Chapter Text
August 6th, 2289
Tuesday
14:00
Air rasps painfully in his throat, as though it's the first time he's taken a breath. It's not. Despite everything that's been thrown at him, he's lasted twenty-one years, nearly eight thousand days, breathing all the while.
Maybe it just feels like the first, because he thought he'd taken his last. He'd settled down against this wall, and said goodbye. To everything. To everyone.
Then something brought him back.
It wasn't the pain, that came later. It wasn't the heat, that came later still. It was a thought. A feeling.
I'm not done yet.
I have to find her.
That's when the pain hit.
It's concentrated in his left leg, a savage pain that feels like burning teeth, clamping around the limb, tearing through his boots to rip into the skin beneath.
There's a secondary focus in his right shoulder. A raw pain, this one, like something lodged in the flesh, grinding against bone with every movement he makes.
The last is a dull throb that hovers over his left eye. Nothing, in comparison to the rest, though he can feel a slow, lazy drip on his cheek that can only be blood.
Fresh blood. He's still bleeding.
So he's not dead.
He's not done yet.
The heat is next to make itself known. It covers most of his body, but it's not the searing pain of fire on skin, it doesn't scream at him to move, move now. It's radiated heat, like standing too close to a stove. Or the sun, burning down from a summer sky.
It is August. Early August. But last he remembered, it was morning. The sky a hazy shade of blue, the sun so low that it wasn't even cut by the accelerating blades of the vertibird.
How long has he lain there? Minutes? Or hours? Where even is he?
There's barely any sound to identify the location. There's an indistinct hum, that may be a creation of his ears, or maybe a distant insect. A ticking, some distance away, irregular, not a mine. From behind him comes a whisper of something else. Something gentler.
Open water.
The thought of water brings with it a pang of thirst. His lips are dry and sore; he tries to moisten them with his tongue, but his mouth is filled with grit and the all-too-recognisable taste of blood. He swallows, painfully, and checks his teeth. All there, save for the gap on the right side. The deathclaw's toll.
To the victor go the spoils. With the victor remain the scars.
They'd tried to persuade him to have replacements for the lost teeth; he refused. When he dreams, rare as that is, the teeth are still there.
He presses the tip of his tongue against his gum.
Not dead or dreaming.
He opens his eyes. It's bright, so bright that his eyes snap shut again on reflex. Slowly, he persuades them open, a fraction of an inch at a time. Blue above, grey below. Darker shapes scattered across the grey, slowly, painfully coming into focus.
At his feet, a pair of mutant hounds spill their guts on the ground, savaged by a blade that's still lodged in one of their necks. Stabbed in, with almost the last of his strength, before he dragged himself back to the wall and waited for whatever came next.
Beyond them, a green-skinned abomination scorched by laser fire, brutal spiked board still held tight in its hand. A man, beside it, looking up at the sky with a glassy-eyed stare. His back is twisted, his arms splayed, his flight suit almost entirely red with blood.
Lancer-Knight Conrad. Twenty-four years old. No known relatives. Recently promoted for continuous good service.
He curses at the loss, and moves his head, prepared for an explosion of pain that does not come. He touches a hand to his temple. The blood is sticky, drying. The flow is stopping.
But he's still not dead.
The ticking seems to be coming from the shell of an old-world car, about forty feet away. It's tipped on its side, now, the metal cooling, the core probably spewing rads into the air. The explosion had thrown him off balance, far enough for the mutant on top of the hospital building to get his shot in. A bullet. A .50. He'd been spun around by the force of it, falling to his knees, lucky not to take another shot to the back. By the time he turned around and took his rifle in the other hand, it was too late for the Lancer-Knight.
Just beyond stands an open power armor frame, plating dented and scorched and utterly broken. The fusion core had been depleted by the ferocity of the initial attack, crippling the suit, leaving its occupant unable to defend himself. He'd managed to hit the exit controls but with three mutants charging toward him, he had no chance.
Knight-Sergeant MacDonald. Thirty-two years old. A wife and two children, in Rivet City. Made his rank after the battle for the airport.
Over to the left, smoke still rises from the wreck of the vertibird, everything in it and around it charred or molten. A missile had screamed up from the hospital building, slamming into it with a crash that jarred every bone in his body. A direct hit, from point-blank range. The Lancer-Knight had done an outstanding job to get them even close to landing; the Knight-Sergeant just as much for dragging them both out and throwing them toward safety.
Then another missile had spun toward the 'bird. And that was the end of it. And all of them.
Faint shouts echo out from the hospital buildings; more mutants, maybe the very one that had brought them down. Anger rises in him, but much as he might like to storm the place and take revenge for his lost men, he's down, and wounded. He doesn't need to look at the laser rifle abandoned by his side to know that the cells are depleted. He has to retreat.
He's learned that much, in the last few years.
He tests his limbs. The left arm and right leg seem able to support him. The other two... well. The other two are coming along for the ride whether they like it or not.
He half-pushes, half-pulls himself up, bracing his hand on the wall. He concentrates hard on the texture of the stone under his fingers, the dead grass in between them, the warmth of the sun beating down over him. Anything that isn't the pain.
But he's up. On his feet. The Commonwealth hasn't beaten him.
He's not done yet.
No matter what's happened, he still has to find her.