Chapter Text
So, you’ve been doing this for a while.
A long while, really.
Far too long if truth be fucking told.
Not that you would tell anyone. There’s not a soul in this wasteland whose worth the effort of honesty. Or trust.
Being over two hundred and change, age-wise, only gives you two options for the future. Death, or living out of spite.
You choose spite.
Fuck dying. It wasn’t in the cards for you. Nor would it be if you had anything to say about it. Your mission was easy. Simple. Prowl the wasteland, discover every single vault ever created and wipe them out.
Your hatred for Vault-Tech is legendary. Well, it would be if anyone around you ever stayed alive long enough to ask you about it, and to be fair, you’d probably never give them the chance to get to know you.
Been there, done that, it nearly got you killed. Again.
You’ve wised up. Moved on. Turned brittle and hard.
The only thing that changes about you these days on a consistent basis is the colour of your hair. Blues, pinks, greens and shocking platinum when you can be bothered to take the time to get the right hue going.
The rads were totally worth it. Nothing a bit of radaway can't fix.
Turning a few dials on your Pipboy, a small smile flickers over your lips. Your target is ahead of you, ambling about his day without a care in the world.
He’s a dickbag. A slaver.
And his number is up.
Checking your trusty sniper, adjusting your scope and laying yourself flat on the dusty, red-rusted car beneath you, you secure the butt of your weapon against your shoulder and blow out a breath.
You’re a bounty hunter, albeit, a very selective one. Somehow, despite all the absolute shit the end of the world has brought on, you’ve held onto some semblance of a conscience. You’ll peddle drugs, murder assholes, kidnap if the money is right, but children – that’s a hard line for you.
No, you’ve never had kids, you don’t have some tragic backstory of losing a family. You’re simply not a raging asshole despite the worlds best efforts to turn you into one.
Your finger twitches on the trigger and you huff as you lament not forking out the caps for the laser dot adaptation you spotted in the marketplace three settlements back. Precision is key, of course, but a laser dot was basically a megaphone on its loudest setting announcing your intentions. You're not an idiot. This bounty had it coming in every which way, and in some small part of your heart you wish you could take him out with your hands, watch the life drain from his eyes.
As he most likely did with all those little kids after he was done with them.
You pull the trigger.
A breeze rushes past you, blowing your now cherry red hair into your face, but you keep your eye focused on the target and watch his head explode into a smattering of red mist and chunks.
You’re far enough away that the echoing howls of shock from the people around him sound like shitty whale-song recording used to put you to sleep back in the day. You blink, spare a small smirk at your successful kill, and head down the hill towards the settlement.
Your weapons clink against each other as they sway on your back but you’re used to the sound. It’s comforting. Like the warm puff of a loved ones breath on the back of your neck. An embrace which keeps you grounded.
The guards are patrolling. Or, what could be called guards – amateurs wielding baseball bats and badly redesigned football helmets as they call across to one another and try to disperse the crowd. You slip by them easily enough, walking closer to the corpse of your – fuck, it could be your thousandth victim. You lost track somewhere in the Capital Wasteland.
Did you mention the grenade you planted just outside the gate? No?
Well, the fucker goes off just as planned and everyone around jumps a foot in the air and they all race to the gates or to their homes. The market is deserted and you shake your head in amusement. Fucking predictable sheep.
You crouch by the headless body, nudging its shoulder with your index finger. It’s gory. As expected. You’ve long grown desensitized to it. No shits given. You do you as they say.
You lift the slavers hand, a signet ring on his pinkie flashing in the harsh winter sun. You try to pry the thing off but it wont budge. Cursing under your breath and rapidly losing patience with the bloated digit, your pull a knife out your boot and hack the fucker off.
It’s proof. Incontrovertible proof.
Seven hundred caps. All yours.
You dust off your blue-grey jeans, take a deep sniff and pop the digit in a satchel strapped across your chest.
You pass by a fruit vendor, help yourself to a Mutfruit, and the lick the juice off your chin as you head back to the gates. It’s a long walk back to collect your caps and you were losing daylight.
You throw the core over your shoulder as you push past the guards who are frantically searching the area for any more hidden bombs.
Another day, another life, another day you choose to keep living out of spite.
It never changes.
Until it does.
****
You’ve had a bit of shit luck recently. Seven hundred caps turned into only a hundred and fifty in the end. The father who had commissioned you to kill the man who had taken his daughter - had somehow brilliantly deduced that he’d rather kill you and keep the caps.
