Chapter Text
They hadn’t spoken much in the first days after the observatory. Lucy trusted he preferred the silence. In any case, she had too much filling her thoughts to inspire bountiful conversation over the dry, rhythmic sound of her steps.
Trying to answer her questions about her home, family, and safety felt like stepping through a doorway only to find herself back where she started. Paradoxes and incomplete theories and the sight of her own back turning a corner at the end of a hallway. If she gave chase, would she find herself like Roman Janus, two faces locked impossibly toward both past and future?
Her sore feet and parched throat pull her attention back to more immediate concerns. Regularly scheduled treadmill cardio was far more meditative than squinting through high noon against miles of wasteland dust and wind. Walking! One problem at a time, she tells herself. One foot in front of the other! The Ghoul made it look easy. The dog made it look easier, especially when happily outpacing the group to intercept nuisance critters and catch herself dinner.
“If you’re determined to come along, you’d better keep pace. I won’t be slowing down for you.”
The desert glare is harsh enough to render the Ghoul a pulsing afterimage when Lucy blinks, a few yards behind him. He doesn’t look back at her, and Lucy doesn’t argue that she wasn’t exactly determined to shadow him—she’d been invited.
“Still back here! I’ll have surface legs as fast as yours in no time! You just wait…”
Lucy hopes that her words carry a dignified adventurer’s rasp that doesn’t quite betray how dry and strangled her throat feels. She’d cried a bit recently, more than was probably warranted by her limited water supply and the Ghoul’s patience. He had commented on it the first night they made camp, after all the confusion and anger and disbelief had become just a smidge overwhelming. With a deepened scowl, he had made himself clear—none of that would do her any good. It bothered him, Lucy could tell. Her lack of reply seemed to bother him more, and that had been satisfying enough to help her get to sleep that night.
The Ghoul keeps walking ahead of her.
For all his promises to hold Lucy to his pace, she knows he is moving slower than he would alone. She’s gotten the impression that ghouls need less water than she does—and yet he seems to know the exact moment along their trek Lucy starts daydreaming about impossible filters that can draw water from sand.
“We’re coming up on that old settlement. Hope you’re feeling lucky. I wouldn’t expect many people are still out there to trade with. Last time I passed through to collect a bounty, their well brought up more radroach legs than water.”
This time he looks back, mouth pulled into a tight smirk. Lucy is determined to smile through her disgust.
“Sounds like… water for me, dinner for you?”
They keep walking. The Ghoul sets a faster pace as sunset approaches and leads them to their destination shortly after nightfall. Lucy is tempted to run to the well as soon as she can see it clearly, but the Ghoul anticipates her.
“No rushing in.” He draws his revolver while Lucy scrambles for her canteen. She clears her throat. Even the dog moves more cautiously.
“Right. A deliberate approach.”
It was still an adjustment to think like a surface dweller, expecting trouble and desperate measures at every turn. She understood this world better now, but didn’t respond to it like the Ghoul or Max—they slipped so easily into tense postures, spotted threats in the distance so quickly. Lucy drew her weapon, imitating, learning. It felt terrible to assume the worst; it would save her life to assume the worst. Or at least prepare for it.
There are a couple scattered bodies near one of the settlement’s burned-out buildings, their guns nearby. Others lie in a group on the other side of the well. Lucy can’t make out too much detail from where she stands, but these deaths appear recent. Look for survivors, she thinks. If the Ghoul is looking for something to shoot, she’ll look for something to defuse.
And she finds it, bursting out of a charred door frame, gun pointed unsteadily in their direction, opaque brown bottle clutched at the neck. The man’s face is twisted, with a desperate cast that makes the dog snarl after the Ghoul’s posture changes and Lucy takes aim. The Ghoul will shoot now, the Ghoul will take care of this, and what a shame that there will be no time to wave, to make herself known, to strike a deal.
She braces herself for a burst of gunfire and holds her pistol grip firmly. The Ghoul doesn’t shoot. Lucy doesn’t breathe. The man in the door frame ignores Lucy to take stock of the Ghoul, who stands staring smugly with an aim that doesn’t waver. It is wasteland magic, wasteland telepathy when the stranger points his rifle at the ground. The Ghoul keeps position, the dog barks, Lucy flinches.
“Stay the fuck away from me and move on!” The haunted man slips back through the threshold, tucking his weapon under his arm and slamming the door. Lucy keeps staring, looking for movement through the structure’s broken windows. She holsters her gun, hears footsteps over crunching glass before there is silence. The Ghoul quietly pushes two more canteens into her hand, jerking his head toward the well.
“Quickly,” he says. “Check those bodies, too.”
If she were traveling with Max, Wilzig, or anyone else, she imagines they’d be able to share a moment of friendly relief. With the Ghoul, all she can muster is an awkward stare before cooperating, hurrying towards the water source. It’s better than how they started, she supposes.
