Chapter Text
“So…what exactly are we doing here?” Butch asked as Petra pulled herself into the trailer of an old, rusted semi-truck.
“Smash and grab,” she replied, her voice reverberating off the trailer’s metal walls. Butch cocked an eyebrow.
Petra wriggled her legs over the lip of the trailer, then got to her feet, dusting her hands off with a loud clap. She looked down at him and Dogmeat, wilting a little at his expression. “Scavenging,” she said flatly. “Stay, Dogmeat.” And without another word, she turned around and walked further into the trailer. She did not offer Butch a hand. He rolled his eyes and prepared to pull himself up.
Dupont Circle was only accessible through the old metro tunnels, and Petra had led them there because of a trio of semi-trucks she’d seen in the middle of a street on a previous visit. Before, she hadn’t had a chance to look through them, but now that she had a pack mule—it went without saying that she meant Butch—she wanted to see what they might find.
He wasn’t looking forward to it.
“You’re not using that phrase right,” he grunted, straining to haul himself into the trailer. She made it look so easy. Why was every-goddamn-thing so easy for her? He tried to disguise his heavy breathing with a cough as he got to his feet. “Why are we doing this?”
Petra was already elbow deep in a crate. “Because we need supplies,” she said over her shoulder. “And this—” With her free hand, she gestured to the many cracked crates and dry-rotted cardboard boxes scattered throughout the trailer— “is how we get supplies.”
He eyed the boxes. It looked to him like this truck had already been thoroughly picked over. Unless they were looking for such rare commodities as ‘dust’ and ‘stale air,’ they weren’t finding squat. “Why can’t we buy supplies?” he asked. “I thought scavenging was for dirty wastelanders.”
“You’re a dirty wastelander. Money doesn’t grow on trees.”
“It grows on cola, though.”
Petra didn’t even look up as she jerked her thumb toward the back end of the trailer. “Shut up and scav.”
Butch scowled as he walked to the back of the truck and threw himself down to start looking. He’d scavenge alright, and if he found something good, he’d keep it all to himself, no matter how useful it was, no matter how much she needed it. Some people thought they were entitled to everything. Petra, for instance.
Despite their truce, she was as hard to get along with as ever.
She seemed to think that because she’d been on the surface longer, she had the right to boss Butch around. Telling him when to walk and when to rest, when to talk and when to shut up, even when to eat—when to eat! It was the overseer’s power trip all over again, only ten times as uppity and self-righteous.
The worst was when she wouldn’t let him listen to the radio. The way he saw it, he owed everything to Galaxy News Radio. If he’d never heard Three Dog’s broadcasts, he never would’ve known about life on the surface. And maybe Three Dog had an overly-optimistic view of wasteland life, and maybe Butch was growing more and more disappointed as time went on, but the radio had still been a lifeline in the vault. Petra didn’t get to order him to abandon it.
Of course, if he’d never heard GNR, he wouldn’t live on the surface of a blighted wasteland, listening to Petra bitch and moan. The thought soured his already-dim view of Three Dog.
He turned on his radio to any other station. The last notes of a song played out, replaced by an older man’s wavering voice, and Butch sighed contentedly. President Eden. Now there was a real American—a flag-waving, Nuka-Cola-drinking patriot. There was a man who knew what he was talking about. The wasteland was a shithole, and it did need someone to come in and fix it, how nice of President Eden to notice. Of course he had Butch’s vote. The man wanted to bring back baseball, for crying out loud.
“Turn that off,” Petra droned behind him.
Butch threw his head back, groaning internally. In her usual wet blanket fashion, Petra had a problem with it. She had a problem with everything. He looked at her over his shoulder. “Why should I? I’m just enjoying my programs.”
“You wanna wait and see if any raiders come looking for the source of it?”
He blanched. “You said there weren’t any raiders around.”
She shrugged and pushed a picked-over crate away from her. “I said there weren’t any raiders here right now,” she corrected casually. “I didn’t say there weren’t any in the area, or that they wouldn’t come back.”
