#charon fallout

They stay ahead of the storm by an hour, turning back occasionally to watch it approach and swell like heat from an infection, gauging how long it would take to catch up to them. Luckily, they reach Rivet City first with time to spare. She can feel it blistering against her face, dry hot wind a precursor to scalding bits of sand and stone soon to be hitting them and the ship hoping to shelter them. With each dust storm the old freighter sinks deeper and deeper into the Potomac, dust and grit filling it's empty cavities and leaving a thick sludge that was as heavy as cement. It really was the only place for miles that could weather a storm like this, and that was the start of their problems.

“What do you mean you can’t let us in?”

“Keyes, you know it's nothin’ personal.” Harkness looked endlessly put upon, having to be dragged out of the city when Nico nearly bit the head off the other guard for not letting them in, “we’re at capacity-more than. We’ve got all of fuckin’ DC in here!” 

“Two of us are doctors, you’re going to need us when you got junkies and food poisoning out the ass. Literally.” She argues and Harkness just sighs, running a hand over his face. He knows she’s right but it doesn’t change the fact they have people packed in here like sardines. 

“Didn’t you say three?” Harkness narrows his eyes. 

“Yeah well, he’s my guy. He goes where I go.” She says, voice hard with finality, “besides, you’re going to be happy to have him when fights start breaking out.”

She drops her voice low when she sees he still isn’t convinced, “You owe me, y’know.” a little below-the-belt for her tastes, but if it gets them in, she has other notches to take down too. Even looking at him now, she can’t believe he’s all wires and electrical impulses. Harkness was more human than half the folks crowding onto the ship, that she would stand by. 

Harkness nearly growls at her, spitting off the side of the railing with a scowl, “Fine, but I won’t hear shit about you, got it?” 

“Yessir.” she says and accepts a shoulder pat for her less-than-savory methods. She'll buy him a beer later, if there was any sort of liquor even left in the settlement. Those behind her on the scaffold look dazed and irritated, Harkness was going to have his hands full. 

She returns to ground level, tucking away into her hood and scarf against the grainy wind. Her hat was long since given up to James to shield his face from gravel and dust alike. She finds her companions right where she left them, Charon sitting with his eyes shut against the wall and her father slumped and staring blankly ahead. His strength still hasn’t returned, even their slow pace had taxed him further than she thought it would. 

He blinks drearily at her, “were we too late?” James had guessed everyone would flock here, and at their pace, there was a good chance they wouldn’t be getting in at all.

Nico shakes her head, “Don’t worry, they’re letting us in. Come on,” she lifts under his arms to pull him upright. He stands shakily, leaning heavily on her with a sigh of relief. 

Out of the corner of her eye she watches Charon stand with a crack of his knees, Dog at his feet and ready to go. Out of everyone she owes a drink, he’s first on the list. He practically dragged James all on his own, leaving her to watch their six and pretend to help lighten the load. Not to mention having to be party to long petty silences and even pettier conversation between her and her father. Their arguments always broke down into this, cryptic back-chat in place of an actual conversation. Talking around each other’s ire and Nico realized with no small deflation that they communicated better as doctor and physician than father and daughter. It was easier to keep clean when the latex gloves came on. She stopped pressuring him to talk after that. 

The three of them draw baleful stares as they pass all those still trying to get in and crowding the catwalk. It had been at least a decade since Charon had been in Rivet City, back when their counsel was a little more blind to the dealings that went on in their community. Azrukhal’s most lucrative contacts had called Rivet City home and it was Charon that ran between the two to facilitate trade. He wonders mildly if that would be the role he’d fall into again with Keyes, thinking of the chem station on the top floor of her Megaton home and the horde of locked hard-cases piled by it. He wouldn’t be surprised if she single handedly supplied Megaton with all the raw materials she stopped to gather constantly on their travels. Our Lady of Hope hospital should have been a warning, watching her rummage in half collapsed rooms and packing things away like some rodent. 

If it had been up to him, he would have taken his chances in an abandoned building and hope the walls didn't fall down around him. Rivet city felt like a minefield. It wasn't just the dregs of the wasteland he was watching for, he knew Sister would have been the first through it cities door when he knew people would be packing themselves inside. And he wouldn't be alone. By the end of it, more people will have gone missing and it would be blamed on the storm. Charon didn't have any hope for going unseen, he hardly ever was. Even if he wanted to be.

She shoots him a look when he pulls the knitted cap she’d given him from Moria’s, over his head and pulls his scarf up, also given freely. They are let through with a wave, and Keyes understands when the guard grimaces at the sight of him. Now that she thinks about it, she’s never seen a ghoul in Rivet City, and Quinn never mentioned it when they crossed paths in Canterbury. It didn’t even cross her mind that they wouldn’t let him in with her, so she puts it to bed here. A roll of caps is pushed into the young man' s hands as she passes, ignoring the weighted stare of her father. The guard says nothing and lets them though.  Immediately they are hit with the heavy dank of slick metal inside, thick with the stench of people crowded onboard. Hallways and byways are lined with bodies, camped out on the floors simply because there was no room elsewhere. The marketplace was worse. For them anyway, from here she can see Flak standing with a proud smirk behind his wares. It was as close to Christmas morning for the merchants as they’ll ever get. 

