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Chapter Text

Porter Gage watched Cassius Colter wake up, yawn, swing his legs over the side of his bed and then slide right between the boots of his power armour, without even stopping to admire his ugly mug in the broken mirror or pour himself a morning whiskey, and realised, not for the first time, that everything that was wrong with the world was his fault.

“Tinkerin’ with your fucking suit again, boss?” Porter couldn’t keep the distaste out of his mouth, but as usual Cassius was too busy to notice. What was it about power armour that made the man turn batshit crazy? He just grunted, and swapped out his spanner for the soldering iron, squinting up into the left knee from behind his tinted goggles.

He wondered how many people even knew Overboss Colter’s first name was Cassius. It was a fucking sissy name, and Colter knew it. Sounded like something that wildcard leader of that rogue Mojave raider faction would come up with. What was his name? Casper’s Legion? Caesar’s? Some dumb-ass shit like that. Maybe he should share that little titbit of information with Mason. Or William Black. He smirked at the thought, but he knew it would be too easy to trace back to him, and who knew how much longer Cassius would even be Overboss. It wasn’t worth the risk. Maybe it might make a good joke when he was dead.

Porter’s terminal blinked, and he glanced back over at Cassius. He’d be busy with his damn suit ‘til the second Armageddon, the 2IC decided, and opened the new message. It was from Fritsch. Still nothing. He heaved a sigh and stretched his shoulders. They groaned under the weight of his own armour – the real deal, the raider kind. Good old hand-welded steel rebars and a few feet of heavy chain. He’d never had the patience to deal with fusion cores and rotating actuators and whatever the fuck else Cassius was always bitching about.

Helping himself to a cigarette, he rooted around in his pocket for a lighter and headed for the balcony. The boss might smoke inside if he wanted, but there was enough poison in the fucking air already without adding his own. It weren’t early in the day, either. The Disciples were milling around the fountain like bored leeches, waiting for something to leech on to and suck all the blood out of – literally. Nisha was a fucking freak and her damn pets weren’t much better. Maybe if they weren’t so fucking bored – he started to think, and then caught himself. He was doing the best he could with what he had. The stink from their compound made him wrinkle his nose. Decaying corpses in the wasteland heat could raise a deathclaw’s bile, he decided.

Over to the east, a couple of cars blasted several feet into the air and crashed back down to the earth; rolling and groaning as their metal skeletons warped with effort. Crickets, probably. Or maybe bloodworms. His remaining eye couldn’t see that far. He took the elevator down and made the rounds. William Black made an amusing little joke of firing a shot from the roof of The Parlor, aiming as close to Porter’s boots as he dared.

“Fuckin’ asshole!” he growled, flipping the bird in the sniper’s direction. William just laughed.

Mags was her usual broody, uptight self. Lizzie Wyath stayed out of sight, and for that, Porter was grateful. The former serial killer-turned-raider gave him the creeps. At least Nisha was upfront about being a psychopath, but Wyath could charm the wings off a bloatfly; no questions asked. The Operators were easy. The promise of caps and territory soothed Mags Black out of her icy rage and into level temperature. All she had to do was stick to the plan.

The Bradberton Amphitheatre where The Pack made themselves home stank almost as bad as the stench that wafted out of Fizztop Mountain. Almost. Mason sat in his throne like the king of the peacocks, painted all kinds of garish neon colours that made Porter’s eye hurt to look at. He put ten caps on Mason’s favourite molerat, and watched it tear up a scavver’s back and rip out chunks of her scalp.

“An easy win,” Mason sneered, passing over Porter’s winnings. “Just like Colter’s fucking Gauntlet.”

For the umpteenth time, Porter reiterated the importance of Sticking. To. The. Plan. Mason was not appeased, but he backed off the threat-talk, and for that, Porter was grateful.

He bumped into Shank on the way out.

“Tick tock, Gage.” The man’s voice was a low warning. “Tick tock.”

He wandered through the market, picking up a can of purified water off one of the recently-returned trader caravans, glad not to have to drink the fizzy black swill they all called Nuka-Cola. He punctured the upper half with his combat knife and drank it in gulps, finally stopping in his tracks to stair up at the Cola Cars Arena. Someone, probably not a raider, could have mistaken the look on his face for despair, but not before he grit his remaining teeth and tossed the can into the nearest bin. Fucking someone had to pick up the shit around here. He looked around in disgust and began trudging wearily back towards Fizztop Grille.

A klaxon sounded immediately to his left; outside the vision of his single eye. Every scavver, slave and raider in the immediate vicinity perked up, himself included. He caught Shank’s eye from across the way. Maybe this time, said the look on his face.

Picking up his pace into a slow jog, he headed back through the park to the Overboss’ lair. People were spilling out of holes and corners and buildings, rushing and pushing past him, making their way towards the Arena. There was a tangible feeling in the air, something you could almost taste that sat heavily on your tongue and prickled the skin on the back of your neck. Maybe this time. Maybe it would all be over soon.

Cassius had set aside his tools. His power armour released a hydraulic hiss as it closed around his body, and he shared a glance with Porter, who gave him a nonchalant shrug and a grunt in response. In the distance, he could see the monorail winding its way across the wastes to the park. The pre-recorded message, the one he’d recorded and snuck out with Fritsch to install in the dead of night would be playing. Whoever was inside would be shitting themselves, or fucking pissed off. He hoped for the former, but it was probably the latter.

He escorted the Overboss to the Arena, before slipped away from the rabid crowds into the security room. Russell was already there, waiting. He flicked on the monitors and cracked his knuckles, then his neck. He reached out his bony fingers, eternally blackened with grease, and brought the microphone down to his lips. He nodded up at Porter, who flicked the big green switch, and Russell’s annoyingly charismatic voice filled not just the space between them but settled over the Arena stands like a particularly viscous fog.

“Attention all my favourite undesirables out there! In case you haven't noticed, looks like we got ourselves some fresh meat to run the Gauntlet!”

The fresh meat was wiry, but wily. He was also wearing some creepy white plate armour that gave him the awkward, slightly inhuman appearance of a mannequin.

“The stands are filling up fast. Better hurry 'cause for losers, it's standing room only.” Russell smirked at his own little joke, ignoring Porter’s eye-roll.

Several grenades blasted him through the turret room in record time, and the boos and hisses of the onlookers were deafening.

He took his time with the traps, clued-in scavvers usually did.

He faltered when he reached the room of choices.

He ummed and ahhed between the three doors, lingering on door number one, before seizing door number two.

Porter didn’t bother to flinch. When the grenade bundle dropped from the ceiling, the fucker didn’t even have time to scream before he was blown to pieces.

He tuned out Russell’s gratuitous whooping and stormed out of the surveillance room.

They didn’t need weak little scavvers in Nuka-World, anyway.

Chapter Text

Porter groaned when his terminal began blinking in the middle of the night. He crept up to it, squinting, and opened the most immediate communication.

Harvey’s ankle monitor had sent him an auto-message. The scavver was dead. “Well, fuck me.” He scratched his head.

He clicked on the link to the monorail’s internal communications network, and the light for the speakers lit up red. Suddenly, it turned green. Well, well, well. He had someone’s attention.

He cleared his throat. “That wasn't very nice,” he announced. “Killing an innocent man? You're one ruthless son-of-a-bitch, aren't you? Let me tell you what,” he lowered his voice, trying to sound tempting; conspiratorial. “Old Harv's got a password on him. Take it and use it to unlock the control terminal and power up the Nuka-Express. The monorail will take you to Nuka-World. If caps and killing are your thing, well boy, I have got the offer of a lifetime for you.”

The little green light turned red again. Porter grinned to himself and waited for the klaxons.

When they finally went off, Cassius began the sorry task of hauling himself out of bed. He grabbed his inhaler from the nightstand and huffed a load of Jet, making his 2IC scowl. Porter wasn’t even close to being sorry that the boss had the shits about being woken up by his stupid little game.

He tapped his boot impatiently as the Overboss got his shit together, chucking his toolbelt at Porter’s head. He caught it and slung it over his shoulder. They rode the elevator down together in silence. Cassius was a fucking shitshow. His eyes were bloodshot, he swayed drunkenly and sniffed like a scavver addict. It was disgusting. Once, he’d looked at Cassius and seen a leader; or at least a man capable of acting like one.

Now, all he saw was a loser, and too much wasted time.

He caught a warning in Nisha’s eyes as he slipped into the surveillance room. He locked Russell in the sound booth and drummed his nicotine-stained fingertips against the computer console. He didn’t know what half the buttons or flashy things did, but he didn’t need to. He hoped this one would be over quickly, so he could go back to bed.

Tonight’s contender rolled up in a suit of X-01 power armour, and Porter found himself leaning forward. Russell dubbed the scavver the ‘Tin Man’, and the game was afoot. The Tin Man had a plasma sniper rifle, among the rest of his arsenal; which, likely combined with the suit’s HUD, made him one deadly accurate motherfucker.

He took out the turrets with a single shot each; standing in the doorway like a metal angel of destruction, sparks flying as a thousand rounds of five-millimetre ammunition pinged off the suit. He paused in the trap room, and Porter watched the suit decompress. The audience gasped as a woman in a blue suit that was as familiar as his own ugly face stepped out.

“Jesus! Who’s torturing who?” Russell was crowing into the mic as the Tin Man began neatly disarming the traps, fingers flying over the wires. By the slightly broken clock on the wall, Porter reckoned it took her at least forty-five minutes to get through the room. The onlookers were audibly restless by the time she got through them all and slipped back inside her armour.

He gritted his teeth when she got to the room of choice. Obviously, she’d be protected from the grenade bouquet by her suit; but still. He wasn’t keen on cleaning up after a repeat of the other day.

She was either really fucking lucky, or maybe her helmet gave her x-ray vision, but she didn’t hesitate. She marched straight through door number one into the rad room, without a second’s hesitation.

“Hope someone brought their Radaway, 'cause our little Tin Man is about to get roasted like a squirrel on a stick!” Russell was bragging.

Porter rolled his eyes. The dickhead obviously didn’t know that power armour made you mostly immune to exterior radiation.

It took her a while, but she finally poked around the sickly room enough to find the keys, and let herself out into the Nuka-World access tunnels.

She blasted a hole straight through the fucking monkey, and Russell said something humiliating, but Porter was quite satisfied. Jangles gave him the fucking creeps, and he could never hate watching someone blow the damn thing up.

The Tin Man got lost in the labyrinth, but when the radrats began to overwhelm her she stamped her boot on the ground and the creatures collapsed, dead and twitching. Porter sat up a little straighter. He was no slouch when it came to mechanics, but an electromagnetic pulse was out of his league. Who the fuck was the Tin Man, really? Could she make it through the Gauntlet? Would she face Cassius, or eat a round of hot lead, like the last scavver to get that far?

She made it through the mine room, leaving it smoking and on fire behind her. His heart sank a little. When he’d been cleaning up in there yesterday he’d left the upstairs door past the mudcrabs unlocked, but there was no way she’d make it across the bridge in a suit that heavy.

Russell was laughing hysterically. “Get in there, sucker!” he choked. “Hope she doesn't forget to feed the mirelurks!”

Even so, he got to watch her wrestle the mirelurks in hand-to-hand combat, stomping on their disgusting little offspring with what seemed, he thought – rather poetically; like violent delight. He glanced at Cassius’ monitor. The Overboss was staring at the arena screen, his eyes black and his mouth twisted in a half-snarl.

Cassius hated winners. He hated anyone stronger than him, smarter than him, faster than him. Hell, he loathed people who were just luckier than him. That’s why he’d rigged the game, after all. Weren’t nobody getting one over Overboss Colter. Least, that’s what he thought. Porter felt a smile creeping across his lips. Not even an X-Cell could save the asshole – if the Tin Man made it.

She got through the gas room to Russell’s hissing dismay, and Porter saw a rush of raiders leaving the arena, flicking the safeties off their pistols and cocking their rifles. That was Cassius’ genius, he sneered. Cooling some angry blood by letting the kids out to play.

The Tin Man mashed up the ants and headed, albeit warily, into the ‘zoo room’ – where she found herself the latest attraction. Pausing, maybe for her own amusement, she turned one of the Disciples into a glowing green puddle of goo. The Disciple third of the arena erupted into disbelieving screeching and booing, while the Pack and the Operators only cheered louder.

“Someone thinks she's clever – time for a little reality check!”

Porter increased the volume on Russell’s microphone, and his voice practically rattled the Arena.

“Gage!” Cassius was banging on the surveillance room door. “Get out here! Help me set up!”

He cracked his knuckles. “With pleasure,” he muttered to himself, unlocking Russell’s door and heading out into the Arena.

Cassius was struggling with his wires. “Help me with this thing!” he snapped.

Silently, Porter hooked him up and plugged him in, reciting the order of the circuits as he went. He sorely wished he could just sabotage Colter right here and now, but the Overboss’ fucking HUD would tell him if he wasn’t wired up right.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the Tin Man march out onto the bridge between the Gauntlet and the locker room. She paused, aiming her rifle down at Colter. Humming to himself almost happily, Porter imagined Cassius as a steaming puddle of hot plasma. A man could dream, right?

Cassius exhaled dramatically, Porter thought. “You got me wired up yet, Gage?”

Red, green, red, blue. “Yeah, boss.”

“Finally!” Cassius turned to him. “Now, go shut off that damn alarm.”

“All right, I'm on it.” Porter headed back to the surveillance room, as slowly as he thought he could get away with.

“You think that Power Armor will do you any good, think again,” Cassius warned the Tin Man. The yellow eyes of her helmet gleamed down at him. “Thanks to this suit, I'm the only one that wins this fight. Period. Think you’re hot shit getting this far?”

Cassius had more to say, but with the door closed behind him, Porter didn’t get to hear it. The dickhead always had to have the last fucking word.

He hunkered down over the button that turned on the locker room comm.

“All right. Listen the hell up if you want to make it out of this alive,” he began, quickly and tersely. “I've only got a minute. Find the intercom on the wall. I'll make it quick.”

“I don't need your help.” The voice that snapped was a woman’s angry hiss. Good. She could use that anger. Hell, so could he.

Even so, he scoffed. “Uh, believe me. You do. Ain't walking out of here without it. Look, you made it this far; you obviously got skill. But this fight coming up is rigged. You get me?”

There was a long pause. Porter started to sweat. “Yeah? And what's in it for you?”

“This ain't just about what's in it for me,” he protested. “Both of us reap the rewards if you pull this off.”

Again, she paused. Long and deliberate. Fuck her. “All right.” She decided finally. “I'm listening.”

Porter moved his mouth away from the mic and breathed a sigh of relief. “Overboss Colter. His power armour's set up to draw energy from the electric grid in the arena. Fuckin’ thing's invincible. You name it, someone's tried it -- miniguns, grenades. Not a scratch. You get what I'm saying?”

“I wouldn't expect anything less from a Raider,” the Tin Man snorted.

He laughed approvingly. “You know us well then. You want to win? I stashed a weapon in the lockers. Get it.” He wiped his forehead, waiting.

“Is this,” the voice began again, slowly and as cold as ice. “A squirt gun?”

Porter squeezed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose. God, he needed her to go with it. So damn much, he just needed her to go with it. “Yeah, yeah, I know what it looks like,” he snapped, more impatiently than he intended. “You're just going to have to trust me. Once the water hits Colter's electrically-charged power armour, the circuits are gonna short out.” A smart scavver would know that water plus electricity equalled bad, right? Right?

The exhale on the other end was long and loud. “Are you sure about this?” her voice was small now, and dubious. Full of doubt. Shit.

“I don't have time to get into that right now, but let's just say, things need to change around here.”

“If you’re playing me, you better hope your boss wins. I promise I will be the end of you.”

Porter rolled his eyes. “Trust me.” He said again. “It will. I'm not that big of a dick. Once the water hits Colter's electrically-charged power armour, the circuits are gonna short out.    It'll kill his defences, but you'll only have so much time to do some damage before they recharge. You take him out, I promise you, it'll be worth every minute spent in this Gauntlet.”

He could almost hear her considering before she replied. “Consider it done.”

Cassius interrupted before he could reply. “Gage. Let her through.”         

Porter ignored him. “That's what I like to hear. All right, it's time. I'll open the door. See you on the other side.”

He glanced at the monitors. Cassius was green across the board, until the Arena display began to flicker and dim. Huh. The power was down 30%. Porter’s heart began to race. The Tin Man was smarter than she sounded. Maybe this time…

“DEATH! DEATH! DEATH! DEATH! DEATH!”

The raiders were screaming their little hearts out, bless them. Cassius Colter might have been the biggest waste of time Porter had ever had the misfortune to deal with, but he had a showman’s heart. That’s why Porter had chosen him in the first place, after all.

“All right!” he told them, and Porter turned up the volume linked to the suit. “Disciples! Are you ready for blood?”

“DEATH!”

“And the Pack! Are you ready for things to get wild?”

“DEATH! DEATH! DEATH!”

“Operators! Are you ready to see me notch another kill?”

The stands rattled with the thunder of the crowd. Porter glanced up as plaster rained down on him, dusting his shoulders, and he wondered if the roof would cave in and kill him right there.

“And you,” he told the Tin Man. “Are you ready to die?”

He flicked the lock for the locker room. It opened wide on… emptiness.

The cheering subsided slightly, the onlookers were confused. Cassius took a step forward.

“Well, well, well,” he drawled. “Looks like we have another suicide on our ha – ARGH! STEALTH! SHE’S GONE STEALTH!”

The Tin Man had indeed gone stealth. Porter whooped, trying to remember if he’d left a Stealth Boy in the locker room, but not really caring. She was good. Real good. Cassius froze, and the smell of frying flesh filled the air as he shuddered, electrocuted by his own suit. The Thirst Zapper had done the trick, Porter realised, relieved. You could never be a hundred percent sure.

For Overboss Colter, things proceeded rapidly downhill. Unable to see or land a hit on his target, and burning alive in his own power armour, his life began evaporating as everyone watched. It was beautiful. Porter double checked the monitors were recording. The Stealth Boy finally flickered out and Cassius was left standing there, drenched in his own sweat and piss, as the Tin Man appeared behind him, a sawn-off shotgun poked through the wire cage around his armour, pressed against the bullet-sized space where his chest piece ended and his helmet began.

“Well, that’s you all over.” she drawled, and from Colter’s suit’s microphone, only Porter could hear it. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. He could practically hear the firing pin drop, and then he held the earpiece at length as the blast went off. On the monitor, he could see the blood drip inside the bulbous yellow-tinted eye pieces.

Cassius’ armour keeled over and collapsed in the dust.

Grinning from ear to ear, Porter stepped out of the surveillance room, only to come face to face with the gang leaders.

“The Tin Man?” Nisha’s voice oozed disdain. “Are you sure Gage? You better know what the fuck you're doing.”

“Hey, we talked about this!” he warned them.

Mason folded his arms. “Colter's dead. We've got ourselves a new Overboss.”

“She survived the Gauntlet. She was smart enough to take my advice, and strong enough to kill Colter. She's what we need. So how about we show some respect for our new leader, eh?”

“She'll get respect when she earns respect,” Mags snapped, quick as whip. William echoed the sentiment.

“All right! all right. Now, get the hell out of here. I'll show the boss around.” Pissed off, Porter waved them off. The air in the Arena was hot, and his skin buzzed as though he could feel the little particles of residual electricity in the air. Fuck, maybe he could feel it. Cassius was fucking dead. The Tin Man was a stone-cold bitch, considering she’d killed Harvey. He wondered if the scavver had given her the lie; the sob story about a trapped family, or if he’d spilled his guts.

It didn’t matter. She was here now. She’d killed Cassius. Now, he just had to convince her to take his place.

“Told you it'd be worth it,” he announced smugly.

The Tin Man took off her helmet. “Let's just say you've got my attention.”

He grinned up at her. “What'd I tell you? Worked like a charm.”

Her eyes were suspicious, and she looked at her gun, reminding him she had a round left in the chamber. They were green, too, and sharp. And… come to think of it, she was what a younger Porter would have called a stunner, without irony. She’d had a rough time somewhere, clearly, and had the scars to prove it, but other than that, her skin was unmarked by leftover adolescent acne or radiation blisters. He recalled she had a vault suit on beneath her power armour, which probably explained it. Lack of exposure kept people healthy-looking, go figure.

She cleared her throat, and he realised he was staring. “As I was saying, worked like a charm.”

They both looked down at the corpse. The Tin Man grimaced. “So you really wanted the Overboss dead?”

Porter shrugged. “Dead, ‘out of the way’. What's the difference? Either way, good riddance. The plan was a success.” He coughed, pleased with himself. “I get that you have no idea what's going on, and everything is coming at you real fast, but you need to listen. Taking out Colter wasn't just a last-minute decision. It was something a few of us here have been working on for a while. Now that he's actually gone, we've got ourselves a vacancy in the Overboss department. And guess what?” he grinned like an idiot. “You just got the job. What’s your name?”

The Tin Man winced. “Fuck off.”

He frowned. “I can keep calling you Tin Man if you like, but you look like a sensible woman who doesn’t need a stupid name like that Commonwealth trash I’m sure you’re used to. Overboss Tin Man just don’t roll off the tongue, now, either.”

“If this is a trick, you’re going to end up just like your friend Colter.” She warned.

Porter chuckled. “See? You're fitting in already, Tin Man.” He leered.

If looks could kill, Porter would have been a little green pile of goop on the dirt. “You can call me Croft.” She said, but she sounded uncertain. Porter shrugged. It’d do. “Why me? I'm sure you're better suited for the job.”

He waved her off. “We'll get into that later. Now, I'm sure you got a lot of questions, but this ain't the place. There are three Raider gangs that run the show at Nuka-World -- the Disciples, the Operators, and the Pack; and yeah, if the names didn't give it away, these ain't your typical Raiders. These morons don't exactly play nice with each other.” Croft opened her mouth to argue, but Porter held up his hands, supplicating. All I'm asking is that you trust me on this and give it a shot. I swear it'll be worth it. Meet me at the Overboss' – sorry, your – new quarters, the restaurant on top of good old Fizztop Mountain. We can talk there.”

Croft put her helmet back on and followed the straggling members of the audience out the door. One got a little close, and she paused to tell him something that Porter didn’t hear, but he watched the twit leap back as though he been shot, and the rest scattered, staying the hell away. Good. He knew she’d make it back to Fizztop in one piece. Then the real work could begin.

Russell poked his head of the sound booth.

“Whatcha got for me, Red-Eye?” Porter asked, feeling charitable enough to use the DJ’s preferred name.

He scratched his head. “You ain’t gonna believe me.”

Porter gave him a long look. “Try me.”

Russell wiped his nose. Porter couldn’t smell any lingering jet fumes, and the man didn’t look high, but it wouldn’t be the first time. He frowned, and waited, tapping the butt of his gun gently. “Croft ain’t just your regular raider bitch from the Commonwealth. Hell, she ain’t even a raider.”

“I’m sensin’ a ‘but’?” he folded his arms, patiently waiting.

“She’s a big shot in the fucking Brotherhood of Steel. One of their lone agents, what they call a Sentinel, whatever the fuck that means. Word from the wasteland is that Croft took down the Institute, and damn near single-handedly nailed the Railroad to the wall.” Russell made a shotgun motion with his fingers. “This chick’s a big deal, Gage. She blew up Winlock and Barnes’s operation. Every Gunner on that overpass is dead.”

Unable to hold back, Porter released a long, low whistle. “Anything else?”

Russell re-checked his notes. “Not much. She was originally a vault dweller. I caught the tail-end of a Diamond City Radio broadcast where that twit Travis mentions an “Indy Croft’, but that could be unrelated.”

“Good work.” Porter clapped him on the back and headed for the door.

“Hey, Gage?”

“Yeah?”

Russell hesitated. “You think… you think?”

They shared a look. Porter knew what he wanted to know.

“I think we might be over the rainbow,” was all he had to say. The DJ’s comical expression was enough to let Porter know the joke was fairly over his head.

Chapter Text

The sun was just beginning to rise as Porter strode through Nuka Town. Most of the raiders had called it quits and retreated into the buildings and the shadows to sleep off the intense wasteland heat, but a few were still up partying. He swore he heard echoes of ‘ding, dong, Colter’s dead’ echoing out of the Bradburton Amphitheater from the other side of the market, and grinned in spite of himself.

It made him nervous, when he was right. He wasn’t no egghead, but he was practically Einstein compared to some of the shit heads the tribes took in. The only thing wrong with being smart, meant he was usually right. Which was fine, until some wanker decided he was a cocky asshole and needed to take him down a peg. For a bunch of smug assholes, raiders really fucking hated smug assholes.

Croft didn’t seem like no raider, anymore than she seemed like a soldier. That X-01 wasn’t Brotherhood. Her vault-suit definitely wasn’t Brotherhood. Her shiny plasma rifle was a mystery, too. He had a vague idea that the technology had come from the Enclave, in the Capital Wasteland. Or maybe further out west, in the Virgin Wastes.

Porter had thought that an unknown, anyone, would be better than Cassius, but unease settled into his gut churning the acid up the wrong way. He needed a strategy, some information, something to give him a leg-up over this woman, and he had nothing. He paused on the other side of the fountain and stared up the Grille. There was no electricity in the park, but Croft hadn’t bothered to turn the generator on, and the windows were dark, reflecting only the pinkening sky.

He leaned over and spat in the fountain, getting a move on. The Disciples’ lot was staring to stink already, but what made him scowl was the elevator, sitting up at the patio, sparks flying from the control box as his fist hammered the button. Croft was fucking with him already. He took the stairs slowly, gnawing on a broken fingernail. The workshop was as dark and quiet as the patio, and the power armour frame was empty. That didn’t worry Porter too much, because there was another one in the Grille, but the closer he got to the door, the stiffer the hairs stood up on his neck.

The unmistakable sound of a trigger clicked as he pushed open the doors, and he ducked, not a second too late. He spun on his heel slowly, hands raised in self-defence, eyeballing the hole in the plaster at the end of the hallway behind him.

“Well,” he announced thoughtfully. “Can’t say I don’t -”

Croft fired again and Porter threw himself at the floor.

“Jesus fuck, woman!” he screeched. “I’m unarmed!”

He stood up unsteadily, eye watering as he refused to blink, staring at Croft. Watching her reload the shotgun, her knuckles white even in the dim light.

“Start talkin’.” She had all the calm of a woman sitting down to tea with her gal-pals, and Porter grit his teeth.

“What’s yer name?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I told you, you can call me Croft. That is the only name I will answer to.”

Porter raised his eyebrows. “Oh right, you got one of them sissy girl’s names?” he sneered, ducking again as Croft blew another hole over his shoulder. “Fuck me, you God-damned scavver bitch!” he wondered if he was having a heart-attack. “Put the fucking shotgun down!”

She shook her head. “Don’t think I will. Now have you got somethin’ to say to me, or should I just put this here last little bullet between your eyes and be on my way?”

“Alright, if that’s how you wanna play. You don’t have to like me, anyway. You just gotta sit and listen. Welcome to Nuka-World, Overboss Croft.” To her credit, she didn’t blink as he drawled her name stingingly. “This place was a big-time amusement park back before the world went to shit; although if you ask me, if this place is any indication, it wasn't so hot before it all blew up.” Porter looked around, disgusted. “Anyway, I wasn't the first to think of this place as a good stronghold. Before we got here, bunch of traders had set up shop, and hired a whole lotta guns to protect 'em. They were dug in like ticks. That's why it took pulling a bunch of gangs together to even have a chance.”