“Just checking the well!” Lucy is compelled to announce herself, hoping the man will hear and realize he was right to avoid conflict. “We don’t want any trouble,” she continues, this time more quietly and distracted by the discovery of water—more abundant and less infested than the Ghoul had suggested. It isn’t clean, though, and she fights to keep from investigating its rad count. Without an alternative source, she doesn’t want to know. Not right now.
Lucy roughly filters the well water through a repurposed sock and fills each canteen to the brim. Remembering the dog’s happy panting and diligent tracking, she fills an extra tin can that she finds near one group of bodies. And for her second objective—looting corpses isn’t her favorite activity, but her expectations have changed quickly since leaving the vault. She finds mysterious chems, boxes of cigarettes and ammo that she pockets for their use and potential value. She leaves behind dead men’s keepsakes like watches and letters that sadden her to rifle through. Lucy can’t help but wonder what happened here, and hopes that the answers she is chasing down won’t get swallowed and burned up by the surface.
When she returns, the Ghoul has his back against a structure bordering the ruin’s outskirts.
“Take a look! I don’t recognize some of those chems.” She sets down her findings and the dog lifts her head off the Ghoul’s legs to drink the extra serving of water. He calls her Dogmeat and makes it sound like a fitting name. “I might bring her home,” she says while working on a campfire. “I think dogs could provide plenty of utility to a vault. We could vote on it.”
Dogmeat laps at her water even louder, somehow, and the Ghoul tosses away some of the scavenged items. He packs others away, leaving the remainder to Lucy.
“Don’t get your hopes up, vaultie. If you go back…” He pauses to empty a vial into his mouth. “You might come back with fresh eyes. There’s something to be said about being kept hungry and human. Ghoulish, maybe, but human. There’s plenty wrong with the surface, but it’s less sterile than those Vault-Tec fucks ever planned for.”
Lucy accepts a few nips from a labeled bottle of bourbon he pushes in her direction.
“I’ll convince them,” she says. “To at least think about it. There’s a lot they should know about. Not just about dogs, I mean.”
He tips his head down a bit, and Lucy thinks he is smiling.
“Maybe there’s hope. Who knows? You’re not the same as your daddy, after all.”
He looks back at her, and something pained in his expression keeps her from pushing him for answers.
“You should meet my brother.” No sooner has she said the words than she feels an oozing homesickness crawling between her eyes. What is Norm doing right now? What would Norm think about ghouls and their irradiated tether to humanity? If Norm knew of Lucy’s incomplete discoveries, what would he have to say about their parents?
Lucy lies back, warmed by the fire and comfortable enough with her alliance, new and strange and acceptable for now. She imagined Norm parroting Wilzig’s warning about nighttime campfires. It’s okay, Norm, she’d say. The Ghoul is a very, very good shot. You wouldn’t trust him much at first, but you wouldn’t doubt his judgment about things like this. Probably.
She helps herself to a little more bourbon and looks up at the stars to clear her mind. The sky above her is incredible—there was no projector reel that could come close to it in Vault 33’s archive of recorded skies and storms. There were more stars up there than she’d thought possible to see outside of flat images in textbooks.
Stretching out above her, everywhere. A concentrated strip of brightness, a galactic structure observed at remove. It made her feel small and inadequate just as much as it made her feel untroubled. Nuclear war, a father’s betrayal, daunting wasteland horrors and mysteries—and through it all, there was beauty, goodness, something human, something transcendent.
Look, Norm, Lucy would say. Isn’t that remarkable? She misses him. Wishing she could show him this one piece of the surface, removed from the hateful rest, she thinks she understands him better than she did back home.
The Ghoul sounds confident when he intuits her train of thought.
“I wouldn’t mind seeing that sky again for the first time.” He tilts his head up, follows Lucy’s gaze, points his revolver at the stars with his finger on the trigger. That’s bad trigger discipline, she thinks. “It never loses its charm, just gets harder to appreciate. You’ll see.” He smiles, setting his weapon down to look at the dog instead—who whines when she notices and settles down at his side.
“It’s special,” Lucy says.
“Might be the only beautiful thing brought forth by the war.”
They exchange glances, and Lucy decides the Ghoul seems a better ally without so much cynicism on his face.
When the bourbon has begun to warm her skin pleasantly, he speaks up again.
“Well, Miss MacLean. Indulge me for a moment—Let's hear about this vault of yours.”
Lucy looks at him and can’t stop her grin from widening as she considers where to start. Perhaps they’ll trade a few answers tonight. She knows he’ll voice few compliments about her life back home. She knows by now he’ll have a point. She is excited regardless.
“Okey dokey,” she begins.