They immediately make for the clinic, she and James keeping hold of each other in the cramped halls. Charon stays a lumbering shadow behind, watching hands and guns around them as they descend down the stairs to the clinic. Dog weaves through them all, getting underfoot trying to avoid strangers before Charon grabs a hold of his leather collar and brings him close. The clinic is no less cramped, cots filled with the injured and strung out. Keyes takes a little bit of smug glee in imagining that peculiar pinched look to Madison Lee’s face was bound to have in all of this. Though, the other scientists and doctors didn’t seem much more enthused, either bent over patients or trying to disappear behind a screen. All of them with faces lined with exhaustion and irritation. That changes when they see James.  Wide dark eyes followed them as they moved further in, Keyes trying to find an empty cot or chair to put James in with no success. Madison Li billows in like the angry clouds outside, expression just as dark and withering. Keyes felt little pleasure in being right.

“Right." she crosses her arms and scowls,"You look like a mess. Both of you.”  

“Madison.” Her father breathes, “You seem to have your hands full.”

“You got room for one more?” Keyes grunts and Madison points them to the only free chair in the place. Dr. Li doesn’t ask where he’s been, deciding she won’t like the answer regardless and will act accordingly. 

“Hardly.” She says but doesn’t stop Nico from setting him down with a relieved sigh. The air is swollen and damp with sulfur, she doesn’t understand how the scientists can be shut down here for so long. She just got here and is already counting down the minutes until she can leave.  

James all but collapses in the chair and no sooner does Dr. Li start poking and prodding at him. Much of the same song and dance Keyes did to him on the way here, she'll find nothing more than muscle atrophy and dehydration. She doesn't like the look Madison give her over her shoulder.

"I'll get something for the fever." Madison backs away and moves past Keyes without a glance. Which she's thankful for, not that the older woman would have liked that either. James just watches her go, warily.

"I know this was my idea but," James trails off a little, leaning conspiratorially in her space.

"You're stuck with her now." She had little sympathy and seemed, frankly, tickled by the whole thing, "We all are, they've practically locked us all in here."

"It's fine. We have everything we need here." he tells her decidedly.

"For what?"

"The memorial." He says like she wasn't keeping up, "now we have the numbers and the means to fix up the grid and mainframe. We still need the GECK, but we can prepare everything else in advance." James looked like he was gearing up to keep going and Keyes must have forgotten to fix her face into something placid because he goes quiet with an acidic look.

She sighs, "I need to get to the market before it gets much later, I'll bring you back something to eat."

"Oh please don't." He says rather petulantly, bitterness melting away.

"You'll hurt Bonny's feelings, pops."

"I'll be the one hurting at the end of it." He grumps and she shrugs in defeat.

"Rest, if you can." she says in way of goodbye, and unloads a few bottles of water at his side before she leaves. The softness in his gaze nearly undoes her. It follows and burns her even as she climbs the stairs up to the deck above.

It doesn't sit well in her that for nearly a year she hasn't been able to see him and now jumps at the opportunity to bail, get away from all the terse disagreement and noxious disappointment. Because in all the words they shared, she didn't know what to even say to him besides 'what the hell were you thinking?"

And she did, to his face, with him half slung over her shoulder so he couldn't ignore her. His answer didn't satisfy, and he knew it. To keep her safe will always be the truth, and yet she needled him for the other truth that was too ugly for him to have said, even in anger. To tell the only piece of his wife he had left that it was easier to bury himself in her research and passions when he couldn't find her in their daughter's eyes. She swallows that truth whole and the near-wounded look on her face felt like something Charon wasn't supposed to see, so he had watched the approaching storm instead.

Halfway to Rivet City, after he'd bled and thew up bile and saline on her, she decided he was right. In his own way. It shouldn't have been much of a shock to her when insisted on her doctorate as soon as she could manage, instead of her natural aptitude for mechanics. How he refused to tell her where they came from after Mrs. Palmer let it slip that her father came to the vault.

And yet he got his fair warning too. She explained in detail how she planned to leave the vault, every step so he knew she was serious. He'd look at the pack by her bedside nearly every night when he said goodnight. Now that she was here, having been tossed head first into something he never thought to explain to her, his truth meant little to her. She found it was more comforting than she realized to see someone who looked at her and saw Nico, no disheveled wanderer or errand runner. Though, maybe it was worse to still be seen as the creature who is his daughter, she never liked her much.

"Who was that?" Charon says, having followed her out and into the hall and bent to pass through a doorframe. She doesn't have to ask to know who he's talking about.