Croft shrugged, and Porter’s eye flicked to her finger, resting on the slide. He breathed a quick, quiet sigh of relief. You couldn’t teach good trigger discipline these days, not to raiders. “Sounds like a smart move,” she replied, not taking her eyes off him.

He offered a grin. “Thanks. I'll take credit for that one. Colter did the heavy lifting, but it was my idea. So we've got Nuka-Town, and most of the traders work for us now. They ain't happy about it, but screw 'em. We're thinking it makes a good central location for sending gangs out. Your job, for a little while, is gonna be to clean up the rest of it.”

A single eyebrow cocked over one of Croft’s glittering green eyes. “You've got this area of the park. Isn't that enough? Why do you want more?”

Porter showed his stained brown teeth, scratching at the back of his head. You got a lot to learn, boss. We need the rest of those parks. Every one of 'em not under our control is a threat. The gangs are getting’ too cramped up. They're stepping all over each other. Unless they get room to spread out, there's gonna be bloodshed. The sooner you get 'em all to agree to follow orders, the sooner we can, ah… improve our situation.”

“How the fuck do you want me to do that?” Croft snapped. “I am a Sentinel in the Brotherhood of Steel. One word back to the Prydwen and I can convince Maxson to drop a nuke on your little amusement park here; and you’re telling me what? I can run this place if I kiss enough ass? Is that it?”

It was Porter’s turn to shrug. “Maybe you can do that. Maybe you can’t. But you haven’t yet. Which means you’re curious, at least. Curious enough to give it a shot.”

She stuck out her chin. “What’s in it for you?”

He chuckled. “Peace? Prosperity? The chance to finally sit on my hands and feel my ass grow without worryin’ about some Brotherhood or Minutemen to come around and tell me I can’t live my life the way I want? Which one suits you best, boss? I’ll sell it to you ya, for a cap.”

“You’re full of shit, Porter.” She spat bitterly.

“Blow it all to hell then.” He offered. “Won’t bother me if I’m dead.”

Croft’s shotgun blasted its last bullet at the floor where Porter’s foot had been a millisecond before. “Fuckin’ hit me or get lost you psycho bitch!” He swore, hopping up and down, foot in his hand.

“Eat a dick.” She muttered, sauntering past him into the hall, and disappeared down the stairs.

Still swearing and growling to himself, Porter snatched up his tool-box and went to work on the elevator. She’d torn the motor right out, because obviously, she was a fucking cunt. He watched her when she finally emerged, shotgun on her shoulder, round blue ass swaying like the queen of all shit. Fucking whistling, to boot. A fresh stream of insults spewed out of the side of his mouth as he reinstalled the motor, watching her waltz off towards Nuka-Town and out of sight.

Maybe she’d get shanked, he hoped violently. Except, then the gangs’d turn on him and his head would end right up on those sticks next to hers. No, Croft was his best shot. His only shot. He wiped the sweat off his brow, scowling in the direction of the Disciples’ compound. He’d lived for too long with the stench of death right up his nose to walk it off now.

~

It was nearly dusk already when the monorail started up again. Porter stood up and walked over to the balcony, ignoring the stiffness in his knees. “Aw, shit.” He swore, heart sinking.

“Hey Gage.” Shank called from the ground. “Get down here. We gotta talk.”

Wordlessly, Porter descended into Nuka-Town and followed Shank to Nisha. Her pink pout was turned up in a charmless smile and she practically purred when they walked in. “Gage, Gage, Gage,” she announced loftily. He tried not to cringe as a metal claw caressed his jaw. “Your new little pet seems… promising.”

“I’m glad you approve,” he bluffed, secretly shitting himself. “Maybe next time I come up with a plan, you’ll listen a little more carefully.”

Nisha’s smile flickered. “It was your plan, then? For the new Overboss to come around, and offer the Disciples a favour?”

“No.” his face betrayed no surprise, but it was close. “I told her she should come and introduce herself. Get to know you. After all, what’s not to love, huh?” he gestured at the assorted viscera decorating the walls and railings.

“Hmm.” Nisha smirked. “Overboss Croft is the kind of woman that knows raiders need more than that. She’s off to the Commonwealth to… take care of a little problem for us. If she follows through, well. Her career might last a little longer than Colter’s.”

Shank dragged him off to the Parlour after that, where Mags and William Black had a similar story to tell.

“Caps make the world go around, Porter. Croft gets it. If she sends back our little package, neatly wrapped as promised, well.” Mags shrugged.

“Then the Operators will fall in line. But only ‘if’.” William finished, crossing his arms.

Mason was another story. He cracked his knuckles and his neck when Porter caught up with him, grinning from ear to ear. “The boss-lady is something else, Number 2. Eyes like a beast and teeth to match.” He whistled appreciatively in a way that grated on Porter’s ears. “She offered me a little something-something, you know? Couldn’t let that ass walk away unrewarded. I gave her the Pack colours!”

“Touching.” Porter replied sourly.

Mason wiped a mock tear away from his eye. “Yeah, well. We’ll see if she can put her caps where her mouth is soon enough. Maybe I’ll let her put her mouth a little south of my face after that, too.” He made a lude gesture at his crotch that made Porter wrinkle his nose. “I’m glad you followed through, Number 2,” the Pack Alpha added threateningly. “I was thinking about having you killed. Glad I don’t have to, through. Yet.” He added.

Outside the amphitheater, Shank finally spoke up. “I don’t know what went down with you and Croft this morning, but she’s already acting like the real deal.”

“The key word there is ‘acting’.” Porter frowned. “I need a drink.”

He let Shank up into the Grille and they sat down at the bar; Shank eyeing off Croft’s power armour – quiet, dark in the frame, and Porter reaching for the whiskey. He poured two glasses, neat.

“Fuckin’ ice-machine’s broke again,” he muttered, when Shank looked down into his glass dubiously.

The bigger man shrugged and downed it. “If Croft sets this up we could move on the Commonwealth.”

“Woah, hold on now,” Porter set his glass down. “Lets just see what she can do first, ok? Ain’t you worried she might now even come back?”

Shank grinned, his teeth broken but white against the deep red-brown of his skin. “I got people out there keepin’ an eye out. She deserts, we’ll be the first to know. Might be time for you to get the hell out of dodge if she does.”

“Fuck you,” Porter snapped, bitter. “I built this fucking place. I will die in it before I let any of you fuckin’ scumbags chase me out of it.”

“Just a word of advice,” Shank replied affably. “Don’t mean nothing by it.”

“Yeah, I know. Shit,” he shook his head, gulping his liquor.

Shank looked at him sideways. “What?”

“I did not take Croft for a sweet-talker after our little tête-à-tête this mornin’.”

His companion didn’t answer, only raised an eyebrow and poured himself a double.

“I thought she was gonna blow my damned head off. Kept shootin’ at me, even after I told her I was unarmed. Damned bitch,”

To his surprise, Shank laughed, long and deep and hearty. “Gage, you just dragged a woman through another man’s psychopathic nightmare labyrinth and then set her loose on the psychopath without so much as a ‘thank you, ma’am’. If she didn’t at least try to blow your head off, I’d be thinking she was too soft for this place. What if Colter’d put you through the Gauntlet?”

Porter scratched his head. “I’d be fuckin’ mad as hell,” he admitted begrudgingly.

“Shit, this was your party, Gage. You set this whole thing up. If you expect the tribes to give Croft a chance, you gotta do the same. Hell, either we all get fucked up, or we all get rich and live like kings ‘til the end of our days.”

The 2IC made a non-committal noise. Shank downed another drink and headed for the lift. “Gage,” he added warningly, before he left. “The Commonwealth is waiting.”

He made himself scarce while Croft was away. He fixed the ice machine and had the Disciples set up the Gauntlet again, ready to entertain them when some unwary scavver stumbled across Nuka-World, or they got bored and threw a couple slaves in for a good time. Russell sent him daily updates of Croft’s location, so he knew Shank’s eyes were doing their jobs. And when the monorail started up again a week later and cruised into the park, he began preparing himself for the worst.

But deep down, he was hoping for the best.

~

“Gage.” Croft greeted him coolly. She was out of the blue suit and dressed in black combat leathers. Her blonde hair was clean and combed almost straight, leaving an inch of air between where it ended and her shoulder started. When he returned from a job, he usually looked like shit, covered in sweat and gore, and sometimes actual shit. Croft looked refreshed, ready to take on the wasteland, and Porter couldn’t decide if that meant trouble for him.

“The Overboss returns,” he sneered. “In one piece, too. Lucky me.”

Croft scratched her cheek. “Gonna give me shit, Gage, go right ahead. I’ve been chatting with your little gangs of raider scum, and guess what? They ain’t used to someone deliverin’ on their promises. If I said I didn’t need a 2IC I reckon they’d put you to a firing squad.” He green eyes flashed.

“That is the biggest load of crap I’ve ever heard,” he snapped defensively. “have worked my ass off for Nuka-World, and if you undermine me, I will take you down like the bitch you are, have we got that straight?”

His heart pounded with fear as he lied through his teeth. He was on thin-ice, and he knew it. Did Croft know it? He didn’t think so, but he had to take the risk.

Croft didn’t answer, she just sat down at Colter’s old – at her desk like he hadn’t spoken, and began dismantling her plasma rifle, and cleaning the component parts. He watched her work. She had nice hands, with long, nimble white fingers that worked with mechanic precision, lining all the pieces up at right angles and methodically shining everything up with oil.

Taking a long-suffering sigh, he pulled up a chair and sat down, resting his elbows on his knees and steepling his fingers. “Look. Can we stop slinging insults for five minutes and talk? You’re missin’ the bigger picture, picking fights with me. I know I got you into this mess, and you’re free to hate me for it, but Nuka-World... shit, this was the dream. My dream.” He peeled off his eyepatch and rubbed at his eyes with his hands.

“You painted a fucking bullseye on my back, you asshole.” She told him, but there was no fire in it. Porter was taken aback by how even her voice was when there was no emotion in it.

He snorted. “I ain't gonna lie, it's a part of the reason you won't see me stepping up and running things.” She didn’t answer. “I've run with gangs nearly my whole life. I know how Raiders think, what they're after, and how to use that to your advantage. Trust me, I'm in this, just as much as you are. This shit needs to work out. I need this shit to work out, or I'm a dead man.”

“I’m listening.” She added, when he didn’t continue.

“Leading outright just ain't my style, and there's already some blamin' me for supporting Colter all this time. My talents are best put to use helping a new Overboss get all this shit under control. You get me? Everything you see here is under yours. You're in charge.”

Silently, thoughtfully, Croft pieced her rifle back together, each piece falling into place with a gentle click. “Well. If I'm really running the show now, I’d better get to work.”

Porter’s relief was palpable. “Now that, right there, is just the kind of attitude I was hoping for. Don’t know if anyone told ya, but our former Overboss, Cassius Colter, was a fuckin' asshole, and I’m bein’ nice. Ended up being poison for this whole operation. Nuka-World needs someone who can get shit done and you’ve already gone a long-way to proving you can do that.”

The Overboss loaded a cartridge into her gun. “I’m going for a walk.” She dismissed him.

Porter spread his arms. “You do that. Need me to tag along?”

Croft didn’t bother to answer, only glared at him as the elevator descended. Cautiously, Porter followed her out onto the balcony and watched her head north into the bowels of the park, rifle illuminating her figure in an eery green wash as she picked her way through the tall grass.

She was back by nightfall though, looking no worse for wear. Porter offered her a warmed Salisbury Steak, only to watch her choose an unopened can of dog food, slice around the rim with her combat knife, and eat it cold, never taking her eyes off him.

She settled back on her bed after that, a shotgun on her lap, still watching him.

“I ain’t gonna try anything, if that’s what you’re thinkin’.” He snapped.

Croft shrugged. “Didn’t say you were.”

“Your accent’s familiar. Where you from?”

“Mississippi. You?”

He nodded. “Maryland.”

He sat in one of the Grille booths, boots up on the table, eye wandering outside the window, sometimes flicking over at Croft. He didn’t think she’d fall asleep, until she did, and then he walked over as quietly as he could manage. She snored very gently, and without a hard glare in her eyes or a sneer on her lips, somehow looked gentler. Like a pretty girl you could chat up after a raid, or one that’d get passed around after a few beheadings and a firing squad while you rolled your eyes and had a beer by the fire.

Raider culture was unkind, Gage knew that. But so was life, and you had to be hard to get what you wanted. Croft obviously knew that. He slouched in one of the armchairs nearby, and settled into sleep.

~

“Get up.”

Porter opened his eye to the Overboss poking him with the butt of a shotgun. She’d put sleek, shadowed combat armour on over her leathers and looked ready to go, ammo belts crossing her chest and assorted weapons holstered on her back and at her hip

“Fuck off.” He snapped, turning over.

“Alright, I’ll go myself.” She told him, not unpleasantly, and headed for the lift.

“What?” Porter demanded. “Wait.”

A lone finger hovered over the big red button.

“Jesus, fuck,” he whined. “Gimme ten minutes, I’ll meet you on the ground, alright? Fuck.”

Croft glanced at her pip-boy. “You’ve got five.”

He hauled himself up out of his chair and looked around wildly for his guns. He shoved a few boxes of ammunition in his pockets and dragged his chest-piece over his head, wincing as it made heavy contact with his skull. He downed a can of water in a hurry and hastily chomped on a piece of gum, hand leaning on the lift button as it took its sweet time getting back up.

By the time he hit the ground, Croft was already disappearing into the grass. He didn't even have enough time to light a cigarette.

“For fuck’s sake, woman, slow the fuck down!” he hollered, running after her. A few Disciples that had risen early were hanging around the fountain, laughing at him as he ran.

Chapter Text

“Gimmie what you got, I'm only gonna count to ten. Gimme what you got, I won't say it again. I'm the one with the gun, this here's my idea of fun! Now, gimmie what you got -”

“Will you turn that fuckin’ shit off?” Porter hissed, regretting it instantly. Croft froze in her tracks and turned slowly to glare malevolently. Defiantly seizing his chance, he lit the cigarette that had been dangling from his lip since they’d left and took a long, satisfying drag.

Without breaking her stare, she turned the volume up on her pip-boy radio while Porter’s eye watered from trying not to roll it; and began marching through the weeds again.

“Where we goin’, anyway?” he grumbled, half-jogging to keep up.

“This was your idea, Gage, don’t fuckin’ start.”

“Me?” he nearly choked on his cigarette. “There I was, sleeping in my chair, minding my own business when I get poked in the head by Overboss Croft and dragged off into the wilderness -”

Croft held out her palm and Porter walked right into it, coughing on smoke as her fingers hardened around his jaw. “We’re cleanin’ up the parks, Gage, just like you asked. I spent all day with my tits crushed against the dirt scopin’ the place out, so shut the fuck up, and get in line, or I’ll blow your God-damned brains out. Understand?” She released her titanium grip on his face, snatching his cigarette between her fingers and inhaling deeply, nicotine-induced bliss spreading across her face. “Holy shit. I ain’t done that since high school,” she murmured dreamily.

Grumpily, Porter pulled another stick out of his chest pocket. “Keep it,” he told her sourly. “Just… don’t throw the butt in the grass.”

The Overboss snorted mirthlessly. “Y’all worried about burnin’ your little fortress down, that’s cute.”

This time, he didn’t refrain from rolling his eye. “We passed Kiddie Kingdom ten minutes ago. I don’t reckon the bottling plant’s gonna be too easy, unless you’re desperate for mudcrab chowder -”

“We’re going to Safari World,” Croft interrupted, beginning her march again.

Porter felt the blood draining from his face. “Are you sure you wanna start there?”

“Grow a pair, Gage.”

He laughed out loud.  “I think yours might be bigger’n mine,” he called, approaching the gates behind Croft warily. Something hissed in the grass, and he checked his rifle was loaded.

Overboss Croft took a few steps into Safari World and scratched her head. “Where should we start?” she asked him, and the uncertainty in her voice made him smirk. The queen of all shit wasn’t so infallible after all, he thought to himself.

“If you’d asked me long before we got here, I’d’ve said, ‘not here’.” He replied.

“Helpful.” She sniffed dourly.

Both their necks snapped around as a scream – a human scream – followed by an animal snarl and the sound of an intense fight blew up around them. Croft cocked her rifle and charged forward, Porter on her heels.

A single idiot was engaged in hand-to-hand combat with a de-horned deathclaw. Porter wondered how he wasn’t dead yet. Croft didn’t bat an eyelid, swinging herself up into the nearest tree and trying to gain the high-ground on the creature. Porter got a glimpse of its soft underbelly and fired with quick precision, ducking out of the way as it howled and charged him.

Croft distracted it by blowing a hole through its eye and emptied her clip in its chest as it turned on her. Bleeding and bellowing, the thing thrashed from left to right, under attack on three sides. Porter had almost decided it wasn’t enough to take it down when it finally collapsed, the angry light dying in its remaining eye, red-brown sludge pooling around the corpse like a blood bag that had turned in the heat.

“That’s no deathclaw,” Croft decided in a hushed voice.

Porter eyeballed it. The head was too thick, and it wasn’t de-horned, like he thought, it simply had none. The talons were wide and thickened, to clumsy-looking for a deathclaw, and it widened at the hindquarters instead of thinning out.

“Reminds me of a Mississippi ‘gator,” she told him, sounding amused.

He shook his head. “Deathclaws, gatorclaws… what next?” he muttered. “This place is probably crawling with them.”

“Lady!” a voice behind them called out in a half-grunt. “Cito see you kill monster. You friend?”

Croft traded looks with Porter. “Maybe. Can you tell me about these… monsters? How many there are? Where they come from?”

The man stepped out of the grass and into the light. Croft inhaled sharply as Porter exhaled heavily through his nose. About seven-feet of hard muscle and thick, wavy black hair stared down at them, wearing nothing but a loincloth that didn’t go a long way to hiding anything obscene. Porter rolled his eyes as Croft choked on her tongue, averting her eyes.

“Cito not know. Cito happy you kill monster. Monster hurt Cito and Cito family. New friend? Follow Cito.”

“Follow where?” Croft asked, looking everywhere but the big guy, cheeks bright red. Porter didn’t know whether to laugh or scowl.

Cito puffed himself up confidently. “New friend make monster stop. Cito promise shiny thing give new friend.”

The Overboss made a strangled noise in her throat and nodded. Cito looked puzzled, but led them away from the gatorclaw corpse, into the park. Croft followed, a very strange, dazed look on her face.

“Aw, shit,” Porter muttered, and fell into step behind her, lighting another cigarette.

~

Cito’s family turned out to be a bunch of gorillas that had turned ghoul. Porter didn't even know they could do that. As bad as they stank, though, he managed to be impressed that they’d survived in the park since before the war. Croft had finally stopped blushing and managed to make eye-contact with the Grognak-wannabe for long enough to accept Cito’s ‘shiny thing’ – a holotape, from ‘The Wrinkly Man’, a long-dead ghoul, or at least, what sounded like a long-dead ghoul from Cito's broken English.

For half a second, he wondered how the fuck they were supposed to play it until Croft shoved it in her pip-boy.

"… they can't be tamed, they can't be controlled...”

Croft’s green eyes flickered up to his face, gleaming almost radioactively in the neon green glow of her pip-boy.

"Shut down the Replicator before it's... before it's too late. And if this recording should reach Dr... Hein. Please, tell him... to forgive me.”

The recording ended in white noise. “A fuckin’ replicating facility?” Porter hissed in disbelief. “Clones? Forgive me for laughing but this all seems like one of them bad pre-War thriller flicks.”

Croft twisted her lip, her expression unreadable. “You’d be surprised. Some of that pre-War technology… it’s inhumane, the things they did to people. You’ll never know what you’re capable of until you’re desperate.”

Her dreamy, wistful tone made him narrow his eye at her, but she looked a million miles away, and didn’t notice. “I know you been running around the Commonwealth slapping shock collars on scavvers, and you’re gonna call pre-War eggheads inhumane?”

She shrugged. “Gotta draw the line somewhere.”

“You help Cito now?” the giant butt in. “Save Cito family?”

“Sure,” Croft agreed, like she was agreeing to Fancy Lad cakes for brunch. “I always wanted to be best friends with a bunch of apes.”

Grognak perked up immediately. “Cito glad new friend like family!”

Porter had several objections, but with Cito towering over him, holding a very large club-like weapon, he wisely decided not to voice them and instead followed Croft, hot on her heels.

“Monsters come from big triangle house,” Cito was explaining helpfully. “Door there, Cito never go. Maybe, lady try?”

“That doesn’t sound ominous at all.”

“Ominous?” Porter scoffed. “What kind of fuckin’ raider are you, anyway?”

He withered under Croft’s glare and fell behind Cito, muttering to himself. Sidelined by a comic-book character, with muscles like a – he paused, ears catching a long, low hiss. Exactly like the one he’d heard before. “Get down,” he snapped, voice low, shoving past Cito and catching Croft’s shoulder.

The door to the big triangle house; which turned out to be the Safari Park Welcome Centre, closed stiffly behind them with a metallic clang that was loud enough to wake the dead. The gatorclaw roared, heavy footsteps thudding up the stairs towards them, ropes of drool glistening between its massive jaws.

Cito hollered, leaping at it and Porter pulled Croft down and half crawled, half dragged her along the floor, dumping her behind the indoor garden bed and glancing around it. Cito had managed to swing around on its back and had his big sausage fingers up its nose, beating at its skull with his club. It would have been hilarious if it wasn’t so terrifying.

“’Nades,” hissed Croft, passing three to Gage. She armed a mine for good measure and tossed it between the concrete planter they were sheltered behind and the top of the stairs where Grognak – Cito – was fighting for his life. Porter pulled the pin on one and tossed it underhand towards the beast. The Overboss already had her fingers in his ears and he did the same, though they still rang like thunder when the explosion hit.

The gatorclaw howled even louder, if that were possible, and tossed Cito off. The big man went flying down the stairs and hit the floor with a solid thunk. Then the thing began charging towards them, eyes glowing red with genetically-engineered hatred, only to stamp one massive claw down on Croft’s landmine and wind up thrown backwards itself, crumbling plaster dusting the air as half the wall collapsed around it.

Croft coughed violently in the dust, staggering towards it, halting when a growl and a hiss confirmed that it had survived. The plaster cleared and Porter gaped. It was missing a leg and half its tail; and its entrails were spilling out onto the floor and still it lunged for Croft, inching forwards on its front limbs. She fired a round from her shotgun between its eyes. It flinched, but it kept coming. She fired again and it whined, the long, keening sound of creature in desperate pain but refused to die, instead swiping at her ankles.

She was reloading and danced backwards away from the thick, wicked-looking talons and stumbled. Porter leapt over the planter and unloaded his clip in its head at the same tame Cito hollered and dashed up the stairs, bringing his club down hard on its neck. Finally, it shuddered and lay still.

Overboss Croft let out a long breath. “Well. That’s enough near-death experiences for one day.”

“Death bad,” Cito agreed. “Monster bad.”

Porter sat back on his heels, wiping the sweat off his brow.

Cito led them to the door downstairs, an old pre-War electric door, sealed shut with magnetic reed strips and a seismic alarm.

“Well, how do we by-pass that?” he wanted to know.

Croft looked at Cito. “Did the Wrinkly Man give you anything else? Besides that holo – the shiny thing?”

He looked lost. “No. Think Wrinkly Man friend have-” he paused, tongue stalling on the unfamiliar words “- by-pass?”

The Overboss looked around, checking desk drawers, rifling through trash. Finally, she looked up at them, shrugging. “It’s all I got. Is there anywhere… like this? With a door you can’t go through?”

Cito thought hard, his brow furrowing like he had a bad headache, until a lightbulb finally went off. “A-na-con-da!” he crowed triumphantly, and Porter and Croft shared a look. “An-gree A-na-con-da?” His companions shrugged again and he went back to looking painfully frustrated. “Ride?” he huffed. “Follow Cito. He know the way.”

He led the pair at a staggering pace through the park, and disappeared into the overgrown hedge-maze. Porter balked. “Oh no. I ain't got the brains for mazes,” he confided to Croft.

She exhaled through her nose. “I hope Cito knows where he’s going,” she muttered, and they ducked in after him.

At first, the hissing came from behind. Then, it was in front, and after that, they could hear it from all corners. Sometimes it sounded like it was around the next bend, and then not five minutes later they would barely be able to hear it at all. Nervously, Croft armed her mines and began dropping them at intervals behind them, like explosively deadly breadcrumbs. Cito had long disappeared. Idly, Porter noticed the sun beginning to lower in the sky. Hadn’t they left the Grille not long after sun-up? Where had the time gone?

He wondered if the tribes would bother to look for their corpses before razing Nuka-World to the ground after he and Croft were dead, and didn’t like the odds.

“Fuck!” Croft snapped violently, throwing an arm out to catch him from walking straight over one of her mines. “God-damned-fucking-shit-cunt!” Porter blinked at her string of expletives, trying hard not to shit himself. The landmines were in front of them, and behind them. Who fucking knew where the gatorclaw – or claws – were. It was starting to get dark. Their guide had vanished.

Croft’s pip-boy illuminated her face.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Cheating,” she replied, deadpan. He leaned over her shoulder. Her pip-boy had a pre-War GPRS topographical map of Boston. She zoomed in on Bradburton, then Nuka-World, then Safari World. She grunted, satisfied. Porter was stunned into silence. There, on her wrist, was a detailed fucking map of the God-forsaken hedges. They were two left turns away from the centre.

Tip-toeing around the mines, they reached the treehouse. There was an old lift there, running on its own solar generator, and he held out his arm to help Croft up before he mashed the button with his fist. They ascended slowly, leaving the creepy dark maze behind them. The treehouse was empty, bar a few skeletons. The Nuka-Cola fountains were still operational, but the soda syrup inside them had turned into a thick, glossy sludge that neither were keen on drinking. Presumably, the skeletons had dragged sleeping blankets and pillows up there shortly after the War, and after shaking out the dusty bones, Porter was happy to get some shut-eye.

Croft declined, taking up a chair on the balcony, shotgun on her lap, nails clicking on the barrel. For a while, she turned on the radio, and they sat in almost companionable silence, listening to Russell’s tuneless, dulcet tones.

“I ain't gonna lie to you all – love hurts. It really does -” he began to whine, and she shut it off, for which Porter was quite grateful.

“What were you sayin’ before?” he asked her. “About pre-War tech being… inhumane?”

“Mind your own business.”

“Haven't you figured it out yet? Your business is my business. I only succeed here if you do.”

Her voice fell flat. “And what does pre-War USA have to do with my business?”

“I dunno,” he huffed. “Just sounded like you had somethin’ you need to get off your chest, and there ain’t no one around here you can trust – besides me.”

Croft leaned over the chair to look at him. “Gage, I don’t have enough fingers to count on my hands all the ways you have tried to get me killed since I got here.”

He frowned. “Survival’s the name of the game, boss. Ain’t nothing I’ve done to hurt you on purpose – yet,” he added. “And if you prove you’re up to the job, which you’re doing a pretty good job of doin’ so far, we won’t have a problem, will we?”

“Survival,” she snorted, with an eyeroll. “What’s the fuckin’ point?”

Porter shrugged. “To live longer’n your enemies.”

“If you’re the only one left standing at the end who are supposed to share your wonderful, long life with?” she sounded bitter, and full of regret.

“I -”

“Goodnight, Gage.” She turned back around and went back to ignoring him.

