************************

Shiki had a date today.

Akiha had been in a foul mood every since she’d found out, but, Kohaku noted, she hadn’t actually tried to stop Shiki from going. She had been even more frosty than usual at breakfast, despite Shiki getting up at a proper time for once. Or maybe because of that. Surely Akiha couldn’t be happy that it was because of another girl that Shiki’s sleeping habits were finally improving.

Kohaku was sweeping out front when he left the house.

“Goodbye, Shiki!” she called cheerfully.

Shiki waved to her, and then paused, snapping his fingers.

“Oh! I almost forgot,” he said, digging around in his pocket.

He pulled out a white ribbon. A white ribbon that was very familiar.

“Here,” he said, pressing it into Kohaku’s hands. “Sorry, it took me a little while to remember, but I’m returning this. Alright, I’ll see you tonight!”

And with that, he was gone. Leaving Kohaku staring, dumbfounded, at the ribbon in her hands.

It was like her whole world had come grinding to a halt. How did he know? How much did he know? He hadn’t started acting any differently. He hadn’t said anything. And then, out of nowhere, he’d returned the ribbon. And to her, not to Hisui.

…She’d lost her bet. Somehow, impossibly, he’d realized that she was quiet girl at the window.

Which meant that everything was over.

It had already been a longshot. With SHIKI dead, it would have been difficult to kill Akiha. But far from impossible. She’d been plotting quietly. Moving pieces. And now the entire board had been kicked over.

She felt her knees give out as she collapsed gently onto the stones of the courtyard, staring up at the sky.

She felt… numb. Which wasn’t unexpected. Why would she feel anything else? She was a doll. A doll couldn’t feel disappointed, or angry. She operated by certain conditions that made her keep moving. But the failsafe had been activated. The strings that controlled her were cut.

But something was wrong. She should have started to shut down at that point. Should have stopped thinking anything. Her plan was over. Her plan was all she had. There was nothing left for her but to die. But beneath the numbness, she could feel something. A feeling she shouldn’t have. Something un-doll-like, pushing against the sheet of numb blankness she’d pulled across herself.

She tried to repress it. To shove it back down. But it kept returning.

The doors burst open behind her.

“Kohaku? What’s wrong?”

She couldn’t turn her head. Her body wouldn’t move. A puppet couldn’t move without strings. But she recognized Akiha’s voice all the same.

“...He figured it out,” Kohaku said, as Akiha’s face filled her vision as she looked down, at Kohaku, concerned.. “I promised myself. I’d stop all this if he figured it out. My revenge…”

Akiha’s face stiffened. But she didn’t look surprised. How long had she known? How much did she know? Had Kohaku been overestimating herself this whole time? How much of her plans had been found out, after all? Shiki and Akiha both knew things they shouldn’t. Did Hisui, too? Did they all know what she had been planning? Did they all know what she was?

Well, what did it matter to her now?

An empty smile crossed her face.

“...It’s all over now, anyway… this is the end…”

And then that un-doll-like emotion pushed against the stillness in her heart again. Harder. Harder. So much that Kohaku’s breath hitched. It hurt. It hurt. A doll shouldn’t feel this. A doll couldn’t feel this.

A doll couldn’t be relieved. Relieved that her revenge was ruined. Relieved that Akiha would live. Relieved that she could stop plotting against her.

A doll shouldn’t feel those things.

She lifted her hands to her head, as if she could physically push the thoughts back in, and then stared at her own arms in horror.

A doll’s body shouldn’t move without a goal. Without something to drive it.

“It’s not the end,” Akiha said.

Kohaku looked blankly at her.

“...I can never give back what you’ve had taken from you by the Tohno family,” Akiha said. “I can never undo the evil this family has done to you. That was why… why I didn’t care what you did to me. I… we… deserved it. But no matter what happens to me, I won’t let it end here. I can at least give you more of a life than that.”

“I tried to get you killed,” Kohaku said. “I succeeded at killing SHIKI.”

“Even still.”

Kohaku’s hands were trembling. Jittering like her strings were being shaken wildly.

“I’m just a doll. There’s no point in trying to give me life.”

Akiha’s face hardened. “That,” she said. “I will never accept.”

“What?”

“Makihisa Tohno did not abuse a doll,” Akiha said, her voice fierce. “The crimes and evil he committed were against a human. I won’t let his acts be brushed aside as only damaging a doll. And I will never let him take your humanity from you along with everything else he stole. Even if I have to drag him out of Hell and steal it back from him with these eyes.”

Kohaku slumped, burying her face in her hands. “I have to be a doll,” she said. “It’s too painful to be a human.”

“Then as punishment for trying to kill me, I order you to experience that pain,” Akiha said.

Kohaku’s doll joints were softening. Tubes painfully turned to veins once more. Blood flowed through a heart that started beat again.

“You’re horribly cruel, Lady Akiha,” she managed.

“Isn’t that how the Tohnos have always been?” Akiha said. “As penance, I’ll do all I can to ease your pain. I’ll stay by your side until you can smile again.”

