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Deacon keeps up a steady stream of “fuck fuck fuck shit shit shit fuck fuck fuck” in time with the rhythm of his feet hammering down the ancient cracked tarmac. You’re right beside him, legs working like pistons, lungs on fire. Behind you, the enraged bellows of super mutants. You feel the earth shake as their stampede picks up momentum. Your ears are full of the howling of their deformed hounds, but under that you can pick out an ominous beeping. Suiciders. Fantastic. Straight ahead of you, a radstorm is brewing, coming in fast off the Glowing Sea. Your Geiger counter is clicking frantically, the familiar dense nausea uncurling itself in your stomach. "Fuck shit" is an accurate assessment of the situation.
“Deacon… we need… cover… NOW,” you pant, charging around a corner, almost stumbling as you swerve around the rusted skeleton of a car.
“I know I know I know, fuck fuck fuck! There’s a good hidey-hole around here, I’ve used it before!”
“Where!?”
“Oh you know, general vicinity, just keep moving!”
The mutants are gaining. There must be nearly twenty of them. This is it, you think. Of course, you think that at least once a day, have done ever since Vault 111 spat you out into the Wasteland, but this time you think it with more finality. You’re good with your pistol and Deacon’s better with his laser rifle, but there is no decent cover in the suburbs, no hidden perches where you can pick them off one by one. Too many of them anyway, too easy for them to surround you out here. You can feel the rads building in the air around you, sucking up your flagging energy even faster. Mutants don’t get tired. If anything, the extra rads seem to give them a boost.
“Hard right, pal!” yells Deacon.
He veers abruptly and plunges into an alley between two mostly intact bungalows. It’s clogged with scrub and detritus. Some cover, but not enough, not with the hounds. You scramble after him. Your foot hits something spongy, and the something spongy moans. You tear your ankle away from its scrabbling grasp.
“Hey… ferals… we’ve got…”
“I know,” says Deacon. He has, inexplicably, paused at the alley’s exit. He’s looking out on an expanse of dry scrub that was once a park. The alien-strange shapes of an abandoned playground are black against the sickly green light of the sky. You can hear the storm roiling and roaring now, it’s going to break any minute. The feral you disturbed has pulled itself to its feet, staring around wildly with decaying eyes, trying to locate the sound of your voice. You dispatch it with a single silent shot to what used to be its brain.
“Can't stop here,” you gasp through your burning throat, "Deacon... we have to..."
Then a crack of lightning casts the world in high-relief neon green for a moment and you see that the park is littered with lumpy shapes. They are prone, but starting to twitch and stir as the radstorm gathers. There are dozens of them. Maybe more than a hundred. Some of them are glowing.
“Well shit,” you say.
Deacon looks at you, his expression inscrutable as always behind his mirrored glasses.
“Insert something Shakespearean about death and our inglorious demise here,” he says.
There's an explosion behind you and bullets start to ricochet off a sagging gutter above your head. Deacon grabs your hand and yanks you towards the playground, sprinting directly towards the colony of ferals, now shuffling to their feet. Bullets are flying all around you now as you zig-zag wildly into the open. Mutants are squeezing through the alley. Some are simply crashing through the houses on either side. The radstorm is right overhead. All those gaping feral faces turn towards you as one, then suddenly you’re in the middle of them, weaving and dodging through a sea of rotting flesh and jagged snarls. You lose Deacon’s hand as he turns to smack one out the way with the butt of his rifle. You stumble and feel hands clawing at you, but they're mostly useless against the reinforced lining of your combat trousers. You drop and roll under the remnants of a jungle gym and out the other side, then you’re back on your feet, charging up a rusted slide, launching yourself off the platform at the top. You land running, you accelerate to a barrelling sprint, firing off shots half blind at anything that looms into your line of sight. Somewhere to your left, you hear Deacon whoop.
Then you’re through the main clump of rad-rotted bodies and Deacon is beside you again, and you’re still running, surging forward on a wave of adrenaline. You’re vaguely aware of all hell breaking loose as the mutants hit the wall of ferals, but you don’t waste time glancing over your shoulder. Then you’re in another alley, around a corner, vaulting over a picket fence, scurrying down the side passage of a mostly collapsed two-storey. It’s darker now and the air is muggy and thick. The clicking from your PipBoy is a solid stream of static, so loud that it’s making your entire arm vibrate. You stagger to a halt in the backyard, almost tripping over Deacon as he drops to a crouch. He starts rummaging around in the debris by the wall, and you’re about to ask him what the fuck he’s playing at when he hisses triumphantly.
“Fuck yes. Found it. C’mon.”
