeshift campfire and helped Cooper stitch up the gash that cut between where his eye brows should've been. He glared with the indignation of a petulant child up at her steady hands. Then she’d dug the cleanest roll of synthetic cotton she could find from her pack and wrapped up the jagged rope burns around each of his own. Held the inhaler of meds to his mouth where he tried but couldn’t clutch it securely thanks to the thorough bandaging. And just like the course of the last few nights, with an unstoppable pull not unlike gravity, he had drawn her close to him and refused to let go.

Lucy had tasted small bites of power with Cooper at her side as they’d conquered together every obstacle the wasteland could hurl at them thus far, but never had she felt so full with it as when she sat astride him, a brazen queen usurping a mad king of his throne simply by turning him into one.

“You may actually be the death of me.” He said, lying back against the ground and watching her with a threatening darkness to his eyes that had her fingers pressing down firmer over the growing bulge between them. “Radiation and raiders and fuck all else ain’t got nothin’ on those goddamn hands.” He hissed, and she studied his every reaction to them, learning him in the same way she was still discovering herself. 

“Don’t go sweet on me now, Coop.” Lucy said, rising just long enough to shed her layers, freeing him from the confines of his fly and settling back down over him, inch by unhurried inch, until he struck something deep within her that felt like home. 

He looked up at her in reverence like he always did after the suit came off, the dark ether of his eyes lingering over the fading marks on her body that nearly matched in the shadows, until they stopped at the puckered scar just over her hip bone. A wound all of her own to carry for trusting too quickly and always looking for the best in people. For still having hope that they would do the right thing… She’d answered him truthfully the first time he’d asked about it, walls up and ready for the insults to fly, but he’d only ghosted his fingertips along it the way he still did now.

“I need you to promise me somethin’.” Cooper said nearly through his teeth, hands falling to claw into the meat of her thighs as Lucy drove her knees into the ground and began to roll her hips against him. “No matter what happens when we hit New Vegas, you can’t go quiet on me again.” He slid a finger past her lips, hooking it over her bottom teeth to draw her face down close to his, her mouth hovering an inch over his own. “Not like after the observatory,” he shook his head and she watched the firelight dance in his eyes. “Not like New Reno… Not fuckin’ ever.” He growled, bucking his hips and making her moan around his finger as his voice and cock collided at near the same spot inside of her. “Good girl,” he crooned, and she could already feel the rolling waves of her own pleasure beginning to flutter tight around him, threatening to spill over with a speed and intensity that only he and his honest to god meanness had ever drawn from her. 

She drew his spit slicked finger out from her mouth and pressed it down between them where she needed him most. 

“I thought you liked me quiet,” Lucy panted, grinding down harder as he circled and pressed and pushed her up and up and over, her orgasm crushing his hips between her quivering thighs, mouth gasping up at the stars above before she fell down flat against his chest as her own muscles failed her. His heartbeat raced against her ear and she fought a delirious laugh away from her mouth at recalling the first time she’d found it still beating. 

“Ya know, I thought I’d like you a lot of ways.” Cooper drawled in her hair, flipping her over into the dirt so quick and rough that the grains scratched and burned against the hypersensitive skin of her back. His bandaged hands came down on either side of her head to support his weight. His duster draped dark around them both like a battered shield away from the world. “But I gotta say darlin',” he smirked down at her, all teeth, and his eyes were filled to the brim with dark promise. “This is my favorite.” 

Lucy rolled her eyes and leaned up to kiss him, simply to shut him the fuck up.

The New Vegas skyline sprawled wide in front of his eyes and Cooper glared back at it, not having to suffer the displeasure of traversing such a densely populated municipality in a few blessed lifetimes. But they’d restocked on supplies and ammo since the deathclaw attack. His wounds had all but healed. He was ready.

Until he looked over to Lucy, who instead of surveying the city before her, stared fixedly at a toppled billboard half buried in the loose clay. Cooper Howard, movie star, sat atop his trusted steed, thumb up and encouraging those who cared to trust in Vault Tec to carry them safely through to the other side of the end of the world…

"I never knew you wore blue and yellow." Lucy said down to his past self. "The vault TVs were gray."

And he laughed. A throat splitting bark that rose from the pit of his stomach and echoed around them like he’d been off his meds for too long.

“What's so funny?” She asked distractedly, still staring down at the advertisement as if she’d lost something beneath it.

And he had no fucking clue what to say to her. No words that would put into context the pain he felt at seeing the hollowed out shell of himself that stuck up from the dirt. Or how badly he wanted to burn it and the whole city to the ground if it meant finishing what Vault Tec had started. So he went with the only excuse he could think of.

“My horse,” he started, near gasping for pained air as he pointed down at his fallen companion. “The one you kept askin' about... Her name was Sugarfoot.”

Then Lucy looked at him and smiled, the real, genuine one that lit up her features like a second burning sun and maybe there was still hope for him yet. “The fuck kinda name is Sugarfoot?” She asked in her mockingly best cowboy Cooper Howard impression and he was left rendered speechless once again, stupid and drowning and unable to move until she reached out her hand in search of his to pull him onward and forward. Always forward.

Her impression wasn’t half bad.