Chapter Text
The first time he thought to pull Josie's hair was during his fourth harvest season. It was only her second and she kept getting her ponytail caught in the trellises next to where they had her picking tatos. After the third or fourth time he noticed her hiss in pain and reach up to untangle the strands from where they were caught, something came over him. He waited for her to free herself and go back to her work, and then he reached out and gave her hair a tug.
He liked the way she'd squeaked with pain and frustration, her hand flying back to grab at her head. When she realized her hair wasn't actually caught again she'd turned, confused, and caught him staring. Her face twisted up with something that he realized he liked a lot less than her initial reaction.
“Why're you messing with me?” she'd demanded.
He picked a tato that wasn't quite ready and lied. “That wasn't me.”
Josie had glared at him, then moved pointedly a little further down the row before getting back to their given task. When her hair caught on the trellises again she spun on him, shouting for him to “Stop!” It ripped out a few strands as she did and her hand flew up to her scalp, confusion moving through her expression. Her gaze landed on him, still several feet away and much too far to have been the one to pull it.
He picked another tato. “You should tie your hair up better.”
Josie watched him a little while longer before turning her back again. He didn't watch after that but he heard her gasp again. He heard her stand up. He heard her walk away, back up towards the field house.
Later when he'd gone to trade his full basket for an empty one he'd passed her as she'd headed back into the field with her hair braided and twisted up into a little pile on the top of her head. She glanced at him as they passed each other, looking a little apologetic.
He knew that it wasn't okay to act on those thoughts, pulling hair or hitting or pinching. He figured that out really fast and pretty young. What he didn’t know for another few years was that it wasn’t normal to even think about it. Josie had taught him that too.
“That one,” she’d said, pointing out over the railing. The waves were washing up on the rocks. He could hear it. He was sure she was pointing at a boat because that’s what they’d been talking about: boats… but he couldn’t bring himself to look away from her.
He could see it happening. He could see himself reaching out, putting both hands flat against her back, and pushing. She might try to catch herself, on him or the railing or anything else. If he caught her off guard she wouldn’t have time. She’d go over the railing and down towards the rocky shore below. She’d probably scream, like she had when Gerry and Paul had jumped out and scared her outside the market the other day, except longer.
“I’m going to fix it up,” she declared, leaning on the rail to get a better look. “Once it’s running we’ll be able to go and trade with whoever we want. We could sail all the way down to Quincy.”
She’d tumble, headfirst, arms flailing…
“You could help me,” she said, looking over her shoulder at him.
She’d scream, long and loud.
“You’re smart enough I bet we could figure it out together.”
All he’d have to do is push her.
She frowned. Said his name.
He didn’t want to push her.
She would tumble, headfirst, arms flailing…
“Are you okay?”
She needed to get away from there.
He blinked, trying to dispel the image. “We’re really high up,” he said. He thought about grabbing her and pulling her back, but he didn’t want to get any closer to her. He didn’t want to push her.
She'd scream, long and loud.
She looked over her shoulder at the drop, then back at him, looking a little amused. He didn't like it. “Don't tell me you're scared of heights,” she taunted.
She’d tumble, headfirst- “Well aren’t you scared of me pushing you?”
Josie hadn’t wanted to hang out with him after that.
She didn’t want to build a boat with him so they could go trade at Quincy, and if she ran into him at the market or in the schoolhouse or in the fields she would get that look on her face all over again. That look. The one that told him he’d let the wrong part of himself out to be seen. She sat on the other side of the schoolhouse from him, took up with another boy when they'd gotten older and wouldn’t go into the settlement’s theatre room if he was in there.
The last one kind of made him feel bad, but not that bad. She had friends, afterall. And a family. She could just go be with any of them.
The movies they had there taught him a lot of things. Mostly, they taught him about how he could act. Someday. Someday when he wasn’t stuck in a stupid little settlement that didn't like him or want him and that had known him for way too long. The movies taught him what was okay to say and okay to do, and what would probably get that look. He learned how to talk and how to dress and how to act to be a whole range of people. A lovable ruffian. A chivalrous knight. A suave spy.