Several mines exploded beneath them, and a gatorclaw released a wet, dying howl. “Got one,” she muttered, and he thought he heard her snicker.

Chapter Text

The sunlight on his face woke him. Croft was standing, leaning over the balcony, and he wondered if she’d slept at all. Groaning and stretching, he joined her, gratefully accepting a can of water. From the treehouse, they could see as far as Bradburton proper, sunlight reflecting off the dam wall in the distance.

“This place has got one hell of a view,” he announced, to no-one in particular.

“Look. Down there,”

Porter’s eye followed Croft’s finger a short distance from the treehouse to a construction site. A new roller coaster was in the early stages of construction, but the raider didn’t need two eyes to see that it was winding and faded green, or that the entrance to the ride was a massive anaconda head, complete with truck-tyre sized eyeballs and huge fangs. “Do you think its an angry anaconda,” he asked her conversationally “or just the regular kind?”

“You’re an idiot,” she confirmed.

“Hey!” someone called from below. “Lady! Cito think you dead! Down here!”

Cito walked them through to the other side of the maze, eyes goggling when they passed the gatorclaw Croft had blown up in the night. “Cito glad you safe from monster,” he told Croft fondly. Porter started to wonder if he was invisible. Maybe he did belong in a Grognak comic. He could play the villain.  “Cito kill monster also,” he announced proudly, as they passed another corpse at the foot of the coaster. “Crush head with rock.”

The gatorclaw’s head had indeed been pulverised beneath a boulder. Its slick red tongue poking out from under the stone, decorated with broken yellow teeth. Porter compared the size of it to Cito. How the fuck had he picked that up? The trio made a bee-line for a trailer at the back of the lot, where the big man tried the door. “See?” he told them unnecessarily. “Locked. Window too small for crawl in. Even for lady and skinny man.”

Porter puffed himself up, insulted, while Croft hefted herself up to peer in the window. “I can see a body, and a dead terminal. And – ew, roaches,” she wrinkled her nose. “Gross.”

“How we get in?” Cito wanted to know.

The Overboss unzipped her jumpsuit down to her chest, exposing her cleavage. It was Porter’s turn to avert his eyes, feeling an uncomfortable wave of heat flow up his neck and into his face. When he glanced back, unable to forget what he’d seen, she was leaning with her ear against the door, twirling a hair-pin and a lockpick with slow, careful movements. How did she keep her hands so clean? Porter wondered, watching, fascinated. Cito made a noise and Croft shushed him, eyes flashing dangerously. There was barely a fleck of grime under her nails, no nicotine stains or impacted grit. Her skin probably glowed under blacklight.

When the door finally gave, Cito laughed, loud and barking. Croft stepped back with a flourish, pushing it wide open, revealing the contents.

“Nice work, boss,” Porter told her appreciatively, eyes fixed decidedly on her forehead. Her forehead, not at all sexual, not even a little bit (though he knew now that she had a fantastic rack) – and as soon as the image crossed his mind again, he devolved into a coughing fit.

“Pay attention,” she smacked him over the head, not hard enough to hurt. “Might learn a thing or two. Now, who the fuck is this?”

Hein; read the skeleton’s nametag.

“Jackpot,” muttered Croft, rifling through the pockets. “We have a winner!” she held the swipe card up for Cito to see, amusement flickering in her gaze as he began to whoop with unbridled joy. “Now, can we not go back to the Welcome Centre through the maze?” she asked him.

He thought for a moment, and then nodded. “We go this way. Through rep-tile house.”

Porter perked up immediately. “Reptiles, huh? Now that I could've gotten into, back in the day.”

“It where Cito learn about an-a-con-da,” the big guy said.

He began rattling off random snake facts that were close enough to being interesting that Porter actually started listening.

He almost missed the hissing.

What he’d taken for an old display log in a shattered reptile tank was a big brown gatorclaw that had been curled up, asleep. Cito had woken it with his lizard lessons. It stretched and growled warningly, giving Croft the opportunity to fire twice into its soft underbelly, staggering it.

“Cito, take point!” she yelled, forgetting that she was a Brotherhood of Steel-whatsit and he was a moron. “Gage, duck and cover!”

What was he supposed to do? Snap his boots and salute and say, ‘yes, ma’am’? As the ‘claw whipped past Cito and advanced on him, he scrambled backwards. The only cover was an old wooden bench. An old wooden bench that suddenly seemed very, very flimsy. Porter hefted it up and threw it, where it smashed against the ‘claw’s shoulder, showering it with splinters.

“MACE!” screamed Croft, hurling a grenade in his direction.

“Wha-” he screeched back, as the ‘nade began smoking. The noise he made was otherworldly as he screwed his eye shut. The last thing he saw was the gatorclaw gaining on him.

It howled with pain and Porter heard Cito gasping and moaning nearby. The thing was thrashing, crashing into walls, and smashing whatever glass was left in the display cases. Something grabbed at his shoulder and he bellowed, kicking away from it.

“Motherfucker,” Croft panted, snatching at him again. “Come this way you fucking prick!”

“I couldn’t fucking see you, bloody bitch!” he snarled back, letting her lead him away from the gas. She dumped him against a wall somewhere and disappeared, probably going back for Cito. The gatorclaw was still howling and breaking things up the hallway. Porter opened his eye a fraction, wary of the stinging.

Croft appeared, dragging a weeping, red-eyed Cito with her. “I’m sorry,” she pulled a gas mask off her face and began consoling him. “You weren’t supposed to go back when I threw that grenade, I’m sorry. Let me help you, here,”

He curled up on the ground, a giant, sobbing baby. Croft fished an IV bag out of her kit and pulled him into her lap, cupping his face as she began flushing his eyes with saline. “I’m sorry,” she told him again.

Cito sniffled. “That feel… little better,” he squinted up at her. “Pretty lady. Pretty Cito friend. Cito see why smoke make monster claw eyes out.”

Porter’s jaw dropped. “It what?” His eyes were stinging too, just a little.

“I had a bunch of training grenades in my bag. They have capsaicin and aerosol in them, otherwise known as mace. Maxson doesn’t like to go too easy on the squires. He says they won’t learn if they aren’t in any real danger. I took a couple of kids out on a training exercise and we bumped into a deathclaw. Turns out the big horny freaks don’t like mace any more than people do.”

“Death? Claw? Same like monster?” Cito’s eyes were still bloodshot, but he was staring up at Croft almost adoringly.

“Very close,” she agreed.

Cito sat up, wiping his eyes with his filthy fists. Croft rolled one of her jumpsuit legs up. A nasty bruise was blackening across her shin, streaked with a shallow cut and smeared with blood. She gave Porter a filthy look.

“You didn’t have to kick me.” she snapped at him.

Porter’s mouth drew into a very thin line. “Get over it,” he muttered. “I had my eye closed.”

“Well, fuck me for trying to avoid getting you mauled to death, right?” sarcasm oozed from her mouth as she bandaged herself up. “Next time, I’ll just let it do its thing.”

He muttered an apology he didn’t feel under his breath.

~

The replicating facility was completely dark. Somewhere in the distance, he could hear water rushing. The smell told him it was probably old sewage.

“Cito,” Croft hissed, making Porter jump. She passed him a frag ‘nade. “If anything attacks us, and it probably will, and you can get close enough like you did before, pull this here pin -” she showed him, tapping it with a fingernail “- and try and stuff the whole thing down the gator – sorry, down the monster’s throat. Can you do that?”

“Monster eat friend rock.” He grinned. “Monster ex-plode.”

She clapped him on the arm, and Porter’s eye fixed on her hand, which lingered slightly longer than necessary on the big guy’s bicep. “Very good.”

The wet stink of the leaking sewage combined with the intense wasteland heat made the most disgustingly humid conditions in the laboratory that even Porter began feeling desperate for some privacy and a wet rag to mop himself off with. Croft’s hair began sticking to her face and her head and when she wrung it out, beads of moisture ran down her wrists.

“Reminds me of home,” she commented, voice echoing slightly.

“I see why -” he was cut short by a low hissing, and the gentle splash of water trickling ahead of them.

Cito’s big head pressed between theirs. “Monster?” he asked quietly.

“Stay behind us,” Croft instructed, and she and Porter aimed their rifles into the dark, her scope a tiny red blot in the black.

“We must be getting closer,” Porter muttered. “How many do you think there’ll be?”

The Overboss closed her eyes for several seconds. “Honestly, I don’t want to think about it.” They crept forward, three pairs of ears straining for sound. “You know, I am super glad that we’re going to die here. You know, instead of clearing out all those other parks for your dipshit raider tribes first. Better to leave them nothing rather than waste all that hard work.”

“We ain’t gonna die,” he replied, smirking. “We killed, what? Six of ‘em already? They oughtta be scared of us.”

“I’m sure they’re trembling in their little holes right now.”

“Monster no little. Monster big.” Cito informed them helpfully, and Croft made a noise that sounded like a laughing snort, but Porter couldn’t be sure in the dark.

Without warning, the hallway gave way to a large foyer, and a groan in the dark clued them in to its overlarge occupant.

“It hasn’t heard us yet,” Croft whispered.

Porter couldn’t help himself. “Small miracles. Still got them mace grenades?”

She checked her belt. “I’ve got two left, but we still have to go through there, and I’ve only got one gas mask.”

“Anything else? Frags?”

“Something a little more… lingering.”

The Overboss passed Porter a narrow tube with a yellow radiation stamp on the side. If silence had been less vital to their survival, he would have whistled. “How far back do we need to get?”

She shrugged. “Not far. Just shield your eyes from the blast and maybe hit yourself with a dose of Radaway for good measure.”

He gripped the cylinder. It was cool against his palm. “I’ll do it.”

To her credit, Croft didn’t stick around and wait for him to change his mind. She disappeared down the hallway with Cito on her heels. Porter crept as close to the foyer entrance as he dared, ears still straining against the black for the shuffling and grunting sounds of the beast.

A snort came from the south-eastern corner and he grinned, his broken teeth sharp against his lip. “C’mere cocksucker,” he ordered under his breath. “Split your atoms.” He squeezed his eye shut and pulled the pin, hands trembling. When he didn’t die instantly, he took a deep breath and tossed the Nuka-grenade across the room. It tinkled prettily as it bounced across the concrete and the gatorclaw rumbled as it pounced after it.

Porter remembered to duck his eyes away just in time, tripping over his own boots as he tried to sprint back down the hallway. He clamped his palms over his ears and pressed his face hard against the floor. Intense light flooded the corridor from behind him, followed by a boom that rattled his armour just as hard as his teeth.

There was no sound from the creature at all, though his ears were ringing too hard to notice. Someone much larger than him lifted him up off the floor and something soft cupped his face. When the flashing lights cleared from his eye, he found himself blinking down into familiar bright green ones, though it took a moment for him to register that her mouth was moving and her palms were holding his head upright.

“…can you hear me? Gage? Porter? Are you okay?”

He wrenched his neck away. “I’m just peachy, thanks.”

She smacked the back of his head. “Fuckin’ answer me, next time!”

“Monster dead.” Cito announced. He poked the corpse – if you could call it that – with his club. It was a liquid puddle of red, blistered fleshy looking bits. Not a single piece was recognisable.  

“Radiation is a hell of a thing,” Croft decided, looking down at it.

In single file, the trio traipsed up the stairs from the foyer, into an office block. A single fluorescent light flickered on the ceiling. In the small kitchenette off to the side, Porter found a refrigerator full of drugs. “Take the stims and the Radaway. Sell the rest for caps in the market; or leave ‘em. I don’t care.” Croft told him, checking over his shoulder.

She sat down at one of the terminals, where green lines of code. “Christ, this OS is ancient. Even for pre-War tech. Guess Nuka-World didn’t believe in software upgrades.”

“Friend say funny things,” Cito tried to poke at the keyboard, only to have his hand swatted off by Croft. “Cito not think understand.”

“This is Dr. McDermott’s terminal,” she tried to explain. “This is his work.”

Cito bared his teeth. “Wrinkly Man make monsters? Cito help him. Cito think he friend!” Porter took a step back as he rampaged through the office, turning over desks, and hurling computers and filing cabinets against the walls.

“Uh, boss?” he drawled warningly, pointing a single finger.

Croft didn’t even look up. “Little busy, here, Gage.”

Porter got out of the way, and slouched, leaning back against the wall, stabbing a slit in a can of water while he waited. A hiss came from somewhere behind him, not the gatorclaw kind but the hydraulic kind, and he twisted his mouth, wondering what was going on when he fell backwards, water splashing over his face and down his jumpsuit.

The wall he’d been leaning against had been a door, that Croft had opened via the terminal. Cito’s face appeared above his, teeth showing in a terrifying grin. “Man fall down,” he sniggered, and held his hand out to help Porter up.

Croft stepped around them, cradling her plasma rifle in one arm. “Move out.” She barked. “Now’s not the time for giving each other hand-jobs.”

Porter made a rude gesture behind her back and almost laughed when Cito copied him.

The hallway beyond was much shorter, leading downstairs into a larger lab that was ankle deep with murky, filthy-smelling water. Porter wrinkled his nose into a snarl, reluctantly stepping down into it. He’d taken no more than three steps when his socks began squelching uncomfortably. “Fuckin’ great,” he muttered violently.

The downstairs lab was lit, albeit dimly. Cito was standing in a corner, facing a wall, picking his nose absentmindedly. Croft was leaning around a corner, and Porter slushed forwards to peer over her shoulder. She held up her hand in a vaguely militant gesture that he assumed meant ‘stop’ or ‘halt’ or something, then her fingers flicked forwards in a shotgun shape. “Eleven o’clock,” she whispered.

“What?” he asked.

“Eleven o’clock?” she hissed again. “North-north west of our current position?”

“Huh?”

“Over there!” she grabbed at his jaw with her fingers and angled his face. His eye strained to see in the lack of light, until he caught a slight movement.

The gatorclaw was three times bigger than the others, and its scaly skin was so white it seemed to give off a light of its own when you stared at it for long enough. Its massive head moved as it sniffed the air and its eyes were bright, pink-red, and hungry.

Porter gulped. “Got another nuke?”

“Only frags, and a couple of plasma grenades.”

“How do you wanna play this?”

“Shit,” Croft swore softly. Porter’s eye flicked back away from her face and into the lab. A second, slightly smaller gatorclaw was sniffing under the albino’s tail suggestively. “Is it too late to walk away? Level the park?”

“I’m not entirely sure these things would die if we tried,” he replied.

“Monsters!” Cito joined the conversation abruptly.

“Cito, NO!” Croft yelled, as he sprinted into the lab, wielding his club like a maniac. Which, Porter supposed, he was. With the ‘claws distracted, Croft did something on her pip-boy and aimed her sniper rifle. A green flash washed over the scene and the smaller beast was reduced to a green puddle of goop, floating on the water.

Cito had climbed up onto the back of the thrashing albino gatorclaw and was beating its skull with his club. Porter emptied his magazine into its belly and reloaded while Croft covered him. The thing thrashed, rearing up on its hind legs and roaring viciously. Cito saw his opportunity and stuffed his whole fist down its maw and thrust off his feet.

The gatorclaw hissed menacingly and advanced, not deterred by the grenade in the slightest.

“He didn’t pull the pin, he didn’t pull the pin!” Croft realised aloud and Porter’s stomach dropped into his boots. Cito scrambled towards them as they fired shot after shot. Croft was screaming wordlessly. Porter didn’t know if he was laughing or crying, and then he caught a glimpse of something shiny and silver on Cito’s finger.

He’d pulled the pin.

Porter shoulder-barged Croft and she went tumbling into the sewage. His ankle twisted and he went down after her, landing face down in the muck. He heard the explosion, but he didn’t see it. He felt Croft’s hand on his face, and then gripping the welded chains around his chest. Someone yanked him out of the water and his legs dangled. He felt weightless, despite being waterlogged.

Croft was coughing violently. His eye adjusted to the light in time to see her throw up on Cito’s lap. The big guy didn’t seem offended, only smacked her on the back until she buckled over and nearly fell back into the water. Porter offered her a hand up.

“You good?” he asked, not feeling so hot-shit himself.

She retched some more. “Peachy.” She staggered over to one of the terminals. “Now which one of these fucking terminals turns this damned bitch off?”

~

“…whoever you hand it off to will appreciate it, but the others might get a little jealous. You know how it goes.”

“Are you fucking serious? You want me to plant a fucking flag?” Croft’s eyes filled with disbelief. Porter raised an eyebrow and held out the offending bits of fabric for her to choose. She scoffed, and tossed her hands in the air, but picked one and then stretched herself out beside the flagpole, watching the sun set over Safari Park.

Porter shook the flag out and hooked it up to the pulley mechanism. The thing was dusty and rusted and tough to get going, and the muscles in his arms and shoulders strained at first as he hoisted it. But he got it there, and it picked up in the breeze and began to flutter and unfurl, and then he sat down beside her with a grunt. It was a good start, he thought. It was more work than Cassius had ever put into the fucking place.

“So what now, Gage?” she asked

Overboss Croft had given Safari World to The Pack. Soon, they’d start to wake up and go about their business, and if they couldn’t see the flag from Nuka-Town then Russell would give it away on the radio. Nisha and Mags’d be pissed, but Porter figured it wouldn’t matter much. They’d all get a piece of the pie, one way or another. Assuming Croft didn’t get stabbed in the back, or the eye. And of course, he was there to make sure that didn’t happen.

He had a feeling Nuka-World had plenty more fluffy daydreams in its dark corners, but for now, he was content to sit next to her on the roof and catch his breath.

Chapter Text

Porter had spent enough time with Overboss Croft to realise that she wasn’t just particularly good at killing things. She relished the hunt, the plotting, the take-down. Whether it was leaving a trail of mines behind her or aiming a gun between someone – or something’s – eyes, she got off on it. Maybe if he wasn’t a raider, it would have made him uncomfortable, or even sick, but the truth was, he was starting to enjoy it. Watching her. Hunting with her. Bringing down whatever stood in their way.

He did notice, though, as they followed the slimy bloodworm trail into Dry Rock Gulch, that she harboured a particular brand of malice for the robots. He’d expected the gaping hole she’d blown in ‘Sheriff Eagle’ to be the end of it, and then as they’d walked past the sorry-looking thing, Croft had leaned over and spat on it. With the key to the Mad Mulligan’s in hand, they’d split up to take care of the rest of the walking tin soldiers.

From behind the counter of ‘Doc Phosphate’s Saloon’, he could see her through the window, and hear her grunting violently as she kicked one out of her way. He felt the corner of his mouth twist upwards. She’d taken one of the cowboy hats from the gift shop and in her black leathers with her pistol on her belt, she cut a fine-lookin’ figure for what his old lady would have called ‘one of the bad guys’ from one of those pre-War western flicks.

She froze, as if she could feel his eye on her and swivelled to look up the street for him. He swept the caps from the broken till into his pack and swaggered out into the beating sun. He could almost hear the spurs clicking as he walked.

“How’s it go?” he called out to her. “This town ain’t big enough for you and me... aw, nevermind.”

“It ain’t me whose gonna leave.” She replied, deadpan, finger twitching on her shotgun.

Porter did a double-take. “That so?”

“I can finish a job, unlike some.”

Her little jab was meant to sting, he knew, but he refused to let her ruffle his feathers. “Glad to hear it,” he answered instead, grin broadening as she scowled. He looked up at the old coaster, his eye sliding from the faded sign down to the rickety wooden railings that corralled people as they’d queued up. Croft swung her legs over the low wall easily, but her pistol holster caught on an errant splinter and she toppled, face first into the fence in front.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” she swore.

Porter took the less graceful route, catching up quickly. “You good?” he asked, some genuine concern in it. Croft looked up. Her face and hands were covered in blood. “Ah, shit.” He knelt down beside her, going through her pack for medical supplies.

“There’s a clean shirt in there,” she told him, her voice sounding a little far away.

He grunted. “I don’t care what you’re wearin’.”

“I can use it to staunch the bleeding.” Gently, he peeled her hand away from her face. It was calloused and sweaty, but her fingers curled reflexively around his. She swayed. “Is it broken?”

He squinted. This close, her eyes were very green and clear, and he tried not to notice that her hair smelled… nice. He tried to focus on her nose instead. Her very straight nose, that definitely did not have wiry hairs poking out of it or – “Don’t think so.” He shook his head and handed her the shirt.

She drenched it with half a can of water and held it to her face, letting him drink the rest. The blood she managed to wipe away was only replenished by her flooding nose, and he watched her face as she started to go very white. “I think we oughtta get inside,” he told her. “Can’t believe those suckers used to stand in line and wait for this crap.”

He hauled her to her feet and half walked, half-dragged her inside, fumbling with the key at the door. Inside was musty and crawling with disgusting fat worms. The closest one he managed to stomp on, keeping Croft at his back while he blew holes in most of the rest of them, though a couple managed to wriggle out of range.

“I could’ve gottem,” muttered the Overboss, sinking down onto a corner bench.

“Sure,” Porter sneered. “Need a stim for that concussion?”

“Fuck off.” She snarled back, closing her eyes.

He took a deep breath. He was getting real sick of her snark. “You hate me.”

Croft shrugged. “Probably. If I thought about it.”

“That whole thing. With Colter. I know we talked about it some but, it could be a sore spot between us, yeah?” she didn’t answer, and he hoped she hadn’t passed out. “I mean, here I went and turned on the Overboss. Who's to say I wouldn't do it again?”

One green eye flickered open. “Crossed my mind.” She muttered; and closed it again.

Porter sat down next to her, watching the rise and fall of her chest closely. “I deserve that. Look, Colter was a piece of shit. I've been real clear about that with you.” He paused, wondering where he was going. “Really, though, I guess that was all on me. I'm the one who talked him into bein’ the Overboss in the first place.”

“Are you ‘bout to tell me you shoved a hand up his ass and turned him into a human puppet? ‘Cause I don't wanna hear it, Gage. You raiders… ya’ll are a bunch of sick fucks.”

For a moment, he was completely lost in the image of his hand up Cassius’ ass. Of what that would feel like. A shudder ripped down his spine. “I… Well… fuck me. Woman, you have one hell of an imagination.”

Croft snorted. “Bless your heart.”

“What? Don’t – anyway. I thought Colter was what this operation needed. Big, strong, didn't take shit from nobody. I thought, I thought to myself, the gangs would fear and respect him, and he'd listen to me. I'd use all my years of experience to help him run things. But he was stubborn, and he let shit go to his head. Ain't the first time I've seen it, honestly. One of the worst, though.”

“If you think for one second that I am gonna let you use me, or manipulate me to do whatever suits you, you got another fucking thing comin’, Porter. Not you, not anybody else in the fucking wasteland. Not again.” Croft groaned softly as she sat up. Her face and nose were caked with blood, but it had finally stopped bleeding.

It hit him, then. Croft wasn’t bored, or out for caps, or cruising for shit to do. She was angry at something. Or someone. Maybe everything. He stared her down, unblinking, unsure what to do with that information. “No, I know... or… shit, Croft. That's what I'm trying to say. You… you ain't like Cassius. You ain't like the other Raiders I've run with.”

She coughed, or maybe it was some kind of barking laugh, he couldn’t tell. “I ain’t a raider. I’m the Brotherhood -”

Porter cut her off. “All that tech don't mean shit. Brotherhood's out for themselves, just like everyone else. I am trying to tell you, so far, you make a pretty damn good Overboss, and it's been fun running with you. I don’t think you trust me, and I know you don’t like me, and I get it. I put a target on your back, here, even though I am in just as much shit as you if we… if you can’t pull this off.” He took another deep breath. “I'm starting to be glad we teamed up, is all. Fuck it. You know what I'm getting at. Let's get going.”

He heard Croft inject herself with a stimpack as he tried the big double doors on the other side of the room, but they wouldn’t budge. “Chained on the other side,” he told her gruffly, rattling them.

Deflated, she slouched up the stairs, following the coaster queue into the tunnel moodily. There was a shack and a waterfall with running water that didn’t look contaminated, but the dead brahmin lying in it said otherwise. It wriggled, and he stepped up to it, a sick feeling rising in his gut. He poked the carcass with the butt of his gun and immediately regretted it. Larval bloodworms burst out of it. He stomped on a few of the squirming buggers while the Overboss crushed them with the butt of her shotgun, sparing a few rounds for the bigger ones. Porter shared a look with her. He did not like the odds on what they were going to find up ahead.

There was a small service closet behind the shack, and Croft wasn’t too foggy in the head to pick the lock on the door. “Want that?” she asked, him, pointing at a missile launcher.

“What the fuck were these pre-War folks doin’ with that in here?” he demanded, incredulously. “This place was for children!”

Nevertheless, he holstered his gun and hefted the bazooka, feeling the heavy weight on his shoulders. It felt good.

Croft let him go in front after that. Porter was beginning to worry he’d said too much, before. She was either planning to off him, or to bail, and he had no idea what he was going to do in either scenario. He wouldn’t go down without a fight, but if she pissed off without him noticing, somehow, that was going to be a problem.

He was so deep in thought he almost fell into the pit. Instead, he teetered on the edge as Croft pulled him back by the welded rebars on his armour. 

He nearly threw up. The gatorclaws had been one thing, but the sight of the pit full of worms, crawling and making that weird screeching noise turned his bile. And the one in the middle, some sort of queen, was fucking massive, with spines all along it, feeding on rotted brahmin that had been there for God knew how long. Something hissed and constricted around his ankle and he gulped, looking down.

Croft, extremely slowly, handed him a missile. Equally carefully, and moving as little as possible, Porter slid it into the barrel and carefully aimed down into the middle. There was no scope. All he could do was close his eye and fire.

The explosion was loud, leaving his ears ringing and rattling the walls, dirt and dust raining down on the pair of them. The screeching grew louder as several angry larvae began swarming them. Porter couldn’t hear his or Croft’s guns firing, but he saw the blood spatters and replaced his magazine with excited vitriol.

“D’ya think they’re all dead?” she asked finally, voice thick like her tongue had swollen two sizes in her mouth and spat a glob of dark red into the pit.

He squinted. “I can’t see no more wrigglers.”

“That was the most disgusting thing I have ever seen.”

“Yep.” He agreed. “You’n me both.”

They limped through the gift shop, Croft’s gifted fingers working the safe until it spilled its treasures, while Porter rolled up the lengths of chain barring the door and hefted them over his shoulder. If he couldn’t find a use for them, probably Fritsch or Shank would.

In the amphitheatre, Croft shook out on the flags and helped him pin it to the hoist. He squinted up into the sunlight as it rose, swallowing hard. Four black knives intersected with the crimson switchblade, the mark of the Disciples, began to pick up in the hot, stiff wasteland breeze.

He glanced quickly at Croft, but her face was blank, maybe even peaceful, considering how much dried blood and viscera was spattered all over it. She didn’t look too concerned, and Porter wished he had her confidence. Reluctantly, he followed her back across the park, keeping his eye peeled for any sign of danger.

The fountain was mostly empty. The afternoon sun blazed in the sky, scorching the earth and drying the putrid water until all that was left was the slightly soggy mould that clung to the concrete. Most of the raiders would be inside or in the shade, sleeping off the heat in psycho- and/or ethanol-induced comas.

“Y’all alive back there?” Croft called over her shoulder. She’d nearly reached the lift.

Porter opened his mouth to tell her to wait when a long shadow caught his eye and followed it up the dirty camel trench coat to the devil’s face that belonged to Shank.

“I’ll catch up.” He said instead, pausing to stare at her ass as it disappeared up into the Grille.

