Chapter Text
There should be a name for someone who kills both their parents. A label. A warning. If there is, Lucy’s never heard it before, but she fits the criteria to a tee.
It’s not like her father gave her much choice. She hadn’t exactly been trying to kill him when her gunshot burrowed a hole in his chest and through the glass behind him, the momentum crashing his body to the ground floor below. She was struggling for her life a moment before it happened, pinned down between him and another man she’d never seen, as they attempted to lift her memory straight out of her head.
And then the ghoul showed up and offered her the chance to choose her fate via the little handgun that currently takes up a spot in her boot. He left her to act as judge and jury, and through the shock of it, her father had rushed her again, likely certain that she would never use the weapon on him.
He was wrong.
The end result is the same, though, regardless of intention. Both of her parents are dead at her hand, and Lucy isn’t quite sure how she’s supposed to process that.
All she knows for certain is that there is nothing left for her here. Her mother and father are gone. The distance between her and Norm feels longer than ever. Going back home isn’t an option. How could her brother even look at her now? The Vegas strip holds nothing but haunted memories, and not even the warm embrace of the man she once assumed she would live her whole life with back in Vault Thirty Three is enough to soothe the ache.
No, she can’t stay for Max. The way he looks at her now, like she’s the same innocent girl fresh out of the vault he met in the wasteland, only chips away at her nerves. Whoever she was then is dead in the wake of what she’s done. She’s a new thing altogether, even if she hasn’t figured out those details yet. The desire to keep moving in an effort to outrun her own brain burns deep in her veins, making her restless every night she sleeps in Freeside.
She wonders if that's what kept the ghoul alive for so long, his constant state of travel, only barely outrunning all his ghosts. He is the only person she wants to see again, and he’s on his way to Colorado, of all places, or so says the little man on the TV screen who sprang to life in the aftermath of one of her worst days on earth.
Their status when it came to friendship was always a confusing thing. Everything that should be simple is muddy when it comes to the ghoul. They have traded injuries and betrayals and last she saw him, he rescued her from a fate worse than death, even after she punched him out a window and onto a pole. She’s pretty sure that puts the ball in her court now. He’s made the only gesture someone like him can make that might encourage her to follow his tracks and hope she’ll be welcome.
So after several weeks of trying to ignore her sudden onset of wanderlust, she leaves New Vegas behind in search of the ghoul, hoping she might find a new purpose for herself along the way.
***
In a little town called Sedona that now houses what must be the richest survivors left in the wasteland, she finds him. Mostly by accident.
There is no flea soup for sale in these parts. Restored shops line a Main Street cloaked in towering red rocks, and for a moment, Lucy can imagine what this must have looked like before the world fell. Beautiful. Sun-drenched. Magical. Signs along the street leading here promised she would find good energy near the vortex, whatever that means. If anyone could use a dose of that, it’s her.
The road up through Utah would have been a better path to reach Colorado. It’s the one she assumed the ghoul might take, but those mountain roads are more treacherous than she realized, and traversing that landscape had proven more difficult than expected. Her disappointment is quick these days, and every collapsed road forcing her back south had her wound up and agitated like she’d taken a hit of buffout and chased it with a sugar high.
Doesn’t have anything to do with him, she reasoned. Not at all. It's only the poor weather and dangerous conditions that ruined her mood. So what if it takes longer to track him down? He is capable of taking care of himself. He isn’t waiting for her, and he doesn’t need her.
No one needs her.
If it takes ten days or ten years for them to cross paths again, then so be it. The ghoul is merely a bonus to her travels. That’s what she’s told herself. Every time she says it in her head, it feels fractionally more solid and plausible.
Except it won’t be ten years or even ten more days, because she’s somehow landed right behind the man she thought she might never see again. His long duster, tattered at the edges, is a sure give away, and the cowboy hat leaves no doubt in her mind as she runs to catch up, dodging passersby to tap him on the shoulder, her smile wide even as she tries to control it.
Okay, maybe this was a little more about him than she wanted to admit.
A different face turns around, unscarred and curious, looking at her like she’s the rude one when he’s wearing the ghoul’s clothes right out in the open.
