Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

At first, it’s exactly what Charon wanted.

He’s got a pretty young smoothskin dependent on him, one he can take two centuries of bad employers out on. She’s naive. Innocent to the point of stupidity. Doesn’t know shit about the wasteland. Looking for her daddy so they can go crawl back into that hole they came from.

She was stupid enough to buy his contract without reading it first. Ahzrukhal hadn’t been, but he hadn’t counted on Charon’s own stubbornness. He’d thought Charon could be bought with the usual vices— chems, alcohol, smokes, women. Just like every other American G.I. that Uncle Sam ever produced. It’s not that he couldn’t be, but not for what Ahzrukhal wanted from him. Charon knows he’s a bastard— his new employer is proof of that— but not on Ahrukhal’s level. Even Charon has limits.

He’s never been a particularly good man. He’d enlisted for the fat sign-on bonus the government had promised rather than any misguided sense of patriotism. Still, he’d been a good soldier. Always followed orders.

In the end, he never even got to see a dime of that fucking bonus, even when there’d still been dimes to spend. And he’s been paying for it for two centuries. But centuries later, the pre-war cash sitting in some bank somewhere that doesn’t exist anymore, what else can Uncle Sam offer him now but the girl for whom America Lives On In You?

Yeah, he’d seen the fucking ads. Had figured he’d rather go out in fire than live in a bunker. He’d already done that. But he never really got a choice in that matter— still bound to his contract when the war started and ended in one big flash bang.

But her ancestors had been cowards, he figures. Probably paid out the ass for a spot in Uncle Sam’s Ark, promising to repopulate the wastes when it was all over. Fucked like little bunnies underground, reiterating only the best, cherry-picked American history over and over again until it was distorted into something false. Like an old game of telephone, played on the playground.

And what did her ancestors have to show for it?

A vault bred coward, just like them. A little girl who’s bravest act was probably making the choice to walk into the Underworld, looking for him. And she’d found him alright.

He’d already known then she couldn’t afford his price, even if she was willing to pay it. Not a girl like her.

But. Like he’d said. He wasn’t a particularly good man.

He knows she tried to hide it, back on the train platform, but he knows she’d never been fucked before that. It was half the appeal of it, really. Ruining her. Seeing the stupid little smile slide off her face when she realized what she’d bought. A dud. Not the perfect little bodyguard, to be her white knight. No. Men like that don’t survive out here.

But, in that way, she’d been smart. Had taken off her clothes when he’d asked. Trembling hands, teary-eyed. It’s not that the tears got him going, but it helps, knowing he’s the one in power for fucking once. He’d seen the blood when he pulled out of her, slick with her own come. He hadn’t really given a fuck. It had been decades since he’d had a smoothskin on his cock. Didn’t really matter that she didn’t really want it— Charon hadn’t wanted to be bought and sold like cattle for two hundred years.

He hadn’t fucking forced her. She took off her clothes for him. A fair trade. He put his body on the line in exchange for hers.

And it’s not like he hasn’t kept up his end of the bargain. Steps in front of her whenever someone tries to shoot her— which is fucking often— and clears her path so she can move forward with the idiotic effort to bring clean water to the wasteland. Helping her smoothskin daddy who left her behind.

Even after her daddy is dead, and the project is dead in the water, she keeps at it. Like a good little girl with a cost-sunk fallacy, whenever she needs something from him, something she doesn’t think he’ll give her, she crawls into his lap and starts to take off her clothes.

He knows as much as she’s hung up about it, she doesn’t entirely hate it. Gets wet as a fucking radstorm, and always comes on his cock. He thinks she might even like the crying, as much as she carries on with it when he’s inside her.

But as it keeps happening, as she peels off her vault suit that gets a little looser each time she does, he starts to feel a little… bad. Not enough to stop, no, but the thrill he got from making her bend over her own childhood desk, in her own childhood bedroom because she wants him to help her talk down the Overseer in her stupid vault, starts to lose its charm. It makes him feel… wrong.

He starts to feel like he’s in possession of her contract. He does it to get over the rage that builds inside him at being owned by another person. Punishing her for the same mistakes he made, centuries ago, when he’d first signed the contract with a guided hand. He wanted to ruin this little fucking vault girl, untouched by unclean hands. And it’s clear he has. He’s ruined her.