You shot him of course, grimaced at the three other dirty, tear-streaked faces of his other children hiding behind the kitchen table, and promptly looted their house for anything valuable before leaving.
The kids would be alright.
That’s what you keep telling yourself as you trudge through some razorgrain fields on your way to Diamond City.
You’ve never been here before, and for good reason.
It was too artificial – too gut-wrenching of a reminder of what life used to be like before the bombs dropped.
Not that you were the belle of the fucking ball or anything. You had your small group of friends, fellow scientists, fellow colleagues of the countries esteemed and lauded top laboratory. Groundbreaking things had taken place in that lab and most times you preferred being on the cusp of something wonderous compared to spending an evening with people who ultimately wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire.
Slipping onto a stool and ordering a box of noodles from some droid who bizarrely speaks Japanese - you snort as your thoughts take you to your dark place.
You feel it deep in your belly. A writhing, twisted hatred. It boils and curdles, it liquifies and spews and it takes several deep breaths to calm yourself down.
You had no way of knowing what your Vault had planned for its residents. You thought you were creating the key to the future.
As it turns out, you were fucking duped like the rest of them. An experiment within an experiment.
You’re the only survivor of your Vault.
No, you didn’t kill them.
Or, at least, not intentionally.
You may as well have though.
You sat around the vault afterwards, after the chaos and the death and the gore, and waited for death. You refused to move - you’d given up completely. One year turned into two, two into ten - and one day something scuttled towards you and pulled a terrified shriek from your guts.
You hate, no, fucking loathe cockroaches; and seeing one the size of a fucking cockapoo bounding towards you, is frankly the most terrifying thing you have ever experienced.
And you’ve been through some shit.
When it first hit you that you don’t age – you went through a complicated array of emotions.
First came the pure unadulterated joy that everything you had been working on had fucking worked.
Immortality in a syringe. Super speed, strength, faster reactions, superior healing.
Getting two out five wasn’t a bad deal really. You shouldn’t complain. You did, though. At the time.
Then came the deep, unending despair, of being the sole survivor and the crippling, useless guilt that comes with that.
How the fuck were you supposed to know?
You administered these injections to each vault resident and fellow scientist on a weekly basis. You told them you were keeping them healthy. You kept the smile on your face as you watched them flinch as the needle pierced their skin. You thought you were in the know. You thought you were in the Vaul-Tech fold.
And then came the rage.
The unbridled, all-consuming rage, as you sat at the Overseers terminal and read through his reports. Your little elixir of life, had been tampered with – twisted and contorted – and dispensed to everyone within the vault apart from those within the Overseers inner circle.
One which you definitely were not a part of.
The fuckers had been slipping it into the water supply.
The purpose of the experiment was this: mindless, eternal soldiers. Puppets to play with. When the time came to build civilization – only those deemed worthy would rule – the rest would be used to build, to mindlessly obey and provide.
The degradation of the residents’ memories had only been a brief concern of yours at first. You weren’t friends with these traumatised people who had crowded in down here about five minutes before the nukes went off. You were there to do a job. So, you didn’t notice the smaller things about people which would have alarmed those closest to them.
The slurred speech was always brushed off as tiredness. The swaying bodies a side effect of the drug or the change in air pressure from what they were used to. It was only several months in that something didn’t feel right and you brought it to the Overseers attention.
To this day you’re surprised he didn’t shoot you on the spot. You’ll spend the rest of your life wondering why. And wishing to some extent that he had.
How out of the seventy-five vault residents and twenty-five staff were you the only one to hang onto your fucking wits? You can still hear the screams. The smell of burning flesh. Of roars of rage and wails of despair as death approached a very much suspecting victim.
The residents had changed. Not outwardly. No, it still looked like Travis from Level three, and Susan from the Canteen. It was still little Polly who used to draw on the walls with chalk. On the outside at least.
Inwardly, they were monsters. Feral. Unable to discern language or commands. Uncontrollable and frenzied.
They tore one another limb from limb right up until the very end.
And you sat there in your holding cell, the bars in front of you the only thing stopping the monsters from reaching you, and you watched them foam at the mouth, yell and gurgle up blood. Spitting, hissing, crying and moaning. A lullaby for the damned.
Over time, they starved.
