Chapter Text
They wouldn't even bother, Harkness had said. I worry about them killing and replacing me more than I would ever worry about you being compromised.
When he'd said that, Ted had thought that it was about trust. Or confidence in Ted's abilities, or... Something. And yeah, maybe part of it had been, but it wasn't the whole story. There was no way in hell that it was the whole story. It just took hearing a horribly familiar voice over an intercom in a bunker to figure that out.
It'd started out as something fairly routine. Harkness had gone to do his thing with the Railroad while Ted and MacCready had done odd jobs around the downtown area. One such job - for an entertainingly crazy ship full of robots, no less - had sent them all the way out to Fort Hagen, which had turned out to be crawling with synths. So Ted had made the executive decision to send a courier for Harkness and hang out at Sunshine Tidings until he arrived to provide backup.
(Of course, MacCready didn't get it, but he didn't exactly complain about having his contract extended either.)
Turns out, Fort Hagen went a lot deeper than just the surface level. There was an entire bomb shelter underneath the main building. Harkness didn't trust it, but Ted knew that whatever the synths were guarding had to be important since they didn't seem to be hunting for things to loot. He was the one who insisted that they had to head downstairs, even after they had the thing the robots on the boat had wanted. Even though Harkness was clearly tense.
He'd said it would be fine. He had been the one to tell Harkness and MacCready that. And then they'd heard that terrible voice on the loudspeaker.
"Well, well. If it isn't the popsicle."
Ted went very, very still. Moving only to glance at Harkness, who had that deer-in-the-headlights look he got when he locked up.
"I see you brought friends," the voice said. Ted's grip on the inner workings of his power fist tightened. "Took you long enough to get here. The boys tell me you haven't even been bothering to follow the breadcrumbs I left you."
"Harkness," Ted began slowly. Harkness flinched. He knew, didn't he? "Who is he?"
It took a moment for him to respond. "Kellogg," he said. "His name's Kellogg. He's a merc."
MacCready blinked at them. "Kellogg? Heck, even I know that name."
"He works for the Institute," Harkness continued. "Has for years."
The merc's whole face crinkled in on itself. "Jeez. Explains why people say you should avoid him."
But Ted knew there was more to it than that. There had to be. It had been a sixty year gap between vault openings, and the bastard that'd shot his wife had looked roughly middle-aged even then. If Harkness knew Kellogg by his voice, then that meant they'd probably worked together. And that was what, eleven years ago? So this merc had kept right on working for forty-nine years after he'd been tasked with cracking open Vault 111.
Harkness had been open about what the Institute wanted Ted's son for, open enough that it was probably common knowledge for higher-level synths at the time. Which implied that Harkness knew the man that had broken into the vault that day, knew he was likely to still be alive, and hadn't said a thing.
A trail of breadcrumbs, Kellogg had said. Had Harkness been covering them up?
"What else are you hiding from me?" Ted asked.
Harkness winced again, looking for a moment at MacCready before shaking his head. "Not here. Not now." His big grey-blue eyes were pleading; he was terrified, but it didn't seem like it was directed at the Institute this time. "Please."
"Looks like your boyfriend's got a little bit of a software problem," Kellogg remarked.
Ted whipped around to glare at the nearest security camera. Out of reach, mounted on the ceiling. He wanted to be angry. Was angry, actually. But an outburst wouldn't help. It would just scare Harkness worse.
He let out a breath through his nose. "MacCready, could you shoot that thing for me?"
"Got it," MacCready said; the shot from his ten mil made Ted's ears ring a little.
Kellogg laughed over the intercom. "Someone's pissed. Guess that was a low blow." Ted wished he could shut that up as easily, but they'd have to shoot every speaker in the entire complex. Fucker couldn't see or hear, but he could taunt. "Well, you know where to find me whenever you're done with your lovers' quarrel."
Probably at the bottom of the bunker, Ted guessed as the white-noise hum of the open mic cut out with a pop of static. Then he looked back at Harkness and his anger faded to a quiet simmer; he rarely saw the big guy with an expression that openly miserable.
"When we get home, we're talking about this," he said. He made sure to keep his voice gentle, all too aware by then of what Harkness was afraid of. "But either way, I'm gonna go find this guy so I can beat some answers out of him."
"Understood," Harkness mumbled.
The last of Ted's anger tapered off. "You don't have to come with me if you don't want to," he said.
Ahah, now that got Harkness to look up. "Is that your way of saying you don't want me there?"
"I always want you," was Ted's near-instant reply. "I just don't want you to feel trapped."