He’s watched that light she’d still had a spark of die in her eyes over and over and over again. Each time he pushes inside her. As her father died in front of them. As her vault, the one she was saving herself for, the one that taught her sex was for your husband and not some fucking pre-war ghoul five times older than her own father, locked her out and threw away the key.

So why isn’t he happy about it?

The final straw is when they reach the G.E.C.K. chamber.

The Super Mutant, the pretentious fucking bastard, is dead. A stray shot to the fucking head, and he’s blown his skull to bits. She’s just lucky it wasn’t her.

Blood is splattered across her mouth. He knows it’s not her own, as his eyes rake over her looking for injuries. She never, not once, unholstered the little pistol on her hip in a firefight. She rarely does at all. Too shell-shocked by the violence around her to do little more than cower back, seeking cover. He doesn’t really care— it’s what she wants him for. To do the violence for her.

He knows, by context clues and conversations he’s listened in on, that she was hoping to get back into her vault. A week back, that dream had fucking ended. They’d looked at her, at him, looming over her shoulder, and told her she’d changed. That she was too much of a wastelander— she unsettled people. Made them upset. He’d fucking scoffed at that. She was the most fucking unassuming creature he’d ever met in the wasteland, and she was too much for them.

He’s not really sure what’s keeping her going, now. Maybe just the inertia of her father’s goals. She’s good like that. Promised daddy with his dying breath, tears in her eyes, that she would do it.

He kicks the dead mutant. It makes her flinch.

The mutant was her ticket into the irradiated chamber that lies at the end of the hall. She has a hazmat suit, but with the radiation he can feel that thing giving off, even from here, he knows she’ll be dead before she can even pry the G.E.C.K. out of the claw that’s holding it in place. But they have little choice if she wants to continue the project. One of them has to enter.

And Charon’s no errand boy.

She knows this. So, looking at the body at her feet in desolation, at the irradiated chamber down the hall, she starts to take off her clothes. Pushes him down to the ground with delicate hands, chafed raw from the wasteland. Pulls her suit down off her shoulders, doesn’t look at him as she does it. Climbs onto his lap, settling her core over him. As payment.

For her life.

This isn’t like the other times. She won’t be able to weasel her way out of this one— she can’t slip by unnoticed, past monsters and men. She can’t outmaneuver radiation. This isn’t for her ease or her comfort so she doesn’t have to learn how to kill. Keeping her hands clean for the vault.

This time, her choice really is between fucking him so he’ll help her, or dying an agonizing death that Charon once felt himself. Skin peeled raw, splitting as cartilage melts from the bone.

He’s suddenly so disgusted he pushes her off his lap.

Gets up, paces the fucking room. Kicks the Super Mutant again, a growl ripping through his throat. He feels the radiation warming his bones. Electrifying him.

“Come back,” she pleads, and when he looks back at her, she’s on her knees, braced on the floor where he left her. Her vault suit is tangled around her legs, having never removed her boots. “Please,” she says, her voice anguished.

“No,” he tells her. A low growl in his throat.

“You— you won’t do it?” she asks, and she looks— terrified, and fuck, he’s done that to her. Her chest is heaving, her little tits threatening to spill out of her exposed bra. He can see the teeth marks and bruises he’s left there. Waiting for him. Ready for him to fuck her for her own fucking life.

He lets out another disgusted sound, and he walks off before she can say or do anything else that will make him feel anything.

He hears the start of a sob as he walks into the radiation. The sound of it grates on him like never before. It takes him thirty fucking seconds to walk in there, to fetch the fucking thing. Just slams the case shut, lifting it up by the handle, and walking out. What kind of fucking man has he become that he wouldn’t just do that for her? That she’s on her knees, crying because she thinks she has no other choice than to fuck him or die?

She’s up against the wall, still undressed, her face in her hands when he finds her. Drops the case at her feet without a word, and leaves.

He doesn’t go far. Just down the hallway to kick the dead fucking mutant, and smokes. When he comes back, she won’t look at him. She’s redressed, though, the G.E.C.K. still at her feet. He stands a few feet away from her.

“Thank you,” she finally says, and when she looks up, she looks— teary-eyed. It doesn’t give him the same satisfaction that it used to. Knowing that she’s dependent on him, though she holds the contract. “What do you want?” she asks. For the G.E.C.K., she means. For payment. Because he did this one thing for her.

