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They lay together in tall, dry grass.
It’s unlike anything else, it’s unlike anything from before. before the war, before they stopped trying to kill each other.
She turns her head to look at him and he’s not looking at her. He’s looking upwards, flat on his back, his arms laying lax and limp against cool earth under his skin. His shirt is crumpled and wrinkled and there’s a rip in the seam under his elbow, one of his boots is missing.
She doesn’t ask why.
They meet like this sometimes. Unprompted, unasked, unabated. They just stumble into each other like accidents would.
She’d been walking through the woods just outside of sanctuary, alone. The sun setting, late late afternoon on a November day, she’d taken a stroll in the chill. She’d left her coat on the rails of her front porch of her home, she wanted the chill to eat at her bones, maybe just to feel something real.
Slipping out of sight of the settlement to have some alone time to think by the river, he’d just stepped out from behind a tree, emerging like some kind of twisted fae from the fables. Materializing like he always does. Blaise’s entrances are never clumsy or expected. Always seamless. Here one second, gone the next.
She’d said absolutely nothing. Just made eye contact and then slumped against the ground by the flat edge of the riverbank, water and mud and stones just an arms reach from her left side, and the rest of it all smooth, cool earth with dead winter grass.
He’d come beside her and sat, watching her. And then he’d spoken.
“I trusted you,” he started, blinking slowly in the coming moonlight, “then.”
And she doesn’t have to ask what he means by that.
Rio has been through enough. Dead husband, the vile adjustment from cozy lawyer housewife to rugged wastelander hadn’t been easy either. Being almost eaten by ferals and mutants, nearly succumbing to sepsis from a cut that, prewar, would’ve been a band-aid, neosporin, and forget-about-it.
Finding out your son is an evil genius using human likenesses with consciousness to do his bidding.
And all the friends and enemies she’s made and lost along the way. Pain and love and loss and anger.
She and Blaise had hated each other. That’s the ‘then’ that he means. Then.
He’d killed people she cared for, and every time he’d get out of it, somehow.
Somehow.
Through the last two years, she’s seen him. And she’s seen him kill and maim and she’s seen his eyes red with rage like nothing she knew could even fester in a human’s soul.
And she’s seen why too.
Growing up a bastard raider child, pushed around by everyone he’s ever met. Abused in more ways than just mentally, physically and… and by a man he claimed to have a relationship with.
It’s not justification. But she still can’t bring herself to hate him anymore. Not so long after all of the things that have happened. His murders, the downfall of Nuka-World. So long ago, now.
And it’s the familiarity that really gets her. Them both. People come and go and die and live and she still knows him. He’s still Blaise, she’s still Rio, and they both exist and know each other.
He’s one of three people still alive who know her story, the whole story. Even if he figured it out by accident. She never truly wanted him around, she hated him, but he was always there. To cause trouble. What, then, was malice, is mischief now.
Time was what healed their hearts toward one another. And the death of the raider man that had hurt Blaise in his adolescence. He’d killed him savagely in Nukaworld, and crawled off to lick his own wounds.
She’d found him, then, in The town outside the park, and she’d helped him. Knowing the truth of his actions and knowing what he’d done and been through. Seeing him hurt and disbanded like she’d been out of the vault. She’d helped.
They walked back to the Commonwealth near Concord, after that. And that short journey was all they needed.
She doesn’t call him a friend now, at least not out loud. And she doesn’t think the word friend is even in his vocabulary. But regardless.
His breathing is slow and his breath just ever so slightly visible in the air. And she has a million things she could say on her lips. She was a lawyer and a people person, she always wants to break the ice, feels obligated to.
But this is Blaise and he does as little talking as possible. And there’s something so peaceful about talking without talking, because that’s what they’re doing.
She lays back down from where she’d rolled on her side to look at him and observes the stars as he’s doing, wondering how he sees them, what he’s thinking.
“I trusted you, too.”
And she did. She hated him, he hated her. But there was… trust. Not the trust you put into a friend or family to be there for you or to catch you when you fall, to remember to let your dog out when you go on vacation, but a sort of trust where you know, somehow, they’re on your side.
Even when their hands are around your neck or you’ve got a barrel of a gun to their head.
He hadn’t strangled her to death that day, and she hadn’t shot him. Wasn’t going to. Neither of them.
Somehow.
Some strange feeling of “I shouldn’t.” Some strange feeling of “there’s something I don’t understand”. And now they lie in tall, brittle grass together under a rising moon.
She knows they’re looking for her now, with how long she’s been gone into the twilight, back at sanctuary, but she gives it five more minutes.
He looks at her, then, blinks. And he smiles, a finger ever so tentatively presses to her arm, the softest touch. He’s not gentle, but he is afraid. That’s not what he, or anyone who’s seen him kill or wield a baseball bat, would say, but in the deepest recesses, it is fear. Fear of touch? Fear of intimacy?
It doesn’t matter.
She’d come to the river to get away from her thoughts and feelings. To run from the worry of what’s to come now. After the destruction of the institute and the brotherhood, with all the loose synths and ex-scientists. Scribes and Paladins who want her dead. She’d run from the hollowness she felt, even around her friends.
Everything Leaves her feeling empty these days. Depressed and stunted.
Maybe she’d come down here to cry or to scream into her hands. But when he’d appeared it’s like he’d taken all the frustration away. Not with a kind and loving thoughtfulness like some sort of sentimental virtue, but with a vanishing touch, like a kiss from death.
These short, strange moments leave her feeling at peace. Maybe not heard or expressed or even happy, but calm, easy.
He’ll be gone when she stands to leave, she knows it, so she lingers against his hand a little longer and shuts her eyes and pines for a day when she doesn’t have to worry about any of this anymore, pines for a day where she can open her eyes and he’ll be sitting there without any of his face-obscuring scars and smiling at her.
That’s impossible.
But maybe not, she thinks, matching her breathing to his and staring at the stars for one last second,
Somehow, maybe not.