He kicks a pile of dead branches aside and pulls back a stained sheet of plywood to reveal stone steps leading down to a cellar door. He motions you in ahead of him, pulling the plywood back into place as he follows. The door is solid metal, and after a moment of fiddling at the keyhole, you realise it’s jammed, not locked. You shove your hip and shoulder into it, hard, and it swings open. You’re in.
Then there are several long agonizing minutes with the two of you standing with your weapons raised and your backs pressed to the cold concrete wall either side of the door. You can still hear the commotion in the playground, staccato gun fire and harsh voices bellowing with pain and fury. You try to slow your breathing as it dies down. A minute passes, maybe two. You hear heavy footsteps in the side passage, then two huge shadows move across the dim light coming through one of the narrow hopper windows.
“Stupid coward humans,” spits one.
“Where they hide,” growls the other.
They stomp around for a while longer. After an eternity of seconds, their footsteps start to recede.
You wait until you can't hear anything but the crackle and boom of the storm. Then you count to sixty, slowly, before stepping up on a crate so you can peek through the dust-caked glass. The green haze is so dense that you can only see out a few feet, but those few feet look empty. You listen. You let out a breath you didn’t realise you were holding.
Something small and hard hits you on the cheek and falls down your collar.
“Heads up,” says Deacon, “Wait, sorry, I’m supposed to say that before I throw…”
You fish the RadAway tablet out of your shirt and swallow it dry. Almost immediately, the sick weight in your stomach starts to recede. Your PipBoy has gone silent. The door, if not the whole basement, is almost certainly lead-lined. Crates stacked along the walls, a large cabinet and tool rack, cot in the corner, even a faded rug on the floor. Obvious at a glance that most of the useful supplies have been cleaned out over the years, but it’s dry and contained. It’s not the first time you’ve offered silent thanks to all the prewar survivalists.
“Hey,” says Deacon, “Are you ok? You haven’t called me an idiot yet and I’m starting to get concerned. Of course, my plan – which totally was a plan, by the way – worked flawlessly, so I’m ready to accept your eternal gratitude now.”
You turn to face him. He’s rubbing hard at his eyes with the back of his hand. You stare.
“What’s up? Do I have ghoul on my face?”
“No,” you say, “But this is definitely the first time I’ve seen you without your shades.”
He looks down at the sunglasses in his hand with mild surprise.
“Well yeah,” he says, “Rads make my eyes really fucking itchy. What, surprised to discover I actually have eyes?”
That makes you laugh, even though it's not really that funny and your pulse is still roaring in your ears. You hop off the crate so you’re standing directly in front of him. His eyes are deep set and paler than you would have suspected, a blue so faded it’s almost grey.
“Careful,” he says, with that sardonic half-smile you’ve come to know so well, “Don’t get lost in them.”
Normally you would give him shit for a crack like that, but right now you’re too distracted by the space between you. Or rather, the lack of it. The mere inches of air separating your body from his. You remember the jolt that went through you when he grabbed your hand. That was new. Sure, you’ve been squashed up together in tight spots, in cramped safehouses, but this was different. Your heart is still pounding and you’re no longer convinced that your narrow escape is to blame.
“Are you sure you’re ok?” he asks, with something resembling sincerity in his voice, “I gotta admit, that was a close one, even by our standards. I’d say a decent quarter of my life flashed before my eyes.”
It feels like one of you should move, there’s no reason for you to be standing this close together, but it’s like a magnet is holding you in place. Deacon doesn’t step back either. Instead, he holds your gaze.
“Yeah,” you say, “I really thought… yeah, I’m fine. My heart is beating so fast though.”
“Not mine,” he says, “I wasn’t worried at all and maintained a nice resting 60 throughout that entire near-death experience.”
For the first time, you can see the entirety of his ridiculous shit-eating grin, the crinkles around his eyes, the slight furrow across the bridge of his nose.
Later, you will wonder which one of you moved first, but if there was a moment’s hesitation on either side, it was less than a millisecond. Your hands are on his face, his are tight around your waist and he’s kissing you harder than you’ve ever been kissed in your life. You’ve always been aware of his scent, but never completely enveloped in and it makes you feel giddy. Stale sweat and old cigarettes, that weird ozone smell that lingers after laser fire, the medicinal tang of orange mentats on his tongue. His lips are rough and there’s a surprising amount of stubble scraping your chin. You’re up against the wall now, the hard planes of his body pressing urgently into yours, his hands on your collarbone, on your hips, on your ass. You pull his hips flush with yours, feeding his own urgency back to him. He shoves your cap off your head (his pompadour wig is already somewhere at your feet) and then his fingers are in your hair. He pulls back for a second, gently tugging your face away from his as he breaks off the kiss. His eyes are still so new to you. You search them for some kind of explanation, but you don’t need to.
“I want this,” he says in a ragged whisper, “I want you.”
You move to kiss him again. He obliges for a long moment but then pulls away, insistent.
