Chapter Text
Everyone knows about fight or flight. That had been drilled into all their heads in 33. When push came to shove, people would either fight, or they’d run.
So far, that holds true. Lucy cornered Monty, so he fought. Then he cornered her, so she fought. Tried to kill him just like he’d tried to kill her.
Fight or flight falls apart. Lucy watches as her friends and neighbors freeze in the face of danger. If she’d been a crueler person, Lucy would have thought it looked like they were letting themselves die.
Norm. She has to find Norm. He’s not a fighter, not physically. She helps him run, hide. Flight. She keeps fighting. She has to.
Monty’s back, face disfigured by the gashes mangling his jaw below and the ragehatredhungerlustmurder in his eyes above.
a shovel
her dad
monty twitching his last in a barrel of pickles
fight
moldaver. “I think I know who you are.”
“Everyone knows who I am.”
“You look like your mother.” Shrewd but not wholly unkind eyes bore into Lucy’s.
“Maybe you should do what you do best. Run. And hide.”
Betty shoots down Lucy’s proposal for a search party. Betty’s calm and rational about it; Lucy knows she’s right. Norm sees something Lucy hadn’t. He always does.
So Lucy does what she knows: she fights.
The surface is strange. Skeletons, long bleached and brittle, litter the sand. Hands disconnected from arms from bodies reach for the vault like they wanted in. Flight. For all the good it did them.
Lucy grew up being told the surface would be desolate, and it is. She can see the remains of old-world civilization, though. She’d been told the people up here, if there were any, would be uncivilized. Uncouth. They’d need her and all the good people from 31, 32, and 33 to save them! So far, everyone’s been dead.
What no one had told her to expect was the desperation. The fear. The small family, all dead at their kitchen table. Murder-suicide? Lucy wonders. (she knows now it was mercy)
She’s so proud of her fire when she finally stops for the night. So far, the surface has been mostly lovely. The sun on her skin stirs some deep thing in the recesses of her mind, and she thinks about how warm and real her mother made those grow lights feel.
When the growling wakes her up, Lucy reaches for her tranq gun. The growling isn’t directed at her, and the man now sitting at her fire appears harmless. Risky business, judging by appearance, but she has nothing else to go on. The man tells her to go home, doubts her ability to survive up here. Bold words coming from you, Lucy thinks, a bit childishly. Were it not for his clothes, he could have been from a vault too.
Lucy doesn’t back down, and the man accepts this. He seems sad as he leaves.
“Will you still want the same things when you’ve become a different animal altogether?”
She sleeps fitfully.
Nothing could have prepared her for Filly. She’d always been told to expect the opposite: surface dwellers are savages. They’re supposed to be incapable of civilization! But there it is, in all its unsafe, unstable, unhygienic glory: civilization.
well… maybe not. The people themselves aren’t very civilized. Ma June certainly isn’t civil; she’s all rude language and crass gestures, dismissing Lucy as one might a spoiled child.
No. No one here in Filly is civilized, Lucy muses. No one except the man from her first night on the surface. He urges her to go home — she’s not safe here — and tells her things he shouldn’t have known. He’s kind the whole while.
“You Wilzig?” Ma June asks. The man nods. She tells him he needs to go inside. Reminds Lucy she needs to leave. Flight. What’s Wilzig running from?
“Wilzig!” Another voice, this one loud and confident. Filly goes silent as the man steps forward. He’s like something right out of a movie. Tattered duster, cowboy hat, spurs. He’s like something out of a movie. Scarred skin stretched thin over his skull, eyes sunk in their sockets, a hole where his nose should have been.
His face sears itself into her memory
as he speaks
and around them, the people of Filly flee or prepare for a fight. Wilzig remains frozen.
chaos
a name in a book — wilzig begging for help
Lucy does what she knows: she fights. Fights to deescalate the situation, fights to keep her nerves as the man laughs at her. Almost loses her nerve when he takes the sedative-laden dart like it’s nothing. A very small drop in a very, very large bucket of drugs.
The man aims his gun at her, but Lucy doesn’t back down. She doesn’t know how.
“She said stand down, ghoul!”
More fighting, then flight. She practically drags poor Wilzig out of Filly. Both of them need to get to Moldaver.
When Wilzig tells her he won’t make it, Lucy digs her heels in and tries to to fight.
cyanide. vault-tec plan d. the same thing she saw on that family’s table
The fight’s not done. She saws off his head.