He scoffs, looking away. He only looks back when he hears the rustle of fabric, and he sees her on her knees, crawling over to him.

“Are you going to stop protecting me?” she asks, teary-eyed.

“No,” he sighs. Not for now, anyway. Not while he figures out what the fuck is wrong with him.

“Then what do you want?” she says, her fingers splayed out on the dirty floor. “My mouth?”

It rips through him. Fuck, what has he become?

“No,” he says.

This time, she’s looking away from him. “It’s because I’m used goods, isn’t it?” she says, mouth trembling.

It’s such an absurd fucking notion that he scoffs. “You’re not used goods.”

God her vault did a fucking number on her. Just like he did.

“Yes I am,” she says, still not looking at him.

“You’re not a fucking commodity,” he says, and he just can’t take this stupid fucking conversation anymore. He’s disgusted. He’s done this to her. He remembers the bright-eyed innocent girl she was just a few weeks ago.

He feels her hands on his thighs. Her delicate, vault-bred hands. Soft, just like she is. Squishy in the middle, too soft in the heart. He hated it. Still does, he guesses. She’s never had to work a real day in her life. Picks over the corpses of the people who ran the earth when he was alive the first time.

But he knows that’s not her fault.

She’s reaching for his belt. He stops her. He’s never stopped her before. She looks at him with wide eyes, brimming over with tears. “Why don’t you want me, then?” she asks. He sighs. He can’t even begin to explain the jumbled, spaghetti mess of his thoughts to her.

“You don’t want this,” he tells her with a sigh.

She sits back on her thighs, and Charon slumps back against the wall opposite her. He slides down the wall, his back pressed against the rusting paneling, one knee raised. He rests his wrist on his raised knee, watching her with guarded eyes.

He watches as she bites her lip, chewing on it.

“I do, I promise,” she says. She’s almost eager. It’s a change from all the other times, when she’s curled up on his lap, sliding him inside her for as little time as it takes her to get him off. She never looks at him. Never tries to kiss him, or make it anything other than what it is. Transactional. Never tried to pretend she really wanted it, before. No more than her getting off as he fucked up into her. It gives him pause.

“Fine,” he says, crossing his arms, “tell me you want it. Convince me.”

She sits back on her legs, her hands splayed on her thighs. She bites her lip.

They never talk when he fucks her. So this will be— interesting, at the very least.

She sucks in a breath, and for a moment, he sees that girl again— the one who walked into Ahzrukhal’s bar after selling everything she owned, fixated on buying him. Determined.

The spark in her eye.

“I like when you touch me,” she says, like an admission. He snorts.

“Mhmm,” he says. “Not very convincing.”

Her lip trembles, but her eyes are clearing. It starts a low fire in his gut, the one cleared away earlier.

“I really like it when you—” she says, sucking in a breath. “I like it when your fingers are inside me,” she says in a rush. Her face is flushed, her fingers digging into her own flesh. He’ll bet, the virgin that she was when they met, she’s never said anything like this before.

Her eyes flick over to him, to his mouth. Her lips part, and her tongue darts out to wet them.

She crawls over to him, closing the distance. Not quite on his lap, but nearly straddling one of his legs. Her hand touches his still-raised knee. His arms loosen around his chest. “I want you to touch me,” she says. And then she looks away. “The first time, when you— when you licked your fingers—”

She’s flushed. He can tell by the way her eyes are dilating in the low light, she’s turned on.

Her eyes flick to his hands. She reaches for him, taking one of them to press up against her thigh. “Oh yeah?” he says, mockingly, his fingers trailing up her thigh to press between her legs. She’s overly warm to his touch.

“I like—” she says, and she’s leaning forward to touch his jaw. That’s new. She rarely touches him without taking her clothes off, first. “I like to watch you come. When you’re— you sigh against my throat, and I—”

She almost has him convinced when she says—

“I love you,” she sighs, as his fingers press against her clit through her suit.

He flinches back like he’s been hit. It shocks him so much it takes him a moment to respond. When he does, it’s with a sneer. Wretching back. The thing is— he doesn’t think she’s lying. He knows she doesn’t love him. He’s never done anything remotely worthy of being loved, not to her, but—

“You’re not in love with me,” he tells her. Too harsh. She flinches back, like she already knows it’s a mistake to have said it aloud. “You just don’t want to be alone.” He sees her jaw clench, turning her head away from him.

