Chapter Text
Fifty Shades of Earl Grey
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“Three hundred and twenty four caps for forty shells!?” Rhona flung her arms in the air, apparently no care for what they knocked down or whose faces were slapped. “That's damn ridiculous!”
Allen Lee felt the curve of a smug, thoroughly self-satisfied smile, lips emerging from the tendrils of his thick and shaggy beard long enough to taunt the young woman in front of him with an air of superiority belonging to none other than history's greatest victors. “Welcome to the shit list.”
She seemed unimpressed. “Well don't I feel honoured.”
“It's hardly an exclusive list.” Frequented by a long procession of mortal enemies, complainants and anyone to have looked at him cock-eyed. “Now you want the ammo or not?”
If only someone had come up with a way to harness smugness. Some old world scientist perhaps, with the know how to convert it into electrical energy, or some other resource for the benefit of mankind. There was enough emanating from his befuzzed fizzog to power a small town for several years. Something which greatly irked the young woman in front of him, he observed.
“Drop dead.”
“Your loss.” Allen Lee turned his attention away from her, craning his neck to look up at the supermutant stood dutifully nearby, showing great interest in the mugs lined up in the display case atop the counter. “What about you, big guy? You need to top up your supply?”
“Strong take bullets from dead,” came the simple reply. “Use to make more dead.”
“Fair enough.”
“Why human collect junk?” Strong gestured to the mugs with a clumsy sweep of his large hand, inspiring a sharp and panicked intake of breath from Allen Lee. “Wastes space for meat.”
The woman, Rhona had clearly caught the outraged and disgusted twisting of Allen Lee's lips which had taken out a mortgage on his face and were in the process of moving in all their stuff for an extended stay, and laughed, actually had the gall to laugh when he slammed his hands down on the counter top and glared up at Strong beside her.
“You makin' fun of my mugs!?” Allen Lee demanded, righteous in his fury, spoiling for a fight no matter how ludicrous.
Strong didn't seem particularly switched on to the justifiable rage in Allen Lee's dulcet tones, though rather than engage the angry human further, he elected simply to scratch his head and look briefly to Rhona, finding her the more agreeable of the two, surprisingly. “Why humans keep junk? Only slow them down. Should get rid, or share, like supermutants.”
“Life would be much more pleasant,” she acknowledged, and patted his arm affectionately, with what may well be a commiseratory undertone. “Until the rest of us are enlightened enough to realise that, there'll be a lot more junk collecting.”
Their conversation combusted what remained of Allen Lee's notably short fuse in a blaze of Vesuvian rage, him unsure whether it be the fact that they excluded him from the discussion and carried it on before him, or that they continued to slight his precious collection. He let loose a chesty snarl, the manliness of such an action drawing Rhona's attention on him once more, and doubtless leaving her weak at the knees in the face of such a domineering specimen as he took the opportunity to enquire in what was very much his outdoor voice “You callin' my mugs junk now!?”
She threw a look at Allen Lee, one that spoke of pity, and more than a little bemusement. It took him aback to be confronted with it, only to enrage him further after a moments consideration. She did not appear in any mood to listen to his sensible ravings, and turned her back on him, tugging Strong with her by a thoroughly ineffectual grip on his enormous wrist. “C'mon, big Guy. Let's... leave this one to it.”
Strong 'harrumphed' under his breath, made to swipe away the moisture settled upon his brow with a handkerchief withdrawn from inside one of his wrist wraps, and replace his crumpled fedora atop his bald head perhaps a touch more petulantly than was proper for a socially conscious supermutant. “Strong agree.” He lingered a moment, causing Rhona to halt at the extreme of his arm while he made another considerate visual pass of Allen Lee's collection with a bored and somewhat critical eye. “Mugs are cheap. Homer Laughlin Golden Wheat pattern is worth more.”
With that, he walked away, but not before administering a parting slap to the counter top with enough force that the delicate ceramic items thereon where displaced and upended.
