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His name is Charon and when you first meet him, his life’s in the hands of some evil asshole, a fellow ghoul with beady, conniving eyes and a smirk on his arrogant face. Ahzrukhal professes about loving pain and dishing it out wherever possible, making your trigger finger itch something fierce, but you hold off, because if you let your emotions get in your way it’ll only mean the death of you. You’ll be damned if you gave the bastard even a modicum of satisfaction with that, greedy palms running over your rapidly-cooling corpse as he checks for anything even slightly valuable on your person to peddle off.
Charon is the quiet, intimidating shadow standing in an isolated corner of the bar, a bit like how you used to when you were punished for being too unruly as a child. Nearly seven feet tall and towering well over you, he rejects your hurried attempts at conversation, slicing his tongue like a knife through anything you might’ve wanted to say. He tells you with a pointed disdain to take it to the boss, who treats him like a pet that’s fallen out of favor more than anything else, and it makes something that’s not quite pity well up in your heart.
You won’t take a life for him, though, so instead it takes you several weeks to scrounge up the caps to buy up his contract from Ahzrukhal. When you do, he surprises everyone in the compound — you most of all. Charon takes your deepest thoughts to heart and puts three bullets into his former employer’s caved-in chest without even blinking.
Plink, plink, plink.
Three solitary shots ring out, neat and methodical and almost delicate, despite being anything but. Next thing you know, there are shouts and people are watching, terrified and bewildered at the abject carnage, toeing at the spent shells on the floor yet otherwise unwilling to get in his or your way.
Charon serves a new master now, though you try your hardest to insist he’s a free man, none of that ‘boss’ bullshit — you even go so far as to try and give him the chit of paper tying him to you, but he laughs you off. It’s the first scrap of emotion you’ve ever seen him wear.
With that, it’s settled. Any trace of his old loyalties have vanished into glow dust and a palpable sum of bottle caps.
Your new companion is a peculiar man, though he shrugs the latter designation off like it’s a mere, yet uncommon mistake. He’s quiet and keeps to himself unless you’re in immediate danger, upon which a switch flips and he becomes the cold, mechanical killer you saw in the Ninth Circle that day.
Plink, plink, plink. The bodies drop like bloatflies.
Sometimes you want to encourage him to be his own person. He follows you without question. The only words of his own, the ones that betray any semblance of will, are “I don’t like the look of this place” when you come across an unfamiliar area and the acerbity of his tone when he says “yes, boss” at some of your more eccentric suggestions. But that’s not quite enough for you.
Used to your cushy life in a vault where social interaction was commonplace, this new, pitiless arena you’ve been thrown into makes you starve. You want a man — ghoul, he politely reminds you —that will respond to your quips with idle witticisms of his own and make you feel less like you’re alone in an unforgiving wasteland, at least in the personal sense. Someone who has something more to say and some other facial expression besides the default ‘I am sworn to carry your burdens, boss’ always worn. Someone more than a gun, a tool at your side waiting to be used.
And yet you are too selfish to let him go. You could rip up the contract. Burn it. Pin it to any building and pump it full of lead. The possibilities are endless, and in the end there's nothing stopping you from making that final choice for him, so that he may go on to make his own.
To be free.
...But what would that mean for you?
Instead, you valiantly try to get Charon to open up with his past. He stays locked tighter than a safe. What secrets does he hide in there? Surely he is at least a little bit bothered by the idea of his contract, branded upon his soul. His name to money and none else. What does he want out of this little arrangement, if he won’t take the freedom you half heartedly offer and leave?
“What you want,” is his stiff rasp of an answer, quiet and leaving no room for debate. “I serve you, boss.”
The half-amused, half mocking tone, as if his subservience to you is natural and to be expected, almost makes you laugh. If not for your financial claim over his body and the impassivity of his mannerisms, you’d think the two of you might have been friends.
Sometimes you wonder if this is the way it’ll forever be, you the solitary Lone Wanderer terrified of being alone, travelling with nothing more than a glorified, withered Protectron that refuses to humor your attempts at conversation or companionship.
It’ll have to do.
Then it all comes to a head when he saves you in the metro and you realize, truly realize, that there is something more to it than you originally thought.