"Dr. Madison Li, less a medical doctor and more a scientist," she said like that made a difference to him, "charming, yes?"

"She looks like she thinks the same about you."

"Yes, well. " Warranted, she thinks.

Keyes had little issue with Dr. Li, truthfully, respected the edge she carried and found her judgment sound if not a bit weathered. But Keyes decidedly didn't fit the preconceived molds that Madison had set up for her to fit it, rather, fitted for her father in a way that Nico found mildly pathetic. Li made it plain when speaking of her mother, a good woman if not a little fanatical, said with an air emboldened pity. The same tone she used to tell Nico that she looked nothing like her.

The pair of them breech the wide, high-domed marketplace with a sense of coming up for air. The crowds had thinned, somewhat, now that the market was shutting down for the night. All the usual din was overlapped with the steady beating of wind on the hull, howling low and severe through the metal walls. The sound was like the large vent fans she was lulled to sleep by every night in the vault.

She side-steps people grouped around The Fix and can hear Flak shouting over the jumbled crowd packed in front of their stall, "Clear out. You don't gotta go home but you can't stay here, get it?"

His scowl gets deeper when he spot her patiently waiting for the crowd to disperse, wiggling her fingers at him. The crowd lingering around the stall finally thins enough for her to squeeze closer, Charon looming at her shoulder like some badly concealed threat. Several people still shoot him wary looks on the way past. Flak notices him a beat later and physically recoils.

“Oh, hell no.”

Keyes sighs through her nose. “Can we skip this part?”

"You brought a ghoul in here?” He says, voice a harsh whisper shout. Turns out the hat and scarf didn't do much. Flak shakes his head, "Through the front door and everything, place's gone to shit." He rubs a hand over his greasy, balding head and she feels merciful enough not to comment on it.

"They said the same thing when you two moved in. More slurs though, I think." She leans against the counter.

"I don't know about that." Flak says tartly against her hard look.

“You say that like he pissed on the counter.”

“I could,” Charon offers mildly, first bit of conversation he's offered. And it works wonders Keyes never could have achieved by herself.

 "Alright, alright," Flak grounds out a tired sigh, flapping his hands at her and unwilling to participate in a verbal spar, "I already got enough trouble with everybody crammed in here stabbin’ each other over cram and clean socks."

He is startled when Keyes leans in conspiratorially, “You got any precision drivers? The small shit like," she takes a moment to dig though her pockets and dumps a handful of bent nose pliers the size of her pinky and some tweezers onto the counter, "this."

She's mangled her smallest tools trying to take apart Charon's holotape, instead only managing to crack it's outer shell and bending her remaining gun tools beyond repair.

“Micro-tools,” he repeats slowly, like sounding it out might improve the request. “During a storm.”

"Maybe I'll piss on the counter." She muses.

Flak curls his lip, "fuckin' animal. Fine."

Shrapnel comes out from behind the partition then, arms full with a crate and lets it go on the counter with a dull thud. Immediately Keyes starts pawing through it with alarming focus. Charon doesn't look at the tools spread across the counter once. His attention stays on the crowd thinning and thickening around them, on anyone who lingered a beat too long near her back. When a woman jostled too close when reaching past her for The Fix's wares, his hand had drifted to rest near his shotgun. Keyes didn't notice. She was elbow-deep in a crate, chasing down a terminal board like it owed her money.

“Where the hell did you even get half this stuff?” she mutters, lifting said cracked terminal board toward the light.

“Some caravan outta Pitt.” Shrapnel shrugs. “Guy said it all came from old military stock.”

Keyes turns the board over, eyes narrowing. “No kidding.”

There’s genuine interest there now, enough that she forgets herself for a moment. It’s the same look she got scavenging ruins, intent and hungry. It just makes Charon weary. She scrabbles her way to the bottom of the crate and revels a metal dental case, it's edges dented and rusted. She only means to give it a cursory glance when she pops it open, with some effort, and is rewarded. Inside sat neat rows of tiny screwdrivers, wire probes, tweezers, a solder spool and a compact voltage tester with cracked yellow plastic.

Keyes shuts the case with a snap. “How much.”

Flak grins slow and predatory. “For you? Painful amounts.”

"I said how much. Not rob me."

"You make it easy, dolly."

Stares at him when she tosses two rolls of twenty-five on the counter with theatrical misery. Flak makes an unhappy noise but quickly snatches them up when onlookers started mooning.

“You are a parasite.” She tells him before the market dims for half a heartbeat. Emergency power kicks back in and low muttering spreads through the crowd.

“This been happening all day?” Keyes asked.

“Not until the weather started chewing on the power relays.” He answers, pulling tarps down around the open wall panels and tying them down tightly against the floor. She doesn't need to be told where the door is and shoves her newly acquired wares into her pack. Along with the pen-like shape of a broken soldering iron, plucked deftly from the crate when the shopkeepers are busy tying down their things. She darts a glance at Charon over her shoulder, he snorts a little at her plainly guilt-less expression and follows her though the market once again.