Over time, they died.
You didn’t. You can’t explain why. You’re too afraid to ask why.
You don’t question it. You sat still for ten years and waited for death.
When that didn’t come, you managed to use the leg bone of a resident who had died slumped against your cage, to snap the hinges off your cage and finally leave it.
You lived alone for a century. Waiting.
You tidied up all the corpses, you watered all the plants. You fixed what you could.
And you killed that fucking roach.
Precisely one hundred years or so after the bombs fell – you searched the vault for the breach where this little cretin had crept in. And you followed it out.
****
‘’Genki des ka?’’ The droid in front of you politely asks. You grunt. Slurp your noodles.
‘’Fuck off.’’
The droid lets loose a kaleidoscope of beeps and whirs, lights flashing in a huff before it slowly storms off to another world-weary patron.
Your noodles are soggy.
You sigh and cast your eyes around you, looking for an easy bargain. You could kill, steal or fuck your way to your goal of two thousand caps but – you’re immortal. You had all the time in the world.
People mill about, talking shit, moaning about their day, their crops, their husbands and wives affairs and indiscretions.
The air beside you changes as another presence crowds you and you feel something hard and steely prod your third rib through your leather coat. You turn slowly and raise a brow, mouth in a grim line displaying your lack of patience.
Your first thought is : Nice hat.
It’s an innocuous thought, here one moment, gone the next.
The next one comes on the back of that other one like a freight-train.
‘’Pull that pea-shooter away from me now and I wont pull your guts out through you disturbingly handsome face.’’ You flash him a mocking grin, eyelashes fluttering and you hear a huff of amusement.
‘’Darlin’, I appreciate the compliment, but I aint looking to buy what you’re sellin’.’’
He tips his head back and you get your first real look at his eyes. Hazel. Muddy-brown. Chocolate. Green. It kept changing colour from the neon lights to the side of you. It’s surprising really, to see some humanity still linger around in a Ghoul so visibly.
He’s a definitely a Ghoul. His skin is a charming shade of pale pink bordering on red. A few hues lighter than your hair. He has ridiculously high cheekbones. Sharp. Angular. It accentuates his eyes. A slow, snide, quirk of his lips reveals ivory teeth. Clean, unstained, straight. Aged, sure, but you know if he wanted to take a chunk of your flesh his teeth would make sure he gets the job done.
You tilt your head to the side, running your gaze over his body which is curved towards you, right arm still prodding you in the ribs with his weapon. He’s covered in leather, satchels, and straps. Bullets and various knives adorn his clothing giving him a don’t-fuck-with-me vibe - but when you spot the spurs on his cowboy boots you chuckle.
‘’This aint the time to be laughing, girly. You’ve gone an’ pissed off some pretty important people. They want your head.’’ He murmurs quietly, as he uses his left hand to pick up a strand of your cherry hair and rub it between his fingers.
‘’So why are we still talking?’’ You ask, genuinely intrigued as to why he hasn’t tried to kill you yet – spoiler alert – he can’t.
But he doesn’t have to know that.
‘’Well, I’ve heard a few things about you, darlin’. Colour me curious, but I wanted to know more about the Nightingale from the great Capital Wasteland. They say you sing beautifully after a kill.’’
You roll your eyes.
‘’I hum. I don’t sing.’’
You make to stand but he presses harder into your ribs and your growl of frustration earns you a gruff, raspy, teeth-sucking admonishment.
‘’Sit. Down.’’
You’ve had just about enough of this bullshit.
He’s good looking for a ghoul. You’re surprised by this and only mildly horrified.
You can’t remember the last time you fucked someone. A decade ago? More?
What a shame you think as your eyes sweep over him one last time.
Quicker than a blink you pull a knife from your side and have it pressed against the lean lines of his throat.
‘’Not that this hasn’t been fun – but I have places to be, people to kill and caps to collect.’’
He shoots you.
The fucker actually shoots you and you have about forty seconds to watch your knife slice across his throat before you topple over onto the floor, the thud of his own body landing beside yours stirring up the dust and clouding your vision.
Naturally, pandemonium breaks out and everyone who has a lick of sense scatters. Hands grip you beneath your arms and your world is righted against your will. You swallow the bile… or blood… or fuck knows what at this point which fills your mouth.
Everything’s a bit muted, a bit hazy. Sound is muffled because your adrenaline is riding you harder than a screaming three-year-old on a carousel. You know you can’t die, but fuck, this still hurts.