With all the haste of a starving wolf to an ailing radrabbit, Allen Lee threw himself forward to begin righting them, ever so carefully placing each back in its proper place. As he struggled, he caught Rhona's quiet murmur of “damn, he's got a thing for those mugs” and Strong's rejoining “beard human is stranger than other humans” to which she laughed. Again! Actually laughed again! At him – Allen Lee!
However, they were both correct in their observations, simplistic as they may be. Hunched over his precious bounty, Allen Lee felt he would have cracked a smile at their words, should he be less respected and of lower societal import. A man to be taken less seriously within the community of Far Harbor. Because how little the two of them knew. How little they all knew...
~~~~~
The great and grand tale that is the Homeric Odyssey of the eponymous Allen Lee began, dear reader, as many heroic legacies do, in humble obscurity. In a time before The Fog smothered the land, poisoning all in its wake. Before the synths and their tambourine banging love & peace attitude installed themselves atop the mountain, and the Radeaters arrived and implemented their dogmatic campaign and poison upon all and sundry. In that time when everything was perfect and tinted a continuous rose shade known colloquially as 'The Past®'.
It was during that perfect age, within the limited space of a beshingled two-up-two-down in the greater town of Far Harbor, in the midst of a violent storm, that Allen Lee made his entry to the world in the same manner that he would continue to live every day from then on: red, squalling and brimming with outrage in close proximity to an elevated flat surface of some description. Upon first seeing the howling bundle of pith and vinegar that constituted her first born, Mrs Lee breathed a heavy sigh, possibly of awe, though historians would later contend that it was more likely heartfelt disappointment, and Mr Lee had responded with a gruff grunt that varied neither in pitch nor brevity from all others within his limited vocabulary, and turned away possibly due to lack of interest. And so the family Lee had expanded by one, bringing the number of inhabitants in the beshingled two-up-two-down to a round and mostly even four.
Mr Lee was a gunsmith by trade. Though lacking the tools necessary in traditional smithery, he managed somehow to make do with stand-ins scavenged from uninhabited homes and makeshift variants he had beaten into shape with his fists coupled with grim determination and bloody mindedness, two commodities he possessed an abundance of. He was a tall, imposing man, unusually so for a resident of post apocalyptic Maine, though exceedingly short in both manner and temper. A stoic man unless roused to anger, possessed of all the softness of an I-beam stubbornly wedged upright in concrete, he tended to exist wholly within a self-sustaining miasma of potential rage and unimpressed stonfacedness. Rumour had it that he had once punched an angler to death for having looked at him funny, only to extinguish his cigar squarely in the ex-creature's accused and lifeless eyeball. His most distinguishing feature, and certainly that for which he was best known beyond one gently twitching brow powered by perpetually boiling anger was his beard.
Never had such a mighty arrangement had any business being on a human face. A great snarl of dark bristles clinging to the deep crags of his weathered jaw, and mighty peak of his manly chin. Thick and tangled and sturdy enough to host an entire family of honey badgers, should they be brave enough to arrange a viewing. There was seldom a more towering spire of unadulterated manliness than Mr Lee, a force so much to be reckoned with that a dusky yao guai should sooner slink off to its cave in shame of its comparable inadequacies than attempt it.
As a match to such an epitome of all things male, Mrs Lee may at first glance appear meek, and retiring. A simple mistake to make, until one realises that her distant forebears hailed from across the sea, from a place named Bakewell in the rough North of somewhere, and had found themselves stranded on The Island that fateful day of nuclear devastation following a holiday awarded as a prize in an over 50s magazine competition. To this day it remains a topic of hot debate within her extended family as to what could be considered worse, nuclear apocalypse, a holiday of the type that could conceivably constitute a magazine prize, or hailing from Bakewell.
As the product of such esteemed lineage, Mrs Lee was a short woman of dour countenance and outlook, tufted by a mop of untamed blonde hair, and with a propensity towards answering hails and rudimentary questions in words of one syllable or less. Let it not be said that she was a lazy creature, for Mrs Lee held the well-earned reputation of routinely working her fingers to the bone. She also bore the unenviable burden of running the Lee household as per her traditional upbringing. All meals should consist of meat enfolded in pastry served with peeled vegetables dusted liberally with salt and served with dripping where available. Sides, floors, basins, husband and son to be washed thoroughly and scrubbed clean with Abraxo before sitting down at the table.