He thinks she's headed back down to the clinic and follows dutifully when she grips the arm of his jacket and takes them up, and up, to the very top of the rig. Rivet City security doesn't seem surprised to see her, those who are left inside their quarters anyway- the rest being called into the city proper to handle the unrest swelling inside like a pus-filled wound.

The wind is louder up here, the whole ship groaning under the sustained pressure of it like something alive and unhappy. She remembers where the access panel is, housing the power relays, from the last time she snooped around Rivet City's upper levels with less than pure intentions. She goes first, sidling along the grating with her back to the hull, the wasteland dropping away on her left into a canyon of collapsed structures. Her pack is left behind in the security bunks, too stuffed to fit in with her but she does slip the metal tool case free from its outer pocket. The Dog follows her out when she cracks open the door, already finding sand piled up around the joints and creases of the of the hatch. Dog's eyes squint cutely before he finds shelter with his big head against her side as Keyes looks around for the access box she knows it out here somewhere.

She finds it bolted to the hull plating, one hinge already sheered off. She figured she owed it to at least Flak to fix something up, she did just short change the hell out of him. She wedges herself against the hull and get the panel open, and that's where she finds the most glaring problem and then three more problems that had been waiting under it. She is dimly aware of Charon taking up a position behind her, making a windbreak of himself without being asked. The warmth of it let her work with more precision than she had any right to out here. Her new tools are shaken out into her waiting palm, the compact tester, the wire probes, and put to work.

"We're going to have a hell of a time trying to find a place to bunk down." Keyes nearly shouts over her shoulder to be heard over the wind, "no chance at the clinic or the Weatherly." She'd been trying not to think about it, but seeing it up close and personal put things into perspective real quick.

"Stay out of the common areas." he tells her with emphasis, leaning over her shoulder.

"That's probably for the best." she agrees, but gets the feeling he's thinking of something else other than just the crowd.

The first relay was corroded through and needed bypassing entirely, which meant rerouting to the secondary terminal, which meant finding where the secondary terminal's line had chafed through against the hull plate. She spent about ten minutes of working blind by feel with her fingers wedged into a gap she could barely fit one hand into.

"Might have to take our chances below deck," she muses, sure there would be artless begging involved, but Pinkerton might let them crash on the floor.

"There's nothing there." He tells her, he's been damn near everywhere on this ship and the bow was underwater.

"Sure there is, he's a bit of a grump but I think we can swing it."

She got the bypass seated and the tester blinked green, and by then the swollen storm clouds were a wall all on its own. Massive and slow like molasses. She feels more than sees Charon move away, back into the maintenance hall way and taking the wall of heat with him. She doesn't stop him, more than content to stay here and watch it approach unabashed.

The sky is a knotted swelling of gray and stygian blue, and everything below a blurred haze of sand and dirt. It rose to meet the churning horizon in a vast, infected plume that blotted out distance and detail. She would have mistaken it for rain but all was soundless except for the wind screaming through hollow buildings, like a big fucked up wind-chime. It carried a hot dampness that was almost a physical sensation on her skin, heavy and cloying with static. Looking at the clouds' swollen underbellies found them heavy with a jaundiced glow, promising the back-handed blessing of water. The wall of it was the color of something burning that wasn't fire, that bruised orange-brown she'd had no name for before she came outside and now couldn't forget. The leading edge had gone dark and green with the swell of it. She'd never seen anything so lovely and terrible in all her life.

 It was different to the dust storms she'd seen before, the solid funneling towers of wind that twisted and moved like it was alive. She'd expected noise, wind noise, but this was different, layered, the high frequency edge of it and then under that a low sustained pressure that she felt in her chest more than heard, like something enormous breathing. She'd read about it in the vault, in the geography sections of the terminals that nobody accessed except her and occasionally James when he was making a point about something.

Fishing through her left pocket, large and sloppily sewn-on, and pulls out a notebook only a little larger than her hand and length of her fingers. She'd gone through four of these since leaving the vault, numbered them on the inside cover out of habit more than necessity. Some habits outlived their reasons. Charting hour had been mandatory back home, an hour every evening logging vitals and observations, until it stopped being an assignment and became just what she did with her hands when her head got too loud to trust on its own. Dog is graciously patient when she uses the flat of his head as a table to rest the book on, and is rewarded with an absent neck scratch.

She methodically dates the page, location squished in the margins. Then proceeds to write down every thought, especially the ones kept locked up tight behind her teeth during the trek here. But when pencil finds paper, the words vanish and she's left writing and rewriting her inventory. Bullet counts. Remaining medical supplies.

Ammo: .32 - 14rd. 10mm- 6rd, low. Stimpaks: 2. Water, purified: 3 bttl. Antiseptic: out.

