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“...Fuck.”
It doesn’t take much for the Ghoul to swear, but in this case, he thinks it’s especially warranted.
Because when he steps out of the shack, having finished his real nice and polite conversation with the doctor inside, Lucy MacLean is gone.
He whips his head around, searching for her in the people milling around what can be generously called a town square, but he already knows he isn’t going to find her. That bright blue would stand out too much against the ratty rags and worn leather everyone else is wearing; he wouldn’t be able to miss her.
The Ghoul is not the type of man to panic. You don’t last several centuries in the Wasteland without being able to keep your cool in just about any situation. He might not always be able to keep a lid on his temper, but he can sure as Hell keep his eye on his target.
Which is why the first thing he does isn’t to freak out; it’s to look around for the other member of their little party.
He really should have known better than to leave the Vaultie by herself. Letting her on her own is dangerous enough when she’s in a good state, but the reason their quest has brought them to this ramshackle settlement in the first place is because the kid went and got herself shot up by some critter’s stinger.
A man like him has run into all manner of creatures out in the Wasteland in his time, but his irradiated body already pumped full of substances leaves him more or less immune to a lot of the nastier effects they can have. Most other people in the Wasteland have similarly hardy constitutions, or at the very least, they all act so strung out all the time that it’s impossible to tell what’s what. When the smoothie got got, he’d figured it was just going to be one more injury to add to the list, nothing a stimpak or just telling her to stop complaining and walk it off wouldn’t fix.
By the time the venom had taken hold, it had been well past that point. All of a sudden he’d had a downright loopy young lady on his hands, barely able to stagger her way along, acting like a kid taking their first dip into daddy’s liquor stash and getting in way over their heads. She’d even been giggling as she dragged her feet along behind him, her prattling getting even harder for him to understand than usual.
It had been better than ending up with a dead young lady on his hands, of course, but by the time they’d made it to the settlement he’d been half carrying her as she struggled to stay on her feet without tripping over herself.
Leaving her by herself sitting on the front step of the doctor’s shack had been in equal parts about not having to deal with her for a few minutes when she was testing the last of his patience, and about giving him and the doc a little privacy. He’d been through these parts before, and he knew this man did not always have the most scrupulous intentions towards his young female patients. Lucy was a prime example of an unsullied woman— although, not nearly as unsullied as she had been when the two of them had first met.
She actually knows how to fire a real gun at someone now, and not just a puny little tranquilizer, for one.
So, he simply meant to step inside and set some expectations for how this visit was going to go, not to mention negotiate a price. Those things were both made a lot easier if Lucy wasn’t involved in the conversation, considering her tendency, even after her pretty little world was shattered, to lecture him on his way of handling things. As if his way of handling things isn’t what’s been keeping them alive.
The Ghoul whistles for their canine companion. Part of the reason he’d figured Lucy would be fine out here on her own for a few minutes while he went in to chat with the doctor, inebriated or not, was because she had the dog with her. She never would have let anyone try to take her by force without intervening and stirring up a racket that would have had him come running; he’s only twenty goddamn steps from the stoop he left her on, for Christ’s sake!
When he doesn’t get an answering bark— or a dog bounding up to his feet— that second moment of not-panic hits him, only to fade away when he realizes that in spite of the hustle and bustle he does hear an answering bark— just so muffled he can barely near it.
Following the source of the noise to a nearby container, he pounds on the side of it and immediately hears his dog answer with an almost crazed series of barks. It’s a sturdy old metal shipping container, and as he rounds it to open it up, he realizes the damn thing doesn’t have any way to let air in.
Which means now, not only has someone apparently scooped his travelling companion up and taken her off God knows where from right under his nose, they’ve also put his dog at risk.
It’s often not wise to mess with people who have a reputation like his. Makes him wonder if whoever did this knows who they were fucking with. Either way, they’re going to know soon enough.
Dogmeat comes bounding out of the shipping container as soon as he opens it, her wild barking telling him that something is very definitely wrong, as if he couldn’t figure that out on his own. The dog pauses to look at him as if asking him his permission to continue, and he kneels down in front of her.
“You know where she is, girl?” Maybe it’s stupid of him to think the dog can understand him, beyond just the commands she’s been taught, but there are times— this being one of them— when he thinks that dogs are the smartest creature in the Wasteland, leaps and bounds above the humans (and things very much like humans) that populate it.
