“What’s she doing in Underworld?”
Gal has never felt so exposed in her life. Within the first thirty seconds of stepping into Underworld, ghouls have been literally peeking out of doorways to catch a glimpse of her. You would think she’s a unicorn, not a regular person. It’s unnerving. The architecture of Underworld isn’t helping either; the several days spent traveling here were long enough for her to get used to the sweeping scenery of the Wasteland, and being inside Underworld feels, at least topically, like being back in the fighter cells.
Breathing in deep, she adjusts the pack on her shoulders and takes the stairs up to the second floor. A crooked, home-made sign on the wall advertises for ‘Carol’s Place’. Gal dodges a gaping ghoul and slips into the room.
Behind the counter, a female ghoul in a faded blue dress is seated. She has what looks like a piece of embroidery in her hands. The few pieces of hair left on her head are a light straw blonde. She looks up as Gal strides up to the counter, stares for a moment, then stands with a beaming smile.
“Well, hello there! It’s been a long time since we’ve had one of your kind in Underworld!” she says cheerily. Nobody has ever made such a derogatory statement (seriously? ‘One of your kind’?) sound as sweet as this ghoulette has. Gal finds herself smiling back automatically, shuffling in place a bit under the brightness of that smile.
“Hi. I’m looking to rent a room…?” she asks. The ghoulette smiles even wider.
“Well, then, you’ve come to the right place. We don’t have separate rooms, but I can set you up with a bed, and each one is divided off. As much privacy as you can get around here.” she leans under the counter and comes back up with a coloured plastic tab with a number on it. Gal counts out a handful of caps from her stash and trades it for the tab.
“Don’t mind the staring now. It’s been a bit of a tough year for Underworld, so people may be a bit suspicious. But we’re a friendly group, and you’re always welcome here.” Carol continues. Gal senses the meaning behind that statement easily enough. She can’t imagine that business has always been bad enough for Carol to react this happily to a lone traveler renting a bed. Under the surface, Underworld is obviously hurting.
“We serve breakfast, lunch, and dinner here at Carol’s Place if you’re hungry, and drinks too. If you need supplies, Tulip on the lower level can help you. Is there anything else you need?”
Carol looks at her expectantly. Gal smiles back and tries not to swallow too conspicuously.
“Yeah, uh… is there a bar called the Ninth Circle here?”
“I don’t want to suggest that you can’t handle yourself, dear, but that’s not the place for a young smoothskin like yourself. The Ninth Circle is… a rough crowd.” Carol says uneasily. One hand bunches in the fabric of her skirt and wrings it nervously.
Gal smiles in what she hopes is a reassuring manner. “Thanks for the warning. I’ll make sure to be careful. Could you give me directions?”
Carol purses her lips, but walks her to the entrance of Carol’s Place and points down the hallway obligingly. Gal makes note of the doorway she points to and heads back inside to find her ‘room.’
She’d thought, on the way here, that she’d be itching to get to the Ninth Circle as fast as possible. Now, she finds herself strangely reluctant. Instead, she curls up on the bed that Carol directs her to, shoes kicked off, and flips through Charon’s journal. She’d read it, of course, cover to cover. Even if she’d consciously believed Willow’s words, she’d needed more proof to cement her beliefs.
The little black book had given it to her in spades.
Charon, it turns out, is a fantastic artist. Nearly every other page is full of sketches - residents of Underworld (Gal had recognized Carol immediately - she looked exactly like Charon’s drawing), panoramas of the Wasteland, the insides of buildings and dilapidated subway tunnels. And, in the back, several sketches of her. Her face, lips curling into a smile. The curve of her neck as she looks off into the distance. Her bare back as she sleeps in Charon’s bed, hair splayed across the pillow.
Gal wasn’t sure at first what they were. Part of the documenting process? Some step in Charon’s business procedures? But now she knows better. They’re memories. Charon, at some point in his 200-plus years of living, had taken to journaling and drawing to preserve the things he’d seen and the places he’d been. The people he had met.
It’s pretty impossible, after she’d looked more closely, to misinterpret Charon’s intentions. She sees in his portraits a spark of the people that he’s drawing. For Sophia - a timidness, undercut by a little curl of a smile. Liza projects an assertiveness that reminds Gal of Amata. She looks like somebody that gets what she wants, and doesn’t take no for an answer. Charon has done everything he can to captures people’s spirits in his drawings. Gal would say he’s succeeded.
She flips through the drawings back to the first entry. This journal had only been started a few years ago - Gal suspects that there have been several incarnations of the little black book across the years, each one discarded or stored somewhere as it was filled.
Back from my trip to the Falls. Arrived 0300. Hoped Ahzrukhal was already asleep, but he waited up to hear how things went. The look on his face when I dropped the bloody bag of caps in his hand was priceless. If I can’t get him to care about the lives he’s ruining, I can at least make reaping his reward dirtier than he expects.
It was hard this time. Sophia was… different. Not that the other girls were easier, but at least they’d only stayed in Underworld a few days. Sophia was here 3 months and 14 days.
She begged, every damn day. She would ask me to let her go or to help her escape.
It wasn’t until the slaver at Paradise Falls had her by the neck that she stopped begging.
I see Sophia’s face in my dreams at night. I see what happens to her. It doesn’t matter how little I sleep, how long I stay awake - the minute my eyes close, there she is.
I keep hoping that one day when I put my shotgun to my chin and pull the trigger, I’ll have forgotten to unload it. Hasn’t happened yet.
Ahzrukhal is planning something. He thinks he’s keeping it close to the chest, but he’s had me so long he keeps forgetting I’m around.
This is bigger than the rest of his schemes, and it has something to do with Underworld. I won’t let him wreck this town like he’s wrecked every other settlement we’ve been a part of. These people deserve better.
I know what he’s going to do. I have to stop it. He thinks that he’s going to get away with it, but not if I can fucking help it.
Willow will help. I know she will.
There’s a huge blank after this. Gal flips forward until she comes to the most recent entries.
If Willow keeps demanding I tell Gal about the contract, I’m going to wring her damn neck. The first thing she’d do is come running, thinking she could do something about it. Willow probably would too, fool that she is.
I’m not losing either of them to Ahzrukhal. I’d rather they hate me.
Gal’s got a bright future ahead of her. She’s smart, a quick learner, and she’s got all the right instincts to do well out there. I’d like to see somebody get between her and her search for her father - she’s gotten so good at the hip toss she nearly broke me in half last time she threw me. She deserves the chance to get out of this shithole and find something better. Willow, too.
Never thought I’d be in a situation where fighting a deathclaw bare-handed is a better option than being home. At least here, I get to live by my own rules. I spend my days training, instead of doing someone else’s dirty work. I wonder how crazy the two of them would think I was if I told them I wanted to stay. Willow would understand.
We’ve been freed. That means our days here in the Pitt are numbered. The headaches have already started; I give it about a week before they’re debilitating enough that I can’t handle it anymore.
We need a distraction so we can slip out unnoticed. There’s been talk of a revolution among the slaves. They better do it damn soon, or I may have to start it myself.
Going back is going to be harder than I thought. Maybe it would have been better to never get my freedom back at all. It’s going to make standing in that damn corner, cracking heads, fucking unbearable.
Gal snaps the journal shut, not able to handle any more. Charon’s life reads like a horror story. It’s enough to get her up and moving; toeing her boots on, Gal slips a pistol in the waistband of her pants and ambles out of Carol’s Place.
Even with her new-found determination, taking that final step into the Ninth Circle is hard. She hesitates in front of the door until it swings outwards and nearly catches her in the face. Blushing, Gal mumbles an apology to the ghoul couple stumbling out and slips inside.
Just like when she’d first seen Carol, Gal recognizes the inside of the Ninth Circle like she’s been here before. She hasn’t, of course; it’s just Charon’s frequent sketches of the place that make it seem familiar. The room is dim, smoky, lit only by a few wall sconces. The bar is up against the back wall; to the right, an open doorway leads to another room. Almost every table is full. The low buzz of chatter in the room doesn’t die down completely, but she conversations trail off as tables of ghouls near the door turn and look at her. The looks are varied - suspicion, curiosity, annoyance. Even the man behind the counter stops polishing the glass in his hand and looks at her expectantly.
She can’t look at him, but she feels his gaze on her face. She feels how heavy it is, and she knows instinctively that he’s angry that she’s here. No, not angry. Furious. Gal struggles to keep a straight face and focuses on putting one step in front of the other, until she’s made it to the bar.
Ahzrukhal’s face has strangely never been featured in Charon’s journal, so she hadn’t known what he would look like. She’d sort of expected him to look evil, somehow. But he just looks like another ghoul, appearing middle-aged underneath the damage to his face. His eyes are the most abnormal thing about him; slightly too close together in a thin face, and almond-shaped. He’s not bad-looking, though the suit he’s wearing is faded, patched, and doesn’t fit quite right.
Then he smiles. That smile causes a visceral reaction in her stomach, like somebody has wrapped a hand around her insides and yanked on them. The smile itself is polite; it’s the smile of a business owner to a patron. But Gal sees something darker in in the fringes of it, something less pleasant and more repugnant.