And he read. The settlement he'd ended up in was a school before the great war and it had an extensive library covering a wide variety of subjects. Nobody even watched the place. He could just take what he wanted, whenever he wanted. He learned about empires built and toppled and dynasties that were long dead. He read about mysteries and tragedies and romances. He learned how to think.
Well, he learned how he was supposed to think. He knew there wasn't much he could do about what came and went through his head all day and night, but he could keep it from getting out at least.
He was sixteen when he found the book. It was thick and heavy and had pictures on almost every page. It had… a lot of pictures. Pictures that made him think of the butcher's stand where he was about to apprentice. Pictures that told him where people would bleed from, and what was just underneath their skin, and what he would find if he went even deeper than that.
He wanted to take it.
And he wanted to keep looking at it.
And he could tell that that was not normal.
He'd put the book back on the shelf and left.
That night, skin sliced open cleanly, and blood spilled, and muscles were threaded apart and he pulled the covers tighter around himself.
Skin sliced open cleanly, blood spilled, muscles were threaded apart and he rolled onto his stomach.
Skin sliced open cleanly and blood spilled and the muscles were threaded apart and he put on his shoes.
Skin sliced open and he left his foster father’s house through the window.
Blood spilled and he stuck to the shadows as he slid down the street.
Muscles were threaded apart and he slipped back into the library and found the book again.
This time, he took it.
He stayed up late reading about everything that was under his and everyone else’s skin. He knew it wasn't normal but he didn't have to be normal. He just had to act normal while being observed.
A few months later he was seventeen and he knew where the major arteries and veins were and he knew which parts of the brain did what. He also knew how to butcher a mirelurk. Not long after that, he knew how to butcher a molerat. A radstag. A rabbit.
He'd apprenticed for two months at the butcher and routinely saw blood and innards, but still every night when he laid down in his new apartment above the butcher's shop he saw the skin slice open, the blood spill, the muscles pulling apart… and he had to look. He had to pull out the book and look until he was finally tired enough to pass out.
Every night it took longer.
The pictures were starting to get boring.
He went back to the library.
He was browsing that same shelf, looking for books with more pictures when he heard it.
“Stop…”
It was hissed sort of quietly, and a few shelves over from him. He knew the voice.
He closed the book he'd been looking at and listened.
Another sound, like a whimper, followed by a little thud.
He moved that way.
A few rows down he peered around the corner of the shelf just as she managed to free her lips and say it again. “Stop!”
Paul had her pinned in the corner. They had been dating for a while and he'd seen them necking more than a few times, but she'd always seemed okay with it before. Now she was tense. Her hand was balled in his shirt, trying to push him off. His hand was stuffed somewhere she didn't seem to want it.
His very first thought was about the back of Paul's neck. Some of the books in his hands were big enough he could probably break it. Like the picture in his book back at the shop. Vertebral fracture. If he had his meat cleaver, that would have been better… but he didn't carry that around with him.
Maybe he should start…?
No. He'd scare Josie.
He needed to be normal about this.
A few different scenes flitted through his head. He quickly landed on “What, are you deaf or something?”
Both Paul and Josie jumped. Paul's hand slipped up out of her pants as he turned to glare over his shoulder and shifted, like he wanted to block his view of Josie. Josie was frozen, her eyes like enormous flashing alerts calling for his help.
“What? Get the fuck out of here, freak. We're busy.” His hand gripped Josie's hip.
He didn't want him touching Josie anymore. He didn't even want him looking at her. He started walking that way, the books in his hands suddenly feeling especially blunt. “She said stop. I heard it. Don't you think that means you should… I don't know… stop?”
Paul glared back at him but the cockiness in his eye flagged the closer he came, the more his neck had to crank back to look him in the eye.
Being freakishly tall, something that had afflicted him for as long as he could remember, suddenly felt like a perk.
Paul gathered some of his confidence, but what he said ended up sounding more like a request than a demand. “Mind your business, okay? We're fine.”
In the corner of his eye, Josie was shaking.
The edge of the shelf may have actually been a good option too, if he could get a good grip on him and put enough force into it and aim it just right.
Grab, turn, thwack.
Vertebral fracture.
“Get your hands off of her,” he said and with the way it came out, the way it sounded, it suddenly felt like the whole world was looking his way. Both sets of eyes widened on him.
He liked it.
But that probably wasn't normal either.