Butch hit his radio off and shot to his feet. “Then why the hell are we here?” he exclaimed. “Let’s go, move it.”
Petra snorted. “Don’t tell me you’re scared of raiders, Butch.”
“Of course I’m scared of raiders! They’re bloodthirsty maniacs! Why aren’t you scared of them?”
“Because I’m smarter than them?” she replied, as if it was obvious. He stared at her, dumbfounded, and she glanced over at him with an arched eyebrow. “Come on. Yeah, they’re always looking for a fight, but they’re also always strung out on psychojet. They don’t think clearly.” She sniffed as she went back to scavenging. “There are more productive things to be scared of.”
Butch scoffed and crossed his arms. “Like what?”
“Like deathclaws,” she said matter-of-factly, and he blanched again. What the fuck were deathclaws, and how did he make sure he never came across one of them? “Deathclaws are scary,” she continued. “Radscorpions are scary. Or…a super mutant behemoth. You ever seen one of those?”
He shook his head mutely, adding it to his list of things he was happy to remain ignorant of.
“Take a regular super mutant and make it five times bigger, stronger, and tougher. Deathclaws and radscorpions are scary because they’re unpredictable wild animals; they’re as likely to ignore you as they are to chase you halfway across the wastes. And super mutants are scary because they’re giant, mutation-enhanced cannibals. But raiders?” She shook her head disdainfully. “As long as you can shoot straight or hit hard, you don’t have any reason to be scared of them.”
His busted pistol suddenly felt very heavy on his hip. He ran a hand over it, over the perfectly straight sights he just couldn’t seem to hit anything through. “Right,” he agreed weakly. “Totally.”
Petra hummed. “Totally. So get to it.”
Silently, Butch turned around, sat down, and began to search through the old truck’s cargo crates.
Petra had been on the surface about three months longer than him. Near as Butch could tell, she’d spent most of those three months alone, going from settlement to settlement in search of jobs, clues about her father, and munitions. And while she’d never been particularly easy to get along with in the vault, she was a new level of obnoxiously self-righteous up here.
At the bottom of a crate, Butch’s hand brushed along something. Something smooth, cool, and plastic. He glanced surreptitiously at Petra, but she wasn’t paying him any attention. Quietly, he pulled a plastic box out of the crate. It was a perfectly preserved roll of bandages, pre-war and pristine. Jackpot. Butch slung his backpack off his shoulder, unzipped it, and hid the bandages at the bottom. He smirked to himself as he closed his pack again. All his, and Petra was none the wiser.
The rest of the trailer was as empty as he’d predicted. Dust and stale air, trapped inside moldy boxes for a couple centuries. Petra debated the usefulness of a few rusty cans, but decided to leave them behind. The next trailer would have better stuff, she assured him. Butch rolled his eyes and jumped down to the street after her.
The semis had been arranged in a triangle, so there was a small, covered clearing between them. He glanced over it on their way to the next truck. It was clear someone had been there recently, judging by the cans, bottles, and makeshift lean-tos over dirty mattresses.
“Guess we know where the raiders live,” Petra noted.
“What if they want their camp back?” he asked.
She shrugged. “We’ll be long gone before they do.”
The next trailer door was locked, surprisingly. First piece of evidence that someone up here had brains. Maybe one day Butch would get to meet them. Petra made a triumphant noise as she fished a bobby pin out of her pocket, knelt down, and started picking the lock.
Butch leaned against the trailer, watching her hands as she worked. She must’ve learned a lot in her time on the surface, because he didn’t believe for a second that she knew how to pick locks back in the vault. He might’ve had some use for her, if she had. Might not have teased her so much.
“Why are you so sure the raiders won’t be back soon?” he asked. “Or that they won’t find us before we leave?”
“Because I’m not in the habit of hanging out in the middle of the city, and raiders are easy to predict,” she replied. Her bobby pin snagged on the lock’s teeth, then snapped. She pulled another out of her pocket. “Lesson number one, Butch: chronic jet dependency makes you stupid.”
“They really do that many chems?”
“I don’t think they do anything without chems.”