“Well, look what we have here.” he says smoothly, settling a glass down and turning his full attention to her. “Welcome to the Ninth Circle, my good lady. Are you looking for a drink?”
Her stomach lurches again. She knows that this man has done. She and Willow had discussed it at length, everything Willow knew of, more she’d only heard in rumours. It’s doubtless that there’s even more that nobody knows about but perhaps Charon and Azrukhal himself. Gal wants to jump over the table and shove her pistol in his mouth, but she has to approach this the right way, and that’s certainly not it.
“Yes, please.” she tries, finding it comes out only a little stilted. “Do you have whiskey?”
Ahzrukhal gives her another smooth smile and pours a few fingers of whiskey into a glass.
“A discount for the pretty lady. Four caps.” he says, pushing the drink towards her. Gal drops the caps on the table and waits for him to reach for them before she snatches the drink up. She doesn’t want him to touch her. At all, if possible.
“You seem nervous, my dear. Are ghouls a new experience for you?” Ahzrukhal asks as he whisks the caps away. Gal takes a sip of the whiskey to delay answering.
“I’m sorry. Everything is new for me at this point. I just came from a Vault.” she says, once the whiskey has stopped burning. It doesn’t feel like much of a lie; her trip across the Capital Wasteland had been instrumental in reminding her exactly how much she doesn’t know about survival out here. Thus, it feels a lot like she just walked out of 101 yesterday. Gal takes another sip of the whiskey and clutches at the glass with both hands.
Ahzrukhal leans forward on the bar and into her space. His milky eyes gleam with smooth confidence. Gal resists the urge to back away, but one foot still stumbles backwards. He smells sour, like rotting milk or something.
“Well, let’s hope you’re here long enough to get used to our fine city. There’s plenty of… charm… here to sample.” The tone in his voice is suggestive enough that she feels the need to go take a very long, hot bath to scrub the oiliness from her skin. The skin around his eyes crinkles as his lips draw upwards.
Gal gives him another quick, nervous smile, picks up the drink, and flees.
She realizes very quickly that every table is taken in the Ninth Circle. Every table, but the one right next to Charon. Sighing inwardly, Gal walks towards it before the effect of being near Ahzrukhal has faded and she loses her nerve. Like a magnet, her eyes slide up and to the left to catch on Charon’s face.
He looks livid. Gal can practically see him grinding his teeth behind his lips. His hands, crossed in front of his chest, are white-knuckled where they grip his biceps. She half-expects the peeling wallpaper he’s staring at to catch on fire from the intensity of his glare. But he doesn’t say a word as Gal sits down, back to him, and sips her whiskey. The back of her neck heats up under his scrutiny, though he’s never facing her direction when she turns her head to look.
Gal bolts her drink, buys one more to prolong her stay just a little longer, and then retreats. The atmosphere, the staring - even the conversation around her is too much. She lays in bed that night, trying to sleep but failing miserably.
Having been awake until four or five, Gal sleeps in until noon the next day and wakes up groggy and sore. She takes lunch with Greta, who seems content to ignore her presence completely and inhale her plate of food, and Carol, who makes up for her partner by being cheerful and talkative.
“You said you’ve had a rough year?” Gal asks casually as she picks at her spaghetti. Greta gives her a harsh look and disappears from the table, taking her empty plate with her.
“Yes, well.” Carol says reluctantly. “It’s just that the town ran into a spot of trouble several months ago and we had to evacuate. Everybody is still settling in again.”
“No trouble now, I hope?” Gal continues pryingly. Carol lets out a forced laugh and sets her fork down.
“No, no, nothing to worry about. Though I do wish you wouldn’t have gone to the Ninth Circle last night. We serve drinks here too, if that’s what you’re looking for.”
Gal waves off the offer and spends the afternoon wandering Underworld. She finds the residents, once the initial shock has worn off, are friendly and welcoming. The shop owner downstairs, Tulip is especially excited to have somebody to converse with. Gal makes a mental reminder to come back with some trade supplies when she can, because she definitely needs the caps.
This evening, she stays later at the Ninth Circle, until about one. Ahzrukhal’s small talk gets increasingly more flirtatious; the discounts get higher. And Charon’s attitude grows stiffer and angrier, until she can barely stand the tension in the room. She can’t stumble out fast enough after the last customer.
It’s not until the third night that she gets her courage up and takes charge of the situation. The last customer besides Gal trickles out just after two AM. She sets her half-consumed whiskey down and makes her way for the bartender in the pinstriped suit.
“I want to talk business with you.” she says, crossing her arms on top of the bar and leaning forward. Ahzrukhal looks up and affects a manner of surprise, as if he hadn’t noticed her approaching. She doesn’t buy it for a minute.
“Is that so, smoothskin?” he says, eyeing her. “And what type of business would that be?”
“I want to buy Charon’s contract.” she says. Reaching one hand down, Gal pulls a bag of caps from her pocket. It jingles heavily as she tosses it onto the bar. Ahzrukhal wastes no time reaching for it.
“His contract, is it? Well, let’s see what Charon has to say about that.” Ahzrukhal looks up over her shoulder towards his bouncer and makes a ‘come here’ motion with his fingers. The smile on his face is greasy and vile.
A large hand wraps around the back of her neck and yanks her backwards before she has a chance to react. Her pistol is ripped from the back of her pants. Gal ignores the hand on her neck and slams an elbow backwards towards Charon’s groin instead, but Charon anticipates her move and pins her arms against her side with his free hand. Then he lets her neck go and runs a pragmatic hand down all sides of her torso and each leg. The combat knife in her boot is found and discarded.
“I really was hoping you would stick around a few days.” Ahzrukhal says, emerging from behind a bar. Dark amusement settles across his features as he watches her struggle feebly against Charon’s grip. “My stash of caps has been running low these last few months and I’ve been looking for a way to make some money on the side.”
“What the hell is this? Let go!” Gal shrieks, wrenching her arm free from Charon’s grip. She reaches back and slams her wrist into his side, feeling a jolt of pain from where her bracelet digs into her skin. Charon responds by trapping her arm against her ribs with his other hand and pressing the side of his head against hers to keep her from headbutting him. His breath is hot against her neck; his arms are cruelly tight around her middle, squeezing the air out of her.
“Well, if we’re going to have a pretty lady around for the next few days, we might as well take advantage of it, don’t you think, Charon?” Ahzrukhal muses. He steps forward and draws his index finger down the side of Gal’s face. Gal’s teeth snap shut just after he withdraws, missing by a millimeter. “Ah, a fighter. Just your type, isn’t she? I’ve been thinking you need another reward for ruining my last business venture, so why don’t you take her into the spare room and show her our special brand of hospitality? ”
“Go fuck yourself.” Charon says back icily. His arms grip tighter around Gal’s waist; she wheezes and tries desperately to draw in a breath of air, but his arms are a vice grip around her diaphragm. Involuntary tears prick at the edges of her eyes as her vision wavers before her.
“Language, Charon.” Ahzrukhal says reproachingly. “Or would you like me to come in and observe? I know you enjoy performing for an audience.”
Charon doesn’t reply this time. Instead, he heaves Gal up like a sack of grain and throws her over his shoulder. She hits with an ‘oof’ and sucks in a grateful lungful of air, even as she feels a bruise forming on her hip from the buckle on his armour. She catches one last glimpse of Ahzrukhal’s smug face before Charon turns the corner into the next room and carries her through another doorway on the far side.
The first thing he does is shut and lock the door. The second thing he does is throw her onto the floor unceremoniously. Gal nearly knocks her head against the hard tile, but catches herself at the last second on her elbows, ensuring yet another painful bruise. When she rolls over, he's in the corner, leaning his shotgun carefully up against the wall. He turns, task done, and stalks towards her.
Gal has never seen such rage in his milky blue eyes. Charon picks her up, as easy as if she were a toy ragdoll, and slams her against the concrete wall so hard the wind is knocked out of her. His grip on her wrist is cruelly, painfully tight.
“You stupid little child.” he says lowly, voice cold enough to frost the air between them. “I spent months with you. I taught you how to defend yourself. I told you to stay the fuck away from Underworld. But you didn’t listen, and now you’ve thrown it all away.”
Gal had expected anger. Even overt anger. She’d been prepared for that, she thought. But she wasn’t prepared for the madman that stands before her now. He looks like he wants to tear her limb from limb.
“Do you understand what kind of position you’ve gotten yourself into?” he growls. “Rory told you what happened to the girls that showed up here before you. What I did to them .”
Gal, intent on stopping that train of thought in its tracks, finally finds her voice. “I know what Ahzrukhal made you do to them. It’s not the same, and I’m sorry that I doubted you before.” she stops, breath hitching, and looks him straight in the eye. “I’m so sorry, Charon. I was wrong. Willow told me everything, and I was wrong.”
Charon lets out an honest-to-God roar and slams her into the wall again. She feels like the whole room shakes, but it could just be her own brains rattling around in her head.
“Then you know exactly what’s about to fucking happen to you. And then Ahzrukhal is going to make me take you to Paradise Falls in fucking chains.” he hisses.
Gal hears a soft thump from outside the room. Hurriedly, she throws up a knee, forcing Charon to deflect it and pin her against the wall again. He doesn’t seem to notice the sound.
