Work Text:
His hand is metal; so she fully expects it to be cold when she takes it in her own. Instead his hand is warm, if not sharp against her palm, as his fingers close around her own. She looks out at Diamond City from where they sit perched high in the stands. She leans her head against Nick's shoulder and breaths in his heady scent of cigarettes and coolant, traces the seams of his coat with her free fingers and wonders how it is that she fell in love with a robot.
-
A line of grease is smudged across the freckles dusting her nose and cheeks, and her teeth bite sharp into her bottom lip as she fights with the piece of power armour in her hand. She wrestles it on the suit frame armed with only a wrench and the vitriol that pours from her mouth like a prayer. And when the deed is done she stands triumphantly and crows a battle cry into the still air. Danse offers her a fusion core which she slams into the newly built suit of amour with more force then necessary, and when she smiles at him jubilantly and smears another line of black grease across her forehead; he finds himself at war with traitorous fingers that itch to tangle themselves in her hair, and a feeling he can’t quite name that tightens his chest and stills his breath. And though his lips wish for nothing more in that moment then to feel hers, instead he pulls them back against his teeth as he smiles and says: “Good work, Soldier.”
-
When She returns from the institute for the first time she drinks. Anything and everything with a burn goes down her throat in rapid succession until the world blurs and the pain blurs with it. Cait tries to match her at first, but gives up somewhere around the tenth bottle that’s passed between them. Cait leans back in her chair and slurs with her thick Irish lilt: “I love a good pity party as much as the next one, but you ever gonna mention what this is about?”
She responds by chugging down a nearly full bottle of vodka. When she awakes to the too bright afternoon light, stiff and half sprawled across the table they claimed the previous night as theirs; she finds her fingers locked in a warm grasp. Cait lightly snores from her spot across the table, face hidden by the crook of her elbow. And not for the first time since leaving the vault she finds herself wondering how despite all the fear and death and enemies she has faced, that she had somehow also found friends.
-
She runs her fingers through thick fur and scratches at the spot he likes just below the ears. His heavy panting is the only sign of the pain he’s in and she is very careful not to startle him as she pulls the stimpak from her pack. “That’s a good boy.” She whispers as she slides the needle into the skin by his hind leg. “Good boy.”
The hound will be better with in minutes, but the scare will leave her reeling for weeks.
-
Curie is soft and warm as she wraps her arms around the smaller woman. A simple gesture that hadn’t had quite the same appeal when her body had been hard metal and cutting limbs. She brushes a stray lock from her brow and smiles warmly at the robot who looks at her with new eyes and a lopsided grin.
-
His lips spill lies like endearments, words layered like the sweet pastries she would make before the war, words that flake and crumble just as quickly and leave sticky fingers and stickier tongues. She swallows down the flattery that makes her teeth ache and tries to find the truth she thinks might be hiding in the centre.
But Deacon just smiles a little to broadly and pats her on the shoulder and tells her about the time he fought off four deathclaws at once.
“I didn’t even get a scratch.” He laughs.
The exasperation is plain on her face, but he’s already talking about something else and she’s pretty sure he wasn’t wearing that coat when they entered the building, but she knows its pointless to ask or to comment when he suddenly sports a new do somewhere between the line of her scope and the space of a breath as another raider falls.
-
She finds out quickly that Strong doesn’t like that she can pick locks, its even worse when he finds out that she likes to pick locks. The satisfying click as the safe swings open and lays its bounty bare for her to plunder.
She wonders if it’s because his own fingers are too big, too clumsy to be able to manage such delicate work. Or if he finds something unkind in the gesture, if it’s a reflection of vulnerability that he hides. Something he fears she may just find if she just picks at it long enough.
-
He calls her Ma’am with a soft voice that has no right to sound so cold and dead. She shivers against the rain but other then the faint curl of disgust that pulls at his lip as he steps over another corpse, he shows no discomfort from the downpour that soaks her leathers and trails a river though her lashes. She swallows the fear that this storm is merely prelude to one of the less friendly systems that likes to grace the commonwealth. She calls, desperate across the divide of the street: “X6 we should get out of here.”
He turns towards her slowly and says calm and clear despite the heavy downpour: “We haven’t completed our mission, Ma’am.”
When she shivers again under his gaze, she isn’t sure if it is simply due to the cold and the rain.
-
She likes his hat.
The ghoul indulges her in this, lets her steal it from his head and place it on her own with nary a sigh. He doesn’t tell her he’s shot others for less of a trespass. Doesn’t tell her that he stuck a knife in the gut of the last fellow that dared.
Instead Hancock leans back on the couch and sucks back Jet. Holds the poison in his lungs and lets the world slow down. He watches the sway of her yellow sundress and the coy grin that spreads across her full mouth, watches as she dances to memories of a time he thought forgotten.
-
Codsworth was there at the beginning.
A gift for the new family from the in-laws. Little did she know that Codsworth would become the only family she had left.
One last tie to a world forgotten.
Once upon the time Codsworth would help get the water running to bathe Shaun. Would help with the dishes and the cleaning. Now Codsworth helped her mow down raiders and ferals. Now Codsworth helps her carry the things she can’t. Hold the memories that she can’t.
Shares the burden of remembering.
-
Piper’s fingers are stained with ink. Stories -facts spilled on paper by her pen. “The Commonwealth needs to know, deserves to know!” She cries out. A battle call for truth in a world of lies.
But this world doesn’t want the truth. Reality is already too hard, too full of fear and horror that there isn’t room for truth. Truth becomes a lynch mob and a bullet in the head. Truth becomes lost to fear, becomes twisted stories to tell the youngsters around the dying fire.
Piper knows this.
Yet still she does what she can to bring that which would hide in the shadows to light. Because in a world full of lies, there must always be someone that remembers the truth.
-
“Another settlement needs our help.” Preston says.
Another settlement always needs their help. She wonders if there is a settlement that doesn’t need their help. So she sighs and lets him lead the way down rubble strewn roads and across the plains reclaimed by wilds. And when at the end of the day they sit by a fire, sore and hungry after dealing with the super mutants or ferals or whatever it was this time around. She doesn’t protest at the food the settlers keep ladling on her plate, nor does she protest when Preston graces her with a rare smile and a soft hand on her arm and gives her an undeserved: “Thank you, General.”
-
McCready is just as lost as she is. With a story that hits a little too close to home. She wonders how he does it. She wonders how he can, how she can. But they keep each other going.
And maybe that is enough.
-
She knows the holodisk recording like one knows a song played on repeat.
The cadence of his voice preserved when she can’t even remember the way his eyes crinkled when he laughed. She sits on the couch they purchased together and twists the plain band on her finger. She tries to remember the taste of his lips and the feel of his hands. But the memories are just faded photographs, and she doesn’t have those either.
But what she can’t remember her body does. The plains of her skin marked like the earth. Fine lines that snake across her belly and breasts like the rivers and streams that cut across the countryside.
Memories etched into the skin like forgotten roads. Marks of a time in which they existed. Happily, she thinks.
But two hundred years is a long time to mourn.
Her hand hovers above her pip-boy, fingers over the eject button. The house that they had once planned to fill with laughter and family is quiet but for the breeze that whistles through the holes in the roof and stirs the leaves littering the floor. She sighs and lifts her gaze towards the canopy of stars that she can see through those same holes.
Her fingers twitch and she closes her eyes.
She presses play.
“Hi Honey!”