“Huh.” Butch scuffed his boot heel against the broken road. “You know, I sorta thought raiders were smart.”
“Why the hell would you think that?”
“You said it would be hard for me to start a gang with all the raiders groups up here. I figured that meant they were smart.”
She rolled her eyes. “Butch, I was insulting you. Raiders are dumb, strung-out maniacs who can’t plan a raid to save their lives. If they do manage to hit a caravan, it’s because they got lucky.”
He waited a beat for her to continue her explanation. “So?” he prompted, when she didn’t say anything else. “What does that have to do with me?”
She stopped fiddling with the lock to give him an unimpressed look. “So if you can’t even compete with them, how dumb does that make you?” she asked, and went back to lockpicking.
He scowled at her side profile. “God, you’re mean. What did I even do to you?”
“Do I really need to answer that?”
He scowled harder. Yeah, yeah. Ten years of bullying, cry him a river. Or better yet, go drown in one. At least that way no one would be holding it over his head. He flapped a hand at her irritatedly. “Whatever, Petra. Just work your magic so we can get out of here.”
“It’d be easier without you running your mouth,” she shot back. He wanted to argue with that, he really did, but that would be proving her right, and her ego was bad enough as it was. So Butch shut his mouth and crossed his arms and did not turn on his radio, even though he wanted to.
The lock gave a satisfying click, and the roll-up door shuddered its way to the top of the trailer. Petra gave him a smug little smile as she pushed the bobby pin back into her hair and got to her feet. “How’s that for magic?” she asked.
He wasn’t going to praise her for doing the bare minimum. She wanted to drag him out where they could get shot by raiders at any minute, she was gonna pick whatever locks they came across. “Sure, fine. Where’d you learn to do that?”
“My dad,” she answered, clambering into the trailer. “He always said it was a good skill to have in a pinch. Guess he was right.”
She offered Butch a hand, which he pretended to ignore in favor of pulling himself up. “I thought your dad was a narc.”
He expected her to get defensive. She was like that with her people: her dad, Jonas, Amata. The wasteland’s general public. But Petra only snorted. “You think my dad, the guy who never once ratted on you, was a narc?”
“He didn’t have to rat. Everyone knew what I was doing.”
“True, but my dad didn’t make it worse for you. There were so many times he could’ve had you locked up for breaking one rule or another, but he didn’t. He always said your life was hard enough with your mom, that you didn’t have any good influences.” She knelt down and dug through some ammo containers, hidden among the broken crates. “Guess that’s why you worked for Almodovar.”
Butch’s blood turned to ice. He froze in place, mid-stride to check out a supply box. No way. There was no way she knew. “What?”
She didn’t even look at him, just put the lid on one ammo crate and opened up another. “You worked for him,” she said again, rattling an empty box of shotgun shells before tossing it over her shoulder. “I got into his computer before I left, read his dossiers. He said your services had come in handy.”
He swallowed hard, all thoughts of supplies and munitions gone. “Uh…what did he say, exactly?”
“It’s what he didn’t say, really.” She stopped looking through her crate for a moment, her head tilted to the side. “I guess you…what? Took your bullying to the next level for him? Beat up anyone who disagreed with his rules?” She shrugged and went back to scavenging. “My dad always wondered how so many people got in suspicious accidents. Now we know.”
“You think I beat people up for Almodovar?”
“Oh, not you. Or…not just you,” she corrected. “The Tunnel Snakes beat people up for Almodovar. What ammo do you need? 10mm?”
“Uh…yeah.”
“Here.” Without looking behind her, she slid a box of 10mm ammo to him. The bullets inside jingled as it slowed to a stop, and Butch shoved the box in his backpack, eyes on her back, hardly daring to breathe.
“…You’re acting awfully cool about it,” he remarked.
She made a funny noise—half laugh, half scoff. “Yeah? I’m not.” She stood, clapping her hands together to dust them off, and faced him with a sneer. “But what the fuck can you do to me out here?”
Butch just stared. There wasn’t an answer to that.