After all, at least whoever took the Vaultie had to lure Dogmeat into a crate to get her out of the way— the Ghoul just turned his back on her and left her sitting, half out of her mind on God knows what, on some fucking porch.
Dogmeat barks up at him, ears perking up before she goes trotting off towards one of the paths leading out of town, weaving in and out of the raggedy Wastelanders all ignoring her. The Ghoul could ask them if they’ve seen a girl in a Vault-Tec jumpsuit being dragged off somewhere, but though he’s not feeling especially smart right now, he still knows enough to know none of them are interested in helping him.
It’s a good thing he’s always lived by the wasteland’s other Golden Rule.
Thou shalt learn to rely on yourself, because no one else is going to help you.
Maybe one of these days he’ll finally be able to teach Lucy that, too.
Lucy knows that something is wrong, but she just can’t put her finger on it.
“Mmm…. Where’re we going…?”
The way everything is moving under her feels funny, and not at all right. The last thing she remembers is sitting down on some stairs and being told to stay put.
Cooper was going to get her some medicine. He had to talk to the doctor first. All Lucy wanted to do was go to sleep, so it hadn’t bothered her that he’d left her sitting on the stoop while he went to go talk to him. She’d even had Dogmeat to lean up against, nice and warm and soft, and everything had seemed just perfect even though she couldn’t seem to stay on her own two feet.
It sure was nice of Cooper to practically carry her to town, though. When she had started feeling funny after that nasty bug had gotten her, she almost thought he was just going to leave her behind, or at least make her walk the whole way on her own while staying just out of her reach ahead of her, grinning that stupid smug grin of his as he watched her struggle.
Truth is, she thinks he’s a lot softer than he likes to let on. She’s seen it since the two of them decided to head out into the Wasteland together, when he had offered her the chance to ‘meet her makers’ and in spite of the rocky start of their relationship she hadn’t been able to find a good reason to turn him down. Not when they ultimately wanted the same thing— answers.
She sees it in the way he treats Dogmeat. She sees it in the way he treats her, even when he’s acting like a complete jerk. His heart is all shrivelled up like the ass jerky he carries around on the back of his bag, but it still has a soft spot here and there, and she keeps finding more and more of them the longer the two of them spend together.
Proving that there really is still something human under all of that, after all.
Lucy doesn’t think he’s nice enough to carry her on his back unless he absolutely had to, though, and she’s definitely not walking on her own two feet right now. So… How is she moving?
Opening her eyes feels like a really bad idea at first. The midday sun overhead is painfully bright and her head is spinning from whatever was in the venom of that mutant bug. It had made her feel downright delighted earlier, but there’s something not quite right in the here and now, and that delighted feeling is disappearing even as the spinny dizzy feeling is staying right where it is.
So even though it feels uncomfortable, Lucy forces herself to open her eyes.
She doesn’t see the scrapyard turned town square that Cooper had sat her down in front of while he went to go talk to the doctor. There’s no sign of the milling people ignoring her or even her furry friend, whose fur is somehow still soft even though she’s trekking through the wasteland with them, and Lucy’s hair certainly hasn’t stayed soft.
And she’s not on the wide back of an old grouchy ghoul, either. Or thrown over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, which seems like the more likely option.
The Brahmin that she’s on the back of lets out a low moo, and Lucy wrinkles her nose— not just from the smell of the animal, because she’s quickly getting used to all kinds of new and interesting smells out here in the Wasteland, but because as she looks around she has no idea where she is.
It definitely doesn’t help that everything still looks a little blurry and she’s bouncing on the back of the Brahmin, but she can definitely tell she’s not where she’s supposed to be.
Where is she supposed to be…?
Oh, right. The doctor. Cooper. Dogmeat. She’s supposed to be back in town, having someone taking care of the fact that she got stung by a strange insect.
Why is she having such a hard time concentrating…?
“Looks like someone’s starting to wake up.”
“You want me to…?”
“No, no, let me talk to her. Don’t wanna scare her or nothin.”
Lucy’s brain is starting to hurt. She wants to just keep her eyes closed and fall back asleep (when did she even fall asleep? Was it while she was sitting there on the stoop waiting for the Ghoul to come back? Or was it later?), but she hears someone walking towards her, and she forces herself to keep her eyes open.