Paul finally released her and she seemed to be frozen for a second, big scared eyes locked in on him before she collected herself enough to scurry past. Paul watched as she went, looking pretty distraught. “Jo-” he tried, reaching after her.
Another picture from the book.
Distal Ulnar Fracture.
There wasn't a lot of time but he managed to just check himself as he grabbed Paul's wrist and pushed him back, knocking him roughly into the shelf. He'd wanted to twist it, to see if he could make all those little bones at the bottom of his hand come apart…
That wouldn't have been very normal though.
He glared down at Paul who was finally looking as scared as he should be, blocking his way out until he heard the library door open and shut. Josie was gone, anything else he did to the other boy wouldn't be normal. He turned to leave.
Paul suddenly found his courage. “The fuck's your problem, freak?”
He was practiced at letting the insults slide off of him and so he did, even as the same thought played out in his mind over and over.
Grab, turn, thwack.
Vertebral Fracture.
Three days later he was working the butcher's stand, his back turned to the market as he worked on yet another fucking mirelurk when he heard his name. He turned. He froze.
Josie.
“Hey,” she said.
He didn't know what to say.
He was covered in blood.
She glanced away, then back to him. He knew that look. He just hadn't seen it directed to him yet.
Shy.
Interested.
“Hey,” he finally said. He started to walk up but her eyes flicked to the meat cleaver in his hand. He quickly turned and put it down, then stuffed his bloody hands behind his back as he faced her again. He didn't get any closer.
“I just… I wanted to come and see you. After the other day.”
She wanted to see him? She hadn't wanted to see him since they were kids.
“I… wanted to say thank you. For standing up for me. I don't know what would have happened if you hadn't been there…”
He was pretty sure he knew roughly what would have happened if he hadn't been there.
In fact, the fact that he had been there to stop what was happening to her had started to feel a little bit like fate at work.
“Yeah…” He had to dip his head a little to meet her eye from beneath the stand's awning. “Are you okay? Did you make it home okay?”
She nodded, a strange little smile pulling at her mouth. “Yeah. Yeah I did. A-and I broke up with Paul. He thought the whole thing was…” she took a deep breath, then shuddered. He thought of the back of Paul's neck.
Thwack.
“Anyways. I just wanted to thank you.”
She already had.
Wait, she was nervous...
But not the way she was usually nervous around him. Not the way everyone was always nervous around him.
This was different. This was… nice. “Course. Just… let me know if he bothers you again, yeah?”
She smiled, tucking her chin. Dropping her gaze. Cute. “Okay.”
“And… and don't go anywhere alone with the boys anymore. They aren't having the safest thoughts about you right now.”
Her eyes stayed glued to the counter, her smile flagging a little.
Oops.
Had he ever heard a love interest say something like that in a movie?
No.
Shit. Not normal.
She took a breath, like she was steadying herself. “I'd probably be fine if it were you though,” she said quickly, eyes darting back up to his. “Right?”
Something warmed in his chest. “Yeah. Of course. You'd be safe with me.”
She smiled, ponytail swinging behind her as she walked away. He thought about pulling it.
The next day she was at his stand again. Her hair was in a braid this time and she had her school things with her. Another year and she'd start her apprenticeship too, with the mechanic. She always was handy.
She bought some mirelurk. It definitely wasn't enough for her whole family. In fact it was the smallest portion of the cheapest thing he could sell.
The next day, she did the same thing.
“Hankering for mirelurk all of a sudden?” he teased.
Her jaw dropped open a little, her eyes looking a little frantic as she handed over her caps.
Flustered.
He'd flustered her.
He loved it.
The next day, as expected, here she came.
Mirelurk bits.
Five caps.
He delivered his line. “Keep coming here like this, people are going to get the wrong idea.”
Flustered.
She took one of her steadying breaths, the little smile she wore telling him he was going to like whatever she said next.
“But what if it's the right idea?” she asked, handing over her money with a shaking hand.
Now he was flustered. The right idea?
The right idea?
He suddenly knew that he was smiling.
And she was smiling.
But then her face went red and panicked, and she couldn't meet his eye, and she turned away from where he was offering her her purchase and she ran.
Like a bat out of hell, straight through the middle of the market.