You’re being dragged. Your body is jostled over hard rocks, and you think you black out for a moment before it all comes rushing back at you. You land on something hard, and a light clicks on above you.
‘’Hand me a stimpak, quickly now!’’
You hear the depression of air leaving a syringe, a familiar sound, and a sharp pinch in your belly.
You want to tell them not to waste the medicine. You’ll be right as rain in about an hour. Your body will stitch itself together. It always does. You’ve regrown limbs for fucks sake.
‘’Hold her down. She’s seizing!’’
Rough hands grip your shoulders. You can’t move. You wonder idly if you’ll be robbed. It’s happened before. You got your shit back of course but you had to kill a few people and scare the crap out of a few more in the process.
‘’Where’s the ghoul?’’ you hear someone ask and you think you nod in agreement to the question, but you have a sneaking suspicion you’ve just drooled all over your chin instead.
‘’He’s being transferred to the holding cells. I’m not wasting my medication on ghouls.’’ The prim and proper doctor huffs and you hear a sigh.
‘’Doctor, we took an oath…’’
‘’To save people. Ghouls, Nurse Patel, are not people.’’
‘’But…’’
‘’To your duties, Nurse Patel.’’ The doctor commands and you hear the shuffling of frustrated feet disappear somewhere to your left.
A hand strokes down your cheek. Your brow quirks.
‘’You’re a pretty one.’’
Ah.
One of these situations. Again.
Right. Time to get the fuck up.
You force your eyes open, catching his wrist as it travels down and over your chest. He startles, jumping back as you swing your legs to the side and wait for the dizziness to pass.
‘’I’m... all... healed... up..., Doc.’’ You scowl at him, and he audibly gulps. You toss his arm away like a steaming pile of shit and it falls limply to his side.
You look around you, spotting your weapons and bag sitting to the side. You hiss as the muscles in your stomach pull and burn like hell with each movement, but you press on. You sling your shit over your shoulder, holding in a moan as you tighten the straps, your body leaning more to the left than normal as you try to compensate for your seriously shit balance.
You turn to the doctor who has backed himself into the corner, eyes wide as he stares at the hole in your stomach and how the skin knits back together.
Crap.
You won’t be able to come back here for a while. Two decades should be enough for people to forget about you.
Mind-made up, you strangle the doctor with his own belt. He slumps to the floor.
No one can know.
People out there would pay a pretty penny for knowledge about you and the last thing you wanted was half the population of what was left of earth to come after you. You’ve been a test subject before, thank you. Never again.
You creep towards the exit, having rolled the doctor beneath the bed, and pause as you hear the nurse walk towards the door.
‘’Samuel, how nice to see you.’’
It’s another helmeted guard and he tips his head at the nurse. ‘’Ma’am. The Ghoul has stopped bleeding, but he seems to have gone into some sort of shock. Looks like a seizure. Can you get the doc?’’
Patel hums and shakes her head. ‘’He wont treat Ghouls. You know that.’’
‘’Well, I reckon he’s going to die in that holding cell then.’’ The guard says like he’s discussing mowing his fucking lawn on a Tuesday afternoon.
This isn’t sitting right with you. Yeah, the bastard tried to kill you, but if he’s a monster, then what does that make you?
You wait for the nurse to go back to her office, for the guard to stomp away from the door, and you hightail it out of there.
You get as far as the main gates under the cover of darkness before something niggling and fucking irritating stops you in your tracks.
You can’t leave him to die.
You’ve clearly lost your fucking mind.
Can you take out a whole makeshift police station without killing anyone? Maybe.
Do you want to? A problem to consider another time.
You didn’t have to of course; killing is something that you long, long ago came to terms with as being easy to do. You definitely didn’t lose any sleep over it.
Coming to a compromise with yourself, that you would try to not kill anyone unless you had to, you followed the signs to your destination.
****
So you’ve killed your fair share of Ghouls before.
Feral, nasty things that cling to your clothing and drag you down to their level before taking a bite out of you. The key word here, however, was feral.
This Ghoul, your Ghoul, was all smooth-talking, swaggeringly and staggeringly so, still in possession of all his faculties.
For now.
You have seen how they turn, when they run out of their own little drug they use to keep themselves, themselves. The general population, however, were for the most part fucking idiots and didn’t know jack about how to keep a Ghoul from turning.