“Hey there, sleepyhead.” The body of a woman in the typical dirt-stained and torn clothes of the Wasteland appears in her line of sight, with Lucy’s eyes more or less at belly button level. The brahmin slows to a stop, and Lucy realizes that she’s been tied to the back of it, probably to keep her from slipping off since she’s been unconscious this entire time. “You feeling any better?”
“Buh…?” is Lucy’s very eloquent answer to the woman’s question. “Where… Where am I…? And who’re…?”
“Oh, I guess you’re still a little confused, huh. We met back in town, don’t you remember?”
Remember…?
Lucy tries hard to focus on remembering. It’s hard when everything since that insect sting all wants to run together into one messy river of colours, but she forces herself to think back to when she was sitting on the porch of the doctor’s metal shack waiting for Cooper to finish talking to him.
She had been sitting there with her head resting against the railing and Dogmeat sitting next to her… And then?
Oh, right. Then a woman had walked up. A woman who looked a lot like the woman standing in front of her now, with an exposed bellybutton and a big thick mess of dark hair with a pair of goggles that were getting lost in all of that hair.
Lucy had thought maybe the woman wanted to go in to talk to the doctor and she was in the way, so she had tried to squeeze herself as much off to the side as she could— she didn’t think getting up was a good idea or even an option at that point— and when Dogmeat had started to growl at the woman, Lucy had shushed her and scratched her behind the ears.
Dogmeat is a guard dog born and raised in the Wasteland so she’s sure she had nothing but the best of intentions, but Lucy doesn’t want her to think that every single person who walks up to them might be out to hurt them.
Maybe one day she’ll be able to teach that lesson to Cooper, too.
But the woman hadn’t been interested in the doctor, she’d been interested in Lucy. It had taken her a few moments to realize she was trying to talk to her, and she’d tried to answer her questions as best she could, but thinking and talking were both pretty hard at that point.
She’d told the curious woman her name was Lucy. Yes, she was fine, she had just gotten stung by something. How old was she? Was her health good aside from the insect bite? Lucy remembered muttering her medical chart back at her, her one from her last checkup before she had left the Vault, figuring that a woman with such specific questions was probably working for the doctor.
Which is exactly what the woman had told her— that she was there to help her and she was going to have to take her somewhere else to give her treatment because the doctor couldn’t help her inside of his little shack. That had seemed reasonable to her then, but there’s something in the bottom of her stomach that’s telling her that something is very wrong here.
Not just the fact that she’s tied up. Not just the fact that it doesn’t look like this woman is taking her to any kind of medical facility.
Where’s Cooper?
She doesn’t realize she’s asked that question until the woman tilts her head at her curiously. Lucy tries to keep eye contact with her but it’s hard when she has two heads and Lucy doesn’t know which one to look at.
“Cooper? Was that the name of your dog, sweetheart?”
She opens her mouth to explain, but closes it again because… Well, although Lucy is normally happy to share long, complicated stories, this one feels too close to the chest for her to be able to say out loud.
And also because there are alarm bells going off in her head.
In spite of the fact that she’s tied down, she tries to sit up. Maybe the knots have slips in them. Maybe they really are just helpful people.
The Lucy MacLean who left Vault 33 to find her father might have been inclined to believe that, but she doesn’t think she would have been that dumb, even back then. Not after what those raiders did to her, did to her family and her friends. She had wanted to see the best in people, or at least give them a chance to show her their best, before assuming the worst.
But one thing she’s quickly learned in the Wasteland is that it’s far better to expect the worst, of both situations and people. That way, if something goes wrong, it doesn’t disappoint you— and if something goes better than you expected it to, then it’s just a pleasant surprise.
Kind of like the ghoul whose absence feels especially large and glaring right now.
Bits and pieces of memories are coming back to her as she struggles against the ropes and the woman tries to shush her, telling her to calm down before she hurts herself, feeding her all sorts of things that in her rapidly increasing mental clarity Lucy can see as complete bullshit. Obviously she can’t blame herself for falling for it before, when she was so out of it she could barely hold her head up nevermind make clear and informed choices, but now that she’s sobering up— or shaking off the venom’s effects— she feels stupid.