Harkness- debt settled. Will likely reopen it. Monitor. Then, because the page wasn't full yet and she'd learned the hard way that an empty page invited the wrong kind of thinking, she kept going into the part that wasn't supplies.

Patient: J. Keyes.Hydration improved since departure. Muscle atrophy unresolved, ambulatory with assistance only. Fever: low-grade, intermittent. Appetite: poor.

It read clean. It read like every other chart she'd ever kept, which was the point of writing it that way. Easier to hold a person at arm's length when you called them a patient first.

Affect: withdrawn. She paused, pencil hovering, then added, smaller: Consistent with baseline.

That wasn't true and she knew it wasn't true the second the graphite touched paper. There was no baseline for this. She'd never charted him before, not really, not in the years she'd carried a notebook good enough to chart anyone in. She scratched it out hard enough to tear the page, and underneath, in the same flat hand she used for blood pressure and heartbeats, wrote the only line that was actually accurate: No prior data available for comparison.

"What are you doing out here still? Get back inside." Charon is at the door, looking at her like she was daft, their packs in his hand and he'd clearly been waiting for her to come back inside.

"And miss this?" the look in her eyes was admittedly a little unhinged, "I've never seen anything like it." her tone turned a little wistful as she ignores the door he holds open for her.

"It's rain season. You'll see it until you get sick of it." he grouses, evidently already sick of it.

"Is it always like this?"

He gives up holding open the door and joins her outside, eyes narrowed into slits against the wind, "No."

She sits herself on the edge of the deck, hands curling around the thing metal rails that would do nothing to stop her from tumbling over the edge if she leans out far enough. Dog follows his windbreak and sits in the shelter of her back like an extra shadow, leaning his weight on her. Somewhere below, down in the canyon of rusted highways and collapsed rooftops, a sheet of loose metal clanged arrhythmically against concrete. The distant husk of the Washington Monument dissolved into the bruise-colored sky until only its blinking red aviation light remained, remote and lonely.

She glanced sideways at him. "How is it different?"

Charon was quiet long enough she thought he might ignore her entirely, but when he does it is almost too quiet to hear over the wind, "Big." he muttered.

"That precise, huh?" She's grinning, spinning her pencil between her fingers.

He scowls at her, then at the approaching wall of cloud, this one was big and serious about it and she was too excited about it."Doesn't need to be when you've been out here long enough."

"I guess I wouldn't know then," she says wryly. Back in the vault, storms had been educational material. Diagrams in faded textbooks. Archived recordings played in classrooms where recycled air smelled faintly of antiseptic and overheated circuitry. The idea of weather had felt almost fictional then. Like sunsets or oceans. Now the sky looked close enough to touch.

She catches his sideways look, "It's been-" she glances at her pipboy, looking at the date for the first time in a good while, "a little over a year."

Charon looked at her proper then, studying her profile with that same wary confusion he always seemed to carry around her. He didn't have confirmation before but between this and seeing her wide-eyed wonderment at something as simple as bad weather, it couldn't have been more obvious she really was a vault-dweller. He doesn't think anyone else could look at something as terrible and vast as nature throwing its worst at them, and admire it like it was happening just for you.

"Back then, in the vault," she continues softly, voice nearly lost to the wind, "they used to pipe storm sounds through the atrium speakers sometimes. Always just sounded like angry noise."

"Why?" He asks, unable to understand why anyone would want to simulate a bad weather.

"I think the Overseer thought it made things feel less...underground. Educational. Kind of. He wanted us to understand things outside could swallow you whole."

"And did it?"He says in a way that suggested he knew already, but she paused and though about it anyway.

"Maybe. But it wasn't like being eaten. I was doing the eating I think." She says it with a small curl of her lips. There's something to be said about being reminded of just how cosmically insignificant you are, how small and utterly meaningless. It humbled her back then, when she felt too big for the room and though of whatever was outside it, and it humbles her now in a way that makes her feel so delightfully small. It's her father voice that fills her head now, accusatory, you like it here, don't you?

It was true, and she couldn't deny it. She liked it because it made sense to her. More than ice cream socials and old world history classes. Here, if someone fucked with you, you fuck with them back. If you didn't want to be somewhere, you leave. Beholden to nobody and nobody to her and it was freeing in a way she didn't know she lacked. Until now that is. Charon, presence large enough to fill any room without trying, had fit himself in her life rather unobtrusively. By design she thinks, wearily. It wasn't like traveling with Dog, whose rules are shaped by the land and instinct not society-or what was left of it. She'd learned to read him before she ever learned to read the wasteland itself, mostly because he was so much less complicated about telling her things. Like what water was safe to drink or where not to linger on main roads. He told her where to sleep in the dirt and for how long, in that unsaid way that was all pointed ears and body language. He needed her to notice when he noticed, and to feed him, and to not flinch when he pressed his whole considerable weight against her side like he could keep the cold and the noise away from her like some frightened pup.