“Charon. What he makes you do is not your fault. You need to understand that.” Gal says pleadingly. Twisting her hand awkwardly, she runs her fingers over the inside of his wrist gently, the only part of his skin she can reach. He snatches his hand back like her touch is poison. Then he groans in pain, clutching at his head with his free hand. The ghoul’s breathing becomes laboured as he lets her go and doubles over. Both hands cover his eyes, as if the dim light in the room is too much. Gal makes a small sound and reaches out to press one hand against the back of his head.
Just as her hand brushes skin, the blast of a gunshot rings through the small room. Charon is up and grabbing for his shotgun before she moves a muscle. Gal lunges forward and tries a swipe at the gun; Charon pushes her off and is out the door in a flash. Gal lets out a curse and follows as quick as she can.
A second gunshot sounds. Gal skids around the corner into the main room and takes the scene in. Against the far wall, behind the bar, a splatter of blood paints the cupboards and glasses. If anybody is in the room, they’re hiding below the bar. Charon brings the shotgun to his shoulder and heads for the counter.
“ Stop.” a gravelly voice rings out. Charon stops dead in his tracks.
Something appears over the top of the counter. An unfolded sheet of stiff paper, yellow with age. A thin arm, corded with muscle, follows it. When Charon doesn’t shoot, Willow’s head peeks up above the counter and then she stands fully. Her face and torso are splattered with blood.
The room is silent for a few long moments. Charon lowers the shotgun slowly.
“I need to see it.” He says finally, breaking the silence. “Willow. I need to see it.”
Willow moves out from behind the counter. It’s clear she has to step over something. She gets completely out of the way and then gestures Charon towards the bar.
Charon walks over slowly. His steps are jerky, uncertain. Gal follows at a distance, moving around to the side so she can peer through the opening. All she can see is a leg clothed in a light, pinstriped suit, laying on the floor.
Charon brings the shotgun to his shoulder. He pulls the trigger once. The leg jumps; more blood splatters the back of the bar. Charon pulls the trigger again. And again. And again.
By the time he stops, Gal can’t see anything in the opening but a bloody stump. Charon lets the shotgun slip from his shoulder and stares down at the remains of Ahzrukhal. Willow folds the piece of paper back up and presses it into Gal’s hand.
“You did good, kid. I was getting worried, waiting on your signal.” Willow murmurs. Gal fiddles with the bracelet on her wrist, depressing the small button on the side. She’d cannibalized a radio emitter to broadcast a signal when the button was depressed. Willow, hunkering down outside the Museum of History each night, had been waiting with her radio tuned to the same frequency, ready to burst in as soon as Gal used it.
“I’d forgotten how fast he is.” she says sheepishly. “He had me pinned before I got to the button.”
Charon turns to them. His face is unreadable. He spots the contract in Gal’s hand and steps up to her, slinging his shotgun against his back. His left pant leg is soaked in blood, much like it had been the first time she’d met him. Gal looks up into his cold, expressionless eyes and feels her heart jump into her throat.
“Charon. I’m sorry we didn’t tell you. We agreed that it had to be done this way, or otherwise you would have been able to stop us.” Gal pleads. Charon’s expression doesn’t change. It looks alarmingly similar to the first time she’d seen him up close - cold, calculating. Sizing her up and finding her wanting.
“You’re entitled to my services in combat.” he tells her curtly. “You may command me to perform other services, such as carrying salvage or preparing food. Physical violence invalidates the contract.”
He steps away and takes his place on the wall at the other end of the room, leaving her standing there with his contract in her hand. His gaze settles on the opposite end of the room, avoiding hers. That’s the end of their conversation
Gal tucks the contract into a pocket and looks to Willow, who just gazes back at her, lost.
Willow disappears out the front door to take care of the the people that respond to the gunshots. There are surprisingly few of them; Gal doesn’t know whether it’s because gunshots are a common sound coming from the Ninth Circle or because nobody really cared whether Ahzrukhal was alive or dead. Willow had made it clear that even though the Underworld residents hadn’t know about his betrayal, Ahzrukhal was still universally disliked.
Nobody looks into it too hard. Gal assumes Willow tells somebody about the deal, but she doesn’t ask. Mostly, she just wanders around the bar, poking in the corners and opening doors, until finally she decides something needs to be done about the body and realizes she’ll have to be the one to do it.
Gathering up a sheet that had been stuffed in a supply closet in the other room, Gal carries it over to the bar. It’s going to take some real scrubbing to get this area clean; every inch of the small, enclosed space is covered in blood and chunks. The remainder of the body is completely unrecognizable. Charon had pumped something like five rounds of buckshot into it. Gal finds that she doesn’t mind not ever seeing those weirdly slanted eyes again.
Laying the sheet down over the body, she wraps her arms around the torso and rolls towards her until the body is cocooned in the fabric. Gal finds a bucket and a scrub brush under the bar and carries it to the bathroom in the back to fill up. She can feel Charon’s gaze heavy on her back, but ignores him doggedly.
While the bucket is filling up, she takes a minute to poke around the rest of the space. There’s a short hallway that leads to three rooms: the bathroom, the spare room where Charon had locked them in, and one more room that’s locked up tight. She guesses that’s Ahzrukhal’s bedroom, and doesn’t bother trying to pick the lock. She doesn’t want anything that she would find in there.
Willow has turned the last of the visitors away and is now behind the bar counter. She disappears from sight for a moment and then reemerges with the sheet-wrapped body over her shoulder.
“I’ll get rid of this. Will you be okay here for a minute?” Willow asks. Gal nods, brushes past her with the bucket to hide the fact that she’s distinctly not okay. Willow’s not dumb, she knows that, but Gal still feels like she needs to make the effort.
The bar goes silent as Gal rolls up her pant legs and drops to her knees to start cleaning. This is the filthiest job she’s ever had; never in her life has dunking her hand into a bucket of wash water involved feeling chunks of meat and skin brush against her hand before. She grits her teeth and scrubs harder, feeling a surge of satisfaction as the still-slick blood rubs off the bar and floor with ease.
After a few minutes, a shadow falls over her. When she turns to look, Charon is picking up the bucket by the handle and carrying it off towards the bathroom. He comes back a minute later with a fresh bucket of water and sets it down next to her silently.
“Thank you.” Gal says quietly, looking up at him. He ignores her and goes back to his spot on the wall. Gal sighs and goes back to scrubbing.
She’s almost done when Willow comes back in, carrying Gal’s pack. She sets the pack down and comes over to inspect Gal’s work.
“I think that’s good enough for now, tourist. You need to get some sleep.” she says. Gal looks at the remaining streaks of blood with a frown, but the truth is, she’s pretty tired. It’s probably somewhere around 4 AM and she hadn’t slept well last night either.
She’d been looking forward to having all this done and over with so she could rest peacefully, but she’s no longer convinced that’s going to happen. She throws the brush down anyway and stumbles to her feet.
“We’ll stay here for the night, I guess. Drag the mattress out into the room or something.” Gal says. She knows Willow wants to get back to her own place for a night. She has somebody waiting for her and she’s been remarkably patient in waiting to see him.
“You two will be okay? You won’t kill each other, will you?” Willow asks, mouth twisting. Gal huffs, too tired to laugh outright.
“I don’t have the energy to kill anyone, at least until tomorrow. But thanks, Willow. Get out of here.”
Willow claps her on the shoulder and then turns away. She exchanges a long look with Charon before she leaves.
The bar is dead silent. Gal flips the locks after Willow and trudges to the back to pull the mattress out. She doesn’t even hear Charon, but suddenly he’s in front of her, grabbing the mattress and sliding it from the bed frame like it weighs nothing. She realizes she’s standing in the way with her hand hanging in the air and stumbles backward.
The bed is a queen, and it even has two pillows and a thick blanket. Gal slumps down onto one side so she can start unlacing her boots.
“Do you mind sharing?” she asks dully as she yanks one boot off and tosses it off a little ways. “It’s big enough for both of us.”
Charon is up against the wall in the exact same pose as he was in the other room; leaned against the wall, arms crossed over his chest, looking deliberately casual. Like he couldn’t cross the room and take your head off with one shot. Gal knows better.
“Unnecessary.” he says. “I’ll be keeping watch.”
Gal is tired enough that she has to press her face into her thighs and take a few calming breaths to stop from yelling. She breathes until she doesn’t feel like exploding anymore and then raises her head.
“Charon. We’re in the middle of a city that Willow has assured me is very safe, in a locked room. The only person that would have been a problem is now meat paste. So, do you mind sharing or not?”
Charon looks at her, sitting on the mattress with one boot on and her undershirt hanging all lopsided off her shoulder. His face is impassive.
“I will do as you command.” he says shortly.
Gal takes her second boot off and chucks it vaguely in his direction. It goes wide and smacks the wall next to him. Childish, but gratifying.
“Seriously? This is about the contract? Because I don’t fucking care about the contract. Look, it’s right here.” she says, pulling it from her pocket. She stands up and strides over to him, contract held in front of her. “Take it. It’s yours. Do whatever the hell you want with it.”
