Not when he’s dreamed of this for so long, the warmth of her body safe within his arms, her heartbeat racing under his touch, vibrant and alive. After a year of agonized uncertainty, she is here and real and smiling, tears shimmering like distant stars in the violet of her eyes.
Verena never weeps. She wields that sharp-edged smile of hers instead, as both weapon and shield — but in this moment it is soft and open, warm with affection as the tears sink down her face.
Though his very being aches with longing, kindled to flame and barely tempered into restraint, his hands are gentle as he trails a questing touch over her skin, searching for any signs of injury.
“Tyril.” A hand covers his own, leading his palm against her cheek, where she leans into his hold. He meets her gaze and sees a welling of emotion in her eyes, the urgency of his relief mirrored back at him. “I’m okay. Truly.”
He traces his thumb down her cheek, smoothing a tear away and cherishing the feeling of her skin. “I tried,” he chokes out, and his voice breaks under the force of his regret. “I tried everything. Would have done anything to get you back.”
“I know it, my heart.” The endearment steals his breath, the utter faith behind her words making his heart squeeze in his chest. She looks at him like she would tear the heavens from the sky before she parts from him again, and only a fool would ever doubt she could. “Never again. I swear to you.”
When she draws him down into her arms, his mouth surges against hers, kissing her with a desperation bordering on need. And when she pleads for him, gasping his name out on the sweetest sigh, he answers with a trail of hungry kisses down her throat, eager to reclaim all the parts of her he’s missed so dearly. He feels her fingers tugging through his hair, feels the shiver when he sucks against her skin, feels every place they come together in that perfect, steadfast promise. Never again.
Verena makes good on her word. Night falls long before he’s had his fill of her, and even then, when they’ve curled into a messy tangle in the sheets of her bed, when sleep begins to take her, when he dreams of her again and wakes to the same dread that she will vanish with the coming day — she keeps their fingers linked together, and she doesn’t let him go.
Two major events shaped her long before Logan brought Eleanor Lira into her life. We know the sequence of events that introduced Mona. But what about her previous life?
Her mother worked as many double shifts as possible over the year to afford the trip.
Meanwhile, she studied as much as possible to familiarize herself with the language (sabah al khayr in the morning and masa al khayr in the evening), the customs (three kisses on alternating cheeks in greeting), the food (tabbouleh, manakish, lots of baklawa), and the entertainment (souks with her Khalto Shayma and dance clubs with her cousin, Elyse). Most importantly, she wanted to familiarize herself with the music.
As the plane took off from JFK airport, her destination the Beirut International Airport, she put in her headphones and listened to her playlist.
For RoDAW Day 2. Inspired by this spectacular edit from our lovely host @choicesarehard.
* * * * *
It should have been an easy job.
Find the library, find the supplies, make it back alive.
Another day in fucking paradise.
i.
Colt can’t remember the last time he slept.
When he blinks, the sunlight etches blinding trails behind his eyelids. There’s no wind in the city of angels, just a choking heat that makes the road ahead shiver in his vision, oil slick puddles the sickening color of rust. Black asphalt cracks beneath his feet, the shattered streets he’s walked since he was old enough to hold the rifle in his hands — since his father left him stranded in the corpse of old Los Angeles and told him to fight his own way home.
He swallows down the memory and skirts the skeletal remains of an old station wagon, the doors and windows hollowed to a metal husk. The city center always smells like rot and melted rubber. With a sneer, he yanks the bandana out from underneath his collar and tugs it hastily over his nose.
Three days of walking, darting through side alleys, dodging ferals and mutants and rival raider gangs. Would have travelled safer with another gun at his back, but he moves faster on his own — and more importantly, he draws far less attention.
Gunshots crack the silence, and in two swift steps, he pivots and slides into cover behind the nearest building. His back to crumbled brick, he steadies his breathing and listens for the rattle of return fire. From the carry of the echo, the fight’s still a few streets back, and absently he runs a palm over the ammunition in his pocket, feeling the weight of the grenades hooked into his belt.
Beyond the shells of empty homes, he spots the sprawl of the observatory, high up in the hills above the city. The library will be another half a mile through the open streets, and with a twist of irritation, he can hear the distant gunfire growing steadily closer. An inhuman roar tears through the deafening pop-pop’s of rifle shots, resounding off the nearby buildings and kicking the rapid rhythm of adrenaline into his pulse.
Of course it’s fucking mutants.
And from the sound of it, an unholy amount of them.
The sun is just starting to set behind the bones of old Los Angeles, dipping low over the ocean, and Colt steals a swift path through the slowly growing shadows. He’s charted most of these byways himself, cutting through a back alley and vaulting himself up over a dumpster, the rusted chain links of the fence clattering noisily when he leaps over and lands with a cloud of dust on the other side. He spills out into the middle of the street, and a guttural cry shrieks in alert to his right. Three hulking figures break into a sprint in his direction, yellowed muscles bulging as they charge him with ear-splitting snarls.