“We’ve run together a long time, Gage.” Shank announced himself in his unmistakeable baritone, as smooth as a top-shelf Kentucky whiskey. “Croft is something else. But you ain’t never run with a woman before.”

The old raider shrugged. “If she were just any woman, she’d be dead already.”

They walked together, slowly, aimlessly. Shank’s hands were buried deep in his pockets while Porter’s swung loosely at his side. He felt drunk. Maybe he was dehydrated.

“What did she have to say about all our grand plans?” he wanted to know. Porter lit a cigarette, the only sound coming from the flick of his lighter. “You ain’t told her, have you?” Shank’s lips twisted. “You God-damned son-of-a-bitch.”

“I need more time, Shank.” Porter warned, exhaling smoke. “She needs to clean up the rest of the parks. Mags‘n Willam’ve already got my number, and The Operators won’t fall in line if they think they’re bein’ left out of the dividends, you know?”

“We’ve waited a long time for an opportunity like this. Overboss Croft has her head in the game, she’s the ticket to the big time. Imagine if that old nutjob Caesar had the Courier on his side. Raiders could’ve had Vegas, Gage, but Caesar balls were too big for his -”

“Don’t gimme that shit -”

“I’m tellin’ you, Croft is our Courier. We could have all of fuckin’ Boston eating out of our hands if we play our cards right.”

“Settle down, big guy. Courier’s some bimbo the old ladies make up for the kids, you know? Keep ‘em from runnin’ off the fuckin’ Powder Gangers or the Gunners.” Porter sneered. “We don’t need stupid names or bedtime stories. We got guns, and we got people, we just gotta lead ‘em right. Let’s clean this place up, eh? The Commonwealth’ll still be there tomorrow.”

Shank’s eyes were black and hollow. “You better be right, Gage. Time’s a wastin’.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he muttered, flipping his back the bird as he stalked off towards the Cola Cars. Porter turned on his heel and marched back to the Grille. Fuckin’ Shank, he thought viciously. Caesar’s Legion. Courier Six. Fuckin’ joke.

If he hadn’t been so angry, he might’ve noticed the two scavvers sneak up behind him and throw a sack over his head. He probably wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it, but he might’ve been able to make some noise before Lizzie Wyath stuffed a filthy ball-gag down his throat and buckled it to his scalp.

Instead, his thoughts turned to murder, pure and simple, as the Operators dragged him across the burning ground towards The Parlour, deliberately choosing the roughest terrain. Lizzie was giggling sadistically, and William was panting with effort – he wasn’t doing too well in the heat. It was probably all the Jet.

Several hands hauled him to his feet and tied him to what felt like a whipping post but was probably much worse.

“Hello, Gage.” Mag’s venomous voice hissed in his ear. He felt cold barrel of a gun and heard the click of a trigger somewhere behind his ear. She unclipped the ball-gag and he heard it thud gently on the ground close to his feet.

“What can I do for you, Mags?” he asked drily. It was useless, when she could probably hear how loud his heart was hammering in his chest, but Porter had been born an asshole, and he was going to die like one, if it killed him.

“Do you know how many guns I have, pointed right at your heart?” she asked him, sounding almost sweet.

He chuckled, he couldn’t help himself. “That’s the last thing that’ll kill me.”

Mags ripped off the sack, nails digging into his forehead. “What are you playing at, Gage?” she snapped. Behind her, a flash of green darted across the room and there was a wet wailing scream as someone became a puddle of plasma.

“Oh, Mags.” Croft stepped into the light. “I wish you hadn’t done that.” She waved her rifle in Porter’s direction, nose turning up in disgust.

“Overboss Croft.” The raider leader’s voice was as sharp as a blade, cutting and cold. “How nice of you to join us.”

“It was, wasn’t it?” Croft circled her, boots thudding on the floorboards. “I just feel terrible, you know, because I came down here for a friendly chat, and instead I find you’ve hog-tied my 2IC and clearly intended to damage him some. Without so much as my explicit consent.”

“I thought we understood each other,” Mags sulked, and Porter began to wonder how hard William had bashed him in the head. “And yet, my brother looks out across Nuka-World this afternoon to see two flags flying in the distance. Safari Adventure belongs to The Pack, and don’t get me wrong, you were right to put the animals in a fucking zoo. But then you let The Disciples move into Dry Rock Canyon. Where do The Operators go, Croft? Where’s our piece?”

Croft flashed her white teeth, clapping Mags on the shoulder, and Porter smiled grimly as the raider boss flinched. “Don’t you know the best is always saved for last, Maggie?”

Mags’ eyes flashed with fury, she loathed being called Maggie. Her lips almost disappeared into her mouth as it dissolved into a thin, straight line.

“Cut him down,” Croft ordered William, and he looked stupidly at his sister. Croft’s eyes flashed a warning at Mags.

“Cut him down, you God-damned jackass!” she snapped, and William obeyed.

Porter rubbed at the chafing on his wrists.

“Do you know what happens in a bottling plant, Maggie?” Croft asked.

She shrugged sullenly. “That disgusting swill gets crammed into bottles?”

“It sure does. And then the bottles roll down the production line, where another machine stamps the lids on top. Bill, what do they call the lids on Nuka-Cola bottles?”

“Uhh -”

“No? Too hard for you? Elizabeth?”

“Caps.” Lizzie answered, in her dry rasp.

“The Operators get the bottling plant.” Mags answered Croft’s riddle, deadpan.

“Touch anything that belongs to me or mine again, Mags, and I will level The Parlour faster than William can swallow a plasma cartridge. Are we clear?”

You could have lit a match with the flint in the silence before Mags answered.

She gave her brother the once over, as if deciding how long it would take him to dissolve into green goop like the last guy Croft had shot. “Crystal.”

The Overboss turned on her heel and marched out of the Parlour without another word. Porter knew enough about his lucky stars to walk out behind her.

~

Porter glared moodily out over the balcony, flicking his flip lighter and sucking up his twentieth cigarette. The moon, tinted orange by the air pollution, hung ominously full over everything, simultaneously illuminating and casting Nuka-Town in shadow. He could hear a few of the Disciples still up, laughing and splashing in the fountain.

“Gage.”

He leapt out of his skin, both hands on his gun, breathing heavily. “What the fuck, woman?” he yelped at Croft. He hadn’t heard her sneak up on him.

A wry smile was twisted across her lips, and he nearly started. He was already used to her face just looking miserable all the time. He thought he preferred it. “Get some sleep.”

Unsteadily, he eyeballed the view of the park again.

Croft’s hair tumbled into her eyes as she shook her head making her look softer. “You’re no good to me overtired, Porter. Go to bed.”

She’d washed away the blood and the sweat and the gore; and had on an oversized shirt that Porter recognised vaguely as being worn at some point by Cassius until it had become too filthy even for him. He wondered who’d washed it, and when. She stretched and he caught a glimpse of the delicate-looking fabric covering her ass. Lace, he’d heard someone call it once. She settled herself on her bed and lay there, one knee arched gracefully, watching him.

“I ain’t gettin’ undressed, if that’s what you’re thinking.” He sneered, feeling suddenly defensive.

Croft shrugged. “Do what you want. Just go to bed.”

He raised the cigarette to his lips and took a long drag, ash sprinkling over his boot. It was an improvement, he decided, on having her sit there all night with a shotgun pointed at his chest. Still, he could hear the raiders in the fountain, laughing. If Mags decided to come back for him… Croft would probably sort her right out. He trusted her, he realised with a start. The odds weren’t good she trusted him back, though.  

And yet, the steady rise and fall of her chest told him she was asleep, and he inched towards her. Grognak – Cito - was right. She was pretty. It was damn unnerving to realise that he’d placed all his bets on this woman. If Croft fucked him over, he was screwed. Hell, he was probably screwed even if she didn’t. How many times could he count on a woman like her to save his ass, anyway?

He didn’t like the variables. Why, in God’s name did she have to be the one to walk into his park?

Chapter Text

“Who the fuck would want that?”

Porter brought his boot down on the last of the mirelurk eggs (in this nest, at least) and glanced over at Croft, standing in front of a dusty window. Her hair was glowing as blue as the river of Nuka-Cola Quantum they’d been ankle-deep in for the last four hours, making her look eerily hazy. Like a vision from a dream. If she hadn’t been drumming her fingers on her rifle impatiently, he wouldn’t have believed she was real.

But she was, and he traipsed through the sickly blue syrup to check out whatever she was staring at. He guffawed loudly when he saw it. A full suit of T-51 power armor, decked out from helmet-to-boot in Nuka Cola advertisements.

“They’d see you comin’ from a mile aways,” he snickered. “Look out, it’s Overboss Croft and her Nuka World raiders! Run!”

Croft twitched her finger warningly on the trigger, but her lips turned slightly up at the corners.

Porter’s laughter died, and he swallowed. He still wasn’t used to it, the way she smiled. She’d been doing it since she’d dragged the Operators off his ass, about a week ago. When he’d finally run out of cancer sticks and fallen asleep in his armchair, he’d woken to the smell of potted meat and instamash and a plate set aside at her favourite diner booth for him.

“I think I preferred you shootin’ at me,” he’d told her darkly. “That’s a game a man knows how to play.”

“Worried I’ll poison you, Gage?” she’d asked, smiling up at him, her teeth visibly white.

He stabbed at the food with his fork. “I ain’t ruled it out yet.”

Then she’d gone about her business while he rigged up some Operator-shaped traps. If William or Lizzie came lurking around Fizztop Mountain while Croft was out, he'd be ready. Thankfully, they weren’t stupid enough to get close to Disciple territory. He supposed that was one advantage Nisha's stank provided him with.

Porter did a quick perimeter patrol while the Overboss fiddled with the computers, trying to get into the plant laboratory at the back of the facility. When he returned, the doors were swung wide open, and he could hear Croft’s boot stomping on the gangway as she descended.

“Wonder what you’d look like after taking a dip in that shit,” he observed, joining her beside the huge vats of Quantum, still waiting to be bottled, two centuries after Armageddon.

“I’ll give you ten caps if you drink it,” she offered.

Porter blinked. “You can keep your caps, boss,” he drawled. “Bet Red-Eye’d do it, though.”

There were a few more mirelurks in the lab, and their disgusting spawn. Croft tossed a grenade into the biggest nest, wincing as she wiped spattered egg goop off her cheek. They came across an important looking door, only to find the access consoles were powered down.

“It’s the mains power,” Porter explained. “Once the side-shows are up and running we’ll have to make a trip out to the local power station and get it all back online. Well, that’s Phase 2, anyway. Colter never even made it close to that far.”

“Phase 2, huh?” Croft cocked her head to the side. “Just how many phases are there to your little plan here, Porter?”

“Oh, a couple. They ain’t important until we get Nuka World set up, though.” He hedged, and changed the subject. “Where do you think the queen is?”

“Queens are big, ugly, and easy to kill. I’m more worried about the kings.”

“The what?”

Croft raised her eyebrow at him. “You know, no shell, sonic attack, mind-controls other 'lurks?”

“I… I mean I’ve heard of 'em.”

“Much harder to kill. Keep an eye out.”

Porter began muttering obscenities under his breath as Croft pushed open one of the back doors, the sudden sunlight making her sneeze uncontrollably.

“There’s the queen,” she announced, sniffling, pointing at a reasonably-sized body of water outside the plant. The air had a wet, stagnant smell, like that time the Disciples had left a corpse floating in the fountain.

‘How can you tell?” Porter asked dubiously.

Croft thumbed a grenade in her glove, eyeballing the distance between them and the reservoir. Porter snatched her arm.

“How about we don’t do that?” he snapped, and she grinned again. He felt his heart palpate violently and he wished she wouldn’t. He didn’t have time to complain, though, because a screech echoed below them that turned his thoughts to radio static.

“We’ve been spotted!” Croft turned and pulled him back through the factory door, as something wet and red streaked past.

More screeching echoed above them, along with what sounded like a violent dog fight, from about fifty dogs. Or maybe just two extremely large ones. Cautiously, they crept back out on the balcony to watch the two mirelurk kings fighting to the death. Several lesser mirelurks scuttled around them, claws waving threateningly, sometimes changing sides.

When finally the bigger king had wrested its claws into the smaller one’s maw and torn it in half, it stood on two legs, shrieking. You could almost see the air quiver as the sonar blasted across the plant. Tiny waves rippled across the surface of the reservoir and a black sinkhole of water appeared somewhere close to the middle.

The remaining king leapt from the tower to the water tank and began walking upside-down the wall, picking up speed as the queen emerged from the rancid water.

“Show time,” Croft announced, dumping the green canvas bag she’d had on her back all day, and unzipping it to reveal a rusty Fat Man.

“Holy shit,” Porter whispered, half to himself, dragging his nails down his cheeks. “And me without my hazmat suit.”

The Overboss balanced the barrel of the Fat Man on the broken window, remnant shards of glass tinkling as they hit the ground. "You won't need it." She adjusted the position, checking the alignment on her PipBoy, and carefully loaded the nuke into the launcher. “I hope you brought sunglasses,” she told him conversationally.

Irritably, he moved his eyepatch from from his right eye to his left, squinting his eye shut for good measure. The creak of the nuke being squeezed out of the barrel was barely audible over the mating cries of the ‘lurks in the reservoir, but he still felt the hot flash on his face and heard the sounds of death washing over the plant.

He hit the ground, bullets whizzing over his head, crawling back towards the Khans. Danny Death-Hand’s head was twisted the wrong way around, blood leaking from his eyes and his ears and something had gone wrong, very wrong, and where had Cotton-Mouth and Plissken gone, anyway? Kaa had been standing behind him, and his corpse was riddled with bullets now, too. A missile landed maybe five feet on his left, and he roared in agony as the shrapnel embedded in his arm and thigh.

Was it a coincidence? Porter didn’t believe in coincidences. He crawled on his belly towards the Khan camp. The bonfire was now a raging blaze, illuminating everything. There were raiders everywhere, Khans, Vipers, Gunners, Jackals – in the violence it was hard to tell who belonged to who.  

“Well look at that, the little bitch survived.”

Porter swiveled on his heel, head following the sound of rough, raucous laughter.

“Connor?”

Someone’s hand closed around his throat and lifted him off his feet. “I told ya, kid. That ain’t my name no more.”

“Right,” he panted. “Harvester.”

“You done good, kid,” Connor crowed, his cronies still laughing and cheering. “All this is thanks to you. But you done did the one thing a raider ain’t never s’posed to do.”

“Oh yeah?” Porter choked. “Wassat?”

Connor grinned, showing his green teeth as a couple of the bigger guys peeled his hands off Connor;s forearms, holding him down.

“You done outlived your usefulness, kid.”

“But -”

His voice disappeared with his thoughts and his consciousness as Connor ‘The Harvester’ Gomer plunged a knife into his eye. Porter didn’t even stay awake long enough to feel the pain.

He felt it when he woke up, though. Connor’s gang had razed the Khan outpost to the dirt and left him for dead. There was nothing left for miles but smoke and ruin.

There was plenty left, though, after Croft set off her mini-nuke. The reservoir boiled and evaporated, leaving a slimy sludgey sinkhole of broken eggs and dead ‘lurks, but the rest of the park was still there. She was whooping, fists balled and raised in the air, insanity gleaming in her radioactive green eyes.

Shaking his head, Porter held out his hand, and helped her to her feet, packing away the Fat Man as her boots clunked across the floor in every direction.

“Fuck that feels good,” she announced, to no one in particular. They walked up the radio tower, side by side, an Operator flag slung over Croft’s shoulder, ready to be hoisted.

She popped the cap on a warm bottle of Quantum, grimacing as she bolted it down. “That is disgusting.” She affirmed, tossing the bottle over the railing and pocketing the cap.

Porter shrugged. “You went and drank it.”

“You wanna try?” she poked him with her index finger, ducking as he turned to scowl at her.

“You could’ve brought the whole damn park down with your fuckin’ nuke!” he snapped. “Or the plant. Then what would you say to fucking Mags, huh?”

Croft smiled sympathetically. “Don’t worry. I won’t let her kidnap you again, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“You won’t let her -” he gaped incredulously. “What the fuck is your problem?”

“The fuck is yours? One minute, you’re all, yes boss, no boss, let me kiss your ass, boss, and the next, you’re…” she waved her hands in his face. “What do you want from me?”

“A little god-damned rationality!” he roared.

“How many mirelurk queens have you killed, Porter?” she sneered. “How many?”

“I -”

“That one was mine, don’t you dare count it.”

He closed his mouth and glared down at her.

“For me, that makes nine.” She told him smugly. “Nuke’s the best way to fuck ‘em up, every time.”

“Well, ‘scuse me, I didn’t realise the Overboss was the fuckin’ queen of killin’ queens!” Porter growled back. Nine mirelurk queens? He’d only seen two, maybe three in his entire fucking life. Croft was a magnet for danger. Or more of a danger-seeking missile, he realised.

~

“Hey, hey - got an update for you louses out there. You know how the bottling plant has been chock-full of Nuka-lurks for as long as we've been here? Like, I personally know at least three jackasses who got themselves killed trying to loot the place. Anyway, that ain't a problem no more!”

Russell wiggled his eyebrows over the mic at Croft as though guaranteeing she’d be seduced by his ass-kissing. To her credit, she remained as unperturbed as if she hadn’t noticed, staring off into space.

“Our new Overboss has added a notch to her belt and added the Plant to the list of places she's conquered for us. At the Overboss' orders, The Operators are now running the show out there. If you're on good terms with 'em, maybe they'll share some caps with you. If you're not on good terms, well... your loss, man!”

The recording light blinked from red to green, and Red-Eye stepped out of the sound booth, shaking his head. “But really, boss, that was fucking incredible. I thought Colter was the man, you know? And now you’re here, and kickin’ ass like Colter ain’t shit. And he wasn’t, compared to you, anyway. But, like -”

“If that’s all, Russell, I’d really like to hit the sack. You know I’m grateful for your work, really, but y’know. I’ve been out there killing mirelurks all day.”

“Yeah? Yeah! Sure, I…”

Porter let Red-Eye’s voice fade into background noise as he left the studio with Croft, raiders visibly moving out of the way as they slouched across the marketplace.

“Another one bites the dust.” Shank commented from behind him, making him jump.

“And how about not counting our mirelurks before they’ve hatched?” Porter hissed, grabbing the bigger man by the shoulder, and dragging him out of earshot, pretending to check out the dynamite and laser pistols on display at the weapons stand. “Two more parks, alright? We’re getting close. Don’t screw this up now.”

Shank watched Croft from the shadows. She was locked in an intense conversation with one of the scavver slaves.

“What do you think they’re talking about?” Shank asked.

Porter shrugged. “Who cares?”

“She could be in cahoots with them. Plotting to free them all.”

Porter’s eye snapped back to Shank’s face, his expression as dark as his skin. “What makes you say that?”

“We still know next to nothing about her.”

“You’re the one that’s so eager to drag her out into the Commonwealth and see what she’s got,” the 2IC sneered.

“Better to know now, rather than later.” Shank answered soberly.

Croft’s hand cracked across the slave girl’s face. “Get back in line!” she barked, and then turned to others, ogling them all. “The wasteland doesn’t owe any of you shit.” Croft announced. “I don’t owe any of you shit. You got a problem? Take a number.” Scowling, she marched out of the marketplace in the direction of Fizztop.

Shank’s chest rumbled with deep laughter. “Oh, I got her good.”

The slave girl was staring in Shank’s direction, one cheek redder than the other. “You paid her to ask Croft for a mutiny.” Porter guessed, deadpan.

Shank wiped a tear from his eye. “I didn’t pay her shit. Just told her she wouldn’t get her regular ration unless she did me a favour. Overboss Croft,” he grinned, shaking his head at the sky. “You’re doin’ God’s work, Gage.”

Porter rolled his eye. “Spare me the gospel.”

~

Back at the Grille, Porter collapsed heavily on the dilapidated couch. Croft was sat down on the edge of her desk, already beginning to strip her guns into their component parts.

Porter closed his eye, but even without looking he could see her long, slender fingers, working the metal with practiced precision. Russell might be willing to die to stick his nose between her breasts, and he’d caught more than a few of the men, himself included, and even some of the women too, mesmerised by her ass as she strutted around the park like the queen of all shit. But it was her hands he liked the most, he realised. Those nimble white digits seemed to take on a life of their own, gently picking apart traps or coaxing open some lock; Croft was very, very good with her hands and Porter appreciated that about them.

How she kept them so clean was a mystery. He couldn’t remember what colour his fingernails were supposed to be; if they hadn’t been born black and brown. He’d been smoking far to long to wash the nicotine stains off his fingers, and he always had some dirt or grease or blood all over them.

He opened his eye. The Overboss was leaning over her work, deep in concentration. Like a shadow, he slipped past into the back of house. In the toilet, he filled the sink with water, ignoring the slow leak from the cracked porcelain. Self-conscious, he locked the door and stripped off. There was a semi-clean shirt hanging on the back of it, and he dumped it in the slightly cloudy but still translucent water, and opened the mirror cabinet for the first time in his life.

Croft had hidden a whole lot of shit in there. Women’s crap. There were some stims, a bottle of vodka, a cup and a toothbrush, a few tiny little coloured bottles of that stuff he’d seen her put on her nails; something called tampons, various drugs, and medical paraphernalia, and of course, a slightly grubby bar of oily-looking soap.

Porter lathered up the shirt and used it to wash his face, not surprised to find his skin slightly red-looking from the wasteland sunburn that just never seemed to go away. He washed his hair last, and the fact that it was still thick and dark, chestnut brown did startle him. He’d expected to be entirely grey and balding by now, like his father. Finally, he took a razor and shaved down the stubble either side of his Mohican. He grinned at his reflection and then scowled; remembering his teeth were still brown and broken. Not for the first time, he wondered how Croft managed to get hers so damn white.

He didn’t have a change of clothes, but he knew there was a clean (if slightly mouldy-smelling) mechanic’s jumpsuit in one of Cassius’ lockers that’d do while he aired out his own gear. He’d have to be discreet about it, of course, he didn’t want the Disciples thinking he was suddenly domestic. He strolled out of the toilet, whistling and naked as the day he was born, only to realise Croft was sitting on the kitchen table, legs crossed. Porter stopped dead in his tracks, a wave of heat flooding his face. Had she set off another mini-nuke?

Her expression didn’t change as her big green blinkers lowered from his head to his crotch and back up. Scarlet, he glared back at her defiantly, flexing his shoulders. Whatever sarcastic quip he’d stored up for precisely this scenario was long forgotten.

“Are you done in there?” Croft finally asked him mildly.

Porter found his voice. “Yes, ma’am.”  He resumed his whistling and marched over to the locker, praying to whatever sad excuse for a deity might exist that it wasn’t locked. Without looking over his shoulder, he stepped into it and zipped it up. Croft held out a pair of socks that were almost still white, and he squinted his eye at her, unable to tell if she was smirking at him or not. 

Chapter Text

“You’re drooling.”

“Huh – what?” Porter slurped, startled awake, and nearly toppled out of his armchair.

“Don’t you have a bed in the back? You should sleep on it.” Croft commented, thumbing a grenade from hand-to-hand.

He eyeballed her suspiciously. She was sitting cross legged on the floor, various footlockers and suitcases scattered around her bed. It looked like she was packing.

“Goin’ somewhere, boss?” he drawled, trying not to draw attention to the rope of saliva he was wiping off his chin.

Croft didn’t bother to look up. “I’m heading out for a week or so. I’ll be able to restock ammo and explosives on the Prydwen.”

Porter shrugged. “The what now?”

“The Prydwen,” she explained patiently. “Semi-rigid airship, hovering over Boston Airport? Brotherhood of Steel HQ?”

Porter didn’t answer, he knew the one. Without a word, he made himself a cup of coffee and retreated to the balcony for a smoke.

Overboss Croft joined him, and they traded puffs. He smirked, mostly to himself. The idea of sharing a cigarette with Croft no longer made him ill. Waste not, want not, as his father used to say, surprising himself with the thought. He hadn’t thought of his old man in years. Either way, Croft never took more than a few drags, and it wounded him deeply to watch her discard a half-used stick. Better to swap it back and forth than toss it.

“You plannin’ on comin’ back?” he asked, as if the answer was of little consequence.

Croft scoffed lightly, a brief smile lighting her face. “No point leavin’ a job half-assed.”

Half-assed is half the raider way of life, Porter thought darkly, but kept it to himself. “Whatever you say.” He shrugged again. “Boss.”

She walked out in the heat of the day, while most of the scavvers were sleeping off the heat. Porter watched from afar as Croft waded through the long grass, her blonde head ducking between the reeds. He folded his arms across his chest as orange smoke began billowing upwards from her location, and he counted the minutes until the shadow of the vertibird was cast over the valley.

A few brave gunners in the mountain range fired at it, and were shot down immediately by the heavy artillery on board. It didn’t land in the park, like Porter had expected, but hovered a few feet above the grass and Croft climbed aboard from a rope ladder. He watched her lock forearms with whoever was onboard in a fraternal embrace before the machine twisted her out of sight and began to ascend.

“Tribes aren’t gonna like this,” Shank spoke from behind him, startling him, and he turned to see Fritsch as well.

“She’s the Overboss,” Porter replied, with a confidence he didn’t feel. “She does what she wants.”

‘What are we gonna do while she’s gone?” Fritsch asked dubiously.

Porter clapped both men on the shoulders, swinging his whole body between them.

“We,” he announced. “Are going to do a little digging.”

~

They started in her quarters, going through what she’d left in her room. Fritsch cracked the safe. Colter’s old code, 6969, had been reset to 2310.

“Birthday?” Shank asked.

“Dunno,” Porter replied, racking his brain.

“October 23^rd,” Fritsch scoffed. “The day the bombs fell? The apocalypse?”

“Why would that be her safe code?” the 2IC wanted to know.

Fritsch heaved his shoulders. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

Inside, Croft had stashed a few stims, antibiotics, a rabbit’s paw, a sack of caps and an old leather cigar box. Inside the cigar box was a SPECIAL book, the kind you gave to a toddler, and a couple of military dog tags and a holotape.

One was Brotherhood of Steel, belonging to a Paladin Danse, designation DN-407P. The other two, curiously, were pre-War, belonging to Nathaniel Hanlon and Nathan Hanlon respectively. The holotape was in good shape for its age, and Porter pocketed it. Russell would probably have something they could play it back on, and if Croft kept it safe, it might be important.

Other than that, they found a .44 Magnum with a comfort grip stitched inside Croft’s mattress and a recipe for deathclaw wellingham folded and taped to the underside of one of her drawers, with a shiny key tucked inside.

Fritsch sealed the safe back up and Porter tidied everything, trying to make it look untouched, although he couldn’t do much about the slashed mattress.

With no leads bar the holotape, the trio traipsed down to Russell’s dungeon in the Cola Cars Arena, where he cracked open a few lukewarm beers for them while he rooted around in his stash for an old holotape player.

When he finally found it, he needed some help from Fritsch to get it working, and then one of the parts was broken. Shank held Porter back from punching the DJ in the face when he nearly snapped the tape, trying to shove it in the mechanism.

“I’ve got this,” Fritsch announced soothingly. “We’ll drag it over to my workshop and get it working. It shouldn’t take too long.”

Porter hovered outside, chain-smoking.

“I’m going to head up west. One of my eyes has a lead on Vault 111.” Shank told him, in his deep, monotonous voice. “You should come with us. If we take the monorail, we can be there and back before the Overboss comes home.”