“You don’t know how I feel,” she says, defensive.

Doubling down on it? Fine then.

“Your little vault never taught you the difference between lust and love,” he tells her with a sneer.

But the tears spring to her eyes freely. “Shut up,” she says, turning away from him, angrily. “You don’t know anything about me. Or my vault.” She’s just mad about the rejection, he knows. It’s the same look he’s seen across her face week after week as her world has fallen apart around her. And now she’s just clinging to him— the only thing she has left.

It’s pathetic. But he understands it, at least.

It’s not love. It’s desperation. She doesn’t want to be alone.

“We’re ending this here,” he tells her, his jaw set. “You don’t want to fuck me, and you’re not in love with me. We’ll take the G.E.C.K. to the purifier in the morning and settle the rest of this fucking mess then.”

She ignores him. She extricates himself from his lap, what little was left of his erection dying down as she does. Her movements are jerky, even as she wipes the tears from her eyes. He sighs, watching her roll out her sleeping bag. She doesn’t bother to remove her armor, the leather shoulder padding and bracers, just curling up around the G.E.C.K. with her back to him. He can see the gentle shudders of her chest as she cries herself to sleep.

For the first time in a long, long time, Charon feels his fingers itch to press a hand to her side. As a comfort. It makes him snarl to himself. That’s not who he is. That's not what this is— what this has ever been.

He smokes his way through the last half of his package of cigarettes. There’s another carton at the bottom of his bag, the one she’d gotten for him. You’re strong, she’d told him, you should be able to carry your own things if you want them.

He doesn’t keep much in it. She never asks him to carry her things, even when he knows it’s weighing her down, but she always offers to split the things she scavenges. Food, caps, ammo.

He closes his eyes, his fingers itching for another cigarette. Instead, he eyes his mistress, curled up on the sleeping bag. Her eyes are rimmed red, and while he might have attributed it to the crying before, he thinks it’s a lot worse than that. Radiation sickness, he thinks. They’ve been fucking a lot more than usual, with so much happening all at once that she needed his help with. He always spends inside her, and he knows that can’t be good for her, not with how he oozes radiation out of every pore.

He sighs.

She’s got a few bags of RadAway in her pack. He raises to his feet to go through her bag. He pulls out one of the signature orange bags, stringing it up on an old hook on the wall. For lab coats or something, he figures. But before he can administer it to her, he pries the G.E.C.K. from her arms. Even though the thing itself doesn’t produce radiation, the device probably has collected it down to its atoms. He’s not going to waste the RadAway on her if she’s just going to collect all the radiation again overnight.

She whimpers in her sleep when he pricks at her vein with the needle, but she doesn’t wake.

She’ll feel— and look— better in the morning. She’ll forget all about her idiotic ideas of loving a creature like him.

In the morning, she doesn’t look at him. By that time, he’s removed the line from her arm and tossed it, and the usual color has returned to her cheeks. It’s clear she’s still upset with him, though. He shrugs it off. It’s never bothered him before, why would it now?

She clutches the G.E.C.K. close to her chest, like she’s afraid if it slips from her fingers it’ll disappear entirely. Maybe it will.

Charon thinks about reaching out. About calling out her name, saying Mistress—

But he knows what she’ll say. She’ll snap at him and say she doesn’t want to talk about it. So they walk in silence. He follows her out of the chamber, down the stairs, into a wide open room they’d passed through the previous evening. There are a few bodies in the room, and a few ammunition crates. Walking through these places, he always wonders who the hell put them in places like this. Had Vault-Tec known what the fuck would be going down, centuries after the world ended? Or had scavenagers just dragged them in here, and then crawled into a corner and shriveled up, like an old world roach?

He’s hunched over a green ammunition case when the doors blow open.

He has little time to react. Not to reach for her, or to cover himself. The concussive force of it blows both of them back against the wall, and he hears the sickening crack of her head followed by a whimper that he hates.

He’s been impaled by shrapnel from the door, all up his side. He can feel the blood seeping into his clothing, but he grits his teeth, raising up on his knees. His vision blurs. Still, he looks for his mistress. She’s passed out on the floor, but even through his warped vision he can see that she’s breathing.

