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The black cloaked mutant had gone, left him dangling like a fly in a spiders web with a chunk of uranium crudely shoved through his gut like a goddam suppository. Cooper felt his insides rearrange themselves. Squirming worms of intestine writhed and squelched as they knitted back together. Flesh and sinew stretched and regrew. The green radioactive glow dimmed and was consumed.
Might as well let nature takes its course.
He studied the desecrated church. There wasn’t much else to do. Before everything, it would have been right at home in one of his movies. Now? Dark. Torches and lanterns lit the little adobe structure with a dancing flame that briefly illuminated crude murals. Meat bags dripped and glistened in the gloom. (Or was that his own blood still leaking?) Best not think about what- or who- might be contained within. And the smell…
God ain’t set foot in this place in a long ass time.
Speaking of time, how long had he been out? It was still night. The mutant couldn’t have taken him far, not on foot, not that it mattered. What mattered was safe now, so long as Hank MacLean kept his word. Not that Cooper stood a chance of wading through a pack of deathclaws and fuck knows what else lurked under the Lucky 38.
Nothing good.
Even a man like Hank cared for his daughter. For Lucy. Or seems to enough. His one redeeming quality? She’d be alright, back in her sterile little vaultie world beneath everyone’s feet. Cooper believed it, because the monster that was The Ghoul still loved his little girl. His Janey. Fathers and their daughters.
And if not? Well. He taught Lucy how to fend for herself, not that she needed much coaching.
And yet.
And yet he drowned himself in booze and regrets before the hand-off. He explained to Lucy when all he had to do was sedate her and be done with it. She had to know, to understand, because she damn well deserved it. They had been getting along… In another life, or another world, he might have called her friend, not that that descriptor seemed fully apt.
Lucy was the impetus, the catalyst that reawakened a thing long dormant. Not a spark. A cultivator. She nurtured that seed of goodness in him like the fucking corn field in her vault she wouldn’t shut up about.
And he threw it all away. He damned their partnership. Stamped the sprout of it under his heel. Squashed to once again wither under the wasteland sun.
He sighed. His head drooped low to his chest. Footsteps jolted him out of his head. There, impossibly in this hellish place, stood his daughter, looking just the same as the day the bombs dropped. Her matching cowboy getup pristine versus his centuries of filth, her optimism vs his cynicism. Janey, who stared at him, silent, the ghost of Christmas past.
Had he not suffered enough torment?
He tried to speak.
He knew not what to say.
He called her name.
But the phantom did not answer.
Janey just stood, smiling sadly, and pitied the creature he had become. Pity cut worse than fear, than rejection. Silence burned worse than anger or tears. And phantom or no, tied as he was, he could not reach out and hold her in his arms. And if he could, if he did, would the phantom hold? Or would he clutch at air?
Then, hands emerged from the darkness to rest on Janey’s shoulders, one finger darker than the rest. Lucy stepped around her, hiding and protecting Janey who clung to Lucy’s leg. His ghost of Christmas present. Her cheer to his Scrooge. Now all they required was Christmas future and the cast would be complete. Damn Lucy recounting A Christmas Carol. He thought he tuned that shit out.
“I would have helped you, you know?” Lucy said like it was obvious.
“Yeah.” He acknowledged.
Lucy smiled sadly. “But you didn’t need my help. You dared not acknowledge or admit it to yourself.”
“Admit what?”
“That you can’t get too close, couldn’t let yourself feel. But you did. You had to, much as you tried to stop it, to stop me.” She laid a hand over her heart, on the darkened blood still staining her suit like corruption manifest. “Can’t be stabbed in the back if you stab me first, right?”
“Something like that.” He sucked a wheezing breath, then coughed a bitter laugh. “Ain’t you one to talk? Punchin' me out a goddamn window and skewerin’ me like an iguana on a stick.”
Her gaze fell. “I didn’t mean too…”
“That’s the way of the wasteland sweetheart. It don’t care for you or me. Don’t care bout things like karma or morality. Just the way it is, way it’s always been. Ain’t nothing personal.”
“You sure? Does it have to be? Is having someone to watch your back such a bad thing?”
He swallowed naught but blood and dust. “Trust, that’s what breaks, and what breaks you. Trust in the familiar, in good. Good times. Good folks. Good doesn’t last. Never wins. Never has, never will.”
“The only reason your as close as your are now, is because decent people.” Lucy said as her hands clenched not fists at her sides. “Because of me. Then you threw me away. You trusted my father’s word over mine?!.”
“And fuck me, I’ve suffered for it. Suffered lifetimes. Lost everything. Lost myself. I’ve done enough self loathing without you cricket chirping in my ear.”
“Yeah? Now you’re punishing me to punish yourself, your past mistakes, the person in the mirror, just so you can make brand new ones.”
“That man is dead.”
Lucy huffed. “That’s not what you were saying on that pole.”
He shook his head. “I lied. Course I lied. We all lie, ‘specially to ourselves.”
“Like your doing now?”
His glare could melt steel, but Lucy would not relent, nor buckle, or bend, or break. The wasteland may have changed her. He may have changed her. But she never broke. “Tread carefully vaultie.”
“Cooper Howard? Really? That’s who you are? The name you kept from me? Why? Cause I wouldn’t believe you? Or because you thought you killed that part of yourself?”
“Shut the fuck up! You don’t know me! Even if you are all in my head. You’re not really her. You’re not real...”
Janey stepped from behind Lucy. Shielded her. “Daddy stop!” She yelled with outstretched arms and he shrank back.
“Sorry darlin’.”
“Don’t sorry me! Apologize to Lucy!” She took a deep breath and added, “Please?”
“Fine. Sorry. Guess ol’ Lucy’s right. I’ve been stupid.”
“And what are you going to do about it?” Janey challenged.
“What I do best I guess, what Lucy does best, something stupid.” He owed her as much.
Lucy smiled as the specters of her and Janey dissipated into the evening air.
Then the mutant returned as a tear rolled down Cooper’s cheek.