Kohaku felt Akiha’s arms around her. Tears welled up in her eyes. She couldn’t remember the last time.

She sobbed. Being a human was painful.

****************

Ciel was going to kill someone. And if she had her wish, it would be the clueless woman currently rummaging through her pack and chatting to her as if they were having tea together, not in the aftermath of a battle.

Unfortunately, that seemed unlikely, given that right now, she was entirely at that woman’s mercy.

As part of her Brotherhood training, she’d been taught a threat ranking of the various foes she could expect to encounter in the Wasteland. The top of the ranking was about what you’d expect: Deathclaws, Super Mutant Behemoths, high end military robots like customized Assaultrons. Lower on the list were other giant natural threats like the larger end of Radscorpions,Cazadors, various Super Mutants, and some of the more organized factions that weren’t in good standing with the Brotherhood, such as the Enclave and the NCR. Even lower were scum like raiders and wildlife like molerats.

But there was one entry marked as “Special”. One that she was warned could be either barely more threat than a raider, or worse news than a whole pack of Deathclaws.

Vault dwellers.

It always seemed to be vault dwellers who caused some of the biggest shakeups in the Wasteland, one way or the other. Sure, sometimes it was the emergence of some rogue faction, or a particularly notable member of a faction like that one kid from Arroyo who’d been instrumental in taking down the main Enclave base, or a surprise faction showing up and taking over entire states like the NCR or Caesar’s Legion, but time and time again, some strange man or woman would clamber out of a vault and make it their business to turn the world upside down. As if the world wasn’t disrupted enough already.

This particular vault dweller seemed to be firmly in that camp. When Ciel had come across her poking around a former military base that she’d been sent to retrieve technology from, she’d gone by the book- which was to say, she’d pointed her thermic lance at the target and demanded immediate surrender or retreat, in the name of the Brotherhood. Generally, that was where a lot conflicts with humans ended- unless you were up against a particularly drugged up raider or at least a very stupid one, anyone with a working brain decided to go the other direction when someone wearing power armor pointed a weapon originally designed to cut tanks in half at them. The vault dweller, though, put her hands on her hips and glared at Ciel without a hint of fear.

“How rude! I got here first, you know! And who the heck are the Brotherhood of Steel, anyway?”

An unusual reaction, but not one that wasn’t covered by her training. Ciel had moved on to the next stage of the “intimidation” section of first contact guidelines. 

“We are an organization formed from the remnants of the US Military, dedicated to the preservation and securing of technology. If you interfere with our work, you will be eliminated.”

Technically, a lot of her supervisors had advised her to skip this part.

 “If they don’t run immediately, just kill ‘em,” her sergeant had said during training. “Either they’re trouble, or they’re too stupid to live. If it’s the former, you’re doing the Brotherhood a favour by killin’ em. If they’re the latter, you’re doing the world a favour.”

Ciel, though, didn’t care for that attitude. Wastelanders might be distasteful and troublesome, but they were still people. So she gave this foolish woman a second chance to live.

One she’d squandered immediately, of course.

“You guys sound like jerks, and I still got here first,” she’d said, crossing her arms. “You go away! I read in a magazine that they have a cool gun here, and I want it!”

Ciel had stopped trying at that point.

“Entering combat,” she’d said, raising her lance and thrusting it forward, turning on the heat cutter.

What should have happened was that the annoying woman in front of her should have been chargrilled and sliced in half. What happened instead was that all of a sudden the woman was holding a strange little box in one hand, and with a terrible buzzing noise, Ciel’s power armour servos all locked up at once, freezing her in place with her weapon only inches from the woman’s chest. The autofit system started malfunctioning too, squeezing her in so tightly that she couldn’t even reach the manual release.

In other words, she was trapped like a sardine in can in her own damn power armour while the woman curiously circled around her, inspecting her armour and weapon with a detached interest that make Ciel feel like a museum exhibit.

Not that this vault dweller probably knew what the hell a museum even was.

Vault 45 wasn’t one that Ciel was familiar with. She’d never seen the entrance anywhere, and it was her first time seeing a jumpsuit from it. All that really meant, though, was she didn’t know what flavour of crazy this woman was.

It still seemed familiar though, somehow.

That was when the woman had found Ciel’s pack and started rooting through it.

“Stop that,” Ciel had snapped, but obviously, it had been to no avail.

“Ooh, what’s all this stuff, anyway?” the woman said.

“The contents of that pack belong to the Brotherhood of Steel, and-”

“I know who they belong to, I want to know what they are,” the woman interrupted her, and then paused. “Actually, I guess I don’t know who belong too, other than the organization thing. Who are you, anyway?”

“My name is Paladin Ciel, and as a ranking officer of the last legitimate branch of the US Government, I command you-”

“Ciel, huh? That’s a kind of pretty name. Are you pretty, Ciel? Oh, my name’s Arcueid, by the way. I have a last name, though. It’s Brunestud! It’s okay that you don’t, though. Shiki said that most Wastelanders don’t have one.”