“Sure,” Porter snapped irritably, stamping on the butt with his boot. “And what d’you think’ll happen to this place, without someone to keep the gang leaders in line?”

Shank held out his hands placatingly. “Just a suggestion, Gage. No need to get your panties in a twist.”

The mention of panties was enough to make Porter turn scarlet, cheeks flushing as he pictured her face, those green eyes, looking him up and down. Naked. He’d felt more than nude, like she’d skinned him and taken a good, long look at what was underneath, at things she had no right to be seeing.

What had he been thinking, anyway? Cleaning up? Raiders didn’t clean up, unless that meant raking in caps or seizing a rival gang’s weapons store. Then there was the other idea, that he’d been doing it for her, to impress her or something. He didn’t give a fuck what Croft thought of him, so long as she did her job. She could look at him with her big eyes and her pretty face and find him lacking all she wanted. He was damn proud of the work they’d put into Nuka World.

He briefly reconsidered Shank’s offer. He needed leverage, if she ever turned on him. Blackmail was a more admirable pastime for a raider than fucking taking a bath. He cracked his knuckles. He wasn’t done yet.

~

For the most part, the gangs were sated. They each had new territory to explore and colonise. The Operators had a clam chowder night that Porter actually bothered to attend and for once, the food was decent; and they were all full before they ran out.

He went back to sleeping in his own bed, in the Grille kitchen, though he lined the stairs with mines and unplugged the lift from the generator every night, just in case. The dreams came nearly nightly, too. Connor stabbing him in the eye, driving it home, twisting it, the white-hot pain before the black. He was dead, he’d been so sure he was dead.

“True friends stab you in the front, not the back,” he heard his mother saying, standing at the sink, drying the dishes. He heard his father scoff. “True friends don’t stab you at all,” the old man said, and then Porter would wake up, his body coated in a thin layer of sweat, stabbing pain in his eyeball. Or at least, the space where it used to be.

He went to the bathroom, he knew Croft kept stims in there now. He inhaled sharply as the needle punctured his skin, wincing as the cold fluid began drawing up his arm but the dull throbbing behind his eyes began to slow and fade.

He looked at himself closely in the mirror. The skin around his tortured eye was puckered and angry-red, but nearly smooth, as though there’d never been an eye there at all. A large chunk was missing from the middle of his eyebrow, too, and the bony socket felt jagged under his fingertips. It was hideous, made him look feral. Like a mark of Cain, except instead of killing his brother, he’d been betrayed. It was a reminder. Porter Gage would never look out for anyone except himself again.

There was an explosion close by, coming from somewhere downstairs. Porter hastily zipped up his jumpsuit and grabbed his eyepatch, hurrying for the door.

“JESUS FUCKING CHRIST!” he heard Russell screaming. “WHAT THE FUCKING SHIT, MAN? FUCK YOU!”

“I’ll be down in a minute!” Porter yelled, snickering.

“GO FUCK YOURSELF, CUNT!” Red-Eye snapped back.

Porter plugged the lift motor back into the generator and descended, hurrying in through the ground floor doors. A bit of shrapnel had cut Russell on the leg and one of his hands, but other than that he was fine. He refused to get anywhere near the 2IC though, swearing and muttering obscenities under his breath, limping the whole way back to Fritsch’s workshop.

“What happened to you?” he wanted to know, pushing his glasses up his nose and squinting at Russell.

“Fuckin’ paranoid wanker cunt,” he whined, glaring at Porter and shuffling over to the first aid kit, yanking out ribbons of bandage. “Fuckin’ asshole.”

“Gotta deter the scavvers somehow,” Porter replied, deadpan. “Whatcha got there?”

“Ta-da!” Fritsch gave a flourish with his hands, waving at the repaired holotape player. “Should work, anyway. I got those old arcades up and running, and this thing was in better shape to start with.”

Porter hovered awkwardly over it, cautiously inserting the tape. The player clicked and the sound of static reached their ears. After a couple minutes of white noise, Porter scowled.

“A blank holotape?” he hissed.

Fritsch frowned, flipping a screwdriver over in his fingers.

“Fuckin’ dumbasses,” Russell sniffed. “The fucking volume is all the way down.”

Porter breathed a silent sigh of relief while Fritsch reset the tape and turned up the volume dial.

The feedback played again, and Porter swore, but then stopped.

“Oops!” A man’s voice, laughing, and the sound of a child babbling in the background played from the speaker. “Keep those little fingers away – there we go. Just say it, right there, right there, go ahead.” The baby cooed. “Hi honey! Listen, I don't think Shaun and I need to tell you how great of a mother you are; but we're going to anyway. You are kind, and loving, and funny, that's right, and patient. So patient, patience of a saint, as your mother used to say.” The voice sighed wistfully, before beginning again.

“Look, with Shaun and us all being home together it's been an amazing year, but even so I know our best days are yet to come. There’ll be changes, sure! Things we'll need to adjust to. I - I'll rejoin the civilian workforce, and you'll shake the dust off your law degree -” Porter and Fritsch traded looks. “But everything we do, no matter how hard, we do it for our family. Now say goodbye Shaun. Bye-bye, say bye-bye!” There was a tiny sneeze, followed by a chuckle. “Bye honey, we love you.”

White noise played out the end of the tape, and Porter struggled to find words. Fritsch stared at the tape player, his chin resting thoughtfully on his thumb. Russell was sulking, shaking an empty puffer, trying to get another hit of Jet out of it.

“What the fuck was that?” Porter asked, mostly rhetorically. “What does that mean?”

“Maybe Shank will have more answers,” Fritsch replied. “I don’t think its anything. Its too old, and like, law degrees? That’s like, a pre-War thing, man… I don’t know.”

They let the implication hang in the air.

“Could be an heirloom kinda-thing?” Porter scratched his head. “Like, I dunno? An old family… thing?”

“Gage. Fritsch.” Someone was banging on the workshop door.

“Is that Shank?” Porter asked, confused.

It was indeed the big man, standing outside the door with his hat on his hands and a smile on his face, gold tooth winking in the daylight.

“I got something you’ll wanna see,” he told them.

“We got something you’ll want to hear,” Fritsch added. “Maybe you can make sense of it.”

“Never mind that now, let me show you what I found, first.”

“Did you get to vault 111?” Porter asked.

“We did, but we couldn’t get inside. Sealed tight, that one. Then we found something else,”

He led them to the Cola Cars Arena, towards the locker room at the far end.

“Let me out!” someone was screaming, banging on the door. “I’m from the Brotherhood of Steel! You can’t do this to me!”

Porter froze in his tracks. “What are you doing, Shank?” he half-whispered.

“Relax,” Shank replied soothingly. “It’s not what you think.”

He nodded at his men, and they opened the door, seizing the woman inside by the elbows and holding her back.

Her freckled face was white with fear, and her mousy brown hair was bedraggled and half in her eyes.

“Scribe Haylen,” Shank announced pleasantly, by way of introduction. “Tell these gentlemen here everything you told me.”

Chapter Text

Porter crouched, scratching his head. He’d heard enough. “You,” he announced to the scribe, “are out of your fuckin’ mind.”

“It’s true,” Haylen snapped back defiantly. “It’s all true. Every word.”

“And what? You think Croft killin’ her superior officer is going to lose her points around here?” he gestured over his shoulder at Shank and Fritsch. “We’re raiders, in case you hadn’t noticed. Shooting your betters is as tame as it gets.”

“I didn’t come here to warn you,” the girl replied, voice trembling. “I came for payback.”

“She was packing,” Fritsch agreed, tossing a bag on the floor between them. Porter didn’t need to unzip it to see the outline of a rifle. He chuckled. “You thought you could shoot your way through a few hundred raiders and still have enough bullets to try on the Overboss? You really are out of your mind, aren’t you?” The girl’s got balls, he thought, almost admirably. Great, big stupid ones.

Her eyes turned down and she pursed her mouth into a thin line. Porter dusted off his hands and stood up, looking warily at Shank.

The big guy’s teeth were white against the dark of his skin. “Turns out the Overboss has been feeding the Brotherhood of Steel a few little falsehoods about our numbers and our firepower.”

“I – what?” he raised an eyebrow. “Why would she do that?” he asked, only half to himself.

“Because she’s a traitor and a murderer.” Haylen blurted out.

Fritsch sneered. “The grownups are talking, now, kid, so keep it down.” He looked up at Gage. “You gotta admit, it could be true. What about that holotape we found? All the pre-War shit in her room?”

“She had Danse’s holotags, too,” Porter added thoughtfully.

The girl’s head snapped up. “She what?”

The men ignored her. “It’s ridiculous. A fuckin’ fairytale. Are we raiders, or are we little grandmas, having tea parties and knitting blankets?” Porter demanded.

Shank shrugged. “I’m not arguing one way or another, Gage. But you need to talk to Overboss Croft. Seriously. What’s her motivation? What’s really in it for her?”

“I’ve talked to her. She’s come into the arcade a few times. She’s bored, Shank. She’s in it for the thrills.” Fritsch explained. Porter tried not to look like that information was news to him.

The big guy, however, was unconvinced. “I don’t buy it,” he told them darkly, eyes roaming the room and landing on Haylen. “What should we do with her?”

Personally, Porter would have loved nothing more than to snap a slave collar around her sunburned little neck, but he didn’t suggest it out loud. “Leave her here. Let Croft make the call when she comes back.”

“And if she makes the wrong call?” Shank asked.

Porter scowled. “Make it another one of your little tests. In fact, make it the last one. She passes, you shut your damn whiskey-hole and fall in line.”

The big man grinned again. “You got it, number two.”

Alone with the scribe, Porter, seized by inspiration, wheeled around and crouched back down beside her. “What’s her name?” he asked Haylen.

“What?”

“Croft. What’s her real name?”

The girl shrugged sullenly.

“Come on.” Porter rolled his eyes. “You want me to believe Croft and your Paladin Danse were ‘romantically involved’?” he made little quotes with his fingers. “He must’ve called her by her first name.”

Haylen shrugged again. “If he did, I never heard it.”

Porter shook his head. “That’s too bad, kid.” He got up. “Be seein’ you.” He let the door swing shut behind him.

“We could always bring Nisha in to get the truth out of her,” Shank suggested, out of earshot.

“Torture like that don’t work, Shank.” Porter scowled. “Ever heard of a false confession?”

He shrugged his heavy shoulders thoughtfully. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

“There has to be some truth in her story,” Fritsch piped up.

Porter rolled his eyes. “One, Croft’s a vault dweller. Two, Croft’s in the Brotherhood of Steel. Three, she probably killed the paladin. His ID tags were in her safe, so it wouldn’t be a stretch to say they were an item, either.” He looked at his fingers and counted them again just to be safe.

“And the rest?” Shank wanted to know.

“She ain’t two hundred years old. Only gotta look at her to know that. The BoS blowing the Minutemen sky-high, well maybe she had somethin’ to do with that. Croft doesn’t waste her time with scavvers. And as for the Institute, there is no doubt in my mind. You’ve never seen her waste one of them AI-bots.” He snickered, remembering Sheriff Eagle.

The big man took off his hat and smoothed the thinly cropped hair underneath before replacing it. “You ever think your Overboss is too good to be true, Gage?”

“It’s crossed my mind, yeah.” He replied darkly. “But there ain’t much I can do except pray on my lucky stars that she ain’t lying, is there?”

~

Porter packed a bag of his own that night, and sat on the balcony, smoking, waiting for the sun to rise. He slipped like a shadow through Nuka-Town, avoiding the scorching sun, and hiked along the monorail track to the station. It was a little rickety in some places, but the rails themselves were hard steel and if he made long strides, he didn’t have to worry about losing his balance and falling through the floor. He missed having decent depth perception, and cursed Connor’s name, muttering under his breath like a lunatic as he inched across the metal tightropes.

He headed north-east from the station, giving populated areas a wide berth. He was a raider, sure, but a lone raider. It was about a whole day’s hike to Sanctuary, and there it sat, just like Haylen had said. The wooden fence ran most of the way around the settlement, topped with ropes of barbed wire. The heavy turrets guarded the bridge, black and menacing and completely offline, once the guard dogs of a civilisation trying desperately to rebuild, now silent, sad effigies; there to remind people who dared to move on that the wasteland had no mercy left to give.

As he got close enough to read the signs and graffiti plastered all over the walls, he began to notice a common theme.

WHERE IS GENERAL CROFT?

SAVE US, CROFT!

SENTINEL CROFT AGAINST THE INSTITUTE!

Then across the gates, in gleaming white that had dripped as it dried, giving it the ominous appearance of fresh paint:

CROFT BETRAYED US ALL.

“Jesus Christ.” He muttered, pushing the gates open, the hairs on the back his neck raising at the sound of the rusted squeal. To the north, the fields along the river were littered with gravestones; at least a hundred. Fields of razorgrain and corn framed the houses to the west, black and rotting; while oily black crows cawed and fought each other over the scraps. In the river to the north, several large water purifiers sat silently, gathering filth, the generators long dead.

One house among the many looked more battered and tired than the rest, the windows in the front all smashed, the door missing, more posters and graffiti sprayed all over the walls, inside and out. As Porter approached, a Mister Handy puttered out into the doorway, black smoke blowing from its reactor, its buzzsaw whirring violently.

“Get away!” it snarled, in a mocking pre-War British accent. “Stay away from this place!”

Something about it was so dreadfully comical that Porter burst out into hysterical laughter as he darted away from the mechanical blades, rushing down the main street the way he’d come.

Then he heard it.

From the north-west, the sound of the air-sirens, loud enough to wake the dead. He ducked between two houses, jumped a fence, and ran across a rotting old bridge, planks dropping into the water behind him. He ran up a steep hill, sometimes on all fours, pushing open an old gate with hinges so old that it simply gave out under the pressure of his grip, and he toppled forward. There was a crashed vertibird on the other side of the hill, and several of those old demountable offices you often found on pre-War construction sites. Hell, he’d once lived in one once; when he was nineteen years old and had clawed up the ranks of some gang, becoming too important to sleep on the ground, or in a tent.

“Porter?”

He leapt a mile in the air, heart hammering. “Jesus fuck woman! What the fuck?” he yelped.

Croft just raised an eyebrow. “I could ask you the same thing.”

Porter gulped down air like a drowning man. He didn’t really have an answer.

“Checking up on me, are we?” she smirked. He tried to stare her down. “How long have you been following me?”

He straightened himself up, trying to find his dignity.

“You weren’t following me, were you?” she realised aloud, voice sharp. “You came here to snoop around in my vault!”

Porter shrugged. “You’d do the same, in my boots.” He replied coolly, wearing a bravado he didn’t feel.

Croft snickered. “No doubt. Well.” She gestured onto the platform. “After you.”

“What?”

She rolled her eyes. “You came all the way out here, didn’t you? Why waste a trip?” She stepped onto the steel, standing in the middle of the blue and yellow 111. “Besides, I could probably use a hand.”

Porter blinked, and moved to stand beside her, and they began to descend into the dark, the sound of steel grinding all around them.

~

Croft’s vault was ominously dark and lifeless. The entrance was littered with lab coat-clad skeletons, and boxes of blue suits and dusty pip-boys. Porter wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but this wasn’t it. He breathed in the stale, recycled air and wondered if it was safe to smoke.

She led him down a few short hallways, into an office that would have belonged to the Overseer in its day, and made a beeline for the storeroom.

“I told you I’d come back for you,” Croft cooed, swinging the door open wide. She rifled around in her duffle and pulled out a pair of large, thick protective gloves. “Put these on,” she ordered.

Porter glanced around her head, trying to see what was so important she’d left it in storage in a vault probably a mile underground. His jaw dropped.

“What is that?”

Croft pulled a couple of familiar-looking pins from her hair. “A cryolator. Experimental snap-freeze weapon developed by Vault-Tec before the War. I couldn’t take it with me when I left.” She waved the hair pins under his nose. “Didn’t have any of these.”

Porter wrinkled his nose, looking around them. “You ask me, whole idea of these vaults was messed up. Sure, stick me underground with no control over anything. What could go wrong?”

“Sure,” Croft agreed, not breaking concentration. “Your whole family probably won’t get murdered or kidnapped right in front of you.”

“Probably,’ he agreed, though Croft’s complaint was oddly specific. He was more worried about the weird experiments. “What was it like, living here?”

“Fuck,” she snapped, tossing a broken pin aside and starting fresh. “Um. It was cold.”

“You ever hear about that vault with the guy and the puppets? How he went crazy, and killed a bunch of raiders? Or that one where the food extruders only served muck, and the dwellers went crazy and turned into cannibals?”

Croft fingers twisted and flexed. “Yes, I’m sensing a theme,” she agreed.

Porter gave her the side-eye. “Anything like that happen in here?”

The locked cabinet gave a pop and a croak, and the protective window dislodged as Croft darted back, letting it shatter on the ground. Cold air wafted around the space between them, and Porter could see his breath.

“Put the gloves on, pick it up.” The Overboss ordered, and Porter complied.

He set it on the Overseer’s desk at her instruction, and the ageing mahogany beneath it frosted over, turning white. “We should let that sit until it warms to room temperature,” Croft frowned. “I should’ve worn power armour.”

“Will it still work if it heats up?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. If not, there’s always the ice box.”

“So, what was it like down here?” Porter asked again, looking around the office. It was fairly standard. Desk in the middle. Filing cabinets against one wall. Shelves, with a few empty boxes of ammo. A green light blinked on the terminal, indicating it still had power. The only thing out of place was the skeleton sprawled in the office chair, completely dry and white – not a single trace of flesh left; not giving away secrets.

“You’re not going to let it go, are you?” Croft frowned at him.

“I just heard a little rumour, that’s all.” Porter slid a cigarette between his lips and lit it, recycled air be damned. “Someone told me you’re a relic. Pre-War, like one of those ghouls.” He performed a strained flapping gesture with his hands. “Only, you ain’t a ghoul.”

She shook her head. “You know it ain’t none of your business.”

He scoffed. “You got a past, Croft. So do I. And now? You ain't afraid to take what you want, and don't let anybody get in your way. Got more guts than most folks. What I can’t figure out though, is why?”

“Why?”

“Your motivation, Croft. You trust me about as far as you can throw me, and I gotta say, I don’t feel like I deserve that.”

Croft paused, looking him up and down calculatingly. “I used to try to look for the good in this place. The right thing. And you know what I got for it? Nothing. The wasteland is an empty place, and it doesn’t just kick you when you’re down. It waits until you start to hope again. Start to think, maybe this time, things will work out for me. And then it tears you a new one all over again, and again, so now? Now I’m going to do whatever the hell I want.” 

Porter nodded. “The whole damn world is here just to tear you down. Deck's stacked against you from the very beginning.”

Croft accepted an offered cigarette, eyes briefly gleaming maniacally in the firelight as she lit it. “I want to burn it down, Gage. All of it.”

“Most folks are too stupid to realize it,” he agreed. “They just sort of stumble through, managing to scrape together some shitty little life for themselves. They struggle, every day, until something catches them off guard, and then that's it. Lights out.”

The Overboss took a long drag. “They’re idiots, Gage. I tried to do something about it, but I can’t help them anymore.”

“That's what I mean. They don't get how it is. They don't see it coming. But then some folks are too aware of it, you know? They see the world for how fucked up it is. And they decide they gotta have it all, right now. All the booze, all the chems, all the caps; and they don't care how they get it. In fact, if they can take it from others, they feel like they're getting the upper hand. Only, they ain't. Fuckin’ raiders... They get so greedy, so focused on right now, they make shitty mistakes, and wind up dead. Hell, maybe some of them want to die. Life sure ain’t fucking easy in the wasteland.

“All these people, they either try too hard or not enough, maybe not at all. You and me, though? We're different. We know how to walk the line between fighting for what we deserve and getting out of control. I had this shit figured out early. Grew up in your average crap-hole settlement, with parents that meant well, but they were pushovers. Watched them get smacked around by raider gangs for years, handing over whatever they had to keep their lives. One day, I'm watching them cower in front of some punk with a gun, and it just hits me. I ain't gonna end up like this, I said to myself. I bailed. I'm what, 12 years old? Didn't matter. I'd seen enough of the world to know how shit works.

“I bounced around for a few years, taking whatever jobs I could to pay for food, one way or another. I was a runner for a caravan for a while, did some scavenging, did odd jobs for settlements. No matter what, one thing never changed. When the raiders came through, everyone rolled over. Raiders took what they wanted, moved on, and that was that. Didn't take long before I finally figured out where I'd really been heading all along. Next time a gang came through, I joined. Worked my way up over the years, and now here we are. Running with you now... seems like it was all worth it.”

Croft smiled to herself. “We made the right choice, Gage.”

A waft of smug pride made his back stand a little straighter. “I feel like you get it. What you've been through out there, in here. Whatever happened here. You can relate.”

Croft folded her arms and studied the floor intently for a while, before jerking her head up and offering him a wry smile. “Come on. I’ll take you on the grand tour. That’s more than I ever got.”

She began marching down an adjacent corridor and Porter followed, wondering if he’d somehow cracked Croft’s cold outer shell, just a little bit.

~

The man in the fridge was so tall and broad he looked like in been stuffed in post-mortem. Porter looked up at him, half expecting to still see life in his glassy blue eyes, only to notice the frost gathering on his eyelashes and shudder. His head was shaved, and you could see the silver of the bullet, deeply dented into the metal plate that had been drilled onto his skull.

“When he got shot, I was trapped in here, still half-frozen.” Croft gestured to the fridge across the corridor. The other fridges were full of corpses, too, some frozen with their fists banging against the glass, faces twisted in eternal rage. Others, curled away, hiding their fear in their hands. Every one of them different. Every one of them dead.

“We came down here the day the bombs fell. October twenty-third. Foolishly believing we’d continue our lives down here.”

“Why’s he different? Why’d they shoot him?” Porter wanted to know.

“The Institute. They – tried to take him. He resisted, so their hitman, Kellogg, shot him.”

“Why didn’t they grab anyone else?”

Croft’s mouth tightened into a thin line. “They did. Nathan was frozen in there with my son. I watched them take my baby and kill my husband.”

Porter needed to sit down. He reached for another cigarette instead, his head spinning. “How’d you get out?”

“The Institute wanted to keep me as a backup, but the fridges malfunctioned eventually. I had no reason to stick around, and a thousand reasons to get out of here. I tracked Kellogg across Boston, and I killed him.”

“Sounds… cathartic.” Porter replied, unable to explain the cold dread trickling down his spine. He tried and failed to imagine Croft as a mother.

She let out a long exhale. “You have no idea.” They began walking up the corridor the way they’d come, boots clanging softly on the metal. “Well now you know. I’m a soft little pre-War vault dweller.”

“Shit.” Porter ran his fingers over his Mohican. “It’s all true, isn’t it? You are a relic. Pre-War.”

The began walking back towards the vault entrance. He followed Croft around the Overseer’s desk, wincing as she cracked her knuckles, and watched her begin stripping the cryolater into its component parts, white fingers twisting and pulling at the perfectly machined joints. “So there you have it,” she said, without looking at him. “My sad little history. Are you satisfied?”

“Thank you for trusting me.” Porter replied, taking a step back. Maybe it was just the atmosphere in the vault, but he had a bad case of the heebie-jeebies. “It means a lot.”

When Croft was satisfied with her inspection of the weapon, she began piecing it back together as quickly as she’d pulled it apart. Wordlessly, Porter fetched the ammunition from the storeroom, fat blocks that could have been mistaken for plasma cartridges, except for the distinctive pale blue colour. Croft loaded the gun and tested the safety, glancing down the scope experimentally.

“I’m done with the heat, Gage. It’s time for nuclear winter.”

Chapter Text

“So… what did you do? Before?”

The pair picked their way across the wasteland back towards the monorail station, picking the occasional fight with packs of feral ghouls or wild dogs and hunting down deer for food.

“I was a lawyer,” Croft admitted.

Shake the dust off your law degree, Porter remembered, though he didn’t mention it. “You gonna make me ask what that is?”

She didn’t answer straight away. “I worked with politicians. I wrote treaties. I was trying to make peace. End the war, with smooth talking and law-making.” She took a deep breath. “Seeing the world, the way it is now…”

Croft trailed off, and they continued on silently.

Porter coughed. “What? You wish you’d tried harder?”

“I wish I hadn’t bothered.” She snorted. “I wasted my life.”

He tried a different tactic. “What about your… about Nathan? Was he a lawyer, too?”

“He was a marine. A soldier. A damned good man.” Her voice turned cold and clipped, and Porter dropped the subject all together.

They were half-way back to Nuka Town on the monorail when he remembered, slapping his palm to his forehead and swearing. Croft stepped back from him slightly, looking alarmed.

“I should probably mention,” he began, starting to sweat. “A couple raiders dragged in a sniper, come looking for you while you were gone. She’s, ah… Brotherhood.”

The Overboss narrowed her eyes. “Doctor Li?” she asked.

“No-o,” Porter said slowly, wondering if he should ask about Li instead. “A scribe. Haylen.”

Whatever he’d been expecting, it wasn’t the short, barking laughter that escaped from Croft’s lips, stifled immediately by a coughing fit.

“No,” she choked. “You’re kidding.”

His sour expression was answer enough, and she didn’t press him as the monorail ploughed onwards. She cracked her knuckles as they exited the station.

“Alright. Let’s get this over with.” She gestured to him to lead the way.

Fritsch was outside the door, a screwdriver in one hand, soldering iron in the other, and grease smeared across his forehead. He snapped to attention when Croft and Gage appeared, removing his goggles. “Boss,” he acknowledged.

Croft nodded, and Porter opened the door for her, holding his breath.

“Scribe Haylen,” she began loftily, and the girl’s head jerked up.

She let out a long, slow hiss, watery blue eyes looking almost feral from within her deep purple eye sockets. “You’re lucky I’m tied up,” she replied darkly.

Croft smirked. “Sure. Because, you could take me, right? Hand-to-hand?” she laughed again, but it was more musical this time, filled with genuine amusement.

“This is how you killed Danse, isn’t it?” Haylen asked. “Point-blank. Tied up. Defenseless.”

“I don’t know what you think you know, Haylen, but whatever it is, it isn’t the truth.” Croft countered.

The scribe rolled her eyes. “I went to the bunker, Croft. I saw his body! I know that it was you. Everyone else thinks you’re a hero. That he deserved it. But I know the truth. He loved you, and you betrayed him -”

“I was -”

“Doing your job, right? When you murdered all those people in the Railroad, who trusted you and looked up to you, you were doing your job. When you ordered that air-strike on the Castle and killed Preston Garvey and all of the Minutemen who called you General, just doing your job. What about the innocent scientists in the Institute, were you doing your job when you overloaded their reactor without even running the evacuation sequence? Or -”

Croft’s fist cracked across Haylen’s face and she gasped. Porter tensed up but didn’t dare move. “Let’s get one thing straight,” she growled through her teeth. “I gave Garvey and his pets everything. Every settlement, every kidnapped scavver, every fucking inane issue I was there until I had nothing left to give but it was never enough; and the Railroad were filthy scavver scum letting synths escape justice and assimilate into human settlements and if I had to kill them all over again, I fucking would.

“And as for Danse, Haylen?” she leaned right up into the girl’s face. “Danse was everything he hated. The Brotherhood of Steel indoctrinated him his whole life to believe that synths were the enemy and when he found out he was one, he begged for it. He got down on his hands and knees and he begged me to kill him, Haylen, so I did.”

