Smoke billowed over the fragmented pavement, the weathered ground. Shacks and merchant stalls crackled and buckled under roaring flames.

Those who had not been reduced to charred corpses were huddled amid the remains of their outpost, most of them hunched over and coughing, wounded and bleeding and bleary-eyed. The proximity of Legion hounds and eager-eyed recruits kept them on their knees.

Vulpes Inculta walked through the pitiful gathering of subdued wastrels. He had picked out a spot of blue amid the dark tones of char and dirt. A vault dweller in the Mojave. A novelty. A bright little fruit in a barren desert. Vulpes seized the girl, a firm hand under her arm, and lifted her from the ground.

food wobbled on the plate before she stabbed it with her fork. as if to still her thoughts before they bubbled out of her mouth towards lucy. chaos was an unfamiliar taste && one she didn't plan on acquiring if she could help it.

even at four learning to tie her saddle shoes. white laces, black leather, perfect little loops things that made her little smile bounce && shine. when her brain traded in colors for calculation && words for weapons was a distant memory to place . a grin curled at one side of her mouth. “   bert is a saint, don’t get me wrong,  ”

There have been inklings in the past -- tingling sensations, really, that started at the center of her chest and rolled through her limbs. Sometimes, when they used to live in the Vault, Lucy's hair would sit a certain way. (Echo subconsciously notes it; she's annoyed when others don't, too.) Sometimes, here in the wastelands of the surface, Lucy would say something entirely off kilter and make her laugh. (It's something she holds onto with an iron grip. Something she won't ever let anyone from the surface take away from her.)

Maybe she never paid much attention to that butterfly feeling because Echo couldn't afford to. Eventually she'd get hitched by some guy and start having kids. That was the way their world worked.

( That was what she ran from in the first place. )

Now? This dilapidated world is their oyster. They can laugh and sit around a newly-lit fire and not care about the past. Maybe one day they'll part ways once Lucy finds her father out here -- Echo has no intentions to go back to that damn vault -- but now... now they have this.

But when Echo's laughing with her entire body at a joke she's just told, she doesn't expect Lucy to just go for it -- it's unmistakably a kiss, though the awkward angle has her hitting just at the corner of her mouth. The former vault-dweller's laugh dies, lips parted with questions she's too chicken shit to ask.

Did you mean to do that? Is the surface getting to you?

( Did you have that inkling in the past, too? )

Echo Galaeus was never good at words, so she chooses action: her tired fingers reach for Lucy's jaw, softer than they've been in years, to pull her back in for a chaste, honest kiss.