"It's got nothing on this though." she sweeps a hand out before her, "Have you seen worse before?"

"Yeah, makes this look tropical." He thinks about the Flats, out west pinned between Fiend clans and Brotherhood factions and the Khan's squatting above them all.

"Wind strong enough to lift you off the ground, parts of the sky would rotate around it until it reached the ground. Taller than any building in the city." He says, coming close so she could hear him better. Out there, it was so vast and you could see for miles without a hill in sight. It turned deadly when twisting cyclones touched down in spires bigger than whole cities.

"Where was it?"

"West, couple hundred miles." He remembers the old names for those broken state lines. Though, she'd probably knows them too, he supposed. He was a little amused at the thought of her sitting in something so benign as a history class.

"It rained there. Actual rain, not acid. Came in off the great lakes, cold like ice and sideways. It rained for days straight and everything smelled like salt and wet rock." He'd never seen anything like it before, and hasn't seen anything compare since coming to the Capital.

She tries to picture it and can't quite get there, her reference points for rain being limited to vault plumbing and one particularly bad morning east of Arefu where the sky had wrung out something thin and gray that barely counted.

 "Where else have you been?" She asks and know she's pushing her lucky but can't help it, this was the most he'd spoken to her since they left 112.

"You got a map?" He asks after a moment, and she thinks he isn't talking about her pipboy.

"Paper? Yeah," She flips to the back of her notebook to a thick wad of folded paper, pinned in place with rusted clips to the cover. She pilfered from the library, seeing as it was the only map she's found yet with the full territory of old America. It flails against the wind when she unfolds it, fighting to get out of her grasp. It's dotted with circles and wide outlines for the settlements around the capital wasteland, scribbled in inky pen that smeared against the names of old towns. He takes in from her and spreads it over his knee when he drops down beside her, holding the edges flat with a wide palm.

He points with a square finger to the place out west he was talking about, "Here. It's Khan and Fiend territory now, they got clever about keeping dry I'll give them that."

"Are they like raiders?" She never thought about factions outside of the capital, she wonders if the Brotherhood are that far reaching.

"The fiends, yes. The Kahns', not so much." Then he drags his finger up north, "up here, far enough that the nights went on too long. Winter up there was dark most of the day. People got strange about it."

"People aren't strange here then?"

"Funny, then."

He's squaring off chunks of the map east and west of them with a wide finger when the first rain drops fall. A fat drop drops and soaks into the part of the map he deemed the Commonwealth.

She plainly admires it, without embarrassment, because it's just a fact and there's no use in pretending otherwise. "I knew they were big, y'know? But the-" she makes a vague gesture at the full breadth of the thing spanning the sky from left to right with no edges she can find. "The scale of it."

“You think this'll flood the lower decks?” she asks, holding out her palm, having stripped the gloves from her hands. A piece of grit smacks against her cheek enough to sting.

“If it does, it's bad news for us. ” He's already up by the door, having shoved her map in his back pocket, "in."

"It'd be an improvement." she argues, but follows anyway.

"We shouldn't stay much longer." he tells her, and is relieved when she nods in agreement.

"I need a day, maybe two." She gives him a questioning look, "You think we'll stay clean?"

"Try. No more stealing."

"Stole more than the solder iron." she admits graciously, and he grumbles in complaint.

The upper corridor was quiet except for a generator chugging somewhere overhead and the rain, which had started in earnest against the skylights above the bridge. Real rain. She kept getting distracted by it. She slows to a stop at the end of the corridor, suddenly very unsure of where she was even going. Pinkerton was the best option, she tells herself, but the truth is going back to the clinic was the last thing she wanted to do. Her guilt weights on her chest and she just needs to fucking think in a dark quiet corner with nobody trying to talk to her. Nothing about purifiers or obligations. Or her mother and how she dedicated herself to the cause and so has he.

She'd rather stick to the upper floors, better yet the security quarters but she doubts they would let them stay. If it were just her and Dog, she'd hole up in a supply closet and call it a night. But she can't imagine trying to fit her Goliath of a partner into a space as cramped as that, let alone long enough to catch a wink. The only other option was down.

Getting there was less a route and more a negotiation with the ship's layout, which hadn't been designed with destination in mind so much as function, and had long since stopped performing either. She'd been through these corridors once before, briefly, following a rumor and then Pinkerton's deliberately unhelpful directions, and the route had not improved in her memory. What she remembered as a left turn turned out to be a hatch. What she remembered as a hatch turned out to be a badly-patched wall. The lights went to emergency amber somewhere around the third access corridor, and she clicked on her pipboy without breaking stride, the greenish wash of it cutting a path in front of them. The storm was louder here, no longer just overhead but on all sides, the bow catching the full pressure of it.