“Fuck!” Colt has no time to catch his breath, lungs aching as he leaps back into motion. He grits his teeth past the protest in his weary legs, fumbling under his coat for the rough surface of a frag mine, fingers catching as he sets the charge and flings it carefully behind him.
The super mutants scream a chorus of bestial rage, and he hears their footsteps pounding hard against the pavement as they tear a swift pursuit.
Then, blissfully, the rapid beep beep beep of warning before one of the unlucky bastards finds the gift he left them, and a localized explosion lights the dark of setting dusk. Pained growls die to whimpers in his wake, buying him a moment to break ahead. His ears ring from the blast, but a frantic laugh lifts from his lungs, manic with relief when he slips through the sharp-edged brambles of a desiccated bush and emerges in an empty parking lot alone.
He rips the bandana from around his mouth, leaning on his knees as he drinks in deep lungfuls of air. Across the buckled asphalt of the lot, a shambled building overgrown with ivy seems to barely stand against the darkening night, and he rises to survey the property with narrowed eyes.
The library awaits.
ii.
Nobody appreciates good literature anymore.
Mercy thumbs gingerly through the worn pages of another ruined book, and feels her heart break just a little at the state of it. The notes inked in have long since faded, half the paper scorched to ash, another volume — and all precious knowledge housed therein — now permanently lost.
She plucks out the few pages left intact and tosses the rest in a heap with all the others. Against her will, the sting of tears builds at her lashes, and she swipes angrily under her eyes, refusing to let them fall. She’s made it this far, found the only place that might hold any whisper of salvation, but the deeper she works through haphazard stacks, the more destruction she discovers.
The clank and whir of metal joints hiss as one of the protectrons ambles down the hall outside, and she watches the bot forge through its patrol with some small amount of comfort. The office drones were little more than scrap when she uncovered them, and now their tinny voices keep her company on the longer nights alone.
She forces a slow, steadying breath into her lungs, and sets her shoulders.
Somewhere in this godforsaken mess, she knows there is a prize worth finding. Worth leaving her life and everything she loves behind.
There has to be.
iii.
The adrenaline is fading.
It takes Colt longer than it should to scale the building, his fingers shaking as he hauls himself up onto the edge of the roof. A winded sigh heaves from his lungs, bruises and freshly bleeding scrapes throbbing a vast array of pain across his body. He feels the onset of fatigue weighing his limbs, but pushes stubbornly past it, trekking toward a busted skylight at the far end of the building.
He drops through and rolls to break the fall, landing in a crouch among a maze of slanted bookshelves. Dust motes spiral up at the disturbance, his boots crushing moth-eaten carpet as he straightens and inspects the room around him.
Chairs and upturned tables litter the ground, filing cabinets stacked into a slapdash barricade against the door. He takes a step and nearly stumbles over brittle, long-dry bones, the edges jutting out from rotten clothes.
A flare of annoyance chatters at the back of his mind.
All this fucking trouble for a bunch of burned-out books.
There better be something good here.
The first filing cabinet gives way with a squeal of creaking metal, and he’s got another wedged between his shoulder and the palm of his hand when the sound of weighted footsteps clomp steadily louder toward the door.
He lets the cabinet fall back into place with a groan of irritation, reaching for his rifle.
“Initiating search for hostile target,” the grating voice of a protectron rings out in warning.
Rolling his eyes, Colt braces his boot against the last remnants of the barricade and shoves with the full force of his strength, growling at the resistance before the furniture all comes crashing down into a heap, freeing the doors and his way out.
He grabs for the handle just as the protectron barrels through, sending him sprawling back onto the floor. He kicks himself into a roll, narrowly avoiding a laser beam that singes through the carpet and leaves a smoking scorch mark where his head would have been.
Colt scrambles to his feet, ducking into cover behind a mangled reading desk. He waits for a break in the jets of red light that soar overhead, and peeks over his cover just enough to land a few shots into the protectron, bullets pinging off its metal frame. The fourth one cracks through the translucent dome at the top of its head, and he’s lining up the shot to bring it down when the bot fires off another streak of searing energy that shreds open the leather of his armor, burning into his skin with a scalding rip of pain. Gritting his teeth, he struggles to hold steady and releases a wild spray of gunfire until the robot crumples and collapses into the dust.
There’s a beat of quiet, just the hissing gasps of his own breath as he climbs shakily to his feet. Lifting a hand to his shoulder, he grimaces at the heat that radiates from the laser burn, throbbing like a knife wound in his skin. “Shit. Shit, shit.” A quick search through his pockets finds the last remaining stimpak in his hand, and with a grim sigh he uncaps it, sinking the needle into the muscle of his shoulder.
The medicine works quickly, easing the worst of the pain to a more tolerable ache, the burn still pulsing with a vengeance in his skin. He’ll need to clean and dress it before long, but only once he’s certain there’s no longer any threats within the building. Any supplies he finds won’t be worth a damn if he’s too dead to drag them back to the garage.
Colt slings his rifle over his good shoulder, pulling the silenced pistol from the holster at his hip instead. With one last glance back at the shattered wreckage of the protectron, he palms his weapon and slips out through the door.