The scribe howled and sobbed, too angry for words, struggling against her binding.

“I loved him.” Croft added, voice soft. “It was the merciful thing to do.”

“Everything he did for you,” Haylen told her wetly. “Everything you meant to him. And you call firing a round into the back of his head mercy.”

“You think you knew him so well, because you were in love with him?” she scoffed. “A kind word here and there, a shoulder to cry on; that’s all takes to make a dumb little girl like you swoon; and fall head over heels.” Croft shook her head. “As if you would ever have had the strength to do what I did for Danse. You’d force him to live up to your idea of him, rather than let him die the way he wanted. How is that fair? Or kind, or merciful?”

“Just kill me,” Haylen rasped. “Get it over with.”

Croft frowned, and stood up, turning to Porter. He felt like a deer in a rifle sight, half a millisecond after the shot had gone off. “Can I borrow your N99?” she asked. Porter pulled his pistol from his holster, checked that it had ammo, and handed it over without a word.

“Let me make something clear,” she announced, walking a half-circle around the scribe, kneeling on the floor. “I’m not killing you for coming here to kill me, or for accusing me of murdering Danse. I’m not even killing you because I want to. Not at all.”

“Spare me,” the scribe muttered, tears beginning to streak down her cheeks again despite her bravado.

The Overboss leaned in, her lips very close to Haylen’s ear. “I’m killing you for defecting from the Brotherhood of Steel. And when I’m done, I’m going to report killing you to Maxson.” She flicked off the safety. “And then he’ll thank me.”

“No. No, please, I -”

Porter watched, unable to look away even if he wanted to, as Croft executed the field scribe. She handed his pistol back, looking very tired, and exited the cell, glancing cursorily at Fritsch as she left.

“Get that cleaned up,” Gage muttered to him as he passed, watching him sprint off ahead of Croft. Probably to announce the prisoner’s death to Shank.

~

Back at the Grille, Porter sat at the kitchen table while Croft locked herself in the bathroom. He had the vague idea that she’d been in there longer than usual and was debating whether or not to knock or barge in when she stepped out, hair damp, dressed in a clean but mouldy-smelling shirt. He followed her back out and settled down in his favourite armchair as she dropped herself heavily onto her bed.

She scowled, fingers tracing the lines where her mattress had haphazardly been sewn back together by Fritsch some days earlier, fingers lingering over the outline of the .44 hidden inside the stuffing. “I don’t know why I expected more from a bunch of asshole raiders,” she groused.

Porter felt the corners of his mouth tug upwards. “Watch who you’re callin’ raider,” he retorted.

“I was thinkin’ about making her run the Gauntlet.” She mused back. “Provide a little entertainment for our loyal subjects.”

He snickered. “I’m sure they’d love that. Somethin’ to waste their caps on, anyhow, and get drunk and rowdy.” Croft yawned, and he mirrored her. “You really do all that shit out in the Commonwealth? Take out the Railroad, and the Minutemen?”

“Gage, did you not just watch me shoot an unarmed, incapacitated woman in the back of the head?”

He pulled off his eyepatch and scratched at the socket. “Yeah. Yeah, I was there.” He paused. “Good on you, though. Them Minutemen were a bunch of fucking sheep, no better’n scavvers.”

Croft didn’t answer, only rolled over to face the window.

“Hey, boss?”

“Yeah?”

“You ever find your kid?”

She was silent for so long Porter thought she’d fallen asleep.

“He’s dead, Gage.”

Porter felt the beginning of something stirring, deep in his chest. He was about to cuss out the Institute for a bunch of thieving, murdering eggheads, when Croft spoke again.

“I killed him, too.”

Chapter Text

Porter had a vague sense of unease about the length of time Overboss Croft had been asleep. A day turned into a second day, and he found himself making excuses and looking for reasons to check on her more and more often, reassuring himself that she was definitely still breathing, chest rising and falling steadily.

It didn’t help that she looked like a corpse. Her pale skin had turned waxy and the deep, purple bruises under her eyes refused to lighten. He checked the bathroom for skin flakes, too, just to be safe. He’d witnessed a fellow gang-member become a ghoul once, and the process wasn’t pretty.

“Gage?” she croaked suddenly, and he nearly tripped over his own feet, skulking around her bedside.

“You all good, boss?” he drawled, anxiety straining his voice.

She didn’t open her eyes, but she did roll over, groaning as though the mass of her body might cause the whole thing to collapse. “Water.” She croaked again, and the relief that flooded him caused him to rush from her bed to the bar and back with a glass of ice and a can of water without even the slightest resentment.

Croft slept for another day after that while Porter drifted between chain-smoking on the balcony, soldering more lengths of chain on his armour, and cleaning his guns. He couldn’t remember if he passed out from the heat or the paranoia, but when he woke on the fourth day, the boss’ bed was empty.

There was a few empty tins of Cram and a box of Instamash in the trash by the bar, as well as a half-eaten box of funnel cake and clean dishes, drying on the sink. The cryolater was gone from her desk, as well, though, curiously, the helmet of her X-0II had replaced it, split open, coloured wires poking out of the hardwire at odd angles. Whatever she’d been doing, she’d given up.

Porter splashed his face with luke-warm water in the bathroom and tried to decide her most likely whereabouts.

Grudgingly, he started at the arcade.

“What do you want?” Fritsch grunted.

Porter shrugged. “Came in to see how’s business, is all.”

“Business is doin’ great. The Overboss came in this morning to steamroll everyone’s high scores and now all the idiots are back here, trying to win their fucking top spots back. No-one drops caps around here like a junkie raider with a bruised ego.”

Porter snorted, tuning out the vicious strings of expletives and cackling coming from the game rooms.

“So, what’s next? The triumvirate are salivating over the last two parks, just waiting for Croft to bring her A-game and clear ‘em out. And Shank is, well. He’s got even bigger plans for this place than you.”

“Shank will wait his turn if he knows what’s good for him,” Porter replied, ignoring Fritsch’s blatant attempt to outsmart him. He didn’t know where the little scavver fuck even learned words like triumvirate, but he wasn’t about to start asking, either. “Did you get that mess at the Arena cleaned up?”

“Yeah. We’re running low on body-bags since Colter started the Gauntlet, but using them beats smelling bodies.”

He nodded. “Good.”

Raucous laughter echoed out of the Nuka-Zapper room.

“Hey!” Fritsch snapped suddenly, barging past. “I said no acid in the water pistols, you fucking scavver shits!”

Chuckling quietly under his breath, Porter left the arcade to smoke outside. He lit up in the shade of the awning, eye lazily scanning Nuka-Town. It was nearly fourteen-hundred, and the only raiders out were scurrying back to the shade of their holes, except for a couple of younger ones milling around the marketplace in their little gangs, throwing trash at N.I.R.A and laughing like jackals. Fitting, Porter decided, seeing as their bare skins were striped with the garish neon colours of The Pack. He wondered if any of them were Mason’s, then decided they were probably too old. It wouldn't be too much longer though, before the Alpha's progeny made up the whole pack.

Idly, he wondered if Croft’s son would have been one of them, an angsty young kid trying to make waves in with the tribes, getting in over his head before being bailed out by his mother. Or shot, like Haylen, or his father’s killer. A shudder trembled down his spine. He believed - no, he knew that Croft was many things, but infanticide seemed like a bold sort of line. He tried to calculate how old the boy might have been, but the whole, trapped-on-ice thing made even the roughest dates on the timeline just that. Rough dates. He supposed it was probably for the best, at least for him. He doubted that mama Croft would have had time for a shit-hole like Nuka-World, or a one-eyed, nearly burnt-out raider wanker like him if she still had a kid to think about.

Speak of the devil, as his own mother would have said. Across the park, Croft marched out of one of the smaller buildings, one Porter had never been inside. The ripples of heat rising from the scorched concrete between them distorted his already limited vision, but he was sure it was her. White-blonde hair, cut to her shoulders, and that unmistakeable swagger, it couldn’t have been anyone but the Overboss. There was someone with her, another blonde, taller, slimmer, but with the rushed pace of someone barely keeping up. She was also wearing a ridiculous lime green shirt that Porter knew featured Cappy and Bottle, the annoyingly chirpy mascots of Nuka-World; and he knew that because the first thing he’d done when he and the gangs had taken over the park, was set fire to their whole offensive clothing line in the gift-shop.

He waited until they’d disappeared from sight, and shading his head with his hands, darted across the way and slipped through the door they’d come out of. It was just an office. On the ground floor was a small lobby with a reception desk. The computer terminal had been smashed in and the phone was missing all its wires. At some point, someone had set fire to the bookshelf, but that was all. He mounted the stairs two at a time, only to find more of the same upstairs. A desk, a smashed computer, an empty Nuka-Cola vending machine. A glass display cabinet had been shattered and the contents taken, and the grimy couch was littered with condom wrappers, but that was it.

And yet, it was the place Croft had chosen for a clandestine meeting with another woman. He eyeballed the filthy couch. Maybe they’d just come here for a good time, but that just somehow didn’t fit. He left and headed back to Fizztop. He’d finally come to a peaceful sort of understanding, with Croft. He wasn’t about to start getting all paranoid over nothing. Not when there was so much else still on the line.

~

There was no sign of the other woman when Croft returned that evening.

“Hey,” she greeted, white teeth flashing, bustling past him behind the bar, close enough for him to take a deep breath of her leather-scented sweat. She found the box of funnel cake she’d discarded earlier and sat up on the counter, eating it with her hands.

“Hey yourself.” He replied, watching her long fingers shred the pastry and lift the pieces to her mouth, one by one, out of the corner of his eye. “Had me worried – for a while.”

She shrugged nonchalantly, licking sugar-syrup from her fingertips, and he had to deliberately force his head the other way. “You know what it's like. It can be easy to kill someone, but it's never easy to kill a friend. Or at least, someone who used to be.”

Porter didn’t answer, only busied himself with heating up a can of Pork ‘n’ Beans.

“Anyway, Kiddie Kingdom. You and me. How about it?”

He pretended to consider it, his heart already racing. “Why not Galactic Zone?”

Croft scoffed at him. “I’ve scoped it out. Galactic Zone is crawling with fucking robots. You ever been burned by an assaultron head laser, Gage? Because I have and I think I’d rather face another Institute Coarser than go through that again.”

“Good thing you blew the Institute to kingdom-come, then, isn’t it?” he stirred his beans, glancing up at her wryly.

Her smile was vicious. “They had it coming.”

“Yeah, it ain’t bad enough that they had to go and make robots do their dirty work. They went one step worse and made ‘em look human.” He shuddered violently at the thought. “Ever feel the tiniest bit hurt that the Institute never tried to replace you with a synth? I mean, c'mon, I'm important, right? I was worth replacin’.”

Croft laughed at his dumb joke and he felt a hot flush spread through his chest.

“They replaced enough people that I care about, Gage. You’ll forgive me for bein’ glad there’s someone left I like who’s real.” She stretched, cracking her spine. “Tomorrow, yeah? Maybe we can get that Ferris wheel going. Hope you’re not scared of heights.”

He only glared at her, chewing his food thoughtfully. She surprised him by leaning over and gently pulling his eyepatch off. This close, her eyes were liquid green, the colour of cooled plasma goop, and he struggled to remember how to swallow. She studied him intently, eyes flicking from the scars to his good eye and back, her fingers brushing the side of his face, as gently as a lover might.

“Your eye is really gone.” She announced, a statement rather than a question.

Porter was mildly offended. “You think I wear this thing ‘cause it drives the ladies wild?”

“I thought it might have been like a pirate-thing.”

“What?”

“You know. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, pirates used to wear eye-patches over one eye, so that at night or when they went below deck, they had an eye that was already adjusted to the darkness, and they wouldn’t stumble around without a light.”

In that moment, Porter bitterly wished he were a two-eyed eighteenth-century pirate.

“How did it happen?” she wanted to know.

None of your business, Porter wanted to grouse back, give her a taste of her own medicine. “It doesn’t matter.” He said instead. He twisted away from her intense, luminous eyes and walked out to lean over the balcony, lighting a cigarette. A couple of Disciples were tormenting a slave with a noisy, liquor-fuelled game of Russian roulette, and he watched. He’d left his eyepatch on the bar, and the breeze that wafted across the mess of scar tissue where his eye had been stung a little, but he didn’t feel like going inside to retrieve it.

He heard Croft clattering around somewhere behind him, rifling through her toolbox, and swearing as something gave her a mild electric shock. He tried not to think about her fingers, wriggling patiently as she pulled apart a gun or gadget, or flexing as she shovelled cake into her mouth. The same mouth that had been very close to his face not five minutes ago. Close enough to – a .44 fired beneath him, and the Disciples cackled. The slave had slumped to the ground, his knees bent the wrong way, finally out of his misery.

Porter watched them string him up on a pike, wrapping barbed wire haphazardly around his limbs like some kind of biblical-BDSM puppet, laughing and cheering each other on.

~

He was crawling on his stomach, and everything was on fire. People were running and screaming or firing guns and screaming or laughing and running. The ones that weren’t dying.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this, he thought. He was trying to remember what he’d said; figure out what he’d done, where it had all gone wrong –

“Well, look at that, the little bitch survived.”

Porter stopped and rolled over onto his back. He tried to prop himself up on his elbow, but it collapsed in a white-hot haze of pain.

“Connor?”

He howled and doubled over as a steel-capped boot came down hard on his kidneys. Someone’s hand closed around his throat and dragged him to his feet as he choked and spluttered on the taste of his own blood.

“I told ya, kid. That ain’t my name no more.”

“Right,” he gasped, nails scraping at the fist around his neck. “Harvester.”

“What was that?”

He gargled, coughing and choking. Something warm was running down his chin.

“I said what was that?” Connor shouted, his cronies laughing.

“Harvester!” Porter managed, and Connor dropped him like a stone.

He wheezed, clutching at his throat, gasping for air.

“You done good, kid.” Connor grinned down at him, his gang circling. “All this is thanks to you.” He spun around, arms wide, before looking back down at Porter. His grin widened, his teeth shining orange in the light of the blaze. “But you done gone and did the one thing a raider ain’t never s’posed to do.”

“Oh yeah?” Porter choked. “Wassat?”

It took three goons to hold him down as Connor spat in his eye.

“You done outlived your usefulness, kid.”

“But -” Pain flashed white, like a nuke across his vision and his whole body flooded with the most intense heat he’d ever known before it all went black, and he ceased to exist as Porter Gage for a moment, becoming only a black shadow that existed everywhere and nowhere all at once, with no light at the end. He drifted, for what could have been a few seconds, or two hundred years, and then he felt something, pulling, tugging at his consciousness.

He was dragged, backwards through the agony and then Croft was there, bright green eyes right in his face and something was wrong, this wasn’t how it went, he’d never seen her here before. Her hands grasped something, waved it, white-knuckled in his face.

Connor’s knife, the hilt made of bone and the blade of steel, honed to a mirror-shine, smeared red with his blood.

“How did it happen?” she asked him, but it wasn’t what he heard. Instead, her voice echoed around and around in his damaged head, asking something else, the same five syllables twisted into different words.

Did you get him back?

Chapter Text

Porter woke up to a green-tinged sky and thunder rolling in the distance behind the park. He blinked away the sleep from his eye, catching the vaguest whiff of a memory, or had it been a dream? He’d been having the same old dream, the one about Connor, but Croft had been there, or had she? The 2IC shrugged himself and heaved his creaking bones up onto his feet.

Maybe it was just the overcast sky, but Croft looked different. Her skin was less waxy, she seemed to have some colour in her cheeks. Her fingers twitched and she grasped at something before rolling over, muttering something about filthy synths and railroad trash.

He glanced out to the balcony as the first spatters of rain began to hit the roof. He was sweating already. The humidity, he thought grimly to himself, is worse than the fucking dry heat. Was it too much to ask for a nuclear winter? He went inside and locked himself in the bathroom, wiping himself off with a cool, damp rag that once might’ve passed for a pillow case. Croft had replaced the soap since her trip back to the Brotherhood; and added a few more things to the cabinet. There were fresh razors and two bottles marked shampoo and conditioner that he had a vague idea were meant for washing hair, and a black and white aerosol can, left in a suspiciously conspicuous spot labelled MEN in bold letters and underneath, deodorant. Porter sniffed it cautiously. He had no idea what it was for.

Back on the patio, he made a bee-line for the coffee machine. Croft was sitting on the end of her bed, stretching, and he could hear every little pop as she cracked her spine into place.

“What’s on your mind?” she wanted to know, drifting up to the bar, wakened by the burnt caramel smell of the coffee pot. Porter tried not to notice her bare legs as she stretched up on her toes.

“Hope this lets up soon,” he groused. “I hate bein’ wet.”

Croft smirked at him over the rim of her mug, and he just knew she was deciding whether or not to make him suffer.

She spent the morning working on her power armour, ignoring the looming rad storm, taking the pieces apart and evaluating their condition one by one. He fired up the soldering iron, leaving blackened metal behind wherever she pointed. Occasionally, she’d ask him to find a different size screwdrivers or nuts and bolts when the multitudes already stashed in her toolbox weren’t right. Porter found that putting their heads together, working side by side, was dangerously close to endearing where with someone else it would have been annoying. Croft, to his relief, didn’t seem to notice; nor did she notice the way he forgot to breathe when she reached up to smear mechanical grease across his nose in amusement. Scowling, he huffed out on to the balcony to light up, frown deepening at the fat rain drops that splattered on his head.

Something soft caught him in the square of his back and he swivelled on his heel. “You’ll need this.”

Porter picked up the thing she’d thrown off the ground and shook the dust off it. It was an intact pre-War gas mask complete with a rebreather and protective goggles.

“The fuck’s this for?”

Croft looked over her shoulder at him as she put her legs into her black flight suit, one at a time. “There’s a radiation leak in the sprinkler system. I’ll be fine in my suit, but I don’t think you can shoot straight hooked up to an IV pumping you full of Radaway. You’re just not that good.” She grinned, zipping herself up. “From the map, I can tell the employee tunnels are going to be a bitch to clean out, but I think that’s our best bet for disabling the fire panel, and if we can do that, we should be able to kill anything else that moves without our skin melting off.” she added, turning to her guns. The cryolater was propped up on her desk, in its new place of honour, beside her plasma rifle.

Shuddering at her vivid imagination, Porter got a little closer. The Overboss had added new scopes to both and swapped out the barrel on her rifle for an improved splitter. The boosted gamma wave was a nice touch, too. He leaned in, eyeballing the marksman’s stock. X-18-A was engraved into the metal above the trigger, and the sight of the laser-tooled characters made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

“I couldn’t modify the cryolater overmuch. I know that it works, but I need to see it in action before I can improve the design. Are you familiar with the standard operation of a flamer?”

He blinked. “Every fuckin’ son-of-a-bitch in this place has, at one time or another, decided to come at the wasteland like a fiery reject from Hell.” He looked Croft in the eye defiantly, sliding a fresh cigarette between his teeth. “Yours truly included, though thank God those days are behind me.”

Croft only shrugged. “Good. This thing works pretty much the same way, only spraying cryogenic gel instead of fire. This is a crowd-control weapon. If the ghouls start swarming, you start freezin’ ‘em.”

“Ghouls?”

“The sprinklers spray radiation, Gage. Radiation makes ghouls. Keep up.”

“Right.” Croft passed him an ammo belt loaded with little blue fuel cells and he slung it over his shoulder. “So, what’s X-18-A stand for?” he asked.

She ignored the question, focusing on her Pip-Boy instead, changing the subject. “My armour’s warmed up. We should move out before the ferals start waking up.”

“You don’t think we’re gonna wake ‘em up anyway?” Porter asked, surprised. He watched her fingers gently tug at the cables connecting her suit to her terminal, warm flush creeping up his neck.

She smiled without showing her teeth. “I meant The Disciples.”

“Oh. Those ferals.”

~

In Porter’s experience, power armour was noisy. If it wasn’t the rust, it was the hydraulics; if it wasn’t the hydraulics it was the low whine of the fusion core slowly using up the last of its pre-War juice. Either way, they were loud and obnoxious, usually like their owners.

Overboss Croft though, was silent as they crossed the park; and the only sound that came from her power armour was the crunching of the dry grass and the dirt beneath her boots. Those noises, he found more reassuring than annoying, especially as the green-black clouds had swelled to mammoth proportions, blocking out most of the sunlight. Her headlamp flickered to life, illuminating their path in a wash of red light.

They stood together at the entrance to the Kingdom, Croft’s head swivelling from side to side. He wondered what she was picking up on her infra-red HUD display. Pre-War carnival music was playing over the loudspeakers, crackling with static as though they were made from tinfoil. It was like someone had been expecting them. Porter’s gut churned with unease.

She signalled him to wait and took the first step over the threshold. And then another, and then another. Slow. Deliberate. Waiting.

The floodlights lit up suddenly, and Porter fumbled with his mask as he caught the first wafts of toxic yellow-green mist out of the corner of his eye.

“Well now, friends!” Something – someone – began to wheeze, in time with the music. “It seems we have another uninvited guest to the park. Up! Up, performers! It’s time for another show!” The voice cackled, and if simply the will to regrow a new organ was all that it took, Porter would have grown about eight new eyes, there and then.

They began to crawl out from everywhere. Behind doors, out of gutters, dragged themselves out of the drains and the cracks in the pavement. Old, deformed, deranged; stinking of rot and mould. Someone – Porter would have bet his life on the voice from the speaker – had painted their faces in garish primary and neon colours, giving them the appearance of hideous pre-War clowns. Some had angel wings or devil horns, others wore huge ruffled collars or glittering top hats. It would have been funny if it the sight of it all didn’t make Porter’s blood run cold. Even Croft took a few steps backwards, though he couldn’t see the look on her face.

“I doubt you’ll even make it to the Theatre, strangers!” the voice wavered in pitch from low to high and then laughed again, and he could have sworn Croft shuddered in her power armour. “Shall we take bets on where these ones shuffle off?” he mused, as though the ghouls would answer back. “What do you think, friends? The tunnels? The fun house?”

A charcoal bloated one dressed in a too-tight leather harness and a rainbow wig lunged at Croft and she opened fire, the green lights from her plasma rifle clashing with her red headlamp. The rest of the ghouls took that as their cue, snarling and throwing themselves at the Overboss and the 2IC.

Porter hefted the cryolater, swearing as he realised how much the gas mask hampered his vision. With a quick glance at Croft, he pulled the trigger.

The cryo-gel spewed from the muzzle in a mist almost as fine as the rad-spray from the sprinklers. It didn’t freeze the ghouls solid, but he could see their flailing limbs slowing steadily. He crouched, letting Croft cover him. He aimed low, for their legs, and grinned to himself as the ferals began to fall heads over asses, confused by the muscles in their legs not cooperating.

“Enjoying that lovely glowing mist?” the voice sighed happily. “It feels great to us,” he had plenty more to say, but Porter tuned him out, after that, half-blinded by the glowing greens and blues lighting up the park and trying to concentrate on not getting his ass handed to him by a pack of fucking zombies.

It began to rain, first slow splatters here and there but escalated until it was completely bucketing down, nearly blinding him. Lightening flashed poison coloured streaks across the backdrop of the sky and the thunder roared, carrying over the carnival tune until Porter began to wonder if he’d woken up in some bizarre apocalyptic-circus dimension instead of the regular old wasteland.

They blasted their way across Kiddie Kingdom to one of the doors to the service tunnel. Croft handed him an employee swipe card, and kept shooting, covering his back as the light on the sensor blinked, red, amber, green. Unlocked. Croft followed him, hot on his heels, and they locked the door behind them, Porter shaking off the rain, Croft shaking off a skeletal arm that was still firmly attached to her ankle.

“Well that was a little worse than I anticipated,” Croft announced apologetically, her voice adopting a metallic tone between her mouth and the speaker on her helmet.

“No shit.” Porter agreed, pulling off his mask and trying to wipe the damp from his Mohican as they trudged through the dimly lit service tunnels. At least the deeper they got, the less he could hear of the carnival music. He tried to imagine folks working in the musty, concrete lined corridors. He couldn’t imagine that they liked their jobs.

The tunnels were long, and the maps were very old, and more than once the pair found themselves going in the wrong direction. Occasionally, more of the inappropriately dressed ghouls would drop out of broken pipes running along the ceiling or leap out from the shadowy corners. Between the plasma rifle and the cryolater, Croft and Porter made short work of them.

She forced open a rusted-out magnetised door into a locker room that someone had once called home; a very long time ago, at least, Porter judged by the undisturbed dust. There were workbenches, and beds with pillows and threadbare sleeping bags. There was an ammo stockpiles, and a room off to one side that stank of fertilizer, filled with makeshift plant beds with overgrown carrots and twisted-looking corn.

Croft’s power armour shuddered and released a hydraulic hiss, and she stepped out of it, a dark smudge of grease beneath her eye. She wiped at her forehead.

“It’s hot as fuck in that thing,” she told him conversationally, her expression rueful as she looked up at it. “I never did get around to replacing the cooling unit.”

Porter shrugged. “Keeps the rads off you, though. And the ghouls.” With a grunt, he hefted his cage armour off his shoulders and began unravelling the chains that did a mostly okay job of keeping his ass in one piece. “They made it good down here,” he decided, looking around. “After the War. Looks like whoever lived here was safe.”

“Not safe from the rads.” Croft replied. She paused suddenly, head swivelling. “Do you hear that?”

Porter strained his ears; but heard nothing. He followed her as they wound through the maze of hallways and corridors, a voice getting slowly louder as they approached.

It was the voice from the speakers.

“What are you doing out of costume again?” the voice sounded concerned, even a little hurt. “You know Nuka fires people for breaking character.” It was masculine, and had the gravelly, wet tones of an old ghoul. Ahead, Porter made out the shape of an industrial reservoir, built over a man-made aquifer, though the stuff that glowed as it lapped against the cinderblock walls was definitely not clean water.

There was a tiny, barred window close by, and Porter joined Croft, crawling on her belly. They shared a look and peered down through the bars into a control room. Not all of the lights on the switchboard were dead.

Porter sucked in his breath. The owner of the voice was indeed a ghoul, a slim husk of a former human, and he was glowing. He was also wearing a shiny black tailcoat, a red bow-tie twisted up at his throat and a top hat with a white band on his head. Stifling a shocked laugh, Porter wondered if he could pull a molerat out of it.

He was talking to a water-logged feral, shivering as the Glowing One painted its flaking skin, streaks of colour blooming on its paper-white face.

 “Yes, of course I’m kidding,” he told it soothingly. “But seriously, the clown makeup helps scare the invaders off, and there are two new ones in the park.” The feral hissed and growled, almost as if could speak back. “No, no. I don’t think that’s going to work this time. There’s… something different about these ones.”

The feral puffed its chest, baring teeth, growling and trembling and the Glowing One did the same, toxic particles blowing from his exposed skin and hanging menacingly in the air. Life and healing for ghouls, but death for humans. For a second, Porter was a afraid that he’d suddenly turned feral, too, until he began to laugh his insane, echoing cackle. “See! I can do that, too. Now, stop squirming. I’m sorry, I know you can’t help it. We just have to hold out until she gets back with a cure. Then we’ll drive out the raiders and get the farm back in order. We’ll fix this, I promise.”

Croft risked a glance at Porter, one eyebrow raised. This one is a fucking mental case, he read on her face. He grimaced. I think I prefer the ferals.

The Glowing One wiped some red across the feral ghoul’s eye sockets, in what looked more like blood than paint, and Porter swallowed. “There. Back in character. I need to prepare some more surprises for our visitors, so I’ll leave you to find your own way out.”