The woman hadn’t been alone. There was another person with her, someone who was leading the brahmin that she had with her, too covered up in scarves and a mask and a pair of goggles like the one on the woman’s head to be able to see their face or tell anything about them aside from the fact that they looked big and bulky. Dogmeat had growled at the both of them, and even when Lucy had shushed her, the second the woman had reached out her hand to her she had gotten up like she was planning on lunging at her—
And the person with all of the scarves had tossed Dogmeat a treat. A strip of jerky, although from what kind of animal Lucy didn’t know and probably didn’t want to know. It had been enough to grab Dogmeat’s attention, and what had happened after that is still a blur— but she does remember that the dog wasn’t with them when the woman had helped her to her feet and guided her to the brahmin with the promise that they were going to take care of her and not to worry about a thing.
Sweeter words than she’s heard from most people out to hurt her here in the Wasteland, but she knows better than to think that sweet words mean anything at all, now.
“Let me—” Her tongue feels heavy in her mouth, like she’s going to swallow it and choke on it. All of the pulling and tugging on the ropes has her vision swimming even more, and she feels like she’s going to throw up just purely from the motion sickness. She lays her head back down on the brahmin’s back, albeit reluctantly, just so she doesn’t have to worry about the entire world going upside down on her. “Let me go.”
“Now why would we do that? We’re trying to help you, remember? Just stay still and go back to sleep.”
“I think you’d best listen to her.” Lucy doesn’t know when the sound of Cooper’s gun being cocked became such a familiar and immediately identifiable sound to her. She also doesn’t know why she finds it comforting. “She tends to be the more reasonable one ‘tween the two of us.”
Turns out— luckily for everyone involved, maybe including the fuckwits who decided to scoop up the Vaultie and walk off with her, because it puts him in a slightly better mood than he might have been otherwise— the would-be kidnappers didn’t make it too far.
He supposes they had no reason to be hurrying. Far as they were concerned, the girl was alone with nothing more than the dog they took care of by luring her to a shipping crate and locking her inside, all while a bunch of people watched and said jack shit. Probably looked like easy pickings, a Vault-Dweller with a dopey smile and nothing to keep her safe ‘cept for one mutt.
Why waste their energy making it as far away from town as they can when they’ve got the score of their lifetime just casually strapped to the back of their pack brahmin?
Sneaking up on them had been surprisingly easy, too. Makes him wonder how they’ve survived out here for this long, and whether this is their first time at this rodeo, although the woman was talking to Lucy with the air of someone who knows what she’s doing. Dogmeat is standing next to him, growling and baring her teeth, all of her fur on end. His gun is doing most of the intimidation for him, because he doesn’t feel the need to posture too much for a duo of dense motherfuckers like these two.
This isn’t about making a big show, anyway. They’ve got something he wants, he’s there to take it back.
“If you folks untie the lady and let us be on our way, I might light both of you walk away with all of your limbs still attached,” he says, cocking his head as he looks at the woman— clearly the leader between the two, because the only thing the person leading the brahmin has done since he waltzed right up behind them is stand there looking like an idiot.
“Who the fuck are you?” the woman asks, that polite facade that she was putting up with the Vaultie slipping away completely now that she’s face to face with someone who has no chance of buying her bullshit.
Lucy, blessed little idiot that she is, tries to lift her head to look at him. She looks like a newborn foal that hasn’t figured out how its neck works yet, especially with the way they’ve got her roped to their brahmin, which is just standing there without a care in the world for the fact that its masters are being accosted.
“Cooper—” Her voice still has that thick, syrupy texture of someone who’s had a bit too much, but from the way she’s pulling at her ropes he’s guessing she’s sobered up some.
He also remembers what the doc said about how if the antidote isn’t administered soon enough the damn poison can cause serious brain damage. Which is a ticking clock he doesn’t need on this whole fiasco, but he also doesn’t expect he’s gonna take too much time to deal with the idiots who have taken her.
“I thought you said she was alone?!” the wrapped-up brahmin handler hisses to the woman.
“She was alone! Fuck!” she hisses right back.
The Ghoul waggles his gun in their general direction. Just so the two of them don’t get so wrapped up in their little conversation that they forget he’s standing there, waiting for them to do as they’re told.
The woman smiles at him, yellow teeth set in a face caked with grime that he supposes is meant to look charming.
“Look here, fella,” she says. “A girl like this must only be slowing a big tough guy like you down. Why don’t we take her off your hands? We’ll give you a fair price for her.”