“Can I help you?” the man asks.
“I’m so sorry. I thought you were someone else.” She pauses, her gaze traveling down the worn fabric as she tries to keep her composure. “Your coat is quite unique. May I ask where you got it?”
“Oh! At the auction. It’s rather smashing, isn’t it? Came with the hat! I intend to wear it to a costume party tonight.”
Lucy swallows the bile rising up in her throat. “What auction? I think I’d like to go shopping myself.”
The stranger frowns. “You missed it, unfortunately. The last one was a few weeks ago. Odd, there hasn’t been a new one yet, but there will be soon at Vault Seventeen. You never know what you’ll find! So many treasures taken off those wretched animals.”
“Vault seventeen? Can you—"
“Oh! So sorry, I do believe I’ll be late for my facial. Did you see they just opened the spa down the road? You must give it a visit. Have a lovely day!”
She watches what might be her only connection to the ghoul wander off in search of a fudging facial of all things, the whispers of that coat mocking her as they sway in the summer breeze. She has half a mind to snatch it off him in broad daylight, but forces herself to remain calm, even as her fingers twitch. Finding answers would be difficult if she earns a bounty on her head for theft.
Thankfully, the people of Sedona are more than happy to fill her in about their 'most impressive project' lodged into the base of a jagged red mountain.
“They’re finding a cure for that nasty affliction.” A shopkeeper tells her, fishing out a shiny crystal from a display case so Lucy can feel the vibrations. “Last I heard, they’ve made great progress. About once a month, they auction off the belongings of the test subjects to fund the research.”
“Test subjects?”
“Oh, yes. Lost souls that wander through here after succumbing to the virus. The least we can do for them is offer a chance to contribute to society one last time. If they were sentient, I’m sure it’s what they would want.”
She’s going to throw up right here in this store, all over the rocks and trinkets. “How would I visit this vault? I might like to offer my…support for such a worthy cause.”
“Oh, we all would, honey, but it’s impossible, I’m afraid. There are no tours given. The best we can do is support the auctions, though it has been a while since the last one. I’m sure there will be another soon, right at the base of Cathedral Rock, outside the vault.”
Lucy leaves the store before she’s tempted to say something she’ll regret. These people see ghouls as nothing more than test subjects for a phantom virus that doesn’t exist, and somehow, her ghoul has gotten himself mixed up in this mess. How long has he been trapped here, she wonders? Weeks at least, going by the last auction date. A shiver runs up her spine as she considers what might be happening to him inside the mountain. If he’s even still alive for her to find him at all. All those days she spent waffling back and forth about when to leave Vegas, and he could have been suffering while she stayed just one more night. The guilt of it threatens to strangle her already, such an eager feeling these days, always lying in wait for the next chance to creep up.
Taking on a whole vault by herself isn’t exactly the smartest thing she’s ever done, but she is so close. So damn close, and she can’t leave him there.
He would try for her. She knows he would. He took a detour to save her life the last time they saw each other, an action that held no benefit for him whatsoever, and yet there he was, shooting her father in the ass and saving her from becoming a chipped vegetable.
He would try for her, and so she will try for him. That’s all there is to it. The golden rule still applies even if the world seems intent on ignoring it.
Her Pip-Boy will get her inside.
Her gun will help her the rest of the way until she runs out of bullets.
What happens after that is something she’ll have to take as it comes. It’s not like she has much left to live for anyway these days. She may as well go out trying to help one of the few people who might still be on her side.
And once she finds him, if she's lucky enough that he's happy to see her, she will yell at him for leaving without saying goodbye.
***
Getting inside Vault Seventeen is the easy part. The golden glow of sunset slowly disappears behind her as the doors shut, trapping her inside and cloaking her in a haunting darkness. This part of the vaults is always so darn creepy, she thinks. Would it have been such a hassle to cover the walls in a sunny coat of paint?
All musings on paint colors quickly vanish when the elevator pops open at the very bottom level, offering an almost comically perfect ding to welcome her in, when what awaits her is anything but comical.