Thick, black smoke billowed out from under the Glowing One’s tailcoat, and when it cleared, he was gone, leaving the painted ghoul behind.

“What the fuck?” Porter half-whispered, incredulous. “How’d he do that?”

Croft looked just as confused. “My guess is as good as yours.”

Porter’s handgun fell out of its holster, clattering loudly across the concrete floor. He lunged for it, but it was too late. The painted ghoul had heard them, and lumbered out of the control room, wading through the glowing aquifer towards them, snarling viciously, gnarled fingers outstretched.

“Get back to your suit!” Porter shouted at Croft, as she began to run.

The ghoul made a mad dash towards him, tripping up the stairs. Porter fired two rounds, crippling the thing in the knee, and it flailed for a moment before toppling back down into the aquifer. He aimed for its head but missed, and felt it swipe at his ankles with outstretched hands and then they were both falling, the ceiling getting further and further away until he landed, heavily. For a moment, there was nothing, and then a tidal wave of yellow crashed over his eye and he choked on what was left of his breath.

Then someone lit him on fire. White-hot, burning pain radiated from his skin, filling his pores and penetrating his blood stream, carrying the fire all through his body to his heart, which pumped so fast he thought it might burst.

A metal hand, bigger than any hand had a right to be, dragged him out of the muck by his chest. His ankle squelched up against his boot and he howled, imagining that the skin there had just sloughed right off, exposing his bones. Something shoved against his back and he cried again as cool, delicate fingers began to run up and down his forearms and wondered if her skin was made of tiny razors.

“Shh, shh, I know, you’re not on fire, Gage stop moving!” she was saying, and he knew her voice but he’d forgotten her name and her face and it was him, he realised, he was the one screaming that he was on fire, and he tried to stop but he’d forgotten how and then everything faded into grey sludge and it still hurt but not as bad; in fact it was very nearly soothing.

Porter swallowed, and his eye burned, and his throat felt raw and he was more tired than he’d ever been in his life.

Chapter Text

He woke up on one of the bunks, the bag hooked over the top bunk like a makeshift IV. It was still half-full of watery red fluid and it took him almost a whole minute to realise that it was Radaway, not blood. Every muscle in his body was screaming. Every nerve in every pore on his body was alive like he’d never felt before, like a fleshy defibrillator. His vision was still clouded over with a vague yellow colour, but he could see. He blinked away the tears, grunting as his shoulders shook with sobs, crying half from pain and half from relief.

A cool hand landed on his chest and he looked up again, into the unrestrained concern on Croft’s face and if he’d been in his right mind he would have tried to stop. He was out of breath, out of strength, and out of fucks to give.

“Shit.” He swore, when he could manage a word. He felt itchy and tingly all over, and he looked at his hands, raising them above his head rather than sitting up. His skin was red raw, and flaking in some places, but only lightly. There were no weeping sores or bloody masses anywhere that he could see. “Shit.” He said again.

He remembered the ghoul tripping him up and falling in the irradiated aquifer at the bottom of the stairs. He remembered the Glowing One escaping, somehow, in a cloud of smoke that seemed more terrifying than a simple sleight of hand. On the other side of the room, he could make out the shape of Croft’s power armour. A cold and silent sentinel. Without it, they both might have died. Porter most of all. Exhausted, he closed his eye.  

When he woke up again, Croft was changing his bag.

“Hey there, boss,” he croaked.

“Hey, yourself,” she muttered, but there was no malice in it. She didn’t look at him. “I’ve been checking you for blisters. You’re clean for now. Mostly second-degree burns.”

Porter’s hands roamed over his body, wincing at how tight his skin felt. It was then that he realised he was naked, and if he hadn’t already been the colour of a bruised tato, he would have blushed.

“A little privacy?” he growled unhappily.

Croft’s mouth twisted down. “It’s a little late for that. You’ve got a couple more hours of juice in that bag. Worst case scenario, you try to get dressed, your skin sloughs off. Best case scenario, you’ll feel like you wrapped yourself in steel wool.”

“You’re the boss,” he agreed through his teeth. “Even so, if you could not look at me in my birthday suit, I’d be grateful.”

Croft slid down onto her ass, her back against the bunk. “You ever seen anything like it before?” she asked, and he hoped to God she wasn’t talking about his dick. “A Glowing One, that didn’t go feral?”

“Well,” Porter racked his brain, though it hurt to do so. “I heard of one. This cult leader, out in Nevada somewhere. Now I never met him personal, you know. Went by the name of Bright or something. Real preachy; something about ghouls being the chosen ones, or some shit.”

“Like the Church of Atom?”

“No, like he wanted to go to space. Different kind of crazy.”

Croft was silent for a long while before replying. “Glowing Ones have a defence mechanism, a kind of burst of radiation. When they’re severely wounded, it activates, and it… re-invigorates other dead ghouls. Somehow, this ghoul is in control of its latent abilities.”

Porter swallowed, nearly choking on the pain. “That’s terrifying.”

“We need to get it alone. Away from other ghouls, alive or dead.”

“Can a ghoul truly be considered alive?” Porter pondered aloud. “Just askin'. For a friend.”

The Overboss eyeballed him sideways. “You’re not going to turn into a ghoul.”

“Like you could fuckin’ stop me,” he muttered back.

“I’ve disabled the sprinkler system. The ferals will be weaker without the constant spray, and we’ll be able to get around without masks.”

“Where are we hitting next?”

She sighed. “If I had to guess, I’d say it’s holed up in King Cola’s Castle. But I’ve also noticed the ferals seem to be trying to herd us towards the Funhouse.”

Porter shook his head at Croft’s rationalisation. “Sounds like a trap.”

“A very obvious trap.”

“He’s a ghoul, boss, he ain’t smart enough to be as perspicuous as that!”

Croft let out a barking laugh. “Sometimes, Gage, I think you’re as dumb as a brick, and then you go and come out with words like perspicuous. How the fuck is man like you made in a hellhole like this?”

“What? I’m a raider, ‘n’ I talk with an accent, so I must be a dumbass?” he scowled. “Don’t change the subject. We ain’t goin’ to no Funhouse!”

“Maybe we can ambush him. We’ll have to clear it out before we move one of the tribes in here anyway.”

“Or we could let them do their own fuckin’ dirty work,” Porter muttered.

Croft didn’t sound impressed. “This was your plan, Gage.”

“Really?” he scoffed. “It was my plan for you to strip me naked, handicap me here on this bunk, was it?”

“I don’t know, Gage. Was it?”

Something in her voice caused all the air to rush out of his lungs, and he winced at the pain in his chest. “Where’s my coveralls?” he asked her thickly.

She shook her head, blonde hair tousling with the motion, and for a wild, brief moment, Porter imagined how soft it would feel if he ran his fingers through it. “Incinerated with all the other shit that nearly blew the gauge off my Geiger counter.”

Porter let his head sink back into the mattress, eye closed, wincing at the rawness of his skin. “Bitch.” He muttered under his breath.

“Asshole.” She spit back. He heard her stomp over to the other side of the room. “Take a fuckin’ nap while I go find you some clothes, why don’t you.”

He drew in a deep breath, as much air as he could manage, imagining the bones in his fingers splintering as his hands stiffened, too sore to curl into a fist.

Murderous thoughts played cheerfully out in his mind, and he was vaguely aware of his consciousness drifting off, returning, and then drifting off again, several times.

He jolted awake sometime later, startled by a thought or a dream that he’d already forgotten.

Croft was sitting on the other side of the room, undressed to her waist, her back to him, hissing with pain. An empty syringe clattered to the ground and she lifted her shirt back on over her head.

“Boss?” he called dolefully.

“I found you a few things,” she announced, without looking at him. “You’ll find something that fits.”

There was a pile of neatly folded garments on the floor by the bunk.

“Overboss Croft,” he said slowly, tongue rolling over each syllable. He propped himself up on his elbow and nearly fell back down when the stinging heat shot back up through his arm.

Reluctantly, she turned to face him.

The gash was long, from the right of her hairline down to the corner of her left eye. It was red and inflamed, weeping at the edges. Her eyes looked like roadmaps, and just as dull.

Porter felt his nose curl up into a sneer. “You just couldn’t fuckin’ help yourself, could you?”

Croft only glared at him. “The fuck are you talking about?”

“You went into that god-damned Fun House -”

“Gage, I was exploring the fucking tunnels. They go on for fucking miles, and, guess what, they’re also filled with fucking ghouls.” She paused. “Well. They were.”

Porter took a deep breath. Then he scratched his head. “Right.”

She flashed her teeth. “Worried you missed out on all the fun?”

He scowled. “Somethin’ like that.” Sourly, he picked up the pile of clothes and dumped them on the bunk, rifling through them. “Turn the fuck around,” he growled at Croft as he dressed. Folding her arms, she turned to face her suit. Porter stuffed his legs into a pair of jeans that smelled only slightly musty and tried not to scream. When he was dressed, he sat back down on the bunk, the springs squealing with rust and disuse.

Croft crossed the room wordlessly, and Porter allowed her to move the cannula from his forearm. He fingers pressed gently into his flesh and he had a very sudden, very vivid picture appear in his brain of them wrapped around his –

Nope. He wasn’t going to think about it. Stiffly, he took a few steps towards the makeshift weapons bench to pick up the cryolator. Croft looked him up and down before her eyes flickered regretfully back to her power armour. Porter’s heart sank.

“Nope, nuh-uh. You wanna end up as fried as me?” he demanded.

“It got too wet in the storm. Some of the joints have seized up, and all the lubricant in here was damn near dust. Better to be able to move than wind up in a metal sarcophagus.”

Porter folded his arms, and quickly unfolded them. Skin against skin felt like sandpaper against raw muscle. “I don’t like it.”

Croft’s smile when she looked at him took put some of the warmth back into his cold raider heart. “You’ve got my back. I’ll be fine.”

~

Croft held the door to the Fun House open for him, and he begrudgingly slouched through it, glaring at her balefully. There were a few stray ghouls in the ticket room, and one had twisted itself up painfully in the red cordons and was snarling at them with a mouth full of black, broken teeth, even as it disintegrated into a puddle of glowing goop.

“Welcome boys and girls, to the Fun House!” The Glowing One giggled over the speaker. “And aren’t we having fun?”

“Warning,” Porter read the sign on the wall with intense distaste. “Fun House may cause motion sickness. Do not vomit in walkways.”

Croft smirked. “Oh boy,” she eyeballed Porter. “That is not what I had in mind when he said Fun House.”

Porter shook his head. “Let’s get this over with.”

He pushed his way through the set of doors at the other end of the room and came face to face with – himself.

“A house of mirrors!” Croft crowed delightedly, pushing past him.

“Careful now,” Porter warned. “Wouldn’t want ol’ Glowey the Great back there to think you’re enjoying this.” His scowl deepened as Croft preened, wiping a smudge off her face and pushing her hair back behind her ears, before flicking it back over and running her hands through it. “Are ya done?” he snapped, and she grinned toothily at him before taking point, leaving him alone, staring at his own reflection.

There was nothing in particular that he liked about himself, he realised. He had a full head of hair, even after forty, but he shaved most of it, so it didn’t matter. His eyes were the colour of wet dirt, but he only had one left, so it didn’t matter. He supposed his old acne scars gave him a kind of tough-as-nails, raider-asshole look. Useful in his line of work, but he’d never been big with the ladies. Sure, he’d gotten laid. But after a big fight or a successful raid, all the girls wanted to score, anyway. It was a rite of passage. Fight. Win. Fuck. After it was over, there’d been no reason to hang around, not for him, and definitely not for them. It didn’t matter.

He’d seen Croft’s husband. A soldier. Enough shoulders for three men. And her other piece, Danse. Brotherhood. Enough of a man to have been wanted by two women, at least that he knew of. One the father of her child, one her commanding officer. Relationships that mattered.

He, Porter, wasn’t like that. Scrawny looking, made of lean muscle. Wiry. Old. Raider scum. Croft had no reason, and no business liking him. Their relationship was one of mutual respect. He could live with that, be proud of that. Anything else was too unfamiliar, and his plans were too important to navigate whatever kind of emotional minefield he was desperately holding at arm’s length.

In the mirror, his lip curled in disgust. He looked away, and with his arms outstretched on either side, felt his way through the labyrinth after Croft. The sound of the carnival music was starting to pick up faintly somewhere ahead, and he groaned.

He nearly tripped over her, crouched on the floor, fingers gently coaxing apart a spring-loaded trap. A growl echoed ahead, and Porter aimed the cryolater, slightly unnerved by the three Porters pointing their guns back at him. Bile-yellow flashed in the corner of his eye, streaked with red and blue stripes and he fired. The ghoul howled as its arm blackened from the elbow and cracked off, and it fell, off balance. He sprayed it a few more times until went still.

They stepped over it, very carefully checking around every single corner for traps, ears straining for the tell-tale sounds of feral ghouls. Beyond the mirrors was one of those backward sliding walkways, and he caught a glimpse of Glowey behind the glass at the end, his rotting black smile stretching from ear to ear, nothing but a deranged gleam where his eyes should have been.

Before Porter even had time to aim, grey smoke billowed around him. He was gone again.

“How does he do that?” he muttered again.

“When we find him, you can ask him,” Croft replied evenly. They linked hands and half-crawled, half-slid along the rusty metal. His hand wrapped around hers made it look smaller, and he swallowed, looing away.

At the end of the sliding runway, they found a room with a deep pool of fetid, irradiated water and giant, spinning Nuka-Cola bottles, with narrow platforms made for much smaller bodies to jump from.

“Ain’t keen to wind up looking like a ghoul,” he reminded Croft. “Can we limit the rads?”

The Overboss, slimmer than he was, went first, leaning her body against the bottles and using the momentum of the spin to jump the gap from bottle to bottle. Porter watched her leap from the last bottle to the solid ground at the other end of the room, reassuring himself she was steady and waiting for him.

He took a breath and leapt onto the first platform, clutching at the neck of the bottle anxiously as he adjusted to the pace of the spin. It felt faster than it had looked, and looking down through the grill in the platform, he could see the brown water churning. Croft reached for him as he stepped off the last platform, and despite himself, he clutched at her, his head still spinning.

“Are you going to throw up?” she asked.

“No!” he snapped, only slightly dishonestly. “Why?”

She steadied him, gripping his forearms tightly. “You look a little green.” her eyes were anxious.

Porter took a deep breath. “I’ll be fine.” He opened the door into the next room. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he swore. Croft tucked her head under his arm.  

“Oh, shit.”

It was pitch black inside, except for the coincidentally green lights that spun in flashing, kaleidoscopic patterns on the walls.

It got worse.

Some of the lights were tunnels, and some were spinning plates. The fucking thing was another fucking maze, this one a dark and nauseating light show. And the tunnels spun, too, tripping the pair up as they stumbled through them, sometimes head over ass, sometimes the other way.

Or they’d get to the end of one and find out that was it. A dead end. When they turned around, a ghoul had lumbered in after them.

“Duck!” Croft hissed, and Porter hit the ground. He heard Croft’s silenced 10mm fire once, twice, three and then four times, and then she grunted as the tunnel twisted, dumping her on top of him and toppling them both to the floor. She wriggled away, and he reached for her boots, trying to give her a leg over and accidentally somehow ended up with a palm full of her ass.

If she’d noticed, she didn’t mention it.

When they finally crawled out of the tunnels into the next room, Croft frantically wiping the gore from the slimy ghoul corpse off her leathers, breathing heavily, Porter heaved himself over to the corner and threw up. If the wanker who put those signs up was still alive, he thought viciously, I’d hunt him down and shove them so far up his ass he’d be able to taste his own shit.

Croft, who’d seemed to find the whole endeavour a hilarious game so far, was leaning against the wall opposite, her face looking a little colourless, taking deep breaths in through her mouth. Ordinarily, Porter might have made a snappy comment, but the smell of his own bile lingered in his nostrils and after accidentally groping the Overboss, he decided it was in his best interest to be keep his mouth shut.

The fourth room was a sickening art installation of furniture glued to walls and ceiling; a house pulled apart that reminded him oddly of a snake cube puzzle his father had made him as a small boy; the pieces of a pre-War house pulled apart, so they lay away from each other at unnatural angles as if waiting to be folded back up. The music was louder here, too. They were getting closer to the source.

“You see any way to stop that fuckin’ sound?” he asked Croft, but Glowey cut her off before she could answer.

“Feeling dizzy yet?” he cackled. “Can’t tell which way is up?”

A couple of ghouls crawled out of the shadows, making it a little more obvious.

In the fifth room, the carnival music was deafening, and the entire room was a spinning platform, with doors all around that open and shut at random. The ghouls inside were especially insane, and Porter didn’t blame them, though he still killed them with extreme prejudice. Who knew how long they’d been stuck in there, that ungodly tune playing over and over, spinning endlessly? They might not have even been feral when they first ended up in there.

“Round and round and round and round!” Glowey, at least, sounded delighted with himself.

Croft and Porter stood back-to-back in the middle of the room, where the spinning seemed the least obnoxious.

“Right, one at time,” Croft announced over her shoulder. “We go for the doors. Look for the exit.”

“On your mark,” Porter shouted back, struggling to hear over the music and the ghoulish laughter.

They went for the blue door first and found nothing. The yellow door had a couple of dead scavvers behind it. The green door released a bloated ghoul, and Porter shoved Croft out of the way as he tossed a grenade in after it and slammed the door.

They went for the purple door, only to be lurched in the other direction as the spinning suddenly increased speed. Porter gave Croft a leg up and she wrenched it open, falling back on her knees. Was that a baby crying? As the room spun, Porter caught a glimpse of a baby’s crib and Croft’s stark-white face as she slammed it shut.

A flamer trap, a grenade bundle, a hallway that got smaller and smaller. By the time they found the right door, Porter was about ready to hurl again.

Croft collapsed on her knees and slowly lowered her face to the floor, pressing it against the filthy, peeling linoleum. Exhausted, Porter flopped down beside her.

“Doin’ okay, boss?” he wanted to know.

She stared straight at him, but he got the feeling she wasn’t really seeing him. Then she nodded slowly, sitting up.

Still a little unsteady, he got to his feet, gagging, and then helped Croft up, too. “Who the hell’s idea of fun was this shit?” he asked her, but she didn’t laugh.

The door beyond led back to the fun house foyer, but they weren’t going that way. Croft stormed through the service corridor, Porter on her heels. They found the Fun House control room easily, through another door, and up a flight of stairs. They came to the big glass window where Porter had seen him, watching them struggle from a safe distance.

“Sorry, little raiders!” he sang over the speaker. “Already gone, but don’t worry! I’ve still got plenty of surprises for you!”

Chapter Text

While Croft hooked her Pip Boy up to the terminal, Porter lingered by the glass window. Glowey had done his little disappearing trick right here, and that had to be all it was, a trick. A controlled burst of radiation was one thing, he reasoned, but teleportation? They hadn’t had that shit pre-War. No way some random ghoul two hundred years later had that kind of technology. Although…

“You ever see anything like this?” he asked Croft, slowly, still scanning the floor and walls for secret door.

“Like what?” she replied, without looking up.

Porter frowned, fingers running through the dust, nothing but hard concrete beneath his fingertips. “The way that ghoul moves… it’s impossible.”

“Actually, teleportation is how I used to come and go from the Institute. My… they installed a chip in my Pip Boy. The Coarsers had chips implanted during manufacturing.”

“What?” he snapped, eye watering.

Amusement danced in Croft’s green eyes as she glanced at him.

“That’s fucking terrifying.”

“They could only jump in and out of Boston proper.”

Porter rubbed at the goose pimples that had exploded all over his forearms. “Great. That makes me feel so much better.”

“The Glowing One isn’t teleporting.” She scoffed.

He threw his arms in the air dramatically. “We might never know.”

“They’re pre-War. They worked in the park, escaped down here when the bombs went off. The early rad-storms turned them into ghouls, and one by one, they went feral.”

“Huh. Go figure. Anything else? What about ol’ Glowey?”

Croft shook her head. “There’s always some twit that keeps a fucking diary. Lucky for us, I guess. Last entry says a bunch of raiders took over the park, pushed them all back in here. There’s some notes about someone named Rachel. She was looking for a cure. Poor bastards.”

“My lot?” he wanted to know.

“Don’t think so. It’s pretty dated. Maybe the raiders that were here, back before the scavvers.”

He tried not to roll his eyes. Croft ran her fingers through her hair, the soft strands falling gently back into place. She looked tired.

“We should go back to the tunnels,” he suggested. “Regroup, a bit.”

Croft gazed balefully back up at him. “We’ve been in here three days. The tribes will think we’re dead. They will tear each other apart.”

Porter swore softly. The cut on Croft’s head was gleaming wetly in the green glow from the terminal. The biggest killer in the wasteland, he knew, was infection.

He nodded at her Pip Boy. “Can we get a message to Red-Eye on that thing?”

The Overboss coughed, eyebrows raising. “You must really be desperate.”

The 2IC set his jaw, by way of response.

~

“They’re going on a ghoul-hunt folks, and they’re gonna catch a big one! That’s right assholes, the hot piece of ass we all know as Overboss Croft has turned Kiddie Kingdom into a god-damned war zone! The body count is in the hundreds – well, I suppose if you think of ghouls as people, which, heh, c’mon, guys – and she ain’t done yet.

"Word from our one-eyed 2IC is they’ve got the brains behind the outfit cornered and it won’t be long now before a flag rises up over the park and a fourth territory joins the park. Which reminds me, head on down to Fritsch’s arcade and place your bets! The Disciples are leading three caps to your one and the Operators lagging behind as the underdogs, thirteen caps to one! Tensions are surely running high amongst the tribe leaders at the moment.

"Now for the morning announcements! I’ll start. Whoever convinced NIRA to stand over me while I was sleeping, thanks a lot. You owe me a new mattress. Up next, anonymous: ‘Whoever's dumping bodies in the swan pond - thanks. Totally set the mood for a romantic evening, it really paid off.’ Damn, you all are disgusting -”

Croft flicked off her Pip Boy radio. “I’m going to kill him.”

Porter shrugged, stiffening his shoulders against the cool concrete at his back. “A free press invigorates and educates the wasteland’s citizens.”

Croft’s head jerked in his direction and her lip curled at the corners. Her chest heaved as she snickered halfheartedly. “Him, then you.”

He hid a chuckle behind his fist, watching the light on the terminal across from where they sat on the floor, casting an intermittent green glow. “Right. Time to talk game-plan.”

“We need more information,” the Overboss started. “Who the fuck does this ghoul think he is? Why’s he so hell-bent on protecting this horror-show shit heap?”

Porter scratched at the inflamed skin around his five o’clock shadow, white flakes falling into his lap. “I don’t see how that helps, much. We don’t need to know his fuckin’ life story, boss. We just need him dead.”

“Chasin’ him around the park hasn’t gotten him killed yet, but it nearly killed one of us. If you want to talk strategy, we need something we can use against him. We need to find a weak spot.”

“Then we need to get him away from other ghouls. Even their corpses. If he can’t resurrect ‘em, its one against two.”

A slow smile slid across her mouth, and a boiling urge to lean around and press his own against hers made him physically nauseous. “That’s a good start,” she said.

Porter brushed the flakes off his legs. “I saw we go during the day. Wait for the sun to be right in the middle above us. The ghouls’ll be more lethargic in the heat, an’ if they do swarm, they’ll be slower.”

Croft looked thoughtful. “They’ll bloat in the heat.”

“We’ll go back and get the gas masks.”

Pale brows rose above her eyes, and she winced as the scab on her forehead cracked. A thin trickle of blood began to trail down her temple. Porter did his best to ignore it as they started to form a plan.

~

King Cola’s court shimmered and fluxed ahead like some kind of bizarre Psychojet-fuelled mirage; the kind his much younger brain used to cook up during the old nine-day tribal raves out in the middle of Black Rock Desert. Porter took a deep breath of stale air through the filters on his mask and tried to ignore the smell of his own body odour.

He groaned softly as the sweat pooled in his pits and ran in literal rivers down his back and took an awkward step-and-a-half, wincing as his sack peeled thickly away from the inside of his hairy thigh. Croft was just ahead of him, her body twisting around a trash can for cover as she scanned the way forward. Her leathers clung to her ass like the skin of a ripe, red tato and Porter was too hot to even try to think of anything that prevented the resulting half-mast in his jeans.

In fact, it was a good full minute before he realised, she was signalling madly at him to move ahead. He could hear her growling something obscene at him as he passed that he made sure to ignore.

A ghoul crept drily out from the shade of a lamp post and hissed at them blearily. Porter disengaged the safety on his .44 and fed a single round between its eyes, and he would have sworn on his parents’ bible that the look it gave him before it died was one of pure exasperation. Croft’s shadow joined his on the sizzling pavement and he felt, rather than saw her appear at his elbow.

“You ready?” she asked, the mask giving her voice an underwater quality.

“Yep.” He grunted back, eyeballing the doors ahead. Croft trained her 10mm ahead, and Porter mirrored her as they inched across the bridge together, the sun hard on their backs.

The Overboss wedged herself into the door frame as Porter kicked open the flimsy plywood that served as a door, throwing his body to the ground as the trap exploded. He heard a faint whistle as a missile sailed overhead and the resulting eruption as the buildings on the other side of the bridge began collapsing into each other.

“Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” he groused as he got to his feet, sweaty hands wiping more sweat over the sides of his head. His Mohican had melted into a dodgy comb-over, and he scowled at his reflection in Croft’s mask. “Fuckin’ missile launcher… sure this ghoul ain’t a friend of yours?”

“Wait -”

Porter stumbled back into Croft as he tripped over a mine, and a hundred caps exploded out of it and hurtled through the air towards him, shredding his shirt. She shoved him violently off her and snatched his dropped .44, standing over him and firing at the painted ghouls that had zeroed in on their dramatic entrance.

She clawed her mask off and dropped it on his shoulder, making him shout with pain, but the ghouls went down. Five headshots. Clean. Well, unless you counted the streaks of gore and greenish grey matter that spattered out of the back of their skulls, but Porter wasn’t that kind of man. Breathing heavily, she turned around to look at him.

She was drenched in sweat from head to toe, clothes and hair clinging obscenely to her body and she seemed to sway above him. The purple bruises under her eyes framed the anger and thinly veiled loathing that glittered within them, like a fresh plasma burst.

“I get it,” she snapped at him. “You’re a man. You’re heavy-handed and you like to be lazy. But please, for fuck’s sake, could you learn to fucking look before you put your fucking feet down?”

A thousand and one snappy responses came to mind, but just as he was about to open his mouth, the pain hit. It was like a graze at first, an annoying sting. Uncomfortable, but tolerable. Then his arms and chest began to tingle and burn, like twenty people all stubbing their cigarettes out on his bare arms at once.

He sat up, stretching, air hissing through his teeth. Croft was gingerly peeling off his shirt and running water from her canteen over the cuts. Bleeding rivers dripped down his forearms and were evaporated before they hit the ground.

“We need to get inside before we fry out here,” she muttered, mostly to herself. Porter peeled his mask off, gasping as the suction broke the seal on his skin. She pulled bandage rolls from the first aid kit in her belt and began winding them around his chest. He took another and carefully rolled it up his arm. “Some of these are deep,” she announced. “You’re going to need a stim later, or I’ll have to stitch ‘em.”

“Lookin’ forward to it,” he croaked.