She yanks Charon’s hand out and goes to drop the contract in it, but he pulls his hand away at the last second and it flutters to the floor. Gal closes her eyes and takes several long, deep breaths. Tears of frustration are beginning to prick in the corners of her eyes.
“Would you just tell me what you’re angry about? I came here to help you, I don’t understand why that’s a bad thing.”
Charon looks her straight in the eye as he pushes off the wall. Crossing to the other side of the mattress, he unslings his shotgun and tugs his armour off over his head. Those pieces, along with his ammo belt and boots, get stacked in a neat pile next to the mattress. Left in a black t-shirt and his customary thick trousers, Charon flips the edge of the blanket back and lays down, facing the far wall. He doesn’t say a thing.
Gal grits her teeth as she scoops up the folded paper and marches over to the other side of the mattress. Laying down, she yanks her side of the blanket over her hips and faces away from him.
They sleep that way all night long.
Morning doesn’t dawn any better. Gal wakes up late morning to find herself alone in bed. Panicking, she fumbles her way into her boots and dashes through the doorway into the other room - only to find Charon in the middle of cooking breakfast. He takes in her disheveled appearance with no comment and slides a couple of radscorpion eggs onto a plate.
“Good morning.” she tries, once she’s calmed down a little bit and done something vaguely respectable with her hair. No response.
Charon takes the pan he’d been cooking on and runs it under the faucet to cool it off so he can scrub it clean. Gal notes that his shotgun is in the corner of the bar area, propped up against a wall so it’s never too far away. The flecks of blood that had been left over from her scrubbing the night before are gone.
“We have to talk about this eventually.” she says as she seats herself at the bar. Charon pulls a bottle of water from the banged-up old fridge in the corner and slams it down in front of her. His passive-aggressiveness is just as wearying at 10 AM as it had been at 4 AM.
“You told Willow about Ahzrukhal’s deal, and Ahzrukhal knew that. There’s no way she could have walked into Underworld and expected him to let her be.” Charon picks up an old, faded dishrag and scrubs the inside of the pan. “She also knew that Ahzrukhal was always looking for a way to make a quick buck. Including the convenient arrival of somebody like me. Somebody that Paradise Falls would want.” Charon shakes the pan off and sets it to the side of the sink. Gal pauses her monologue to take a drink of the water.
“So it follows that the only way to make this plan work was to send me in and use me as a distraction for you, so that Willow could kill Ahzrukhal. If you’d known she was going to try, you’d have killed her. If she’d walked in herself, Ahzrukhal would have ordered you to kill her. And if you’d expected I had some intelligent plan to make this work, you would have figured the whole thing out and foiled it. So I came in, pretending to want to buy your contract, and the whole thing worked out perfectly.”
Charon, in the middle of putting food back into the fridge, freezes. His knuckles are white on the fridge door. She waits for him to reply, but after a moment, he lets go of the fridge door and turns away from the bar area. She watches him return to his spot on the wall with marked frustration.
Her stomach is too twisted up in knots to eat. Gal pushes the eggs away and slides off the barstool, waving Charon away when he moves to follow her out the door.
“Just… stay here. I’ll be back.” she says. Charon obeys, but his gaze follows her out the front door.
A shirtless ghoul with mussed, dark brown hair opens the door to Willow’s apartment. He gives Gal a once over and grins.
“Gal, right? Come on in.” he says in greeting. Gal smiles in return and steps into the apartment tentatively.
Quinn leads her into the kitchen, where Willow is sitting at table, smoking a cigarette. She is wearing, of all things, a pair of black pajamas with little hearts and cupids on them. She doesn’t hide her amusement at Gal’s raised eyebrows.
“Quinn thinks he’s funny.” she says in explanation.
Quinn, busy pouring coffee into a chipped ceramic mug at the kitchen counter, grins again. “Correction: I am funny. She obviously thinks so. Good taste, that one.” Quinn brings the mug over and sets it down on the table next to the other chair. A box of sweetener packets follows. Then he disappears through a doorway.
Gal sits down and wraps her hands around the mug of coffee gratefully. Willow, ever the attentive one, sees something in her eyes that tips her off and frowns.
“Uh-oh. Trouble in paradise, I take it?”
Gal takes a sip of the coffee and nearly burns her tongue off. The taste is bitter and strong, more like chewing through black tar than coffee. She’s not surprised that Willow drinks it that way. Gal sets the mug back down but keeps her hands wrapped around it to give her something to anchor herself to.
“I… yeah. He won’t - he won’t talk to me.” she admits. “He just keeps telling me he’ll do whatever I say. I tried explaining why we did what we did, and he just walked away and didn’t say anything. I don’t know what to do.”
Willow snorts and takes another drag of her cigarette. The smoke curls up towards the ceiling in lazy spirals.
“What a baby.” she says, not without amusement. “It’s the contract he’s worried about. Think about it. You used to be on the same level. Equals. But now you have his contract, that’s not the case anymore. You’re in charge, and he’s worried about what that means.”
Gal’s fingers go reflexively to where the square of paper is settled in her pants pocket.
“But… he has to know that doesn’t change anything. I even - I mean, I tried to give him the contract and he refused it. I don’t know what else he wants from me.”
Willow fixes her with a look. “You can’t give him the contract, Gal. That’s not how it works. And you can’t destroy it, either. Either you hold the contract, or somebody else does. Those are the only two options.”
Gal frowns. “Okay then. So I hold his contract. But he should know I’m not going to use it.”
“Should he?” Willow counters. “You forget that he’s 200 years old. How many owners do you think he’s had that haven’t used his contract?”
This conversation is nearly as frustrating as her ones with Charon has been. She swallows another mouthful of dark, gritty coffee to keep her sharp tongue in check and finally gives in to the sweetener packets on the table. Drinking that stuff is like drinking toxic waste. She’s not even sure sweetener can fix it.
“Yeah, well, he should know I’m different. I’d never use something like that to my advantage. Damn it, we just put our lives in danger to kill Ahzrukhal, you’d figure that would make a difference!”
Willow watches her with a steady gaze that seems faintly unapproving. Gal returns the stare stubbornly and crosses her arms over her chest. Willow’s raised eyebrow tells her that she knows Gal’s stance is more defensive than assertive.
“Let’s just get this straight so everybody at the table understands the score.” the ghoulette says, casually slipping another cigarette between her lips and lighting it with the cherry of her last cig.
“You, a young woman who, though surprisingly mature for your background, came directly from a Vault into the Pitt, met a man whom you at first thought was, in fact, going to defile and/or murder you. A month and a half later, due in no small part to your wise and knowing mutual friend, you’ve… let’s say ‘figured out your differences’. Am I tracking so far?” Willow doesn’t wait for Gal’s reply. “What you didn’t know is that your companion is actually 200 and some change years old and has, for almost that entire time, been tied to a contract that strips his free will completely and puts him at the mercy of other peoples’ whims. You’ve figured out, however, that most of that timespan was unpleasant. Are we still on the same page?”
Gal is trying very hard not to shrink into her chair, even though Willow’s tone of voice is as careless as if she were talking about the weather.
“So Haven blows the fuck up, Charon disappears because he doesn’t have an option to stay, and you get left there with a lot of very wrong assumptions about the kind of person he is - through no fault of your own, because these are interesting times we live in and you didn’t have all the facts. He comes back to Underworld and to the servitude of a vile man who deserves to burn in the lowest pits of hell, and we come up with a plan to fix that little situation.
“Once everything is said and done, upon finding that Charon is uncomfortable and a little suspicious of the whole situation, your response is, ‘Well I don’t care about anything you’ve done in the past, even though I don’t actually know what all you’ve done, and unlike the other employers you’ve had over the past 200 years, I’m not going to fuck you over!’ And, in a completely rational fashion, you’re confused as to why he doesn’t answer that with immediate and unbridled enthusiasm.”
Gal has failed at not sinking down into her chair. Willow takes the cigarette from her lips and taps the ash off the end into a chipped ashtray sitting on the table.
“Did I miss anything important?” she asks lightly, looking down at her cigarette. Gal straightens up, crosses her arms on the table, and buries her head into them with a long sigh.
“No, I think you covered it all…” she mutters sarcastically into the table. If Willow hears, she doesn’t reply.
After a few moments of silence, Gal feels a hand on her elbow and looks up.
“Don’t be too hard on yourself. Charon may be suspicious, but I’m not - I know you’ll do the right thing. It’ll just take some time to convince him of that too. And if I know you as well as I think you do, I know you’re committed enough to wait, aren’t you?”
Willow is simultaneously the best and worst person on Earth. She always knows exactly what to say - probably because she can read Gal like a book. And open one, with all the important parts underlined. Which is exactly why she’s grinning at Gal now in a way that says, ‘We both know I’m talking about something more serious than a roll in the hay’.
“As committed as you are to wearing heart-covered pajamas for your guy.” Gal mutters in a desperate attempt to save face, looking away in embarrassment. Willow lets out a snicker and sits back in her chair. Clearly, she’s in no way ashamed of the little pink and red symbols that decorate her clothes.
“I’m sure he can find you a pair if you’re feeling jealous. Quinn is a master at procurement. So when should we leave? Day after tomorrow? I don’t think we need to be quick about it, do you?”