Blood coats the walls and floor, drag paths of crimson bleeding into desperate handprints at the hall corners.
Smashed glass crunches under her boots, and she grips her gun tighter as the blue-tinted lights flicker overhead. Something awful happened here, she just isn’t sure what until a body in a white coat, mangled and torn to shreds, comes into view. And then another and another, interspersed with dead feral ghouls, forming a chain from one room to the next.
Briefly, she is reminded of the one horror movie she was allowed to watch back home in Vault Thirty Three. Becoming a participant in such things had never been on her to-do list.
There are files scattered across metal tables, featuring photos of people with ghoulified features staring back at her.
Subject thirteen. Female. Aged early twenties. Freshly infected. Turn rate of ninety-six percent. Failure on day seven.
Lucy flips a blood-smudged corner of paper.
Subject sixty-eight. Male. Infection date unknown. Turn rate of fifty-one percent. Failure on day one hundred and thirty-two.
There are dozens more, all listing the same statistics along with other identifiers like blood type and aggression level. How easily they regenerate broken tissue, and how many vials of sedative it takes to knock them out until induced paralysis takes effect. Whatever they’re working on here, Lucy has her doubts about it being a vaccine or a cure. What exactly the mission is remains a mystery, but someone has put a lot of time and effort into these studies, horrific as they may be, and there has to be an end goal.
When she opens another red folder, the face she’s been looking for is right there waiting.
Her breath catches in her throat as her eyes scan the information in his profile, her blood boiling at the clinically detached phrases that seem so much worse when it’s about him.
Subject two hundred and ninety. Male. Advanced condition. Turn rate of fifteen percent. Failure date not yet reached.
There’s a level number at the corner of his page telling her that he’s one floor above her. She tears her gaze away from the haunted, blank expression on that paper, checks the bullets in her gun one last time, and aims for the elevators.
***
She finds him like one of those coveted rocks under the glass case back at the shop. Still and quiet at the very end of the room, on a steel table, naked except for a sheet and hooked up to an IV pumping purple liquid into his veins.
Lucy approaches carefully, lowering her weapon as she gets closer, her brows knitting together in the middle as her gaze travels across his body, watching the rhythmic rise and fall of his chest that could almost be hypotonic. His skin is hot when she rests her palm over his arm, just above the shackle holding his wrist in place. She longs to see that irritated look she’d grown somewhat used to during their travels directed at her again, but he only stares at the ceiling, eyes bloodshot and dry, as if he’d used up whatever moisture they could offer long ago.
She rubs her thumb across a dark vein on his arm in a gentle stroke, trying to rouse him. “Are you with me?”
It is strange to see someone she once thought invincible look so fragile. She half expects he’ll reach out and snatch her hand up while scolding her for getting handsy. Never thought she would wish for that gruff, annoyed eye roll or some vulgar, biting comment, but she’d take that any day over what she sees now. There’s a monitor at his table displaying fuzzy black and white images that cluster together and bleed around each other, melting into a visual white noise that keeps looping back around on itself. Outlines of people and places, of a little girl that can’t be more than seven or eight if Lucy is judging the height correctly...and of a woman who wears her own hairstyle and claims her wide-eyed features.
Lucy inhales sharply, her mind racing as she tries to make sense of what she’s seeing, only to fall short.
It doesn’t matter now, she thinks, focusing on the practical instead. They can figure out the rest after they get out of this place. The purple IV could be a lot of things but she really hopes it’s the sedative mentioned in those documents because she’s about to yank it right out of his bloodstream, and if it isn’t...if it’s keeping him alive instead of catatonic, then she’ll have a much worse problem on her hands. The available options are slim, so she carefully peels off the tape holding it to his vein and pulls.
Not for the first time, she wishes she knew his name. Never asked him before because he’d probably tell her to shut the fudge up and quit pestering him. She hadn’t been willing to risk the rejection back then, and now she’s lost for how to reconnect with the man in front of her when she lacks even the most basic form of identification for him.