The hall is dark, the overhead fluorescents long since gone to ruin. He creeps forward with careful steps, placing his feet where the carpet will muffle his movement, pausing to listen at each barricaded door. A feeling of unease settles between his shoulders when he catches only silence — no alarms, no tripwires, no army of protectrons swarming to defend the empty halls.
At last he reaches the towering double doors that lead to the main atrium, and that sense of growing dread has sweat gathering hot at the back of his neck. Cautiously, he extends a boot and pushes one door open, just wide enough for him to fit through.
Colt steps into the atrium, his eyes sweeping immediately over every surface of the room before coming to rest on a slender figure taking cover at the far wall, two arms wrapped around the barrel of a sniper rifle trained firmly in his direction. He freezes where he stands, his pistol clenched between his fingers, and just as he’s rushing to calculate if he can land the shot before she kills him, the girl behind the rifle hisses out, “Don’t move.”
His jaw tightens in response, but he remains still.
“Drop your gun.”
“If you’re gonna shoot me, you might as well just fucking do it.”
“Don’t tempt me. Drop it. Now.”
With a withering glare, Colt slowly lowers his pistol to the ground, raising his hands to show his palms above his shoulders.
Only then does she lift her eye from the scope of her rifle, and he’s stunned briefly speechless to see the face that scowls back at him, round-cheeked and soft with youth, a scatter of dark freckles strewn across the tan of her skin. “Who are you?” she demands across the open space between them, the question sharp-edged with suspicion. The rifle remains fixed in his direction. “And what do you want?”
Colt feels the hot pressure of sudden anger pounding at his temples, seething up his spine to squeeze around the nape of his neck. If he made it this far just to die to some kid with a sniper rifle…
He works to keep his tone even. “Same thing everybody wants, sweetheart.” A twinge of satisfaction flickers through him when her eyes narrow into a glare in response. “Weapons. Caps. Supplies.” His gaze darts past her, where a pile of white medical crates sit stacked against the far wall, before flicking back to meet the dark brown of her eyes. “I guess you just found ‘em first.”
With a look of disdain, she inspects his armor, pausing at the spiked plate that hangs over his left shoulder. “You’re a raider,” she accuses thinly.
“I’m a person,” he snaps back. “Just trying to get by. Same as you.”
“You shot my robot.”
“It shot me!”
Her eyes pass over the fresh laser burn still glowing angry red against his shoulder, and the accusation slowly starts to lapse from her expression. “I’m sorry about that,” she mutters then, and he’s shocked to hear a thread of genuine remorse in her tone. “I had them on high alert. There’s been —”
“Super mutants, yeah. I met ‘em on the way in.”
“Did they follow you here?”
“Not that I could tell.”
The girl lets out a tired-sounding sigh and finally climbs to her feet, letting the rifle rest against her shoulder, and it’s almost comical how small the weapon makes her look. She’s tamed the dark waves of her hair into a tight braid down the center of her back, a faded coat draped loosely around her shoulders, and just past the broken teeth where a zipper used to hang, he spies the unmistakable blue of a jumpsuit.
He could almost spit. Vault dweller. Of course.
“Not gonna kill me then?” he sneers, and his temper roils when she rolls her eyes at him.
“Not unless I need to.” And her grip tightens around the stock of her rifle. “Don’t make me need to.”
Cautiously, Colt lets his hands drop back down to his sides, a small measure of tension falling from his shoulders when she makes no move to shoot him. “So now what?”
She considers, drumming her nails at the surface of the reading desk where she stands, a calculating look in her eyes as she studies him. “I’ll trade you for them.”
“You’ll trade them.”
Her shoulder rises in a shrug. “If you want them so badly. A trade seems easier than killing each other, doesn’t it?”
He eyes her carefully. “And what exactly do you want in return?”
Something heavy passes over her expression, a weariness that sits strangely on such a delicate face, there and gone again in an instant. “I’m looking for something. I’ve been looking for something, something hidden here in the library, and I can’t figure out where.” Frustration — almost desperation — cuts into her voice. “You help me find it, and the supplies are yours.”
Colt levels her with a deliberately slow look. “And what’s to stop me from just shooting you right now and taking everything for myself?”
At that, she manages to almost smile. “The fact that you won’t make it out of here alive.”
She’s bluffing. He’s almost sure of it. But she waits patiently for him to make the call, that same small, infuriatingly gentle smile on her lips, and somewhere past the angry cage around his heart, he thinks he might almost respect her for it.
“Fine,” he groans, and makes a show of stowing his rifle into his bag. “We have a deal.”
Her smile brightens, fully formed, the dark of her eyes warm with something like relief when she steps around the desk and crosses the room to stand before him. She’s even smaller this close, peering curiously up at him as if they hadn’t just nearly killed each other. “What should I call you?”
He meets her gaze with a scowl. “Colt.”
“Colt,” she repeats, as if trying out the sound of it. Then she nods in vague approval. “My name is Mercedes, but you can call me Mercy.” And she reaches out to shake his hand, daring to laugh when surprise knocks the glare from his face. “A pleasure doing business with you.”