Mr Lee, though averse to displaying emotion less explosive than nuclear meltdown scale rage did feel deep affection for his wife, and referred to her often as a good woman, and on occasions of particular weakness could be heard to compliment her with the reverent acknowledgement that 'no woman rings a chicken's neck so well.'
Finally, the fourth member of the family Lee was Great Aunt Hortense. Often referred to by the family Lee simply as Aunt Hortense, and by the other denizens of Far Harbor as 'that batshit old mummy', Hortense was a lady of advanced age, taken to rising from her bed each day with assistance from Mrs Lee to ensconce herself within the rickety old rocking chair beside the hearth, where she would remain until supper. Each day was spent staring into space, occasionally emerging from her private journey to inform an absentee named Neville of her findings. It was, from the day young Allen Lee learned to walk, to the day he would find himself musing on a dapper supermutant's quiet assassination of his character, a mystery as to who exactly Neville was. Whether he be some long departed acquaintance of his Great Aunt, an old flame of her possibly misspent youth, or perhaps some disembodied spirit, he would likely never know. Though any who was not fortunate enough to themselves be Allen Lee may be hard pressed to imagine any self respecting spirit inclined to haunt the household Lee. This was not an affliction Allen Lee himself did suffer from. It remained unclear to Allen Lee which parent of his could claim ownership of Aunt Hortense, though it was his mother who assumed sole responsibility for her care, and would occasionally acknowledge her nonsensical ramblings with the odd grunt and occasional one word answer as she worked.
Allen Lee, from the time he found himself heartily berated and instructed to "be a man!" by his father after injuring himself climbing out of his orange crate in an effort to learn how to walk, would spend much of his time around Aunt Hortense's rocking chair occasionally becoming entangled in the trailing end of her manure-coloured shawl, or finding one or more of his undersized feet crushed beneath the active and creaking rockers of her chair. Each instance was treated with the unchanging response from Aunt Hortense of a gleeful cackle and bark of “Damn Germans! This is why we lost the war!” Never did such a response stem his tears. This continued until Allen Lee was six years old.
It was around this time that Mr and Mrs Lee saw fit to introduce a fifth member of the family Lee in the form of Allen Lee's younger sister. As Mr Lee had declined to name his son, Mrs Lee had asked what he should like to name his daughter, to which he had replied “I don't know. Call 'er Fag Ash Lil for all I care!”
Mrs Lee subsequently named her Sandra, after Mr Lee's mother as she believed it would please her husband.
Allen Lee had thought very little of the new addition. So much so in fact, that he did not realise that she existed as an entity until her being meant the loss of his bed. Hitherto she had merely been a negligible presence, not a means of displacing him. Allen Lee had paid her very little attention until that point. Any attention paid to her following the loss of his bed would be fleeting, as he came to invest his limited attention in something that would become a life long love.
Aside from her frequent forays off the Earthly plane and her intimate relationship with Neville, Aunt Hortense bore the hard earned title of chronic hoarder. Like some workaholic pack rat, she had amassed a vast store of junk from every corner of The Island. Should Allen Lee have been an imaginative boy, the very thought of her travelling the length and breadth of The Island ought conjure up tales of monsters battled and Trappers thwarted and other such derring-do. Unfortunately, Allen Lee was a very boring child, and such a fruitful opportunity for self-made diversion sailed neatly over his grubby little head.
Aunt Hortense had accrued such a collection over the years that it posed something of a dilemma for the family Lee. It was so vast that it took up an entire two rooms of the two-up-two-down, and a great deal of the leaky attic to boot. Only the kitchen and the living room remained fully accessible. Mr and Mrs Lee had long ago repurposed the living room for their own use as a bedroom, and Aunt Hortense slept in her own bed in the Master bedroom upstairs at the end of a long and difficult to navigate jungle path, where she lay amongst her worldly possessions as some Ancient Egyptian Queen reposed upon her litter (not that any members of the Lee household would ever make such a comparison, lacking any knowledge of Egypt, Ancient or otherwise, and that should they compare Hortense as such would require a degree of levity thought distasteful and a waste of time in the Lee household).
