Alia_of_the_knife

Act 01 - Chapter 03 - "Babylon" (excerpt)

Virgo sat cross legged on the mattress, taking her time settling in as if trying to find her bearings again. She set The Big Book of Science on her lap and absently ran her fingers along its worn spine before opening it.

The yellowed pages turned slowly beneath her fingers while the drum fire crackled a few feet away, throwing a fragile warmth into the middle of the camp's cold metal.

Beside her, Charon finally stretched out on the mattress, letting go at last of the tension he had been carrying since their arrival. He had spent so many years watching doors, shadows, and unfamiliar faces that he had almost forgotten what it meant to lower his guard. Smoothskins had never been worth trusting in his eyes; too unpredictable, too quick to fear what they did not understand. But here, among his own kind, he did not need to calculate every exit or plan for every betrayal.

Out in the camp, Roy kept watch. He was an arrogant bastard, but they were cut from the same cloth. If one of Gustavo's men tried anything in the tunnels, he would not even make it to their shelter before getting his hide punched full of holes or eaten by ferals. Their savagery was a kind of protection, a challenge few smoothskins dared to take up. For the first time in a long while, he could close his eyes without feeling like he was making a mistake.

Virgo turned a few more pages, absorbed in fragments of ancient knowledge, until a detail caught her eye. Wedged between two sheets, a document stuck out slightly. She pulled it out carefully and found an old, yellowed, crumpled page, slipped there by some previous reader, probably once used as a simple bookmark.

"Listen to this," she said, her voice regaining a lightness it had not had in hours. "A household robot named Barnaby, a Mister Handy I think, who thought he was some kind of comic book superhero." She skimmed the first few lines, an disbelieving smile on her lips. "He calls raiders 'the Forces of Darkness,' and he froze an entire family in a fridge to protect them from radiation!"

Charon, stretched out full length beside her, cracked one eye open, one corner of his burned mouth lifting slightly. "Really?"

"Wait, there's more." She kept reading, punctuating each passage with a small, light laugh, almost childlike. "He's got a... sidekick. Another robot. And one day, to prove his faith, he has it charge into a wall for 'the sacrifice charge,' and..." She stopped, her smile faltering slightly. "And the sidekick dies. For him."

A silence settled for a moment. Charon stayed quiet, simply watching her, the firelight caught in the blue of his eyes. Virgo went back to reading, more softly this time, all the way to the very last line of the log.

"Battery level 34%. Circular blade lubricant reserves: 12%. Recommendation: urgent maintenance." Her voice dropped even lower. "No technician available for 178 years."

She stayed still for a long moment, her eyes fixed on the printed words without really seeing them.

"He keeps going anyway," she said at last, almost to herself. "He's wearing down, he's got nobody to fix him, he probably knows he's going to end up falling apart in some empty hallway... and he keeps telling himself he's a hero, that someone will come threaten him again tomorrow, and that he'll be there to stop it."

Charon propped himself up slightly on one elbow, his gaze more attentive. "That's just a pile of bolts that lost its damn mind, V."

"I know." She closed the book gently over the log, her metal fingers lingering on the worn cover. "But I'm wearing down too, Charon. Nobody's gonna come recalibrate my circuits, replace my dermis, fix what keeps cracking a little more each time." She finally looked up at him, something fragile flickering across her face before vanishing. "And I keep going anyway. I tell myself a story too... About what we're going to do tomorrow. About how it'll be fair, how it's necessary. But there are good people in that tower."

"It ain't the same," the ghoul protested with a protective growl.

Virgo held the book against her chest, her hands trembling faintly on the worn cover Bessie-Lynn had left them.

"And what if one day," she murmured, her voice choked, "I look at you the way Barnaby looked at that poor robot? If I decide you doubt too much, that you've gone... soft?" A silent tear traced a line down her cheek, which she did not wipe away. "I don't want to do that to you, Charon. I don't want to send you charging into a wall and have you die because of me."

Charon did not answer right away, watching her with an intensity that had nothing to do with the fury she had seen in him a few hours earlier in the tower's hall. He finally reached out, pulling her abruptly against him, his voice regaining that hoarse growl that, for him, stood in for tenderness. "I ain't your goddamn little sidekick robot." He rested his chin on top of her head, his fingers slowly losing themselves in her hair, brushing against the black feathers. "I'm the Ferryman, and you're my Consort."

The names hung suspended between them, carrying everything they had come to mean since the encounter with the Children of Atom, titles neither of them had ever really taken the time to put into words, but which spoke, better than any promise could, of what they had become to each other.

Virgo let out a shaky laugh, halfway between tears and relief, burying her face against his chest. "That's a crappy argument," she hiccupped.

"But it's true." His arms closed around her with a strength that might have seemed rough, but that a synthetic body simply felt as powerful, protective. And yet, when he pulled back to wipe her cheeks with his broad thumbs, his touch was unexpectedly gentle. "You ain't some busted up Handy, but if you really want, we'll go see the Railroad."

The bodyguard let a moment of silence pass, his fingers gliding over the android's smooth, warm cheek. Then he went on, even lower, in a conspiratorial tone. "Tulip told me once their big test to know if you're one of theirs is askin' if 'you got a magazine to lend.' If you answer anything besides 'no, but my cousin's got a cat,' they panic and pull out some old gun that shoots nails."

He lifted her effortlessly by the waist to slide her against him, until she found herself stretched out on his chest, wrapped in his arms. "For shadowy spies, you can spot 'em from two miles off. If your fancy institute's scared of guys who get their kicks off Lamplight kid riddles, that says a whole lot about their so called smarts."

The young woman laughed again, a real laugh muffled against his coat, and he let her cry and laugh all at once, without adding anything more, the warmth of the fire wrapping around their two tangled silhouettes in the dim light of the small room.

When she fell asleep against him, Charon closed his eyes. He had watched dozens of faces fade over the years, names forgotten before their blood had even dried, and had convinced himself it would always be that way. That everyone, in the end, disappeared.