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Hancock’s eyes blinked open way too early to get up and way too tangled up in Audrey to get away clean. It was one of those sort of chilly nights where it was actually bearable to curl up together and just fucking forget which one of them was which— any other moment and he would have fucking lived for it, but now he was just sort of anxious about trying to sneak off. One of her legs was wrapped around one of his which would make slipping away fucking impossible, and his dumb ass had to pick tonight to curl his arm under her neck with his face smushed just above her boob.
He was stuck. He was damn stuck and it was making him antsy because he couldn’t reach out for the Calmex he kept stashed in one of the coolers by the chemistry station (very boldly marked don’t fucking touch this Shaun because it had all Drey’s chems too). His pulse was going so fast that he could feel his own heartbeat, and that made him feel worse. How unstable did he have to get before he went feral? How would he know if he was going feral or just panicking?
“John?” Was that his breathing that woke Drey up? He could hear it, gulping and gasping and dry. “You’re okay John. You’re fine,” she whispered. She didn’t reach out to touch him because he’d flinch and he’d woken her up like this often enough that she knew what not to do. “Do you want to get up?” she asked, shifting around a little.
He licked his lips, for all the good it did. “Got some Calmex down in the cooler,” he told her. She had to be the one to get it because Shaun was down there and he didn’t wanna be around the kid when he was like this. He couldn’t because if this was it, if this was the moment, then he sure as shit wasn’t gunna put himself around Shaun. It wasn’t, he knew— he wasn’t going feral because he didn’t really think that it happened so slow— but it was hard to convince himself when he was shaking like he was facing down a fucking Behemoth.
She untangled herself from him and he felt the cold keenly for a second where her chest had been. Shame to go feral with my teeth so close to her tit, he thought. The joke didn’t make him feel better. “On it,” she reported, blearily straightening herself up. She was wearing a pair of Danse’s generously donated Brotherhood issue sweatpants (before he hated her), and a Grognak shirt she’d scavved from Hubris.
“Sorry Drey,” he rasped at her retreating figure. She didn’t respond, but returned with the drug and handed it to him, turning her back so he could inject. He did it quick and tossed the needle, shaking out his arm and grunting to let her know it was okay. She turned and reached out for him— he nodded, his limbs already steadying and his breathing returning to normal.
There wasn’t a better feeling on earth than her all around him when he was high. It was better not being sober because then he could focus on her— how soft her skin was (relatively speaking, of course), all the warmth that seeped into his bones, the cigarette smoke and oil smell of her. “You shouldn’t be sorry,” she said, running her hand down his side. “You don’t have to be.”
“Third night in a row I woke you up like that,” he argued, trying to keep his voice down.
“You know I don’t mind,” she scolded, kissing up his neck. She was squinting even in the dim yellow light that seeped up through the workshop level, but her eyes were still that pretty greenish colour— not like rads, but like plants. “Something’s bugging you.” It wasn’t a question because it always happened this way— something fucked him up and he was fucked up about it for way too long afterwards. His ma always said he was sensitive.
“It’ll wear off,” he assured her. It always did eventually. It was a wonder he didn’t have thicker skin— hard to tell if he just started building stronger walls against the bullshit unfairness of the world, or if he was bottling it all up and sometimes just… popped. Whichever the answer, Calmex usually helped. Jet used to, but since he turned Ghoul his immunity to Jet was off the charts— it was hardly worth it to slow everything down a little, because more often than not it just gave him more time to agonize.
“You wanna talk about it?” she asked. Her head was on his shoulder and he wished for a second that he hadn’t done all this to himself. Ghouled himself, tore himself apart with chems… he hadn’t been a bad looking guy, back before he got enough sense in his head to hate himself.
He didn’t say anything for a while, playing with her hair. She was half asleep again when he finally decided fuck it. “That kid, Billy,” he started. She jolted a little, trying to blink the bleariness out of her eyes.
“Thought that had a happy ending?” she asked.
“Shitty beginning,” he said with a shrug. “He got ghouled and he was alone when it happened. He was just a kid too— shit.” He could feel his nerves trying to work through the fog of the Calmex and struggled to try and lose himself again. “It isn’t a good experience and even my dumb ass had Fahrenheit and Daisy there to… I just don’t like the thoughts of that kid fucking up by himself with no idea what was going on.”
It sounded stupid when he said it out loud. It’d happened long before he was even born and Billy got reunited with his parents. He’d been afraid, but ready for the new world outside the refrigerator. Hancock hadn’t even been half as brave— not dying hadn’t been in the game plan. All that ugly fucking pain; his skin flaking and peeling, his nose rotting off, his ears growing onto the side of his head.
He remembered laughing when his nose started coming off. He’d been higher than shit, of course, and the pain had been bad enough to make him hysterical. His nose was coming loose like a tooth and that had sent him into fits of laughter even as it fell off entirely. He’d vomited quite a bit too— Fahr said it’d been fucking scary watching him up-chuck and choke on laughs at the same time. The ghoul thing really wasn’t making you less creepy, no offence.
“You need more drugs, John?” Audrey brushed back the chunks of hair he still had left, and it occurred to him that he’d just worked himself up again. He took a few deeper breaths, shaking his head. Taking more would scare her and he’d already fucked up her night enough. He wanted to black the fuck out for a few days until he forgot why the kid had messed him up so bad.
He was a selfish fuck real deep down. The kid was probably fine— fuck, he barely seemed to notice he was a ghoul except to realize that he looked different, that his parents looked different. Hancock was the one flashing back to being locked in a dim room where Vic and his goons wouldn’t find him, pissing his pants laughing while he rotted away to nothing. No more John McDonough.
“Just give me a few minutes, Sunshine. It’ll pass,” he mumbled. It passed slower and slower every time, but having her there helped— his one weird contradiction, the one person who loved him even though it didn’t make any fucking sense and he didn’t deserve a second of it.
She stayed up with him until he nodded off, and he didn’t deserve a second of that either.