Finally, a smile. "Never," Harkness said. He reached out to take the hand that wasn't covered in a power fist to give it a gentle squeeze. "Lead the way."
Ted grinned and squeezed right back. Meanwhile, MacCready made a disgusted noise as he was forced to watch.
"You two are a couple of saps," he grumbled.
---
It turned out that reaching the final door was a bit of an anti-climax. Years of being left largely to themselves with little to no maintenance being done had fucked with the synths' servos, meaning the exacting calculations of how and where to move to aim properly were thrown off and had to be redone on the fly. And since they hadn't been made with those additional calculations in mind, they were slow to do them.
So for someone like Ted who was used to fast-paced brawls, their flimsy frames and slow reaction times made them easy to take down. The only ones that were annoying were the ones equipped with automatic weapons, and he had Harkness and MacCready to handle those; if blunt force could be considered good against them, then bullets were even better. And thus, down they went. Through the synths, taking stairwell after elevator after hallway after stairwell, until they reached the last threshold.
Ted sucked in a breath as he stood in front of the door, tried not to think about how much his hands were shaking, took hold of the handle, and-
And there he was, that son of a bitch. Tall, imposing, with a deep scar carved into his smug face. It was almost the exact same face that Ted had seen all those years ago, with only a few more lines to mark the passage of time. There was no doubt about it: this was the same guy that had shot Rani.
"Theodore Edwin Davies," Kellogg said, spinning casually in a chair as he sat in front of one of the bunker control room's many terminals. There was a clipboard in his hands; Ted couldn't make out the text of what he was reading, but it wasn't hard to guess the contents. "Born February 28th, 2045, at the Victory Memorial Hospital in Waukegan, Illinois. Diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, albinism, and borderline personality disorder."
Kellogg looked up and smiled to himself.
"Guess the Institute didn't think about that part," he mused. "Probably skipped ahead to the part where you had a degree in applied physics with a minor in robotics, or should I say..." Here, he made a show of reading from the clipboard. " 'Automation and Intelligent Robotics Engineering Technology.' Fancy. And then there's your boyfriend-"
Ted snarled. "If you lay a hand on Harkness-"
"Harkness? That what he's called now?" The old mercenary smirked as he set the clipboard aside. "Have to admit, A3, I didn't recognize you right away. That new face of yours is a fine piece of work. But you still move like a courser, don't you?"
Fuck. Without looking back, Ted reached out and grasped around fumblingly until a big hand found his. He squeezed; Harkness squeezed back. Still with him, no matter how scared and angry they both were. And MacCready was there too, even if Ted could hear his horrified mutter of "what the hell" in the background. He hadn't left either, not yet.
Kellogg eyed them for a moment. "How much do you know, Davies?"
"I know you're older than you look," Ted replied. "I know why the Institute needed an untainted genome. I know they were the ones behind what happened, even if you were the one who..." His voice hitched, and he paused to collect himself. "I, I know there's nothing to fix. That there's no point trying. And I know how long it's been since you and the Institute took everything from me."
"Smart man," Kellogg said. Then he stood from his chair with a stretch, twisting his neck until it gave a little crack . "I guess that makes the next question, 'how much have you guessed?' "
Ted eyed the merc warily as the cogs turned in his head. "You mentioned breadcrumbs and said you'd waited for me to find them," he said, "but if you're a merc, then you're probably not doing that for your health. Which makes you the bait."
"Good, good. Keep going."
"And if the Institute thinks I'd take it, then they must not think that I've figured out the timeline," he continued. Suddenly, it dawned on him; he glanced back at Harkness sharply. "Oh, Christ-"
" Now he gets it." Kellogg's smirk turned downright predatory. "All that set-up, and in the end it's blown wide open by the one surviving bot that's obsolete enough to not have memory failsafes. It scared the eggheads shitless, honestly. From what I've heard, they're pretty sure your man here killed the old head of the robotics division a few years back."
Ted narrowed his eyes at Kellogg and took a step back, shielding Harkness as well as he could as the grip on his hand tightened. "No. I don't care what you do to me, you can't have him."
Harkness spoke up behind him, uncharacteristically quiet. "Ted-"
" What? Don't fight me on this, Harkness. I won't fucking let you."
"It's not me they want."
Ted froze. When he turned his gaze back on Kellogg, the old merc was still smiling.
"Should've left your boyfriend at home for this one, Davies," he said. "A3-21, initialize factory reset. Authorization code beta-five-three-alpha."