Gal remembers suddenly that she’s become involved in an insurgent plan to take over a giant slaver settlement, groans, and collapses onto the table again.
She returns to the Ninth Circle thoroughly chastened. Charon has his combat rifle out and across one of the tables in pieces. He keeps his eyes focused on the buffing rag in his hand as she walks in hesitantly and stops in front of the table.
“...I’m sorry for blowing up on you last night. It was childish. I was angry because you didn’t react the way I wanted you to, but expecting you to react a certain way is a sign that I wasn’t thinking about your position in all this. And...sorry about the boot.”
Oh God, she’d thrown a boot at him.
Charon pauses, just a little stutter of his hands over the barrel of the shotgun. It’s barely enough to even catch her eye, but it’s there. She wants to push and push until he finally gives in and tells her what he’s thinking, but she doesn’t. Instead, she turns and heads for the other room.
“I’m going to take a nap, and then I was thinking we could get an early dinner at Carol’s. Is that okay?” she calls back to Charon. She knows he won’t answer. It’s the expectation that counts, Willow had said. If Gal keeps treating things like the contract doesn’t factor in, Charon might just believe it one day. It’s the only strategy she has, so it’s what she’s going with.
She’s in the middle of tugging her overshirt off when she notices that the little black journal is still sitting in her pile of things near the mattress. Feeling even more guilty, Gal picks it up and walks back into the other room to set it down next to Charon’s elbow.
“I guess add violating your privacy to the list of things I have to be sorry about. I didn’t have any right to take your journal and I certainly didn’t have any right to read it, no matter what wrong ideas I had at the time. I won’t do it again.”
Surprisingly, Gal feels a pang of loss as she leaves the little black book there. It feels like she’s abandoning the last piece of the Charon she knew. After he claims it, she’ll be left with the voiceless specter that occupies his place. She’ll have no momento of the man she lost in the process.
That’s fucking melodrama at its finest. Gal stops that thought right in its track and goes back into the other room to flop down on the mattress.
Gal wakes up to a loud thud and falls off the mattress in a panic. Scrambling to her feet, she searches the room and finds nobody but Charon, who’s rummaging around in a pack on the floor. He must have dropped it. Deliberately.
She groans, shuts her eyes, and stumbles to the bathroom to wash her face.
When she comes back into the room, Willow is there, leaned up against the wall. Gal is somewhat pleased to see that Charon is intently ignoring her as well. At least they’ll be suffering his wrath together.
“I figured we’d get a jump on getting ready. We were less prepared coming out here than I would have liked.” she says by way of explanation. Gal inclines her head and settles down on the mattress to pull her boots on.
As it turns out, Charon is in fact prepared to talk to her.
“This is not up for debate.” she says stubbornly, still holding the heavy chest plate up awkwardly in two hands. It’s big enough to make two out of in her size, almost. “Yours is falling apart at the seams.”
Charon rolls his eyes at her - rolls his eyes at her - and shoves the chestplate out of his space, forcing Gal back a step in the process. “And you have limited caps. You should be spending them to outfit yourself.”
Gal glares at him. Charon glares back. Behind them, Willow leans on the counter and watches impassively. Tulip looks like she doesn’t know whether to hide under the counter or take the chestplate out of Gal’s hands before she hurts somebody with it.
“I’m fairly certain Tulip would be willing to barter for some of Ahzrukhal’s good stash in exchange for what we need, especially considering nobody in Underworld can even wear a chestplate that size besides you.” Willow says dryly. Charon doesn’t look at her, but he does relent and take the piece of armor from Gal finally. Thank God - that thing must weigh a hundred pounds. Is it really only made of leather?
Feeling the tension in the air dissipate a little bit, Gal rewards Charon’s good behavior by taking the arm guards he shoves at her with no complaint. Their fingers brush; Charon jerks back like he’s been electrocuted and stalks over to the medical display instead, leaving her to fumble the guards on herself. It takes several attempts, one long breath, and finally Willow’s help to slide them into place and get them buckled.
All in all, it costs them 532 caps and the promise of six bottles of Ahzrukhal’s finest before they’re kitted out properly. It probably would have costed more if Tulip hadn’t been so rattled by Charon’s mere presence in her shop. Clearly, Charon doesn’t visit often. The impression she gets is that when he did, it was never for pleasant purposes. He shows not a flicker of annoyment at Tulip’s treatment of him, though; in fact, he ignores her so thoroughly she might as well not be there.
They eat a mostly quiet dinner at Carol’s after dropping the gear off in the Ninth Circle. When they get back to the bar, Charon sits down cross-legged in the pile of stuff, yanks Gal’s pack towards him, and starts pulling things out of it.
So he’s going to pack for her, like she’s a small child. Gal frowns, nearly says something, but turns away with a sigh. Something tells her that Charon is itching for a reason to fight with her, and this is just another tactic to force that fight. She can argue the point and be miserable all night, or she can let it go and get out of doing something that, frankly, she doesn’t like doing anyway.
So instead she runs a hair through her hair, disappears back into the main room, and starts rooting around in the storage closet for something to drink. Willow had warned her away from anything on display at the bar, citing only that ‘you don’t want to drink it, trust me’. This stuff, in the storage closet, is the ‘secret stash’ they’d promised part of to Tulip. Gal picks up bottles at random, inspecting the contents, and finally decides that beer is the safest choice. She pushes an old plastic food dish out of the way, grabs two bottles, and heads to the bar to open them.
“I guess you were right about me getting a chance to drink.” she says in lieu of a greeting as she stops just to the right of Charon. He looks back at her and blinks at the bottle she’s offering. Gal sees that he’s halfway done repacking her gear, feels a pang of irritation, and masks it by taking a swig from her own drink.
After a few long moments, Charon accepts the bottle. But instead of drinking it, he examines it with sharp interest, then fixes her with a sharp look. Gal shrugs and tips the bottle to her lips again. After a moment, he does the same. When she brings hers down, he’s still drinking, tipping the bottle further and further back until it’s nearly vertical. Just as Gal manages to tear her eyes away from the long line of his throat, he brings the empty bottle down and wipes his mouth off on the sleeve of his shirt.
The last time she’d seen that gesture was...
“I’ll get you another one.” she says hurriedly, sweeping back towards the bar and trying not to think of Charon on his knees between her legs. Her cheeks are starting to feel a little warm.
Gal takes a minute to lean against the bar and breathe a little bit, trying to will the flush out of her skin. Instead, she gets a sudden picture of Charon looming behind her, pressing his hips into her and trapping her up against the bar. Hot breath against her neck, thick arms bracketing her body…
This is going the wrong direction. Opening the fridge, she sticks her face in it for a few long moments and lets the chill cool her down. Once she feels reasonably put back together, she picks up the beers and the bottle of amber liquid she’d taken from the storage room and carries it back into the other area. Charon’s finished with the main part of her pack and is shoving ammo and medical supplies into the pouches on the sides in some sort of order that makes sense to him. He takes the new beer from her and raises his eyebrows at the liquor bottle. The side of his mouth tilts up just a little bit.
They drink a while, Gal sputtering and coughing on her first drink of whiskey, then getting the hang of it quickly. Charon finishes the beer, eyes the whiskey, and raises a surprised eyebrow when she offers it to him. But he accepts, and they trade it back and forth until the bottle is mostly empty. As the whiskey spreads from her core into her limbs, it drags her thoughts a dozen different directions - thoughts of touching Charon, prospective arguments to fix this broken thing between them, aimless wishes to stay here endlessly and not carry the burden on her back of a crying baby and a boy with light blonde hair and big ears.
Charon has long since finished going through their packs, now, and leans back against the finished products with one leg bent and the other kicked out across the floor. His elbow rests on the bent leg, long fingers wrapped around the neck of the whiskey bottle as they take a break from drinking.
“Hey. Gal.” he says softly, dragging her attention away from the spot in the corner she’s been gazing at while lost in thought. She blinks and looks over at him. His face is closed off, unreadable.
The silence drags on for a minute. Gal lets it. Finally, Charon takes another drink from the whiskey and sighs.
“When you came here. With Willow. You put yourselves at risk. There was no way to know how it would turn out.” he looks at her for a long moment, then looks away. “If you’d been caught…”
He doesn’t finish, just keeps looking away, his shoulders tight. His grip around the neck of the whiskey bottle is harsh, nearly white-knuckled.
It’s not an apology, or a thank you.
“It was the only way.” Gal says tentatively. “There wasn’t another option, Charon.”
His grip on the whiskey bottle tightens, though his face stays impassive. One small tell that he’s angry.
“There was another option.” he says shortly. “You could have stayed the hell away and left it alone. Went and looked for your father. Started a new life.”
Gal feels her temper start to rise, both helped and hindered by the whiskey. She opens her mouth, closes it, and thinks about what she wants to say, about what the right thing to say is. Only when she’s considered it carefully does she open her mouth again.
“You have to understand that leaving you here wasn’t really an option. Not for me, and not for Willow. You want us to be safe, I get that. We want the same for you. So there was a chance, and we took it. And yeah, maybe it could have gone bad, but if I’d left you here….well. I couldn’t live with that.”