“I am not a Wastelander!” Ciel snapped.

“Oh. Are you brotherhood guys from a vault too? Are you wearing a vault suit under there? Hold on, lemme check.”

“Check?! What do you mean check-”

To Ciel’s horror, Arcueid balanced on top of a nearby fallen Mr. Gusty to reach up to Ciel’s helmet, and, with disturbing strength, twisted it off like she was opening a can and threw it aside.

Ciel blinked at her. Arcueid blinked back.

“Oh,” she said. “Guess you are pretty, Ciel. That’s pretty funny. Get it? Pretty funny?”

Ciel scowled at her.

“I didn’t ask your opinion,” she snapped. “And you just damaged Brotherhood property. As official military hardware of the United States, willfully damaging it is borderland trea-”

Arc placed her hand over Ciel’s mouth, cutting off the rest of her sentence. Then she laughed in delight as Ciel’s angry yells were reduced to mumbling.

“Hahaha! You look sooo mad, Ciel.”

And Ciel was mad. Furious, in fact.

Unfortunately, mad wasn’t the only thing Ciel was feeling right now.

Ciel was not one for sexual promiscuity. Or sexual activity in general. She was devoted to her duty, after all. But, well, she’d grown up in the Brotherhood of Steel. She hadn’t always been a Paladin. When you were a trainee, there was a certain… encouragement to spend time off duty, not studying or training. And in that time you were further… permitted to experiment.

Long, awkward story short, Ciel was never going to be able look Scribe Henson in the eye ever again, and she’d found out that she was into girls and furthermore, into bondage.

So a girl who, Ciel was loathe to admit, was very attractive, and also playing with her while she couldn’t move? That was making Ciel furious, but also more than a little turned on.

“Hee hee. I should find a marker,” Arcueid said. Before Ciel could find out what nefarious plans she had with that, though, a beep came from her waist, and Arcueid frowned.

“Aw,” she said. “The power armour is going to reactivate soon… hmm, what to do, what to do…”

She pondered for a minute, and then smiled. “Okay! It’s boring exploring on my own, so I’ll give you a choice, Ciel!”

Ciel stared at her, confused.

“Either you stop being so mean and we can work together and loot this place together- I take the cool gun and you can have all the computers and stuff if you like technology so much. Or…”

Suddenly, the smile vanished from her face, replaced with an utterly flat expression. Her eyes widened as her pupils dilated, and her sclera flooded with blood, turning red in an instant, her iris flashing gold like they’d been dipped in metal.

Her fingers tightened around Ciel’s face, feeling like an iron vice slowly tightening around her.

When she spoke again, her voice was low and cold, with an edge of menace so palpable that Ciel’s arousal disappeared in a flash of fear.

“Or I crush your head and paint the inside of that power armour with your blood so thoroughly that no one will wear it ever again without smelling your rotting corpse.”

Ciel’s eyes widened as the fingers pressed harder.

“Nod or shake your head. Five seconds.”

Ciel’s brain raced. Her training didn’t cover anything like this. She still couldn’t move. After seeing what she’d done to that helmet, the threat didn’t seem like a bluff. Her head was already starting to hurt from the fingertips digging into her.

“Four.”

Was there any guide to this? Any procedure at all? Was there some secret way to escape power armour? To self-destruct it maybe?

“Three.”

If she couldn’t escape, was she just supposed to die here? Was there some way to communicate the threat to the brotherhood this woman posed with her death? Could she leave some kind of dying message?

“Two.”

A statement from one of her trainers popped into her head.

Don’t get cocky out there, alright? Retreat and bargaining are always an option. I don’t have any use for a dead hero when I could have a live soldier.

“One.”

Ciel nodded rapidly.

There was a terrible pause, where Arcueid’s eyes met Ciel’s, scanning her for sincerity.

And then, as suddenly as the change had come, it was gone. Arcueid’s eyes returned to normal, and the pressure on Ciel’s head vanished as Arcueid raised her hands above her head in triumph.

“Yay! A new companion!” she cheered, jumping off the robot and doing a little victorious pose. “Shiki always says all the fun places are too dangerous, so I have to go alone! But you were going here anyway, so you’ll come with me, right? Plus, you have to have all sorts of new stories! This is gonna be great!”

Ciel’s power armour flickered back to life as Arcueid celebrated. She flexed her fingers experimentally, and then picked up the helmet.

Sure enough, it was ruined.

Sighing, she tucked it into her pack for later repair.

As she followed the vault dweller into the facility, Ciel finally realized why Vault 45 had seemed familiar.

She hadn’t ever heard of Vault 45. But she’d heard of Serum 45. A “cure” for FEV, that had succeeded in reversing many mutations, but only partially. An attempt to make a cross between Super Mutants and humans, with the strength of the former and the intelligence of the latter. A project eventually made obsolete by advances in the Super Mutant process, but at the time of the vaults, that hadn’t happened yet. If Vault 45 was their testing ground…