With the core members of the family Lee served, the addition of both Allen Lee and Sandra Lee posed a problem. In her capacity as a newborn, Sandra Lee had inherited the orange crate beside the stove that had served Allen Lee as a crib and later a bed that could not accommodate his legs, but what of Allen Lee? Aunt Hortense was loathe to part with any of her possessions and attempting to remove them would invariably provoke a prompt and loud reaction as she awakened from her inner travellings with all the certainty of 'I was watching that' from a slumbering grandparent on switching off the television they had been slumped in front of. Thus Mr and Mrs Lee seized upon the only course of action that feasibly remained open to them. Like so many boxes of Aunt Hortense's worldly goods that had been in the way, Allen Lee was relegated to the leaky attic, and the musty haystack therein.
“Let Allen Lee sleep in't hay!” Mr Lee had raged on the rare occasion his wife had sought his counsel on matters of household upkeep. “I'd have given left arm for haystack in leaky attic! Livin' under woodpile down't Lumber Mill made me man I am today! Tha's six years old! High time 'e grew up and started being a man!”
And so it was, while encased snugly within the musty haystack on a particularly dark night that Allen Lee first encountered that which would bring untold joy into his small, lonely and rather sad existence.
A radstorm raged above the shingled two-up-two-down, rattling the rickety eaves with all the din of a thousand Aunt Hortenses in unsteady rocking chairs performing with military uniformity on a parquet floor. It brought with it sickly green clouds that proceeded to pour hefty droplets of lightly glowing rain though the damaged tin roof with total disregard for unimaginative children sleeping in musty haystacks below.
The bucket collecting errant water from the leaky roof gradually began to glow green, the thin steel illuminated by its eerily beautiful, luminescent contents. It should have been soothing, as much as sickening, were Allen Lee not beset by both an inability to sleep and a festering feeling of resentment at having been cheated out of his orange crate. Angered by the natural world's complete disregard for his sleep patterns, by the existence of Sandra Lee and her usurping of his bedding, Allen Lee unearthed himself from his musty haystack, like a molerat emerging from a soft patch of stinking mud, and turned his impotent rage on the boxes of Aunt Hortense's worldly goods piled around him.
Should he have been larger, stronger and quite simply older than six years, the destruction Allen Lee wrought would undoubtedly have been greater, yet still doubtfully impressed his father. As it was, Allen Lee turned his ire at the world on anything small enough and light enough for him to carry.
Ugly, slightly mouldering cushions went flying, flung by the tiny hand of vengeance! Soiled one-eyed teddy bears, moth-eaten doilies and little wooden figurines all felt his small and frankly negligible wrath.
A large and hirsute spider counted itself lucky that its aggressor grabbed it in error, hurled into a clump of soggy newspaper from which it disdainfully scuttled in order to scale the wall and set up shop above Allen Lee's musty haystack, from where it could glower and fill his bed with the dried out husks of its future victims.
In this howling rampage of violent fury, Allen Lee reached into a box marked 'PRECIOUS!' in Aunt Hortense's scratchy handwriting, and closed his hand around something cool, and smooth, and curved. It was as though a helpful soul had elected to open the floodgates and release the roiling, foamy water surging over the dam wall, battering the poor sapling clinging desperately amongst the torrent. His rage fled.
From the green and structurally unsound box, Allen Lee took a single porcelain teacup. He turned it over in his tiny hands, wide-eyed stare glued to the shining object between his sticky fingertips as though bewitched. What was this fine thing that calmed his burning anger and soothed his infant soul? He ran his thumbs over it, memorising the smooth feel of its soft contours beneath their pads. Its pleasing shape which he would one day come to understand as elegant appeared almost like the bell up in the tower of the ruined church near the house. At one side was a handle, slim and rounded as the stem of a flower bowed beneath the weight of a gentle summer's rain. Its perfect glaze shone so bright, imbued with an ethereal glow, like some otherworldly creature in the combined light of the storm and the rainwater from the bucket. Upon its sides, identical front and back, was a songbird unlike any of the diseased gulls Allen Lee had seen previously. It was blue-feathered, white breasted, its beak open as it undoubtedly presented sweet music to the skies above. A heavenly aria on which his beleaguered spirit could soar!
