winter white, (1.5k words of plotless fluff, Charon/m!lw)
Charon dimly remembers the Great Winter of 2130, and the cold that blanketed the ground, the country, possibly the world. Just barely fifty years after the bombs. It felt like the earth had tried to purge itself of humanity, a winter-white cleansing that left his bones aching for months even after the thaw.
Vaultie was not around for that winter long ago, his twenty years but a flash in the pan of the world's post-history. But he’s told Charon about Anchorage, how he remembers the perfectly manufactured snow, fat, pixelated snowflakes falling onto his eyelashes and melting instantaneously at the contact. Endless rolling expanse of hills and mountains, all covered in white.
The snow that falls is not the same as either remember it. Vaultie peers through the only remaining window in the pre-war home they've taken shelter in as the clouds gather. Today had been miserably dark out, and as the day went on, the temperature continued to drop. This winter had been especially cold; they both had doubled up on clothing underneath their armor, and Vaultie still occasionally shakes at his side. Colder than Vaultie has ever experienced. The snowflakes are fat, and off-grey, shimmering with wetness. Each one sticks to the ground.
Charon crowds behind him, trying to peer over Vaultie’s curls through the panes collecting frost. Vaultie tilts his head up; the top of his skull brushes underneath Charon's chin.
"Please tell me you do not want to go out there." Charon mumbles, resting his chin atop Vaultie's head.
He can feel him momentarily try to shake his head before realizing doing so would dislodge Charon. "No," He pauses, sighing, “We need to, uh.” This time, he does extract himself from under Charon, turning around to gesture limply towards the room. “Barricade the windows. Keep the heat in and start a fire.”
It’s not the worst place they’ve been stranded in. The house is abandoned, but relatively clean; no gore or viscera, only dust and the bleached scattered pages of long lost books littering the creaking floors. Giving the window one last, long glance, Vaultie moves away from it.
Charon nods, then pauses. "Should I check the chimney to see if it is functional enough to hold a fire?" He has eased into offering answers to Vaultie of his own accord, instead of waiting for commands; sometimes he is so afraid to trigger the contract he says nothing and in turn nothing gets done until Charon realizes Adam is struggling on his own. The words still come out slow and careful, taking his time picking out the correct phrasing. He does not fear Vaultie, not in the least.
But it's so ingrained. Vaultie understands. They understand each other, and their strange, stilted ways, similar and yet so foreign. He beams at Charon. "Yeah. I-I'll... I'll go move stuff around." Charon nods curtly in reply, clasps his hands together as Vaultie holds his gaze, just a little too long; his face goes red and he darts away.
Charon shakes his head, the corners of his mouth twitching upward automatically as he turns towards the fireplace. The hearth is filled with a thin layer of ash, having sat long dormant for years, possibly a century or more since someone had last stayed here and used it. His knees protest when he crouches down, ducking into the fireplace. If there were any blockages at the top, they could suffocate to death, which would ruin the purpose of the fire-- keeping them relatively alive.
He finds a poker when he blindly reaches back; with it, Charon prods upward. He flinches as soot falls down, grumbling and rubbing at his face.
There's a bang behind him, something falling to the ground. He knows he will end up aiding Vaultie once he's started the fire. He's strong in some ways, but not in others; he can haul around his sniper rifle and fifty more assorted pounds of random, useless junk, but raw strength fails him in most other ways. Charon used to have no opinions about helping or not; in the beginning, he did all things, with no finite rules. And as time wore on, his world expanded, and there were things he could deny-- and he did, freely, when he could. By the end of his term with Ahzrukhal, he could refuse many things that weren’t combat-orientated, could feel the bonds shiver and fray every time he raised his hand towards him.
Vaultie is different. He does not mind helping Vaultie.
There might even be a part of him that likes it. It is strangely rewarding to aid someone who is not trying to scam a few junkies their last caps or rough up human cattle if they get out of line on their way to the pen; and Adam never asks for help, not much, always takes on his share if he can. Charon clears as much ash as he can from the hearth, pushing it aside.
When he turns around, Vaultie has given it his best go dragging furniture in front of the window and door. There's a coat rack sitting on the ground, which he can venture was the source of the banging; he stands and sidles up behind him, grunting helplessly in an effort to drag a heavy couch towards the fireplace, and nudges him aside.
“Start the fire,” Charon interrupts through Vaultie’s nervous, baleful stare. He’s still pressed to his side, unmoving from the arm of the couch; Charon nudges him with his hip again, and he finally lets go of the couch. “I got it.”
“Alright,” Adam mumbles, “but if you need help...”
He tilts his head towards the bookcases lining the room. “Find some kindling. And don’t get distracted by the ones you can still read.”
It’s strange to think of him being the one giving out orders still. But Vaultie flushes and mumbles “I wouldn’t— n-never—“ but he skitters off to collect, and only tucks two under his arm to read for later.
He moves the couch near the fire, and then tables and a heavy armoire in front of the door. The stairs are too rotted through to see if there’s anything on the second floor, but by that logic if there was anything up there, it wouldn’t be able to come down and bother them besides; by the time Charon comes back with a splintered coat rack, Vaultie has coaxed the pages and book covers into a small, if overly smoky fire, squatting in front of the hearth.
He stands behind him, shoving the wood into the fire over his head. Vaultie glances over his shoulder up at him.
“Mmn.” Charon grumbles, arms crossed over his chest eyes on the fire. “Finished.”
The temperature is starting to drop further, enough that Adam’s fingers are trembling in the low light of the fire as he shoves a few more things into the hearth.
Charon crouches easily next to him, rests his arms against his knees. Adam turns his face to him, smiles falteringly.
“It’s fine.” He murmurs, then nods towards the floor, “Those too?”
There’s a modest pile of books away from the heat of the fire. Adam flushes. “No, uh— they still. The words haven’t faded.”
Adam clears his throat, “I could, uh,” he glances back at the fire, the warm tones playing over his face as the flames flicker. He has a few long curls hanging in front of his face he brushes idly away, tucking them behind his ears, twisting them between his fingers. He’s speaking more to the fireplace than Charon, “Read a few.”
Snow has gathered outside, pressing with the wind against the frosted over window panes. The house groans as the wind gusts and blows through the house; but near the fire, on the couch, the heat is blissfully warm.
It doesn’t hurt to have Adam lying in between his legs, head pillowed against his chest. The emergency blanket is scratchy but large enough to drape over them both; they have their bedrolls, which would give them more space, probably more comfort. Charon doesn’t mind. They’ve draped every cloth thing they’ve got over top of them to keep the heat in.
“It was the green heart of the canyon, where the walls swerved back from the rigid plan,”
May even go so far as to like it, the heat and warmth of him radiating against him, his voice uncharacteristically steady as he reads from the book in his hands. Charon lets his head tilt forward, pressing his face against Adam’s scalp, curls tickling the long since desensitized skin of the divot of his former nose.
“And relieved their harshness of line by making a little sheltered book and filling it to the brim with sweetness and roundness and—“
Charon wraps his arms, warm and swaddled under the emergency blanket and Brahmin pelts and excess pieces of clothing, tighter around Vaultie’s belly. And Adam breathes in, swallows, the click of his throat lost in the crackle of the flames devouring the pages and pages peeled from cracked spines. “And softness. Sweetness and roundness and softness.”
The window is whited over from steady snowfall. Vaultie shifts, settles in warm in the crook of his body, a heavy and reassuring weight against his ribs and stomach that he feels with each breath. Charon’s eyes droop. “Here,” Vaultie mumbles, his fingers rubbing the dog-eared corners of the pages, “all things rested.”
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