Croft tied off the bandages and helped him slide his arms back in his sleeves, now crusty with dried blood. Porter reached forward to button it back up, but his hands closed over hers instead, gripping the fabric with white knuckles. He met her gaze, never more aware of how close her face was, or how unreadable. “Stop trying to die.” She told him, enunciating each word carefully. “I need you.”

He got to his feet, and she passed his pistol back, fingers lingering on the butt. He holstered it.

“Where’d a little thing like you get that good, anyway?” he asked, nudging one of the dead ghouls with the toe of his boot.

“Learned from the best,” she shrugged. “Ex-gunner. Went by MacCready.”

“No kiddin’?” Porter scoffed. “Went? You kill him, too?”

Porter caught a glimpse of something hard in Croft’s eye. “No. He went back to Washington to take care of his son.”

The finality of her tone told him that was the end of it, and he followed her through the courtyard and into the castle proper. He blinked the dust motes out of his eye as a mad cackle burst over the loudspeaker.

“You’ve finally arrived! Quickly, quickly! The show is about to begin!”

Croft turned on her Pip Boy flashlight, illuminating the foyer in a soft yellow-green as the ghouls began to stir, growling softly in confusion. With the casual nonchalance Porter had learned to expect from his boss, she flicked a grenade over the ticket counter, the ring pull glinting silver as it wound down her finger and settled between her knuckles.

He didn’t even have time to hit the ground before it was over, leaving nothing but a star in his eye and a ringing in his ear and a desiccated, dismembered arm bouncing across the moth-eaten carpet and coming to rest beside Croft’s boot.

They shared a look and split up, flicking the safeties off their pistols as they each took to the theatre room doors on either side of the ticket booth.

The ghouls inside were already dead, and Porter missed his mask. He pulled a faded bandanna from the pocket of his jeans and wrapped it twice around his face, covering his nose and took deep breaths through his mouth. The corpses were bloated, but there were no signs of decay. No maggots, no rot, just bloat and shit and vomit.

Some lay on the floor, arms and limbs splayed out like they’d been dragged there not long after biting it. Others sat limply in the velvet seats, the fabric all in varying states of ruin and decay, their bodies angled towards the stage itself.

Half the floorboards on the mezzanine had rotted completely through, leaving dangerous holes in the floor. A two-hundred-year-old gilt throne had survived the years, though, still waiting for some forgotten king or queen to open the show. The main stage had a cheerful backdrop of shrubbery and apple trees that seemed ignorant of the inch-thick layer of dust and cobwebs that coated everything, eerily trapped in time. The hairs on the back of Porter’s neck prickled uncomfortably.

“Yeah. This is fine,” Porter called to Croft conversationally. “I wasn’t plannin’ on sleeping tonight, anyway.”

“And now,” an unmistakably female voice crooned over the loudspeakers, practically trembling with excited. “The show you’ve all been waiting for!” There was a pause, and a drum roll. “Oswald the Outrageous!” the voice announced breathlessly, accompanied by a fake patter of applause  

“Huh.” Croft winked at him, cocking her head to the side thoughtfully. “Glowey the Great was way more on the money.”

A loud bang echoed in the theatre and thick, acrid smoke billowed dramatically across the stage.

“I’ll admit it, I didn’t think you’d make it this far,” Oswald grinned down at them, materialising in the shadows and strolling across the mezzanine, resting his forearms on the balcony. Porter felt a flash of momentary alarm, worried he’d fall right through the rickety old floor. “I can tell you’re different to the usual invaders, so I’ll not bother with the usual tricks and delusions I use to scare off the superstitious.”

Porter caught a glimpse of silver as the Glowing One dropped the grenade and he hurled himself at Croft, covering her as they landed heavily on the floor.

“Fuck off,” she wheezed, the breath knocked out of her. “It’s a smoke grenade, Gage!”

“What -” Porter rolled off her and scrambled to his knees as Oswald suddenly appeared on the main stage. “When the bombs fell, everything changed.” He strode towards them, the heels of his boots echoing menacingly on the creaking wood. “We changed. And somehow, I received a gift. Actual magic. The stuff of legends. Perhaps you’d like to see some?”

He dropped a smoke bomb and reappeared behind them. Porter pulled Croft up, holding her behind him as she struggled to catch her breath.

“UP!”

With a flourish, a ghastly green cloud burst from Oswald himself, flowing from his collar and out of the sleeves of his shirt, blasting around the theatre like a nuclear shockwave as the ghoul bent over, laughing at his own bad joke.  

To Porter’s horror, the ghouls stirred and began to rise, dead one minute and walking the next. Filthy talons stretched towards him. Hollow black eyes stared into his. Noses that had long rotted away sniffed the air, closing in on him.  

“No matter what you do, I can heal my friends and we will PROTECT what is ours!”

The ghouls advanced on Porter and he whipped his shotgun off his back, firing with abandon. Maiming their legs and knees seemed to be the most effective means of keeping them down. He turned back to Croft, but only caught Oswald with a long, serrated-edged sword raised above his head, murder alive in his luminescent eyes.

Then he stumbled, and choked, spraying Porter with blood and glowing specks.

“What -” he rasped, only then noticing Croft behind Oswald, her combat knife buried in his back.

Growling, he let a smoke bomb fall from his sleeve. Porter lunged towards him, but caught only Croft, coughing and spluttering as they inhaled the ash powder.

“Sorry, but I’m not going down that easy!” Oswald hissed over the comm. “The show must go on! If your asinine assault won’t be dissuaded, I guess it’s time for the final act. Join me on the roof of King Cola’s castle, and we’ll see an end to this production.”

Porter laughed, still choking a little on the ash. “What the fuck?”

One of the not-quite dead ghouls whined, nails scrambling one of the chair legs. Croft leaned over him and closed one eye, and with a single shot the creature was silent again. She collapsed back down onto the floor, sighing heavily.

“I have no words.”

Porter snorted, and joined her on the floor, wincing at the burning pain in his arms and across his chest. Fuckin’ caps. Red-Eye would laugh his ass off if he ever found out about a cap mine.

“Should we go meet him on the roof?” He asked Croft dubiously. “If you ask me, it sounds like a fuckin’ trap.”

“It’s definitely a trap,” she agreed. “I don’t see we have much choice, though.”

“We should look around first.”

“And what? Give him more time to set up missiles and mines?” Croft scowled. “That’s my job.”

Porter grinned. “He’s two hundred years old, you’re two hundred years old. Are you sure you’re not related?”

The Overboss scowled. “Go fuck yourself.”

Exhaling through his nose, he hauled himself up, bouncing on the balls of his feet, feeling the sweat squelch between his toes. He made a mental note to burn the socks he was wearing and held out a hand to Croft. “C’mon. Let’s get to it.”

She gazed up at him from the floor, blonde hair splayed out behind her head like a filthy halo, and for a moment he thought she was going to wave him off. Then her fingers reached up and closed around his wrist and he pulled her up. She stumbled, and her other hand flew up to balance on his chest. Croft rested there for a moment, with her cheek pressed against his shoulder.

He could almost feel the exhaustion radiating from her body, the bone-deep weariness that threatened to overwhelm her. Fear stirred in the depths of his bowels, fear that she’d succumb to it; and what would happen to him if she did.

Then she pulled away, and she was Overboss Croft again. Down-to-business, shoot-first ask-questions-later Croft. An elevator pinged ahead of them, doors sliding open with a mechanical whirr, like it had been called just for them.

~

The sun was setting on the wasteland, and the world was orange. A warm breeze stirred the dust, and Croft sneezed. Porter leapt away from her, alarmed, but the noise didn’t seem to have alerted any ghouls to their presence, or even Oswald for that matter. The roof was mostly crumbling, though some scaffolding remained that was so old Porter wouldn’t have trusted the weight of a razorgrain on it, let alone his foot.

A plink, plink, plink sound echoed down the metal railings, exploding in a now familiar cloud of thick grey ash and the Great Magician himself appeared, glaring down his lack of a nose at Overboss Croft.

“You raiders are all the same,” he scoffed. “You come into someone’s home. Steal their belongings, kill those they care about.”

Croft nodded along. “Yep. Happened to me. Shit’s fucked, but there you have it.”

Oswald ignored her, continuing his rant as if she hadn’t spoken. “I’m not going to let you kill anymore of my friends. This is our home, not yours!”

“You… realise your ‘friends’ are feral ghouls, right?” Croft asked him, making little air quotes with her fingers.

Oswald’s rage seemed to make him double in size. “They’re not feral, they’re sick!” he snarled, his skin rippling with green luminescence. “They can’t help what they’ve become. It’s an illness and it certainly doesn’t justify you trying to wipe us out!”

Croft glanced back at Porter; eyebrows raised. Are you seeing this? “What?”

The Glowing One took several deep breaths, trying very hard to calm himself. The 2IC took a step back, wondering if he was on the brink of turning. “It’s an illness that affects the brain. We’re going to find a cure. Then we’re going to drive you out of our home. We’ve defended this place for over two hundred years. Do you think you’re the first outsider I’ve met who has chosen to brand ‘feral’ ghouls as monsters? How many of them have you needlessly slaughtered while ignorantly believing you’re doing the world a favour?”

“Ghouls like your friends… it’s too late for them, Oswald. The radiation changed them forever.”

Triumph gleamed in his hypnotic green-washed eyes. “So you admit it! They’re sick, and you try to kill them anyway! I’d say that makes you the only monster around here.”

Porter heard a faint click as Croft palmed a fresh magazine into her 10mm. “I’m done talkin’. I just can’t reason with stupid.”

Oswald’s retort was drowned out by the sound of Croft’s gun firing, and Porter saw a look of surprise flash across his face as his forearm twisted the wrong way and his sword clattered off the scaffolding onto the roof. Then, with a wicked grin, smoke clouded around his figure and he disappeared. Ferals began crawling out of the woodwork, spilling from old crates and barrels and writhing out of the shadows, advancing.

Somewhere over their heads, Oswald reappeared, giggling maniacally, dropping grenades from above. Porter lost sight of Croft as two charred and bloated ghouls cornered him, regenerating even as he blasted them in the head. He aimed his shotgun and blew two rounds into the biggest one’s chest and it reeled, stumbling into the slightly smaller one. He took advantage of the distraction to slide between them and the wall, cracking the barrel down on one of their kneecaps as he dashed up the scaffolding and leapt over the discarded crates.

He landed on his feet – barely – and twisted back, swapping out his shotgun for the magnum and the machete he kept in his boot, slashing at the withered skeleton-looking ghoul that made a run for him, carving the leathery skin from its chest to its hip. It clattered to the ground behind him and he shot it in the back of the head for good measure.

One of the bloated ones was rounding back on him, its broken teeth a mouldy, rotting nightmare in its face. He cast his eye wildly for Croft but she was out of sight somewhere and if he died he’d never get to her. Screaming incoherent profanities he leapt on it, catching it by surprise and driving his knife into the back of its head. It flailed wildly and he saw, rather than felt, himself go flying through the hair and roll from his back onto his feet, catlike, unloading hot lead into the things belly.

That was a mistake, he realised, when it exploded. Hot, noxious black fumes erupted into the air and Porter lost control of his gag reflex, throwing up into the bandana he’d wrapped around his face. He ripped it off, chunks flying, and again, failed to find Croft as several painted ghouls charged him. He discharged two rounds into the face of the closest one and kicked out at the one behind, roaring with satisfaction as its femur crunched beneath his boot.

The third one knocked him off his feet and took a chunk out of his neck. Knuckles white-hot with pain or rage or desperation, he forced his knife up through its groin and out its belly, hot black entrails emptying out onto his chest as the ghoul went limp.

He staggered to his feet. “Croft,” he rasped, not recognising the sound of his own voice. “Boss?” The bloated one with the broken knee snarled, inching toward him on his hands. He shot it, not sparing it a second glance. Old wood creaked, far above his head. Oswald’s corpse landed heavily four feet from where he was standing.

He looked up. Something thick and hot dripped from the precariously balanced scaffolding, smacking him lightly on the cheek and trickling down his face.

“Croft?” he croaked again. He wiped at his face furiously, the dark red liquid mingling with the ghoulish black ichor on his fingers.

Chapter Text

It was dark, and that was good. Porter edged along the far end of the Nuka Boulevard towards Fritsch’s arcade, praying he’d locked up his precious toys for the night and the animals had fucked off. The absence of light in that direction was reassuring. He rattled the chains around the front door handles, not too loudly, and pressed his ear to the warm metal. Nothing. He climbed up onto a nearby dumpster and hauled himself over the brick wall, squeezing down the narrow alley towards Fritsch’s window. He pressed a palm against the glass and nearly fell over when it swung open, squeaking from disuse – a sound that was remarkably happy, given the circumstances.

Then he heard a click, and his eyes adjusted to the lack of light. Fritsch was glaring at him, a thin sheet pulled up over his junk and a magnum aimed at Porter’s chest.

“You wanna tell me why you’re snooping around in the back alley behind my workshop, Gage, or should I skip the friendlies and shoot you dead?” he asked directly, voice still rough from sleep.

For a moment, Porter just blinked. How much could he say? How much dared he say? “I -” the words dried up in his mouth, and he licked his lips. “I need your help.”

Fritsch cocked his head, assessing the 2IC. “Turn around.”

Porter’s eye narrowed. “You don’t understand -”

The mechanic waved his gun violently. “Turn the fuck around so I can put some damn pants on!” he hollered. “Pervert.”

He turned obediently, knuckles cracking as his hands clenched. He didn’t know if they had a lot of time.

~

Porter stood with Shank and Fritsch, waiting together in the dark behind the Grille. “We should go,” he told them.

The mechanic looked at his watch and began counting down. “Three. Two.”

Air raid sirens blasted over Nuka World. For a few moments, they heard nothing else. Then it began, like the low rumble of distant thunder, rising in crescendo. Their excitement was so thick you could taste it in the air as they tripped over each other, sprinting to the Cola Cars Arena.

“FUCK YEAH!” he could hear them screaming. “SOMEONE’S GONNA DIE!” another one sounded off.

Shank idly pulled a hanky from his pocked and wiped blood off his knuckles. The slaves they’d dumped in the monorail had needed a little convincing.

Fritsch scratched his head. “What’re we gonna do if they get to the end game?”

The big man smirked. “Trust me. They ain’t gonna make it that far.”

“We need to get a move on,” Porter growled. “We don’t have much time. If they see us -”

“Yeah, yeah. The queen dies, and her little dog, too.” Shank laughed nastily, his bottomless black eyes gleaming in the dark.

“That’s if she ain’t dead already,” Fritsch muttered under his breath.

Porter’s heart damn near stopped. He twisted on his heel and punched him square in the mouth before he had time to take a breath. He felt his hands close around the fabric of Fritsch’s shirt and air rushing through his clenched teeth as he tried to breathe. “You listen to me, you little radroach-faced assho-”

“Knock it off!” Shank roared, spit flying into Porter’s face as the big man peeled him off the little one.

Grass crunching loudly under his boots, Porter stormed off toward Kiddie Kingdom without another word, blood rushing in his ears. Fritsch was howling somewhere behind him, something about broken teeth. Shank was snapping back, but he’d already stopped listening.

Most of the time, existing in the wasteland felt like living in an hourglass after the sand had long stopped falling. It was a place that time had moved on from.

Now was not one of those times.  

He took long breaths through his nose, trying to clear the red from his vision and when he’d finally regained a modicum of sanity, he could hear their footsteps following him through the park. They were discussing the carnage, their tones casual but strained. The dead ghouls had to be in their hundreds, all in varying states of rot and decay, the crazy colours of their costumes clashing with the dark muck of biological fluids sprayed every which way all over the park.

Porter’s mouth turned up in a thin line, and he was proud, he realised, of what he and Croft had achieved so far. He used to wonder if he’d just expected too much from Colter, but the way Croft had charged in, guns blazing, had been all the proof he needed.  

“This is an old white man’s wet dream,” Shank snickered when they approached the castle, appraising the dilapidated ruin with amused disgust. Fritsch remained sullenly silent.

The smaller man slipped on the battlements as the fake stone crumbled beneath his boots. In a heartbeat Porter had his belly on the ground, palms closed over Fritsch’s collar. Shank pulled them both back up and they dusted themselves off.

“Thanks,” he muttered, just loud enough for Shank to hear, too.

Porter spat down the side of the castle. “Don’t mention it.”

He kicked open the door to Oswald’s tower. He’d left Croft on the floor by Oswald’s computer, as far away from the dead ghouls as he could get. Her skin was long past white, well into the greys of a corpse (near-corpse, he reminded himself harshly) and her breath came in long, deathly rattles that seemed few and far between.

“We’re back,” he told her quietly, keeping his voice on the gruff side. He didn’t know if she could hear him, but it made him feel slightly better. Shank rolled out a length of old linen suspended between two thick steel bars.

“That,” he announced gravely. “Ain’t lookin’ so good.”

The handmade tourniquet had been slightly yellowing when Porter had taken off back to Nuka World. It was now completely scarlet, and the colour was draining from the bandage onto the concrete. When the three of them rolled her onto the stretcher, it left a stain.

“Looks like brahmin meat,” Fritsch added uneasily. Porter shot him a murderous glare, but he was right. Her injured leg had swelled up around the tourniquet. “We should loosen it, at least?”

Porter looked from him to Shank. The big man shrugged. “Your call.”

Croft’s skin was cold as his fingers fumbled over the wet knot, until finally he gave up and cut the thing with his boot knife. He carefully eased the fabric away and tucked it in on itself. He wiped his hands on his shirt, but the red stain stayed, and he couldn’t look.

He and Shank took the stretcher, and Fritsch guided them across the uneven terrain, back towards Fizztop Grille, kicking ghoul corpses aside to make way. The lights in the Cola Cars arena were still casting long shadows and Porter could still hear the audience screaming. Croft’s not dead, Porter reminded himself. She’s not dead. She took that moment to let out a long, rickety wheeze that curdled his blood.

Doctor Mackenzie Bridgeman had been captured by The Pack way back when the tribes had stormed Nuka World under Colter and collared by Shank. Her two assistants rolled the Overboss off the stretcher and onto her mattress.

Grimacing, Colter barged them aside and slit the stitching, pulling Croft’s .44 out of the stuffing and tucked it in the back of jeans.

“Don’t want you getting any ideas now,” Shank agreed out loud, folding his eyes and laying his unsettling stare on the woman.

Croft gasped painfully and sat upright, her hand around Porter’s throat. Not hard enough to hurt, but enough to make him almost piss himself with fright.

Her eyes focused on him, though her pupils were so large they looked more black than green. “You -” she managed, and then passed out again, her body slumping against the pillow.

Bridgeman rushed in, shoving him out of the way. He retreated to the window, leaning heavily against it. His hands were shaking, and he crossed his arms so that Shank or Fritsch wouldn’t notice.

“Three inches by four inches,” Mackenzie muttered, half to herself. Her metal tools were clicking together, every sound as obnoxious as the ticking of a clock. “Femoral arterial penetrative trauma… stab wound,” she added matter of factly, meeting Porter’s gaze for a moment.  

“Jesus,” Fritsch whined. “Jesus fucking Christ!” he tripped over his own boots to get the balcony and emptied his stomach over the side. Porter felt his own bile rising and swallowed hard.

“I need to perform a fasciotomy.”

Porter’s eye crept down Croft’s body hesitantly, breathing hard at the sight of exposed muscle. “A what now?”

“The – this patient has compartment syndrome. The tourniquet around her thigh was too tight and now the pressure in the muscle is dangerously high. I need to make an incision – a cut – here and remove a piece of the muscular lining or I won’t be able to close the wound.”

Porter folded his arms. “And if you don’t?”

“Her leg swells and the wound pops open and she gets an infection and dies.”

Porter swallowed.

“Or, her leg swells up and I amputate, and she dies of shock. Or -”

He threw up his hands. “I get it!” he snapped. He removed his eyepatch and rubbed at the puckered skin that made up the scar where his eye used to be. Mackenzie visibly shuddered, once more averting her gaze. “Do what ya gotta do then, doc.”

The threat was implied, and he didn’t want to risk scaring her too much. He stood back, leaning against the wall, and focused his eye on Croft’s face rather than what was going on. He’d watched her sleep before, a hundred times, and this wasn’t like that. Her brows were knitted together, her hair was damp from sweat and ghoul muck. She wouldn’t have liked that. She’d have spent a day in that bathroom, scrubbing every inch of herself, if she wasn’t half-dead.

He filled one of the metal bowls with a bottle of distilled water and one of the sponges and began to clean away the grime lightly. Mackenzie caught his eye again, and she flushed and looked away.

When the doc was done she hooked an IV bag up over an old tall lamp, and began running clear fluids down a line into Croft’s arm. “It’s saline,” she offered, noticing Porter watching. “I don’t know her blood type, I can’t risk a transfusion here, though she badly needs one. The next few days are going to touch and go.” She pumped Croft full of stims, and her forehead smoothed over a little.

“She needs antibiotics. That – procedure – was not sterile and the risk of infection is…” Mackenzie trailed off, eyeing Shank’s gun. “We’ll come back tomorrow. Keep her warm, and roll her over every four hours or so, at least until she wakes up.”

Porter nodded once. “Thank you.”

Mackenzie looked at Shank.

“We don’t talk about this.” He said.

“I know -”

“It never happened.”

“I -”

Before Porter could object, Shank whipped his 10mm from his belt and shot one of the assistants. Mackenzie screamed, and collapsed on her knees.

“Can you not fuckin’ do that in here?” Porter shouted at him. The big man shrugged.

“Clean that up.” Shank ordered the remaining slave. He hurled Mackenzie to her feet and shoved her toward the lift. “Let’s go.”

The sun was rising, a red blotch on the horizon. Probably meant dust storms were coming. The lift mechanics rattled again, and Russell ascended into the Grille.

“Fuck me. ‘Boss looks worse than me that time some asshole dropped a frag down my toilet.”

Porter exhaled sharply. That had been Cassius’ genius. “I swear to God I’ll drop one down your throat if you say a single fuckin’ word about this.”

The DJ spread his arms, placating. “Hey, I like this Overboss. She’s the first one around here to actually get shit done. Your secret’s safe with me.”

“Russell, I wouldn’t trust you to mind my fucking kidney stones, let alone the boss’s fuckin’ life,” he replied sincerely.

His face fell. “That really hurts my feelings, Gage.”

“Look, you did a good job with the Gauntlet. No one saw us comin’ in. Thank you.” He added, thinking to himself that kidney stones were easier to pass.

“Yeah, well. Those fake scavvers didn’t last too long,” Red-Eye replied, foot tapping anxiously on the ground. He flopped his skinny ass down in Porter’s favourite armchair.

“You held them off, somehow,” Porter told him darkly.

“Yeah…” he scratched his crotch. “Yeah, I did… the Gauntlet got ‘em riled up. I couldn’t let them go home empty handed.” He hesitated. “I slipped a line to Nisha that Mason had bet on The Pack against the Disciples in a fight to the death. She did not like that, not one little bit. I took advantage of the situation and started pitting them against each other.” He whistled, long and low. “There was… a lot of blood.”

“Jesus Christ,” Porter groaned.

“The fights started off one on one, and then the stakes started getting higher. I name dropped the Overboss a little, and next thing I know, Overboss Croft’s Grand Champion wins himself a whole kingdom.”

The 2IC leaned forward in his seat. “You fuckin’ didn’t.”

“Look, the fight was, it was, oh my God, you just, like, needed to be there, okay? It was Mason, melee combat, against three Disciples and two Operators. And he fucking annihilated them, alright? He ripped ‘em to fucking shreds.”

Porter’s throat felt dry. “To shreds, you say?”

“Oh, yeah, like, I’d give that fucking dude a park just to get him off me, you know? But Kiddie Kingdom is there, and Croft’s dead -”

Porter pulled the .44 out of the back of his pants and aimed it between Russell’s eyes. “She ain’t fuckin’ dead.”

“Yeah, but like -”

He flicked off the safety. “I said she ain’t fuckin’ dead.”

Russell swallowed. “The place still needs to go to someone -”

Porter pulled himself up and rocked on his heels, before dragging Croft’s duffle out from under the bed. He unzipped it and threw the painted bedsheet at Russell’s head.

“Fix it. Now.”

“But I -”

“I swear to fucking God,” Porter interrupted him loudly. “that I will fucking shoot you, unless you go raise that flag over King fucking Cola’s Court, today.”

His face twisted into an ugly sneer, but he stormed out of the Grille without another word.

~

Mason threw a rave that carried on for half a week, and much to Porter’s surprise, the Operators and the Disciples showed up to party with them, in their first unified event since moving into Nuka World. Porter meandered through the throbbing mass of unwashed humans, flashing strobes and heavy drums making him feel oddly light-headed. Croft was ‘stuck in the Grille, hooked up to RadAway after fighting off all the ghouls, waiting for the all clear from the Geiger counter’, but if Mason had been disappointed with her excuse, he was too high to care.

The place smelled like shit and sex and blood, in that order. The Disciples and The Pack seemed to be making displays of it, finding common ground in bondage and pain. The Operators milled around the outsides, turning their noses up at the filth. When he came across a circle of teenagers playing ‘hot tato’ with a landmine, he decided he’d seen enough, though he did catch a glimpse of Cito climbing up the Ferris wheel, beating his chest and roaring. Porter couldn’t tell if someone had slipped him a Psychojet or if the kid was just being himself.

Every other minute, he spent by Croft’s side, mostly just watching her chest rise and fall. It was another week before he woke up one day to see her green eyes half-open, watching him listlessly.  

“Why won’t this place just let me die?” she asked, her voice so hoarse he almost didn’t recognise it.

His lips turned up at the corners in a grave approximation of a smile. “You ain’t done yet.” He told her, but he wasn’t sure. Later that day, she sat up and gulped down a half tin of soup, before spewing it back up into the bucket beside her bed.

Doc Mackenzie was dragged back up every day and walked Porter through a series of stretches and exercises that were supposed to help them determine if Croft would be able to walk again. It felt too close, too personal. Croft was the Overboss, they kept each other at arm’s length, circling around each other but never touching, like two noses on a brahmin. That was how he discovered the tattoo on her ass, a small but surprisingly accurate portrait of the statue of liberty. That had been a weird day for him.

He tried to have the doc help her shower, but the woman flatly refused to be left alone in a room with Croft, and after much back and forth, it was Porter that half walked, half carried her into the tiny bathroom, soaped up her hair and let the strands run through his fingers as she rinsed it. Maybe she thought if her face was wet, he wouldn’t notice her tears, but he did. He said nothing, but he cut up a few of Cassius’ old shirts, and offered them to Croft as washcloths. She sat with her head under the water for a long time.

When he came back from one of his nightly walks with Shank, she’d moved from her bed to her favourite booth on the other side of the window. Without a word, Porter offered her a plate of Pork ‘n’ Beans and busied himself out the back, cleaning his guns. He came back to check on her, and she was back sitting on the edge of her bed.

“I need a new mattress,” she announced, eyeing the dark red stains.

“I’ll get someone on it.” He promised. Slowly, she heaved herself to her feet and walked thirteen steps to the balcony. Her right foot slid roughly against the floor with every step, making her wince.

“Won’t be so sneaky now, will you boss?” he drawled, hiding his relief.

She looked back at him, and for a moment he could see fear and pain in her eyes, but in a moment her expression hardened into a sneer. “You just wait and fucking see.”

Porter grinned to himself. Her snappy fire was down to a simmer, but it wasn’t gone yet. They were going to be okay.