He remains still for a long moment as the images on the screen begin to dull and fade. She busies herself by unstrapping all the restraints that hold him there, starting with his ankles and moving up to his wrists, noting all the red, angry chafing that rips his already damaged skin open underneath. And then he twitches as a hard, deep gasp expels from his lungs. It comes on with so little warning that Lucy flinches backward, stuck in a momentary pocket of terror.
His breathing quickens when those empty eyes start to blink into something familiar. She gathers herself, taking hold of his hand in hers because it’s the logical way to calm someone in a traumatic situation, and if ever there was one of those, it’s right here, right now. “It’s me, I’m here with you. Just breathe, you’re okay.”
She doesn't have a single clue if he’s actually okay. Could go either way at this point. She tries not to imagine how she’ll cope if he isn’t. If she actually found him like a needle in a desert haystack, only to lose him again.
Not that it matters, she thinks weakly, with a slight wobble of her lower lip. Not that she cares. She is only here because she has nothing better to do after all, so what if he...
“Vaultie?”
That raspy, southern drawl sticks to her heart like molasses, and she smiles on reflex, unable to keep the relief off her face or the tenderness out of her words. “I can’t leave you alone for a minute, can I?”
He huffs out a pained half-laugh, maybe the first he’s ever graced her with. That hand she was holding lifts out of her grip and moves to cup her cheek, and she tilts her head, briefly taken aback by the softness in his gaze or how gently he touches her. They are caught in a slipstream of time that stretches and unfurls until his blunt nails begin to dig into the flesh of her cheekbone and peel away little strips of skin.
“You’re not real,” he growls. “Gonna have to do better than that, you cocksucking motherfucker!”
Lucy flies away from him, connecting with the empty table behind her and wincing at the pain in her lower back while pressing her palm to her bloody cheek.
Telling him that she is in fact real is a futile endeavor that she’s forced to abandon. Before she can process what’s happening, he’s stumbling off the table, a low rumble erupting from his chest that’s unlike anything she’s ever heard from him, but sounds an awful lot like the feral ghouls they encountered on their way to New Vegas.
Being fully aware of what a feral looks and acts like is one thing. Seeing it on a familiar face, on the only face that she’s longed to see since what’s left of her life crashed down around her, is another thing entirely.
He advances on her faster than someone who was unconscious a minute ago has any right to. She scrambles backward, knocking over a tray of supplies that scatter around her and grabbing the metal to put between herself and him, only barely managing to dodge a swift bite to the neck.
If the man she knows was in there before, he’s not now. All she sees is a hopeless, dark pool of anger in his eyes as she struggles to free herself, missing snapping teeth by millimeters, only to feel the crushing weight of him on top of her. It’s not exactly how she thought she would go. Maybe to a feral one day, sure, but not to him, and she starts to cry as if that has any place in this situation whatsoever. As if it can help her when it can’t.
What can help her, though, might be in the only unbroken syringe from the supplies she toppled just out of arm’s reach. Her fingers grab for it, ghosting the vial again and again before finally curling around the plunger that she presses down the moment she shoves the needle into his neck.
He collapses on top of her so quickly that it steals her breath, and for a moment, all she can do is lie there, adrenaline running through her system and fuzzing her brain. When she gets her bearings and rolls him off her, her gun lies even closer than the vial had been, ready for her to use to defend herself and still containing all its bullets.
Killing him hadn’t been an option that even occurred to her. Not even to save herself. She isn’t so far gone not to realize that most of that decision comes from her own, recently increased sense of self-loathing, then it does for the part of her heart that's grown attached to this man. A therapist would probably love to get their hands on her, she thinks with a huff. They had one back home. A nice woman with a puffy bun whose job it was to assess their mental states and offer suggestions like meditation, should the day-to-day life of cozy vault living become too stressful.
She is so far beyond meditation these days.
Carefully, she presses two fingers to the pulse in his neck, grateful that it still rises up to meet her touch.
She grabs a lab coat off a hook to cover him with, and pockets several more vials of that purple liquid from another supply table now that she knows it knocks him out, pausing to read a hastily scribbled note across a piece of paper on the floor.
The only way out is through.
Through what, she isn’t sure yet, but Lucy has a feeling she’s about to find out.