All else paled into a distant thrum, a far off drumbeat settled alongside that of his heart. An unheard part of the fabric of existence so far below his notice that it simply no longer mattered. This in his hands. This did.
This delicate, soft and smooth thing – all rounded, gentle edges finished with such care and so very, very fragile. It was the softness, the gentility his life so lacked. The opposite to his hard, uninterested parents. His mother, too busy to make time for Allen Lee. His father, hard and unyielding, everything the world expected Allen Lee himself to be. A man, as he was so often instructed to be by his father. Simple, unlike Aunt Hortense and the madness that so consumed her days and stole her nights. This gentle, soft, simple thing in his hands. It was everything he lacked.
Allen Lee examined it again, bringing it close to his angry little face that he could see it clearly, could press his cheek to it. This thing, he thought, seemed similar to a cup. But not like any cup he had seen before. The cups he knew: tall, rigid beakers without a handle by which to hold them and fashioned from battered tin into a rectangular shape by the firm hand of his father.
“No man drinks from anything less!” Mr Lee had proclaimed, incensed that his son's small hands had trouble holding the unwieldy behemoths. “A real man grasps his beaker! Don't you forget that, Allen Lee!”
They were not like this.
This in his manky fingers, this was not a thing to be grasped, but to be held. Cradled.
Curious, the maybe cup held daintily in his wee hands, Allen Lee peered inside the mouldy green box with Aunt Hortense's scratchy writing on the outside, and for the first time in his life felt his perpetually red and unpleasant little face light up in a smile.
Other items of a similar material lay within, a feast of shapes and sizes, colours and patterns. Oh for the joy of young Allen Lee at that moment! Such was his joy that a strange, new feeling seized him, something in his chest that wanted to escape. And so he laughed. Allen Lee laughed, joyful and euphoric, as none of his forebears Lee had ever been previous.
“Here! Allen Lee!”
The boom of his father's harsh voice frightened Allen Lee, the delicate piece with the beautiful blue songbird tumbled from his grasp. It shattered against the rough floorboards, blue feathered beauty, soft and gentle shapes reduced to sharp and jagged edges. The sight of it broken around his bare toes wrought a deep and true sob from the very depths of Allen Lee's destitute little soul. In that moment, a part of him had broken alongside those perfect wings.
“What's that racket up there!?” Barked his father just below the trap door from the attic. “Keep out of yer Aunt's things and get thee to bed! Else I'll tan yer hide and ye'll sleep in't woodshed!”
Allen Lee did as he was told, running back to his musty haystack and burrowing deep inside.
“That snifflin' I hear, Boy!? First gigglin' and now snifflin'! What have I told thee?! Be a man! Yer a disgrace, Allen Lee!”
Within his musty haystack, despite the anger of his father, Allen Lee could not stem his tears. Deep sadness rent his small heart asunder, broken with the destruction of the beautiful songbird, the softness of its curves and glaze torn away from him and made jagged and pointy as everything else in his life. The softness so desperately craved, ripped from Allen Lee's dirty fingers, the water snatched from a dying man in the desert, taken from him and forbidden by his father's demand that he be a man, as he should be. He must remain in his musty haystack, not rummage through the rest of Aunt Hortense's things, where others of the songbird's kind did reside. Though not the songbird herself...
No. Allen Lee must be a man. Allen Lee must deny himself the softness he so craved, though it resided only a mere few feet away. Allen Lee must deny himself.
And yet, standing upon the edge of a deep precipice from which there would be no re-emergence, no handholds in the smooth, softly contoured and glazed rocks of its sides. There would be no escape. There was no escape.
No escape for Allen Lee...