He lowered her abandoned mirelurk bits as he watched after her.
So… not the right idea?
That evening after he'd closed up the stand he worked his way through the smattering of pre and post-war structures, wearing his nicest, cleanest clothes and a freshly washed face and hair that was… well, as tidy as his wiry ginger hair ever got. He had her mirelurk bits wrapped up and sweating in his hand as he climbed her steps and knocked on her door. Unfortunately but perhaps not surprisingly, she was not the one to answer.
Josie's dad gave him a hard look as he opened the door, keeping one hand out of sight. Saying nothing.
Is Josie home had been his plan but this felt suddenly like a scene that was close to turning dark. “Hi,” he started, trying to smile warmly.
He practiced it in the mirror sometimes. It didn't exactly come naturally to him. Always came out pretty fake looking, if not a little creepy, but he was getting better at it. Maybe.
“I'm sorry to bother you sir, but your daughter bought these at the stand today and-”
He caught himself just before he said left without them. That definitely would require an explanation.
“Well, she didn't make it home with them… and I didn't want them to go to waste.” He offered the package out. He'd wanted to see her, talk to her without blood and the smell of mirelurk all over him but the idea of asking for her suddenly felt deadly.
Her father just stared at him for a long moment. The package going ignored between them. “My daughter,” he finally said.
“Y-yeah? Josie?”
He huffed. “Josie? Why would Josie buy mirelurk from you?”
He opened his mouth but the words didn't come. He didn't know why she would do that.
Well, he had a guess. It was feeling more and more like wishful thinking by the second but it was the only thing that made sense, really. He wasn't about to tell her dad that he thought she had a crush on him though.
“I don't know,” he finally answered. “It's not really my business to know what people do with the meat I sell them… I mean I think probably they cook it and eat it but-”
“Okay, don't fucking smart off to me, kid. I'm not buying it. You think I'm gonna believe my Josephine came and bought mirelurk bits from you? What does she need with those? She's sixteen years old! And you had better remember it the next time you come sniffing around my daughter, trying to-”
“Dad!” Josie scolded.
He would have looked, but he was frozen solid on the steps.
Her dad closed the door most of the way. “Get back in the house, Jo. I'm handling it.”
“I am in the house. And I really…”
He didn't catch anything else she'd had to say. He left the package of meat on their front stoop and headed back to his room above the butcher's shop.
He didn't like the butcher very much. He smelled like BO and always had at least a little bit of blood in his cuticles. He tolerated him because… well, because the butcher tolerated him right back. And he was about the only one. Even his foster father had always given him a wide berth, for as long as he could remember. He'd wracked his brain for the reason but could never quite come up with anything he'd done to turn people off so completely so early other than be birthed by the wrong person. Well, he sometimes said the wrong thing. And his freaky eyes didn't help.
“Mr. Horner came by and said to tell you to stay away from his daughter,” the butcher said as they were packing up their wares to bring to the stand for the day. “The fuck'd you do, kid?”
The warmth that she had placed in his heart by her interest, her… flirting - because that was absolutely what it was - had been fully extinguished the night before when he'd been so resolutely reminded of his status there. He'd been keeping to himself for so long he'd basically forgotten. Now his heart was feeling a lot more like a dark, tarry pit than the fluttery thing it had been less than 24 hours before.
“Nothing. She came and bought something and left it behind. I was just trying to return it to her.”
The butcher harrumphed at that. “Yeah. Sure. Look, it's not like anyone here can boycott the only butcher, but maybe leave the girls in town alone? Don't go to their houses? I don't need you getting the reputation of bein a creep on top of…”
The butcher cut himself off before saying what he was thinking, what everyone was always thinking, and his fingers itched for his meat cleaver right there on the block, less than a foot away from his hand. The butcher was large and had a cleaver of his own nearby, but still he thought of bringing the blade down at his collar, hacking through those muscles and to the bone. There were some really big blood vessels around there. His carotid. His jugular.
“Well,” the butcher said, instead of what he'd been thinking. “Anyways. Just keep to yourself from now on, yeah?”
Platysma.
“Yeah. Sure. I’ll just keep to myself.” Forever.
The butcher turned his back.
Trapezius.
Trapezius trapezius trapezius trapezius trapezius...