They hit water about two thirds of the way down. Not much, barely over the sole of her boot, seeping in from some compromise in the outer hull that Pinkerton had presumably decided to have feelings about rather than fix. She stepped through it without slowing. Behind her she heard the measured displacement of Charon following, and the undignified scrabble of Dog deciding to leap it in one go and landing with a splash regardless.

At the end of the semi-flooded hall is a door, once jury-rigged and caked with so much rust it was practically unusable. She cleared the the best she could last time she came through, much to it's owners displeasure, but he'd since re-installed the tripwire. She decides to knock, the polite thing to do, and hears nothing from the other side. She knocks again, harder. Behind her she hears the familiar sound of Charon palming his shotgun.

“Who are you? What's your name?” A man snaps from inside, very close to the door.  

“What's your mum's name?”

The door is pulled open in a harsh movement and Horace Pinkerton is squinting at her in the dim emergency lights.

"No." He says and goes to shut the door again.

"You don't know what I'm asking." Keyes wedges her boot in the doorway before he can close it completely.

"Doesn't matter. Didn't think you'd be stupid enough to lock yourself in here with the rest of us." He narrows his eyes at her.

She just shrugs, "How's your power?" She asks instead.

"I don't know, how do you think?" he snaps.

"Whole damn ship's flickering like a funeral candle, doesn't take a genius." She nods toward the bank of equipment behind him, half of it dark, the other half straining audibly under some kind of load it wasn't built for. "Bet your little life-support rig back there hates it most of all."

Pinkerton's mouth thinned into something that wasn't quite a frown and wasn't quite agreement, which from him counted as a confession. "It cuts in and out. Lost a saline drip twice this week because of it. If you've got some idea, spit it out, I don't have patience for riddles."

"There's a relay panel topside, corroded clean through. I patched the primary and rerouted to secondary, but secondary's chafed against the hull about ten feet down from the access point. That's your real bottleneck- not enough juice getting to where it needs to go, the whole grid's just guessing at this point." She ticks it off on her fingers like she's reciting an inventory, because in a way she is. "Fix that, and the brownouts stop. Or at least they stop being your problem specifically."

He stares at her a long moment, and Charon thinks that maybe he was as lost as he was at her rambling. "You're saying you can fix my power."

"I'm saying I already did."

"...What?"

"Fixed the bypass about an hour ago. Got soaked doing it, actually, you're welcome." She allows herself the smallest, smuggest curl of her mouth. Somewhere behind Pinkerton, a machine that had been wheezing irregularly settled into a smoother, even hum. He turned to look at it with the deep betrayal of a man whose argument had just walked out from under him.

"...Huh."

"Yeah."

"Could've led with that." he grumbles, but he's already stepping back from the door, which she takes, again, as invitation, and doesn't wait for him to change his mind. She slips past him into the cramped dry just past the threshold, Charon ducking low to clear the frame behind her with Dog trotting in at his heel, already shaking water off himself with great enthusiasm directly onto a stack of what looked like very old, very important paperwork.

"Two days." Pinkerton says finally, jabbing a finger at her like it was a binding contract. "And you don't touch anything else in here. Last time you 'helped' I found my filing system rearranged by color."

"To be fair, looks like you haven't change it."

"Two days, Keyes. Then you're somebody else's problem." He points to the far wall of the ground level they stood dripping on, "and stay down here. Upstairs is none of your business."

The space he pointed to was less a room and more a sheltered corner. Low ceiling, exposed rivets, a smell of waterlogged insulation that had dried and waterlogged again enough times to have given up on the distinction. A cot that had been shoved against opposite walls, the kind of narrow that made your back hurt looking at them. A porthole the size of her head looked out at nothing but black water. Someone had left a chem lantern on the floor and it threw a low blue-green light that made everything look like the bottom of a river. A few old footlockers sat under the bottom bunks and one of the windows had been covered with a sheet of plywood and a strip of rubber insulation, doing uneven work against the draft.

Above them, Pinkerton snaps the curtain on the upper landing closed and she watches in amusement at his shadow hunched over a newly-juiced x-ray machine. She willingly ignores the suspicious body-shaped lump illuminated on the stretcher still visible from their level below.

Charon dropped both packs without ceremony and sat on the edge a crate with the particular tired efficiency of someone who'd slept on worse. He probably had a specific count of worse places. She figured he kept a running tally of them somewhere in the back of his head, the way she counted caps and caliber.

She claims the footlocker lid as a workbench and pulls out a frankly unsettlingly bulbous object from a bundle of her change of clothes in her pack. It does not feel much better when it's revealed to be his contract in an oval lock case. She sets it on a oil cloth and unclasped her tool case next to it. She worked the bent contact back with the smallest flathead, gentle, the way you'd set a small bone. The metal had memory and it wanted to go back wrong. She persuaded it.

"How long have you had it?" She asks and half didn't expect an answer, even if he was being exceptionally chatty tonight.