Seemingly satisfied with his non-response, Petra made that funny noise again and began to walk away. “One more trailer,” she said over her shoulder. “This one was a bummer.”
Dazedly, Butch followed her out. His new box of ammo jangled in his backpack, right next to his bandages. From around the sides of her pack, he could just barely see the embroidered snake on her jacket. His jacket, technically. His jacket, his bandages, and her everything else.
Butch could perfectly remember the day he began to work for Almodovar. He was freshly sixteen, the soles of his too-small boots were falling off no matter how much glue he pasted on them, and it was his third time begging the overseer to put him in charge of his family’s ration coupons. The first two times, Almodovar told him he was too young. But it was his birthday, everyone said the third time was the charm, and all Butch wanted for his sweet sixteen was the security of independence. If his mom didn’t hold the coupons, she couldn’t drink them away. If the overseer would just grant him this small measure of autonomy, life in the vault could be so different.
Boots that fit. Meals every night. A treat, every once in a while.
No more pitying looks. No more whispers. No more leftovers pressed on him as he left his classmates’ birthday parties. No more burning shame.
But Almodovar said no. Said that wasn’t the way things were done in Vault 101, that tradition was all they had, that they couldn’t change whatever they wanted for one person. It didn’t help that Butch wasn’t working, not really. He had chores, small responsibilities to keep the vault going, but he didn’t have a job. A PipBoy and all the obligations it entailed, but no payment. His mom was the breadwinner. He was a dependent. And that wasn’t going to change for another two years.
He cried, just a little.
Almodovar comforted him, gave him a tissue, and said there was something he could do, if Butch was interested in a little ‘side job.’ Butch told him he was willing to do anything—anything—and Almodovar just smiled.
Extracurricular guard work, he called it, under Stevie Mack’s direct supervision. No set schedule. No official title. He wasn’t allowed to talk about it with anyone but his fellow Tunnel Snakes—and it was a group job. They all took it, or no one took it. It was up to him to convince the others. Butch had scoffed at the notion that anyone would listen to him, and Almodovar said he’d always admired Butch’s leadership abilities, his passion and drive. No one had ever said they admired anything about Butch before. No one else in Vault 101 had created a gang before. And when the overseer slid a month’s worth of ration coupons across his desk, Butch was ready to agree to anything. He did agree.
And that was that.
The lesson he learned from it was quite simple: the overseer could have solved Butch’s problems long before then, could have refused his mom drinks or done away with the coupon system altogether. He could have, but he didn’t. People didn’t care unless Butch gave them a reason to. If being useful was what it took to not go hungry, then he’d be useful—no questions asked. That was the way the world worked. Push and pull. Give and take.
Simple.
They had to walk across the truck-fortress to get to the final trailer, through trashed cans and cracked glass bottles. When they reached the door, Petra pulled a bobby pin out of her hair before kneeling down to pick the lock, but it opened without any nudging. She shrugged and got back to her feet, but the alarm bells were going off in Butch’s head. They were standing in the middle of a raider camp that wasn’t nearly as abandoned as it looked, the trucks didn’t have anything worth taking, and now there was a lock? He didn’t know much about the wasteland, but he knew nothing out here came easy. Nothing came free.
“I don’t like this,” he said, shaking his head and backing up. “This feels like a trap.”
She rolled her eyes. “You used to beat people for meal credits, but you’re scared of an unlocked door? Gimme a break, Butch.”
Heat flashed through him—anger and shame. A familiar mix. “I didn’t—it wasn’t like that,” he argued. “You don’t get to judge me for it.”
She snorted as she maneuvered herself into the trailer. “Jesus. Take some responsibility, for once. It was wrong, and you know it was wrong.”
His hands clenched into fists at his side. “You are so…so—"
“So what?” she taunted.
He stopped himself before he unleashed exactly how he felt about her. Even if she deserved it. “You…it’s not like you’re a saint, either,” he snapped. “You can be a real bitch, you know that?”
“Call me that again, and I’ll show you just how much of a bitch I can be,” Petra called behind her as she walked further into the trailer, leaving Butch glaring at her retreating figure. “Remember when I broke your nose?”
