Chapter Text
I
He’d had enough time to figure out what kind of boss she was. The bad ones were usually bad from the start; he'd heard the deal offered by Ahzrukhal. He had wondered why it was so low, surely a servant of his loyalty was worth more than one life, but nevertheless, she didn't take it. She came back with the money and bought him fair and square. From there, she was in the middle.
Fair seemed to be the best way to describe her, really. She did things by the books, regardless of the accountant. She had visited Underworld multiple times after she refused Ahzrukhal’s alternate offer. A young woman of her pedigree had made a real splash, especially with Snowflake. Whenever he came to buy his Jet, he’d be buzzing about her more than his withdrawals. She was his head of real human hair, warm, talkative, and even better: fast-growing. Gossip about her tainted the air, it was even on the radio. Because of Three-Dog, he knew who she was long before she held his contract.
The girl was odd, either grew up in a vault or merked someone who had. Though, he hadn’t seen a more skilled Pip-Boy user in a long time. He knew she was tough, even with what little he’d seen of her. The day she recruited him was the same day they both became family friends of Reilly’s Rangers. They had the armor to prove it, though Reilly couldn’t find a helmet that fit him.
He still didn’t know a lot of things, though. Where did she come from? Who is the father she’s searching for? What are her goals for him? Why did she take him on to begin with? What’s with her and ghouls?
Though, to him, none of his questions mattered.
He got up, put on his old leather armor, and gently walked downstairs to be greeted by the robot and get breakfast. He remembered the basic orders she gave him when they walked in, “This is your home as much as it is mine, you have full reign of the food and weapons as long as you refill the fridge and replace the ammo you use. Get the caps out of my pack, don’t worry about paying. Do what you have to, eat whenever you’re hungry, but just clean up after yourself.”
So, he took to eating three meals per day and had a snack if he felt dizzy.
Like his previous mornings in Megaton, he cooked, ate, and cleaned up his breakfast in less than six minutes. The fridge looked a bit sparse, and he grabbed the old canvas bag.
He opened her door silently. She was twisted up in her blankets, a wash of fair skin and green fabric. He couldn’t help but list her vulnerable points in his head as he pulled the exact number of caps out of her bag.
Exposed chest, weapon at least five seconds from her hand, mobility obstructed by bedding, blind left side.
By now he was sure he would never use any of the information he subconsciously collected.
The sound of the front door closing pulled her from sleep. She blinked a few times before she remembered and reached for the eyepatch on her nightstand. After detangling herself from her blanket, she made her way to the bathroom and carried out the same morning routine she had in the vault. Pee, bathe, dry off, brush teeth, brush hair.
Since the Reilly’s Rangers job, she’d been taking things slow. Maybe it was because she wanted Charon to get acclimated, maybe because she’d been going really fast since Paradise Falls, maybe because she hit a wall in the search for her father.
“Project Purity", she mumbled to her reflection as she sat in the bath. Her father’s life’s work? Why didn’t she know about it? Why didn’t anyone tell her anything?
Pieces started to fit together when she picked her first wasteland lock and found her way into Moriarty’s terminal. She knew she wasn’t like everyone else. Too short, too reactive, better with screws than computer keys; a puzzle piece with only one wrong-shaped peg.
But until recently she felt just as wrong-shaped in the wastes. She remembered her first night here, sitting in Moriarty’s Saloon with all sorts of questions swimming in her head. Gob came out of the murk behind the bar as Moriarty stalked upstairs for the night, smiling and shit talking under his breath.
She looked up from her hands and saw nothing short of a nightmare. She visibly recoiled in shock.
He too flinched back a bit, and the two of them stared at each other like a dog seeing its reflection for the first time.
“Uh, smoothskin, do you need something? A drink, maybe? Anything? Anything at all?” He asked nervously.
She blinked a few times, and swallowed her shock before replying, “I- Um, yeah, may I have a drink?”
He looked like he was waiting for more, but she just stared back at him. “Wait... you're not going to hit me? Yell at me? Not even berate me a little bit?”
“Why would I do that?” She asked.
His brow furrowed. “You’re another Vault Dweller, aren’t you?”
She nodded.
“My name’s Gob. I’m a ghoul, Well, not all of us got the chance to hole up in a nice cushy Vault when the bombs fell. A bunch of us got stuck out here in the world and got a full-on blast of heat and radiation turned us into a pack of walking corpses. Near as I can tell, we age slower than you. A lot slower. There are even a few Ghouls that were alive during the war. Of course, with a face like ground Brahmin meat, you can imagine that folks don't take too kindly to us.” He explained.
“Oh. Are there a lot of you out in the wasteland?”
“Depends on where you go. There are such things as feral ghouls, the name tells you what you need to know. But in general, I’d say that you smoothskins outnumber ghouls like me.”
She went quiet and played with her thumbs a bit.
He bent down, pulled up a bottle of whiskey and a Nuka Cola, and poured her his simplest drink. “Mister Moriarty would have me charge forty, but I’ll give it to ya for thirty.”
She pulled out thirty dollars from her backpack, and Gob looked at her like she was stupid again. “You’ve got no clue, huh?”
“I know how to do basic math. This is thirty.” She said, gesturing at him with her money.
“Thirty caps, sweetheart,” He said, taking her money. “If you’ve got any more pre-war tender, give it here,” he added, counting out her change.
She handed him the rest of it, and he gave her back 192 caps in three rolls and some loose ones. “Cap rolls come in all different wraps and sizes; we tell ‘em apart by length. One hundred, fifty, and twenty-five.” He said, gesturing to each respectively. They were rolled up in different substances, one in aluminum, one in thin plastic, and one a mix of paper and cardboard. “If you’re a good barkeep, you can tell when they’re not real caps by weight. Don’t try to screw anyone, especially not Mister Moriarty.”
He pushed the drink toward her. She sipped it, focused hard on not recoiling from the albeit watered-down whiskey, and kept thinking.
“D-Don’t you tell Mister Moriarty I gave you a discount, okay?” He said, suddenly back to his previous apprehensiveness.
“As long as you don’t tell him that I broke into his terminal.” She replied quietly.
The ghoul’s eyes went big. “Fair enough, smoothskin.”
They got to talking, as she slowly drank her single whiskey and cola. Gob did a lot of listening and even smiled at one point when he talked about his adoptive mother Carol.
One thing he said stuck with her. She could hear it clearly in her head as she stared at her face in the still bathwater. “The Wasteland is a cruel mistress. She needs to take something from you before you can even think about conquering her.”