Chapter Text
It really shouldn't have been as attractive as it was, Piper thought as she watched Blue dig a screwdriver and a bobby pin out of her bag and start prodding at the safe she'd found. Plenty of people knew how to pick locks. Any scavver worth their caps knew the basics; no sense letting a locked door stand between you and good scrap. Piper herself had learned the basics after about the third time she’d been... detained while chasing a story. Blue, though, was in a league of her own. Safes that had successfully resisted decades of scavengers would invariably open like cans of cram in her hands. Very talented hands, those.
Okay, Piper, focus. Jeez.
Piper watched as delicate fingers ever so carefully positioned a bobby pin in the lock and slowly twisted the screwdriver until it caught. Blue shifted the pin a fraction of an inch to the right and tried again.
"Tough one, huh?"
Blue paused and turned to look at Piper over her shoulder. "Means there's probably something good in there, right?" She turned back to the safe, her lips pressed together in concentration. "Think I've almost got it."
"And here I thought you'd finally met your match," Piper teased.
As if on cue, the safe emitted a satisfying click and swung open. Blue rifled through the contents and grabbed a few boxes of ammo before standing back up and storing them away in her backpack. "Ha. Maybe next time."
Blue had asked her to join in on a scrapping mission in Concord, and while it wasn’t the most exciting way to spend a day, Piper wasn’t going to turn down a chance to talk to a primary source about the world before the war. And hey, helping new settlements build up their defenses wasn’t the worst thing she could be doing . The two of them had spent the day wandering the empty streets and picking up as much useful junk as they could carry.
Piper cast her eyes around the room, trying to see if they’d missed anything. Blue had stripped the room bare, even picking up the old bottles and cans lying around, but Piper had learned that Blue would find a way to use anything she picked up. "Where'd you learn how to do that anyway? If I didn't know better I'd think you were some kind of two hundred-year-old cat burglar."
"You got me. Had to pay for law school somehow, right?” Blue picked up her pistol from where she’d set it down on the floor and walked towards the stairs of the hardware store they were currently searching. "Nah, I taught myself when I was a teenager. At the time I thought it would impress girls, but it really only came in handy one time when I’d locked myself out of my apartment. After that I sort of got into it as a hobby. Turns out a lot of the most common commercially available safes have pretty much the exact same configuration. Once you know the trick they aren’t too hard to crack.”
Piper followed her down to the main floor of the building. "Well, you can color me impressed, Blue. You'll have to show me that trick sometime."
"Sure. Teenage me would be elated that it finally worked," Blue said as she walked out the door and started down the empty street.
Piper smiled a bit at that in spite of herself. Sure, Blue meant it in a general sense and not a Piper-specific one, but it was nice to think that Blue might be showing off for her.
As she followed Blue back outside and through Concord to yet another abandoned building full of junk, Piper’s nostrils were assaulted for the umpteenth time that day by the smell of rotting deathclaw. The carcass had clearly been sitting out for some time. Scavengers both human and animal had taken what they could, leaving a misshapen pile of meat, bones, and spent 5mm ammo that smelled worse than a super mutant camp in August.
Blue had told her the incredible story of her first few days out of the freezer, and Piper had believed her, but seeing the dead deathclaw up close… if Piper had been surprised when her vault dweller interviewee had casually mentioned putting down a deathclaw, seeing the enormous carcass decomposing in the weak January sun made Piper shake her head and gaze bemusedly at the woman walking a few yards ahead of her.