“She ain’t for sale,” he says, his mind flashing back to the moment he’d pushed her at gunpoint into a den of organ harvesters, and then immediately focusing back on the present. “And you folks aren’t in a position to negotiate. So why don’t you just do as I fucking tell you, untie the girl, and stop testing my fucking patience?”
Although he’d opened the conversation willing to let bygones be bygones if the people just did as he told them to, now that they’ve pushed him, the only reason he hasn’t blown their heads off yet is because he doesn’t want the brahmin startling and running off with Lucy still tied to its back, making her even more of a pain in the ass to retrieve.
The woman glances back and forth between him, the brahmin, and her companion. With her hands up, she takes a slow step towards the brahmin.
“Alright, alright. You win. Let me just…” She crouches down, reaching for the ropes keeping Lucy tied to the brahmin.
Or so she wants him to think.
By the time she has the presence of mind to actually go for the obvious gun she has hidden in the saddlebag, he’s already blowing her hand clean off.
The woman shrieks as her hand is separated from her body in an explosion of blood, which continues to spurt uselessly from her stump. He watches as Lucy recoils when some of it splashes across her face, but he’s seen her in much worse condition, covered in much worse than some random Wastelander blood.
“Shit! Shit! Shiiiiit!”
Her companion is fumbling for the gun at their hip. Seriously, how did these two fucks make it this long without someone else ambushing them? Wasteland standards must really be taking a nose dive.
He’s done trying to hand out mercy today, though. The Vaultie can’t even say he didn’t try. He gave them a chance to walk away and they decided they would rather try to fight back.
Fair’s fair, after all. He’s just abiding by her precious golden rule.
The brahmin had startled at having a woman’s hand blown off so close to its body, but it full on panics when he blows the other person’s head clean off, spraying the ground in a shower of blood, brain goop, and skull fragments.
Thankfully Dogmeat stops his nightmare scenario from happening, charging forward and barking at the brahmin to herd it and stop it from running off. He steps forward and grabs its reins, all of his old animal handling coming back to him like riding a bike.
When the heifer calms down and he can get her to stop, he quickly unties Lucy from where she’s strapped to the thing’s back. It would probably be easier for him to take her back to town still tied to the thing— but it’ll be faster if he carries her.
“Coop…” She’s still talking like her tongue is made of lead, but the fact that she’s talking and looking up at him is good enough for him right now. “Sorry…”
“Sorry for getting your ass kidnapped?” he asks, raising a hairless brow at her, and she snorts. He doesn’t know whether she’s laughing or exasperated with him. Better be the first, after he came after her in the first place.
He didn’t need to. There’s nothing about her that makes her necessary to keep around, not really. Sure, having her around might make some things easier— but they definitely make a lot of things harder.
Still, here he is, scooping her up into his arms. He could throw her over his shoulder, but he doesn’t feel like having her throw up all over the back of his coat.
Besides, she seems to settle right down when he lifts her up like that, and she hardly weighs nothing.
He’ll just have to trust that they don’t run into any more deadly critters on their way back, because he can’t hold his gun like this.
Lucy practically cuddles right up to his chest with him carrying her like this. It’s almost nice, especially since it’s been a loooooooong time since anyone else felt safe cuddling up to him like that.
And since she’s actually being quiet for once.
Dogmeat trots along at his feet as Lucy murmurs something. He can’t tell if she’s asleep or just so out of it from the venom pumping through her that she can’t talk right, but either way he can just barely make out what she says, her words so slurred that it takes a little creative interpretation.
“Thanks, Coop… Love you…”
He’d probably think he was hearing things if the dang girl weren’t some fairy tale princess who no doubt throws around a word like that way too often and with far too little care.
Sure, she’s toughened up some since he first met her on the other end of a syringe gun, but she’s still soft. Soft in the heart, and soft in the head if she thinks saying something like that to a man like him is a good idea.
But he lets out a deep sigh from somewhere in the depths of his chest, almost like a death rattle, as he carries her off away from the two mutilated dead bodies and the brahmin’s forgotten why it was spooked in the first place and is just peacefully grazing on scraggly grass around the corpses of its former masters.
“Yeah, yeah, sweetheart,” he murmurs low from that same place the sigh came from, more of a rumble than real words, as he carries her off to make sure she doesn’t end up dying on him or ending up some kind of brain-dead lump.
“Love you too.”