Feral, once-human ghouls swarm like dust clouds in the low-hanging labyrinth of the DC underground. This time, they’ve come in numbers unlike anything you have encountered before. There are limbs everywhere and a putrid, rotting hand is over your mouth before you can even cry out. In the struggle your weapon is lost and you can feel them biting, tensing, lashing out. Ten, maybe twenty or more, even, wailing and tossing their heads about so violently they’re giving themselves whiplash.
It’s saddening to see, but you can almost understand their agony. They share your hunger. They share it, yet in a different way. It is a soothing sort of irony, you reflect, as your vision begins to blur.
Plink, plink, plink.
In an eternal instant, the hands are gone, the bodies shoved away with the triple shot of a modified shotgun. Paper in a breeze. The last feral drops like a sack of sand before you and you clutch your side, swaying on your toes as blood seeps down an exposed bite mark on your collarbone.
Charon’s armed and ready, unmoving at a distance. Not a scratch. “Boss?” he asks, same as ever. You wonder if that’s a spark of concern you heard just then, in his voice, or if it’s just the blood loss talking.
“I — I’ll live.” That last breath comes out a pitiful wheeze. The words themselves hurt to say, but you force them out past the cry that bubbles up within you. “Just need a stim. Pass me one?”
Charon obeys, slowly and methodically, as he is wont to do. But this time something is different. In two strides, he’s beside you, kneeling over you with chem in hand. You try to protest weakly but he doesn’t let up, his ministrations technical and impersonal as always but gentler than you ever thought they’d be.
His eyes are distant, vacant as he presses the needle against your grimy forearm, the sting of it bringing you back to the ground. You feel as though this is the farthest he’s ever been, despite being so close in proximity. Is that him in there, struggling against the mask? Does he care more than he lets on, or has he simply caught on to the weakness you never bothered to hide? You would give anything to know what he’s thinking in the moment.
“Charon …” you say hopefully.
“Hm? Oh.”
He grunts in sudden acknowledgement, stepping away. The job is done quickly and already you feel the stimpak’s healing warmth as the analgesics flow through your veins. “Be more careful next time.”
In one of the books Dad kept on his terminal back in the vault, there had been a little section on Greek mythology, written in the days so long before that they were barely a wisp in the pages, longer a ghost of the past to those that lived two hundred years ago than the Great War was to you.
You remember one such entry that particularly stood out:
Charon, the ferryman of the underworld. Keeper of souls, deliverer of judgement. Paid in a single gold coin per traveler, he is a silent, watchful warden of the junction between life and death.
As a child it didn’t make much sense to you, and it still doesn’t, not entirely. Those ancient words might as well be in a different language. But sometimes, reading the passage over again in your head when it comes still makes you wonder if that Charon and this Charon, their motivations, their pasts, their enigmas, are one and the same.
There are still so many things you don’t know about your ghoul bodyguard, so much you want to learn. To outsiders — hell, maybe even to himself, Charon’s nothing more than a slave, a hired gun whose past fades into obscurity, his personality into irrelevance behind the suffocating grip of his trigger.
To you, though, there’s a man inside that broken and shriveled frame. Someone who’s been beaten down and forced into subjugation by years of torture and brainwashing. Maybe that’s all that you’ve been told about him, aside from assertions of his complacency, but you know that that man is not dead. Far from it.
You know it from those brief, almost-gentle moments after near-death like just now, those cold, calculated killshots made with only your safety in mind. The righteous dispensation of justice upon the one that came before you piercing his outward, otherwise impenetrable apathy.
You know that he respects you more than he ever did his previous employer, contract-bound or not.
You know that the real him is in there, somewhere.
And you want to let him out, as long as that may take. You will never stop trying to let him out, no matter how much he rebuffs your attempts to.
“Thank you,” you blurt out, overcome.
Charon only glances at you before looking away, muttering something under his breath. His unnatural eyes are tinted with something you’ve never really seen on him before, and you have half a mind to be worried before his face shifts into neutrality again.
But for once, he doesn’t seem to push the gratitude away, try to correct you in that concise, succinct way of his, that it's his responsibility to look after you, you are the boss, holder of his contract, and so on.
So maybe something’s meant to give after all.