"Long time." he says, voice a low rumble confined to their corner. She thinks about how long long time means for him specifically and then tries to stop thinking about it because it leads somewhere that makes the back of her throat feel tight.

"Was it always Azrukhal?" She asks, and almost already knows the answer. A mere bartender wouldn't have ties to anything so official as a holotape with terms and conditions.

"No." And she wants to ask how many but didn't know how to do so delicately, so she doesn't.

She takes the solder spool out and rigs the cracked housing with a low bead along the fracture, using the tip of the compact iron she'd palmed from Flak's crate. The iron was broken at the switch and she'd had to bypass the control directly, which meant the heat ran slightly hot and she had to be quick about it. The bead wasn't pretty. It would hold.

She seats the reel housing back in and tests the contact. The tester blinks, pauses, blinks green, and begins.

It takes her a while to understand that it's not just distorted music, hard to make out and clogged with a static warble. She heard that same jingle for nearly two decades when waking up in the morning. That same chime for morning, noon and night to let them know the time without the sun. A throat clears, and a man begins to speak. 

“Registry Instrument 11██Permanent Subordination Record████Tec Department of ██████ Continuity.” 

Charon was sitting up in the next second Keyes stiffened in recognition.

“Vault Tec grants full ██████ to commanding parties and hereby declare ██████ the following articles to govern their association. This agreement is entered into between the contracting party hereafter referred to as the Holder, and the contracted individual, hereafter designated as the Asset.

The Commanding party: Dr. Morel Kestrel  (hereafter referred to as The Holder)

The Sworn Party: Aleksa██████ (hereafter referred to as The Asset)

Much of what's said is lost to static, the cassette rotted to hell she imagines. What did Vault Tec have to do with any of this? Her gut twists sharply, dread building. The voice speaks of protocol and executive function, and Nico feels ill. She remembers clearly what he said to her that day in the sewer, how odd his wording was. It’s why it stuck with her, despite everything strange and unusual about their arrangement. 

"First clause: To ensure the continued physical security of the Holder, the Asset is fitted with a Class-████gical Inhibitor (designation NI-███7), surgically seated at the time of registry. The Inhibitor's sole sanctioned function is the suppression of impulse pathways associated with aggression toward the Holder; all other cognitive function remains, per Vault-Tec assurance, "fully unimpeded." The device may not be field-deactivated by the Asset under any circumstance. Tampering, attempted removal, or signal interference will be treated as a Class-1 Behavioral Violation un██████ for Protocol 9-N review. We remind all Holders that the Inhibitor exists for their protection alone, and accepts no liability for outcomes arising from its disablement, malfunction, or removal."

“Conflict resolution hierarchy: Commander law supersedes internal██████. Contract may only be transferred, not nullified by either party. Possession is clause and contract both. Unilateral ██████ attempts will be logged as Administrative Irregularity (Code ██-NULL).”

“Vault Tec thanks you for trusting our men in arms, like you always have.”

The tape ends with a click, harmlessly popping out of her pipboy and onto the trunk with a clack. He mildly hoped it would skip right over the edge of the metal grate in the corner of the room and disappear into the dark below forever.  But it doesn't, instead landing against Nico's boot with a dull clang.

The man's face is clear in a way nothing else is, has ever been: thin, scrubbed pink, glasses pushed up into hair gone steel-gray too early for the rest of him. A white coat without a single wrinkle in it, like even fabric knew better than to move out of place around him. He never looked up from the clipboard in his hands, like whoever he was before he was Charon, wasn't worth the effort of his eyes. The same chime from the start of the tape plays underneath it all, closer now, less chewed by static, three notes dragging slow like the batteries behind it had already been dying back then too. A voice in that same even register, giving an instruction he can't quite catch the shape of even now. A number, said twice. Someone had been waiting on him for something. He hadn't had it to give. He still doesn't know what it was.

It passed as fast as it came. His jaw worked once, hard, and the stillness dropped back over him like a sheet pulled tight over a body. If Keyes hadn't been watching so closely, she might have missed it entirely. She looks at him then, her wide fey eyes took up nearly all of her face, pinning him in place. She must have saw something on his face, because she looks back down and picks up the screw driver again. Putting its metal edge to the screw and turning it loose, it falls from the hole. he watches her do it three more times and detach the case. The tweezers are next and they pluck a wire from the inside, the one connected to the speaker. Then she put it back together again, screw by screw.

"Wasn't trying to take anything from you. Just wanted you to have it whole. However you wanted it."

"I know." he says with little inflection, careful not to show how peeved he was about being gentled like a startled animal, "It belongs to you. Do what you want with it." And it was true, she could toss it in the Potomac and he'd carry it no matter the condition. He wanted to put it at the bottom of the lake himself, but could not. All he could do was dig his nails into his palm until blood was pulled from them, dizzy with the tension that shrouded him so completely that nothing was left.