Josie didn't come back by the stand. Her dad did a few times, always with his gun performatively over his shoulder and always with a glare that could kill leveled right at him.
He was always nice. He never made any small talk or big talk or anything-other-than-meat talk to anyone. He kept to himself, as was expected. He kept completely to himself for a long time, caught in the endless cycle of butchering animals by day and looking at his book in the evenings.
One day he was keeping to himself and butchering a radstag, (all on his own- he was really getting somewhere in life,) when a conversation came close to his stand.
“Yeah. All we'd have to do is catch one, then he could cut em up for us,” a voice said. It was a voice he knew. It was one of the older boys- or… men now. He was maybe four years older and had been training for guard duty.
He immediately recognized that he was likely talking about him, and the way he'd said it made it sound like they wanted him to cut up a person. That was kinda funny, so he turned to the group of three by his stand and made an impulsive little joke. “Cut who up?”
All three looked up at him sharply. No one was laughing.
Not funny, then.
Not the right thing to say.
What he should have said was “Cut what up, I mean.”
The three looked at each other, varying degrees of disbelief and excitement over their faces. The one closest to him - the one who'd been speaking - looked particularly pleased. He turned to peer up at him from under the stand's roof. “Radstag. Going hunting later.”
Eh. Not particularly exciting. Obviously he could do it though.
“Sure,” he said.
“Great. Hey listen,” he shifted on his feet, leaning closer as if he didn't want to be overheard. “You seem like a smart guy. Probably got a good head on your shoulders, right?”
Well… yeah. He was smart. Smarter than anyone he'd been in school with and some of the teachers. Most people didn't see that, though. All they ever saw was his weird eyes, weird hair, violent lineage… it seemed like Josie had been able to see it when they were kids but even to her everything else had clouded it out eventually.
He studied the other bo- man… that's what they were now, men. “I mean yeah I think I am. I might be a little biased about it though.”
The guy chuckled, seeming a bit surprised. “Wow! Funny too.” He hooked a thumb his way while looking over his shoulder to his friends. They both seemed similarly amused.
He liked it.
“Hey, so what do you think of all those synths they got running around here, huh?”
The smile that had been threatening behind his composure faltered. Synths? What did he think of synths? People were paranoid about synths around there. Thought their friends and neighbors had been replaced by android versions of themselves. Seemed like bullshit to him though. “I dunno,” he lied.
“You don't know? Don't know how you feel about them spying on us? Living undercover right under our noses, just waiting for the Institute to flip and switch and turn them feral?”
The other man’s eyes were intense on him. The two behind him were keeping a distance, forcing the other people in the market to divert away from his stand, keeping them from being overheard.
It still didn’t sound likely, and he wanted to ask why he was so sure… but that might’ve ended the conversation. This was the longest he'd had in a while.
“I didn’t know that,” he said.
“Yeah. They could go berserk any second. Wipe the whole town. And I work with the guard, okay? Believe me when I say they ain’t doing jack shit about it. There are people right here in this town that don’t act right. Don’t act real... because they aren’t.”
Don’t act right.
Don’t act real.
Don’t act normal.
His cleaver was about a foot away from him.
“We - the three of us - give a shit though. We know how much danger we’re all in by not sniffing these things out.”
His cleaver was in his hand.
The other man eyed the weapon but didn't really react. “So we made a little group. We watch the people around town, look for red flags. Fact finding, you know? Information we can take to the council. Get them to fuckin do something about this shit, yeah?”
The cleaver was heavy at his side, his grip tight.
When he didn’t say anything in response Danny finally straightened. “You see a lot of people, right? I know you work this stand every day. I bet you know a lot about the people around here.”
Something released in his chest, a tension he hadn’t realized had been there until it was gone.
He did see a lot of people.
And he wasn't the kind of doesn't act right this guy was worried about.
“Yeah. I do.”
“That’s good. You can keep an eye on things for me then. Could let me know if anyone…” he gestured vaguely around the stand “Orders anything weird, I guess or… or acts weird, or looks different from usual. And if you do that for a while and I like what you’re seeing…”
The guy looked him dead in the eye. Most people couldn’t stand to do that.
“Well then maybe you’d be Deathclaw material.”