“And you think I could have lived with dragging you back to Paradise Falls to sell to the highest fucking bidder?” Charon counters, slamming the whiskey down on the floor with such force that Gal’s surprised the bottle doesn’t break. “But what I want doesn’t fucking matter, does it smoothskin? Now that you have my contract, you can do whatever you want, and I have to live with it.”
You’re in charge, and he’s worried about what that means, Willow echoes in her head.
“What do you want, Charon?” Gal asks quietly.
The jerk of his shoulders betrays his surprise. The look he gives her is equal parts suspicious and questioning. He doesn’t know why she’s asking, but he’s afraid of finding out the answer.
“What do you want?” she asks again.
Charon tears his gaze away, mouth set into a thin line, and stands up. He disappears into the bathroom with a hard slam of the door, and doesn’t come back out.
That’s okay. She didn’t really expect him to reply, she thinks as she starts tugging her boots off. The whiskey beckons, so Gal steals it back and takes another long swig.
She’ll just have to keep asking, until she gets an answer.
They leave on schedule, despite the snafus that come with all of them being blatantly uncomfortable around each other. There is a tense moment when Willow and Charon argue about whether to take the overground route or go through the metro tunnels, but it resolves peacefully - since Willow and Gal had come back through the tunnels, they’re mostly cleared out, and fighting off feral ghouls and the occasional raider is easier than fighting off Super Mutants and the Brotherhood of Steel.
Gal finds that after spending her whole life in a Vault, and nearly a full year more of it trapped in the same three rooms for days on end, she doesn’t much enjoy being underground anymore. The walls feel too close, the air too damp and cold, the shadows too dark. They have to keep quiet, with the way sound echoes down the tunnels, so they don’t attract a pack of ghouls or tip raiders off to their position.
Charon ignores her, other than to give gruff instructions about staying close and watching her back, and Willow is irritated with Charon and in a foul mood. Thus, the trip is miserable.
Halfway down the red line tunnel heading towards Dupond, Charon stops suddenly and holds up a hand, closed into a fist. Gal and Willow stop obediently, both glancing around as Charon’s head tilts, his eyebrows drawn together in concentration. He pivots towards Gal, pushes her out of the way, and lifts his shotgun to his shoulder. The buckshot catches a woman with a crowbar in one hand in the chest. She lets out a strange gurgling sound, and slumps to the floor.
They pause for a moment, Gal taking in that she’d just nearly died, and Charon and Willow listening intently. Something scrapes down the side tunnel the woman had emerged from.
“We need to move.” Charon says lowly. Nobody argues.
A hundred yards down the tunnel, the first bullet whizzes by. Willow lets out a curse and darts to the side, past a broken-down subway car that offers some cover. Gal and Charon follow.
Ahead of them, the tunnel has collapsed. Gal follows Willow into a side door that looks like it leads to a maintenance area. The bullets are still flying behind them, accompanied by hoarse yells and profanities. Not giving up then, this pack of Raiders.
People on the surface are such dicks.
“Go open the tunnel. You remember where the switch is?” Willow calls to Gal. Gal searches frantically in her mind, glances around the room, and - yes. She remembers this place.
“Got it!” she calls back. Willow nods and leans back out of the doorway to return fire and slow down the Raider’s progress.
She’s lost sight of Charon. Panting from exertion, Gal darts over to the opposite wall and mashes the button that leads to the emergency tunnel set into the floor. With a mechanical groan, the doors on either side begin lifting up, revealing the stairs that lead down under the metro tunnel.
Then, with a horrific screech, they stop moving, only halfway open. Gal lets out a curses and jabs at the button again. The doors don’t move.
“ Shit. Willow, it’s jammed!” Willow looks back as Charon stumbles through the doorway and frowns. Charon takes up her position, allowing Willow to jog over and look at the tunnel. She mashes the button, yanks on the doors, even crouches down to fiddle with the opening mechanism, but the doors don’t budge.
“Damnit. You and I can fit through, but…” Willow looks up and back at Charon. Gal compares the width of his shoulders to the narrow opening in the doors and nods. There’s no way he’s fitting through.
“We’ll have to find something else.” she says, somewhat frantically. “We - “
“No. Go.” Charon calls out. Another blast from his shotgun causes somebody to cry out in pain.
“ Go,” Charon roars. “I’ll meet up with you at Arlington. Get out of here.”
Gal shakes her head, but Willow grabs her by the arm and yanks her towards the doors. When Gal turns her wild gaze on Willow, Willow’s eyes are serious.
“He can take care of himself. Let’s go.”
Gal takes one last look at Charon’s back and starts wedging herself through the opening into the tunnel. Willow follows, and then they’re through.
A few minutes of running later, a huge explosion rattles the steel grating below their feet. Gal stops in her tracks, goes to turn, but Willow is already there to keep herding her forward, not giving her even a second to turn and go backward. Gal gives in and keeps moving. It feels like her brain is stuck on a loop, imagining all the things that explosion could mean.
She doesn’t have much time to debate, though. Something flickers in the corner of her eye; when she turns to look, a hand slices through the air and catches on her air, tearing the fabric of her sleeve. Gal swears and stumbles backwards. Her fingers wrap around the combat knife at her hip and bring it up. The feral ghoul screams as she jams the knife through an eye socket and collapses.
Ahead of her, Willow is engaging two more. One falls over, but wraps itself around her leg, trying to topple her as well. The other is swinging for her head. Gal kicks the one on the ground in the stomach, and when it fails to dislodge the ghoul, brings her rifle around and aims for the chest. The ghoul falls still after three shots.
Willow brings her shotgun around like a baseball bat, clocks the other ghoul in the side of the head, and takes advantage of the distance to pump it full of buckshot. With that one out of commission, silence falls around them. They wait for a moment to make sure no stragglers appear, but all is quiet.
Willow glances at Gal, then winces and looks down at her leg. Her thick trousers are torn just below the knee, and there’s a very clear bite mark on her skin, leaking blood. It looks painful.
“We need to treat that.” Gal says. Willow shakes her head and whips a handkerchief out of her pocket to tie around it, not bothering to wipe up any of the blood.
“No, it’ll keep. It’s not that bad, and we need to get out of here.”
Willow has to slow down due to a limp from the bite. The metro is dark, damp, and quiet. Every little sound, from their footsteps to the drip of water along one wall, echoes eerily through the air. When Gal trips on a chunk of cement, the sound of her own bitten-off exclamation nearly scares her into a heart attack.
Willow injured, Charon missing, and her shaking out of her boots - it’s not exactly the way she hoped to start this trip. Feels like an omen, really.
But even if turning back and forgetting about the Pitt would be the best option, it doesn’t erase the faces of the Pitt slaves from her brain. She could never live with herself if she abandoned them. So on they go.
It takes literal hours to wind their way through the subway, long enough that when they finally emerge back out into the open, dusk is setting in. Gal takes a minute to appreciate the wide open space as Willow rests, leaning against the railing around the metro entrance. Willow dumps her pack on the ground and groans when she unwraps the crusty handkerchief around her leg.
“Fucking ferals.” she says bitterly, yanking a bottle of water from her pack to soak the handkerchief. “Good thing it was me and not you. We can’t get infections like humans can.”
“You can still die from blood loss.” Gal snaps, uncharacteristically angry. Willow looks up from her wound and raises an eyebrow, then snickers.
“You’re testy when you’re pining for your lost love.” she says. Her flippant attitude does NOT make the situation better. Gal opens her mouth to say something cutting, thinks better of it, then shuts it and turns away.
Gal whirls around. “You don’t know-”
She stops at the look in Willow’s eyes. They’ve lost all trace of humor.
“Gal.” Willow says softly. “He’s going to be okay. Charon is tough as nails and stubborn as a mule. He can’t be brought down by a couple raiders.”
“I…” Gal tries. “I just…”
Willow waits patiently while she searches for the words. They stick in her throat, so she swallows once, twice, and then suddenly they pour out like a waterfall.
“It’s just that we left this morning, Willow, and now you’re hurt and Charon is gone and he might be hurt and this is all my fault because I dragged you guys into this and I don’t even know what I thought I could do to save literally an entire city of slaves, Willow, I can’t even fight a feral ghoul on my own without you needing to save me and if you hadn’t I’d have died in the arena in my first fight and you’d be in Underworld and safe.”
She stops only because her chest constricts so painfully she can’t speak anymore. One hand goes to her chest plate as she tries to take a slow breath and unwind the knot in her sternum. This feels an awful lot like the panic she’d experienced when she’d stepped out of 101 - overwhelming and uncontrollable.
Gal doesn’t even realize she’s looking down at the ground until she feels a hand on her shoulder. She looks up, right into Willow’s chestplate, and takes a step forward so she can rest her head on Willow’s collarbone. She doesn’t expect the thin, strong arms that wrap around her shoulders and pull her in close.
“You’re so full of shit, tourist.” Willow says above her head. Just like Charon, she gives off heat like a furnace. They stand in silence for a moment.
“...I told you that I had a family, right? Before I got turned into a ghoul?” Willow asks.
“Yeah.” Gal says softly. “You said they died?”