As you’ve been round the block a few times, you’re not surprised when you stop outside his cell and see him moaning and rolling backwards and forwards clutching at his head, handcuffs banging into his forehead.
The, mostly alive, guards are splayed over various surfaces. You’ve only killed one, or two. Okay, perhaps three of them. The big burly ones you had no chance of overpowering. You unlock the Ghouls cell and swing his leather, weather-beaten bag onto the small table beside his bed.
You rummage through it, vials and flasks tinkling like rain, soft thuds of loose bullets and some sort of book blocking your way until you see the amber-gold liquid you need. Your assassin has just enough awareness left to look at you, a pleading, terrified look that clutches at what little is left of your soul.
You walk towards him, and his body goes rigid. He sneers weakly, his eyes rolling into the back of his head, and you press the inhaler to his lips.
‘’Pucker those lips and suck, Cowboy.’’ You prompt, but he’s gone still beneath you.
You sucker punch him in the stomach and he automatically gasps and pulls his ass-saving elixir into his lungs. He coughs, sucks again, coughs some more and you’re hard pressed not to laugh at this desperation. It shouldn’t be funny. It isn’t.
But you never thought you’d be saving the life of someone who just shot you.
‘’Why?’’ he croaks, and you wink.
‘’You amuse me.’’
He shakes his head, closes his eyes, and inhales a few more puffs before dropping the device to the floor.
‘’Pretty stupid move there, girly. Savin’ the life of little ol’ me. I still have a bounty to cash in on.’’
You lean back, smooth down the lapels of his leather coat, and pat his chest, his eyes following the movement of your hand. You know he won’t be able to move for a bit, he’s still in handcuffs and if push came to shove, you could still kill him.
‘’Well, hows about you tell me who wants me dead, and I’ll let you live?’’ You smirk at the stubborn lift of his chin. The loss of eyebrows due to radiation and ghoulification doing nothing to lessen the effect of his brows drawing down low, menacing and eerily attractive.
‘’I don’t kiss and tell, sweetheart. It ain't in my nature to let something go when I want somethin'. How’s about you unlock these cuffs, and we sort this out the old fashioned way?’’
You laugh, its airy and flighty and fun. Your hand runs down his chest, hovering above his navel, the heel of your palm presses down lightly just above his groin. You watch, fascinated, as he draws in a breath, eyes narrowing.
‘’Of course, if you have something else in mind? Didn’t peg you for the type to fuck Ghouls –‘’ he leers suggestively, bucking up into your hand and you hum.
‘’You know, I didn’t think so either. I’ve never fucked a Ghoul. Didn’t ever want to. Till now.’’ You shoot him a cheeky grin and jump to your feet when he attempts to grab your wrists. You watch his face twist quickly between relief and the cool facade of I-don’t-give-a-fuck once more.
Curious.
‘’I’d best be going Cowboy. These guards will wake up and wonder what the hell happened.’’ You pull your gun on him as he makes to stand and tut at him.
You swing the keys of his cell around your finger, the steady aim of your pistol in your right still focused on his chest. ‘’Now, I’m going to leave, and you aren’t going to follow me. Tit for tat and all that.’’
‘’Get fucked, darlin.’’
You step back, slamming the cell closed, locking it. He snarls and rushes you. The bang of the iron bars echoing around the room.
He’s livid - but you’re fucking riding a high of giddiness.
You step just close enough that you can lean forward and feel the puffs of his breath on your face. You giggle, and before you can help yourself, you raise on your tiptoes and kiss his forehead.
It’s warm, hard, leather-like. You half expected to his skin to slide of his frame with a single touch - but you’re happy to find out otherwise.
‘’You are somethin’ else, darlin’.’’ He grunts, his anger having disappeared into one of complete puzzlement.
It doesn’t last though. His wits come back to him, and he shoots both hands out to try and grab you, possibly even strangle the life out of you, but you jump back just in the nick of time.
You turn your back on him. He’s cursing you, stuttering out promises of a violent death but you hum a song as you walk precisely ten steps away from his cell and drop the keys on the floor.
‘’I’ll be seein’ you soon, Little Nightingale. That’s a goddamn promise!’’ he yells at your back.
You look over shoulder, wink, and blow him a kiss as you disappear into the night.
But not before you pick up his hat and plop it on your head.