“Do you want me?” he asks, in a tone you barely recognize. You realize he sounds vulnerable and it almost breaks you apart.
“Yes,” you say, though it comes out more like a whimper.
“Then tell me,” he says.
“Deacon, I want you,” you say. Quiet but clear.
Then there’s some delightfully frantic confusion as belts and armguards and guns and shirts go falling to the floor. You almost stumble in your hurry to step out of your trousers, but he laughs and catches you and shoves you hard against the wall again. The electricity of his bare skin on yours almost stops your breath in your throat. Your feet are hardly on the ground now, your legs wrapped around his, arms braced on his shoulders. You catch a flash of his wicked smile and then his mouth is around your nipple, and you let out a mortifying squeak. You can feel him grinning even as he teases you with his tongue and you can't help grinning too, you can't help the laughter on your lips as he explores you. His hands and his mouth are restless - of course they're restless - wandering all over you, and as usual, you feel like you can hardly keep up with him.
He releases himself from his jeans with one hand, one impossibly deft motion, then hitches you up higher on his hips, pinning you firmly against the wall. You squeeze your legs tight around his waist and there's another moment of ecstatic fumbling as he tries to line himself up and you slip a hand down to guide him. He lets out a little murmur of approval when he feels the soaking heat between your legs, and his eyes stay locked on yours as you ease down onto him. You almost feel trapped by his gaze, and you can see that he's reading you, searching your face for tells, even now, even here. You have nothing to hide though, not from him. Your mouth opens in a silent gasp as your hips come flush again. His eyes go heavy and hooded and his breath starts coming in hoarse pants as you find your rhythm together. He’s rocking up and into you, hitting you deep and hard and deliberate, and you arch into the wall to keep your purchase, tensing yourself against the friction of his thrusts. Your thighs are trembling with the exertion and the concrete is scraping the bare skin of your back, and you're not sure you can keep this up, but then he shifts a little, and there, that's it, then there's nothing in this universe but his heat and skin and smell. He responds to your shameless moan, buries his face in your neck, keeps up those short sharp thrusts at exactly that angle and...
Fuck. Shit.
A surge of release ripples up your body and bursts out your mouth in a strangled cry. He sinks his teeth into your shoulder as you tense around him, your fingers digging bruises into the taut muscles of his back. Then you're floating and you're still so full of him and a few moments later you feel his body echo yours, a heavy shudder deep inside you. He groans and clings to you tightly as he finishes and then you’re sliding down the wall, you're collapsing together as all the tension flows out of him. You end up in a heap of limbs on the dusty floor, dazed and spent.
He finds your hand and presses your palm against his chest. His heart is thudding like a freight train.
“See,” he says, his breath tickling your ear, “Even 60.”
“You’re so full of shit,” you murmur.
After some indeterminate amount of time tangled up on the floor together, half naked, lazily tracing the bones and curves and scars of each other and listening to the rad lightning snap and sizzle outside, you start to feel cold. He makes a little noise of protest as you pull yourself to your feet and survey the basement. You can feel yourself sagging as your final reserves of adrenaline ebb away. You investigate the narrow cot. Deacon rummages around in the crates and produces a musty but intact blanket.
“I hope that thing is sturdy enough for two,” he says.
You raise an eyebrow.
“What?” he says, spreading his hands, half-amused, half-sheepish, “I like to cuddle!”
On this point, he’s not lying. He curls his body around you, legs entwined with yours, a protective arm across your chest and his face nuzzled into the back of your neck. You can feel yourself drifting in the warmth of his body, but something keeps niggling, dragging you back to a semi-conscious state.
“Why did you grab my hand?” you ask.
Your own voice sounds far away, somewhere beyond the fog of exhaustion clouding your thoughts.
“Why did I what now?”
“When we… with the ferals. You grabbed my hand. Why?”
“Obviously, I wanted to make sure you didn’t try anything stupidly heroic, like taking on approximately seven million super mutants by yourself to cover my pointless ass,” he says, “That would be so typical of you.”
You don’t have the energy to sass him back.
“I wanted you beside me,” he says, after a minute.
“I’m always beside you.”
“I know, pal.”
He squeezes you closer to his chest. You kiss his hand. You note, sleepily, that the hair on his arm is light, almost reddish blonde. How have you never spotted that before? You want to tease him but you’re already half-asleep.
“I’m slipping,” you mumble.
You feel safer than you have in months, even though you know there’s no such thing as safe in the Commonwealth. The rad lightning cracks closer and brighter, followed immediately by a deafening peal of thunder, as if to remind you of this fact.
“It’s alright,” he says, “We have time. It sounds like this storm’s just getting started.”
He kisses the skin just below your jaw.
“Hey,” he murmurs, “What a day, huh?”