Willow hums an agreement. “Had a husband and two kids. Andy and Carla. My husband was a piece of shit, but he was a piece of shit that gave me two of the best damn kids in existence. And then… he took them away from me.”
Her grip tightens a little bit, then loosens. She takes a step back, giving Gal a little space but close enough that the heat of her can still be felt.
“I was lost without them. They were… my everything. And then when I tried to end it all, suddenly this ghoul comes swooping in to save me, drags my sorry ass twenty miles back to Underworld on his own. And it was fucking hard to start over, and there were days I didn’t want to, but eventually it got easier. I found a new place in life. Found Quinn. I owed Charon everything. And yet, I had to watch Ahzrukhal use him as a cronie and a dog for his own fucked-up pleasure.”
Her voice is starting to sound a little strange - more scratchy than normal, maybe.
“And then you come along, and you risk your goddamn life for him like it’s the easiest thing in the world. Like there’s no other option but to do it. You know how many people in this world would do that?
“But it’s more than that.” Willow stops and scratches the side of her cheek. “I lost my family, tourist. We ghouls, we can’t have kids. Can’t make a family in the traditional sense, so we have to do it some other way. Everything you’ve done, for me, for Charon, you’re part of that family whether you want to be or not. And you’re worried about dragging me to Paradise Falls for a vacation? For fuck’s sake, I’d trek all the way to the West Coast with you, if that’s what you needed. I’d go to the ends of the Earth for you.”
The silence hangs thickly between them. Gal makes one aborted attempt to reply and winds up stumbling forward again into Willow’s space. She squeezes Willow’s torso so hard the ghoulette lets out a wheezing laugh, and keeps squeezing. Willow returns the embrace carefully before one hand touches Gal’s hair and smoothes it back. Gal’s dad used to do something similar when they hugged. It feels - nice, but also sad. Like there’s weight to the gesture, a story to it for both of them.
“Okay, okay, enough of that.” Willow says eventually. “Shouldn’t be doing this out in the open anyway. We’re almost to the stopping point, let’s head out before it gets too dark.”
They had stopped at this same house in Arlington cemetery on the way to Underworld, but it had still been light out then and far less creepy. Now, in the twilight, the shapes of the gravestones and crosses look like specters in the gloom. Gal can’t believe that they used to bury bodies in the ground before the war. How creepy is that? In the Vault, they just cremate them like civil people.
“That’s why it’s so safe.” Willow says in amusement. “You humans are so damn superstitious about graveyards, you won’t even go near ‘em after dark. Come on, let’s get inside.”
Willow pushes the front door of the house open gently. They sweep through the house from top to bottom, making sure it’s empty, before dropping their packs and barricading the back entrance. Amazingly, all the windows in the house are intact, making it a good temporary hideout.
Willow starts a fire in the fireplace while Gal clears out a spot in the middle of the former living room and drags a mattress in. The smell of mac and cheese makes her stomach rumble, but she oddly enough doesn’t feel that hungry. Gal doesn’t even contemplate why until she finds herself standing at one of the windows, looking out at the graveyard and twisting a strand of hair around her finger. If Charon had gotten into trouble and they weren’t there to help…
Her eye catches movement in the gloom. Something slips behind a gravestone and then comes out the other side, a large dark shape that she can’t identify.
“Somebody’s outside,” she calls back. Willow carefully takes the mac and cheese off the fire and sets it on a crumbling brick before reaching for her rifle.
The figure ambles closer, moving slowly and keeping to the gravestones for cover. Gal accepts her own rifle from Willow and ducks down so she won’t be silhouetted in the window by the firelight. Willow gets on the other side of the door where she can take down anybody trying to break in.
The figure ambles ever closer, clearly alone. Gal doesn’t want to hope too hard, but…
“ It’s Charon, ” she breathes when he finally gets close enough to identify. And he’s limping slightly on one leg and has a bandanna wrapped around his forearm that looks darker than bandanas should be. Gal sets her rifle down hurriedly, checks that her pistol is on her hip, and darts for the door. Willow lets her go first.
Charon pulls his pistol when they burst out of the doorway, but lowers it immediately afterwards. He looks worn-out, and yeah, that bandana shouldn’t be that colour. The look in his eyes as Gal and Willow stop in front of him is one of relief, which makes Gal beam at him.
“You’re getting old. Time was, you’d have beaten us here.” Willow says drily. It’s how she expresses her own relief at seeing him here and (mostly) whole. Charon snorts and lets her take his pack so he can limp up the stairs and into the house.
“Ran out of ammo and had to gut one with my knife. She was faster than usual.”
“Is that where your new decoration came from?” Gal asks, pointing to his forearm. Charon shrugs, not even looking at it, but the way he he sits down gingerly, using his other arm to lower to the floor, is telling.
“Caught a bullet. Nothing to worry about.” he says dismissively. Gal frowns at him and crouches down by his side.
“You should have stopped to treat it. Is the bullet still in there?” she asks, even as her hand is reaching for the knot on the bandana. She touches it gingerly, just trying to feel if the fabric is wet.
Gal jerks her hand back as if she’d touched a hot stove. Charon has never… flinched before. She’s touched him literally dozens of times. Sure, he’d jerked away from their brief contact yesterday, but she’d chalked it up to him being angry at her still.
Her eyes go from his arm to his face, catching the untrusting, wary look in his eyes. It’s replaced almost instantaneously, but the damage is already done. She stumbles to her feet and away from Charon, her throat tight.
“Well, uh, you should… should get Willow to look at it. Stimpacks are in my bag. Where you packed them.” she says woodenly. Willow is frozen in front of the fire with a fork in her hand, looking at the two of them with a quizzical expression on her face.
Gal feels her throat tighten and flees.
She finds herself in the basement, fumbling a pack of matches out of a pocket so she can strike one and see. Somebody’s left a bunch of old lanterns scattered around a portrait of a man with dark hair at one end. Gal commandeers one that still has some oil left in it and lights the wick before sinking down against a pillar and closing her eyes.
Maybe it would be a different story if she’d held the contract right from the beginning, but going from an easy, dare she say close relationship to this… to flinching at being touched, and arguing, and blatant distrust…
It’s nothing she did, Gal reminds herself. Charon will come around when he feels comfortable, when he’s able to believe that Gal isn’t going to control him or use him. She has to be the gentle, understanding one, which is kind of a big burden when you don’t know what you’re doing 90% of the time. But she can do it. She can.
Something scrapes near the stairway. Gal glances over and blinks.
“...hey.” Charon says gruffly, walking over. He’s no longer limping, though his gait is a bit stiff, and his forearm is neatly bandaged in white gauze. So he’s been taken care of. Good.
She realizes she hasn’t acknowledged his greeting. It doesn’t scare him away; rather, he sits down a few feet away and stretches his leg out in front of him. Gal looks away.
Why would you flinch from me? She wants to ask. Instead, what comes out is, “Do you know who that is?”
Charon turns to look at the portrait they’re both facing, of the man with the high forehead, dark hair, and full beard. There’s not just lanterns in front of the portrait; several vases are scattered about with dried flowers stuck in them, and paper litters the floor. It looks like a memorial or something. Somebody that died here?
“That’s Abraham Lincoln.” Charon says shortly. When Gal looks at him, he elaborates.
“He used to be President of the United States, hundreds of years ago. He was called the Great Emancipator because he ended slavery in the country.”
Gal raises her eyebrows in surprise. “America practiced slavery?”
Charon lets out a huff of amusement. “Yes. For a long time, actually. The whole country went to war over it in the 1800’s and nearly split in two. But the North won, and the country was kept together and slavery abolished, thanks to Lincoln.”
So how did you end up the way you are? She thinks. He grew up when America was still around as a country, so how did Charon ended up tied to a contract that takes away his free will? “It sounds like you admire him.”
“He was a great man.” Charon says softly. “He always fought for his ideals. ‘Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.’”
“...is that a dig at me? Because of the contract?” Gal asks cautiously. Charon looks over at her and furrows his eyebrows.
“...no. I was referring to myself.”
“You?” she frowns. Oh. Oh. “Because of the stuff you’ve been made to do, you mean?”
Charon goes very carefully still, and doesn’t answer.
“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.” she adds after a moment of silence. Rather than relaxing, Charon’s shoulders stiffen, and he looks pointedly away at a dark corner of the basement, very much away from her.
“I will do as you command.” he says woodenly.
Gal fucking hates that sentence.
She stands up, brushes the seat of her pants off, and turns to Charon, though she doesn’t move any closer to him. She can’t handle any more flinching tonight. His eyes are hard, defiant, as they meet hers. It’s like he towers over her, even he’s seated.
“It’s almost like you want me to, you know. I feel like you’re waiting for me to show some evil side I’ve been hiding this whole time, and you’re just goading me until it happens. Is that what you’re doing?”
He just looks at her, expression unchanging.
“Well, it’s not going to happen. Goad all you want, I’m not going to treat you like a - like a - “
The word doesn’t come out. She turns and leaves, the weight of his gaze heavy on her back.
Willow looks up when she comes upstairs. She takes in Gal’s stormy face and huffs in sympathy.
“It’ll take time.” she says. Gal shoots her a look and curls up near the fire, knees pulled up so she can wrap her arms around them.