He scowled as he rubbed at his nose bridge. He remembered; it wasn’t a pleasant experience. “I dunno how you stand her,” he said to Dogmeat. “Always bossing you around, treating you like a dog. Don’t you get tired of it?”
Dogmeat huffed, giving him a deeply unimpressed look. Butch couldn’t help but feel indignant over that, too. Even her dog was self-righteous. Her attitude was contagious.
Butch popped the collar of his jacket, his shoulders hunched defensively. “Whatever,” he muttered, hauling himself into the trailer. “Stupid wasteland.”
When he managed to get inside and straighten up, Petra was already scanning over the crates, a wicked gleam in her eyes. “Jackpot,” she said. “I bet those raiders stored all their stuff in here and forgot to take it with them. Idiots.” She walked further in as Butch glanced around warily. This couldn’t be normal wasteland behavior. There was no way other people were dumb enough to fall for a trap this obvious. But that was Petra in a nutshell. She just had to be right.
Sometimes he wished he hadn’t been so nice to her the first time she left the vault.
“Hey, look at this,” she said, breaking him out of his thoughts. She was at the back of the trailer, pointing to an old refrigerator. “Why bother? It’s not like it still works.”
Irritation and anger gave way to caution. He stepped gingerly around a wooden pallet. “Maybe we should be a little more careful.”
“Be serious,” she said, reaching for the fridge door. Butch saw her hand land on it, her fingers tighten into a fist, and her muscles begin to pull. He noticed a thin wire, placed at ankle height and running along the bottom of the trailer. He watched as she opened the door, as the door hit the wire, as the door snapped the wire in two.
Something fell and clattered against the floor between them. Petra’s face went white, and she only had time to look up at him with wide eyes before everything went to shit.
The trailer lit up with a bright flash and a loud bang, and the resulting explosion threw Butch onto the cracked asphalt of Washington, D.C. All his senses overloaded—his ears rang, his eyes filled with bursts of color and light, his mouth tasted metallic. It took him a few disoriented moments to realize he’d even been thrown out of the trailer. Dogmeat skittered over to him and sniffed at his hair, making sure he was alive, and the world spun wildly as Butch rolled on his belly.
The trailer had been trapped. A grenade, a flashbang or something, connected to a tripwire in front of the fridge. And when Petra opened the door, the tripwire broke, pulling the pin off the grenade and giving them a nice little treat. Those stupid raiders knew what they were doing after all.
“I told you we should leave,” Butch couldn’t resist saying. His voice was oddly muffled in his head, drowned out by his ringing ears. Was he yelling? It felt like he was yelling.
Boots hit the ground right next to his head. He squinted up at Petra, only to receive her unimpressed glare in response. He sighed and flopped back down on the asphalt. Typical Petra. She kicked him, none too gently, in the side. “Get up,” she ordered, yanking on the collar of his vault suit.
Despite how much everything hurt, standing up was better than being throttled in the middle of the street. Butch hauled himself to his feet, wincing in pain—both from being thrown out of a trailer, and from being kicked in the ribs by the worst traveling companion of all time. Petra was waiting for him impatiently. “Someone’s coming,” she said. “We need to hide. Dogmeat! Scout out those shops for us.”
Dogmeat bolted away, leaving Butch less than ecstatic that a mangy, flea-bitten, carrion-stinking mutt was in charge of finding suitable shelter, but Petra—of course—was of a different mind. She started to follow said mangy, flea-bitten, carrion-stinking mutt, all while gesturing impatiently for Butch to hurry. As she moved, he noticed a limp in her right leg, a slight drag of her foot. He looked at her curiously. “Are you—?”
“I’m fine,” she interrupted, shifting so he couldn’t see her leg. “Keep moving.”
He opened his mouth to press further, but the ringing in his ears subsided just enough that he started to hear something from a few blocks over. Something that sounded like whoops and jeers and the occasional spray of gunfire.
Raiders.
Petra shoved him forward, and they took off after Dogmeat as fast as they could.