Willow watches her for a moment more, then goes back to rearranging her pack. “You want first watch tonight, or should I take it?”
Gal shrugs, then reaches out for her rifle, propped up against the wall, and drags it to her.
“I’ll take it. Not that tired anyway.”
Willow shoots her a look, but doesn’t pry.
They eat in silence. Gal finds out that Willow puts hot sauce in her mac and cheese (‘don’t have that many taste buds left, tourist. I gotta do something to make it taste good’). Charon shows up a half hour later, eats his dinner mechanically, and then sets up across the room with his shotgun. When Gal tells him she’s taking first watch, he just looks at her and stays exactly where he is.
“I’m not going to command you, if that’s what you’re waiting for. But you should get some rest.” she adds pointedly. He ignores that too.
Willow looks at both of them, mutters something under her breath, and flops down onto the mattress. Charon and Gal sit in silence, ignoring each other, until she gets back up again for her turn at watch.
It’s not until Gal is already laying down on the mattress and half-asleep, spare clothes tucked under her head for a pillow, that she feels someone settle in on the other side.
“I think we can make it to Megaton by tomorrow night. It’d be nicer to stay in a settlement than to camp out like we did on the way here, huh?”
Megaton? That sounds familiar to Gal for some reason. She frowns, in the midst of shouldering her pack, and thinks.
Megaton. The word on the sign. A city she’d never gotten to her first day out of the Vault. Looks like she’s going to get to see it after all. Weird, how the universe works.
How different would her life have been, had she headed for Megaton instead of turning left at that intersection? Where would she be now?
Gal glances over at her traveling companions, bickering over something as they get ready, and smiles. The Pitt was a lot of heartache and rough times - still is, honestly - but it was worth it. Who knows if she’d ever have met Willow and Charon otherwise? Maybe she’d be farther in the search for her father, but maybe not. No, she wouldn’t give up the way things have happened.
Once they’re through the initial jaunt through the metro tunnels, the way to Megaton is relatively smooth sailing. Charon stops them just out of eyesight of Megaton’s walls and glances up at the area, eyes narrowed.
“They have a sniper on the roof.” Charon says. “You sure we’re gonna be welcome here?”
Gal squints up towards the front gate; she sees a Protectron ambling about in the distance, but nothing else. How can Charon see that far?
“Quinn comes through here all the time. We’ll be fine.” Willow says with a roll of her eyes. Gal moves to get in front - she’s no stranger to ghoul bigotry, she knows that her being in front is the best option - but Charon darts around her and takes the lead without a word.
Nothing happens as they meander up to the front gate of the settlement, though Gal does catch a flash of something shiny up above. The Protectron doesn’t bother them either, just rattles out an advertisement for some bar in town and shakes a metal limb in their direction.
The gate lifts to reveal a sturdy, if somewhat shabby, town cobbled together along the sides of what looks like a crater. Just in front of them is a pathway, reinforced with wood beams, leading down into the heart of the crater. In front of them stands a man in a cowboy hat with a neatly trimmed beards. His arms are crossed over his chest in a no-nonsense manner.
“Welcome to Megaton.” the man says in a deep, melodic voice. “I’m Sheriff Simms. I do my best to greet every new face we get in our little town. Can I ask what your business is here?”
His words are pleasant, and bland of tone, but Gal sees how his eyes dart to their weapons, cataloguing them carefully. Looks like the welcome wagon doubles as the security around here.
“We’re just passing through.” Willow answers. “We were looking for beds for the night, place to eat, then we’ll be on our way.”
“Uh-huh.” the Sheriff’s face is impassive. “If you’re looking for a place to eat, The Brass Lantern will suit you fine. I’d normally send you to the common house for lodging, but we’re full up at the moment. You can try Moriarty’s Saloon, over on the other side of the town. He’ll probably be able to rent you a room or two.”
Simm stops, eyes Charon, and continues.
“Now I want you to know that I give this speech to everybody that visits our fine town, so don’t take it personal. We don’t brook any troublemaking here. If I catch you at it, you’ll be out of here faster than you can blink. Keep on the straight and narrow, and you’ll be welcome back anytime.” with that said, the Sheriff touches a finger briefly to the brim of his hat, turns, and walks away.
As soon as the Sheriff is gone, Willow immediately rounds on Charon with an amused grin.
“You turn heads everywhere you go, you know that? Dinner first, or the saloon?”
Charon gives her a flat stare. “Very amusing. Let’s make sure we have a place to stay first.”
They hike down into the bottom of the crater, passing several houses and an outdoor bar. There’s a large puddle of water off to the side in the center of the crater, with what looks like a…
“Is that a bomb?” Gal asks incredulously, looking at the rusted hunk of metal half-sunk into the puddle. A man in ragged old clothes is standing ankle-deep in the water next to the bomb, speaking to a group of people.
“Yeah, Megaton built up in this crater because of that bomb. They figured nobody would be crazy to attack if it meant they could get blown into little pieces.” Willow explains as they pass it. Charon mumbles something that sounds strangely like, ‘fucking morons’.
“You mean it’s still active?” Gal says with a look of horror. Why don’t they defuse it? If it’s been there since the Great War, there’s no telling how unstable it is. It could go off anytime.
“Well, yeah.” Willow says with a snort. “Do you have the smarts to defuse it? I can guarantee no one around here does. If they did, it would have been taken care of a long time ago.”
The kicker is, Gal is pretty sure she can. Once you got past the encryption on the information storage in Vault 101’s computer system (which she did right after she turned thirteen, not to brag), she’d found whole gigabytes of old classified military information from before the Great War - and she’d read every word of it. If it taught her anything, it was that defusing an explosive is much easier than anybody realizes. She could have it done in ten, fifteen minutes tops.
But tinkering with a volatile nuclear bomb on their first night in town probably isn’t smart. Still, the idea sits on the edge of her mind, ignored but not forgotten. If she can help, maybe she should.
They head up the other side of the crater and around until they stop in front of a building that reads ‘Moriarty’s Saloon’. It looks a bit shabbier than the buildings around it, but then, Gal’s expectations for a bar are pretty low anyway.
The front door opens into a seating area with the bar up behind it. It’s empty of customers, but there’s a figure standing behind the counter, banging on a radio, and another man standing behind him holding a clipboard.
“Come on, work you piece of shit -” the figure standing next to the radio stops and glances up at them as the door swings shut. He’s a ghoul, with dark brown patches of hair and big milky eyes, wearing a faded grey t-shirt. He sees Gal and flinches, his eyes dropping down as if he doesn’t want to make eye contact with her. But when they light on Charon and Willow his eyebrows lift in surprise.
“Willow? Charon?” he says hesitantly, one hand still poised above the radio.
The figure with the clipboard comes forward - an older man with slicked-back grey hair and a short beard. He looks at them standing at the doorway and then at the ghoul with an irritated look on his face.
“Well, are you gonna stand there with your gob open, or are you going to serve our customers, you useless piece of shit?”
With no hesitation at all, the gray-haired man lifts his free arm and cuffs the ghoul across the back of the head, knocking him across the counter and nearly into the wall beside it. The ghoul doesn’t fight back, just lifts one arm above his head defensively and waits for the gray-haired man to back off.
“Sorry, Mr. Moriarty, I’ll get to it right away. Sorry.”
Apparently accepting of this, Moriarty whirls around and disappears into a back room. The door slams shut behind him. One hand covering the spot where he’d been cuffed, Gob looks up at Willow and Charon with shame in his eyes and straightens up.
“Sorry, I - I wasn’t expecting, well. You. What are you doing in Megaton?”
He sounds like he’s trying to change the subject, but judging from the look on Willow’s face, it’s not going to be successful. Gal follows quietly as Willow marches up to the bar. She can see bruised patches on the ghoul bartender’s arms in between the spots where his skin is ripped or missing, clearly new marks and not ones caused by ghoulification. He looks like a wreck, to be honest. No wonder, if that’s the treatment he gets on a daily basis.
“Gob,” Willow says, her voice strangely solemn. “We wondered what happened to you. Carol-”
The ghoul, Gob, starts and looks at Willow with something like panic.
“Don’t tell Carol, please! I don’t… I don’t want her to worry about me. Promise me you won’t tell her.”
Willow attempts to make a placating gesture, but the movement of her hands causes Gob to flinch again and take a step back. His arm is already halfway up to cover his face before he gets the reaction under control. Willow lowers her hands, her mouth twisted in an unhappy line.
“We won’t tell Carol, Gob. But… shit. This is fucked up. Is there anything we can do? Can we-”
Something thumps in the back. Gob glances over his shoulder and makes a nervous shushing gesture as Moriarty emerges again and shuffles around to a stack of boxes in the corner. Willow’s shoulders slump slightly as she cuts her sentence off. She seems disinclined to say anything more.
“We wanted to rent some rooms, actually.” Gal cuts in, before the whole situation turns even more sour. She tries not to be moved by the fact that Gob won’t even look her in the eye, but it’s hard. “Do you have any available?”
“Why, of course we do, lassie.” Moriarty cuts in, bellying up to the counter. “And how many will ye be needing?”