Charon hears voices. There’s a ringing in his ears, so he can’t understand it, but when he turns his head in the direction of the sound, he sees three figures. Two hulking figures in sets of power armor. Fuck he hates power armor. Fucking hated wearing it in Alaska, hates shooting people wearing it here in the wasteland.

The figure at the front of the two in power armor is clearly in charge. The officers never wore the armor. That was for grunts like him. The officer is dressed in all black, a military cap on his head. He can’t see it clearly, but he can tell there’s a silver insignia on the cap. Fucking Enclave.

He tries to reach for his gun, but black boots step on his hand. He feels the crunch of his bones as the officer bares down on his hand.

“Leave the ghoul,” he hears them say. “Just get the girl. She’s the one the president needs.”

He growls low in his throat. Through his blurred vision, he sees the officer scowl at him. The officer lifts his boot off Charon’s hand, and then kicks him over. “Don’t waste your bullets on this creature,” he says. “President Eden will be wiping them off the map soon enough.”

As soon as the officer’s back is turned to him, he lunges forward. One of the idiots in power armor gets there first, even with his lumbering bulk from the mech suit. The soldier raises his gun, and then beats down on him with the butt of it until Charon passes out.

When he wakes up, he’s alone.

The injury of his hand has already started to knit itself back together from the lingering radiation. But she’s nowhere to be seen.

Her things have been taken, too. Her bag, the G.E.C.K., her measly little pistol. He’s alone. His vision is off, but when he pulls out one of the stimpacks she’d insisted he carry, injecting it into his arm, it clears up quickly. He’ll have to pick out the shrapnel in his side later.

It’s easy to trace the Enclave’s path through the vault. What little Charon hadn’t killed, they cleaned up, sweeping through with an efficiency that mimics the old world army. By the time he reaches the clearing outside, he knows they’re gone. They’ve probably been gone for hours, he figures, by the low hanging of the sun in the sky.

So he does what any good soldier would do: he retreats.

She’s probably already dead, he reasons, when he treks all the way back to the Underworld. The contract will find its way back to him, like it always does. There’s something that hangs heavy in his chest when he thinks about it, though, but he reasons it’s just that she’s been a decent fuck, and if he’s being perfectly honest, a good traveling companion. She actually sort of gave a shit about things, before he’d started to wring that out of her.

He finds the Ninth Circle has been taken over by a smoothskin who doesn’t really give a shit when he takes up his old post in the back corner of the room, as long as he buys booze and doesn’t scare the customers.

He knows most of the Underworld has never really liked him. They don’t like the look of him— he’s too fucking big, and he’s willing to be nasty when he needs to be. And there was a time when he would do Ahzrukhal’s dirty work on occasion. Never enough to be consistent, but enough that Ahzrukhal had a hard time parting with him for a couple of years.

It’s been decades since he was last without a master. If he was in possession of the contract, it would have immediately passed hands by now. Most of his employers kept him close for obvious reasons, but a few would fire him for weeks or months at a time, leaving him to his own devices until they wanted to claim his services again.

Back in the Underworld, he picks up where he left off. Traveling with his current employer has left him flush with caps and little to spend it on before now. He buys alcohol from the new girl who runs the bar, chems from Barrows and cigs from Tulip, who eyes him like he did something to his mistress, giving nasty looks every time he stops by. He bares his teeth to her, and she backs off.

He finds it doesn’t satisfy him nearly as much as it used to. Not even his usual vices. One afternoon he ‘borrows’ the sniper rifle from that fucker Crowley at Carol’s and climbs up on the roof of the museum to shoot the heads off all the Super Mutants in the area. When he’s done that, he sets his aim towards the slavers that Willow tells him have set up camp in the Lincoln Memorial. He keeps shooting until they stop streaming from the base like swarming ants.

A couple days in, Charon almost fucks a ghoul trader who comes through. She’s got him pressed up against the wall just outside the Underworld entrance, her hand down his pants, wrapped around his cock, when she tries to kiss him. He shoves her off.

“What’s your problem?” she scowls, shooting him a glare before she slams the door into the Underworld shut behind her.

He doesn’t know what the fuck his problem is, and that’s part of the issue.

He stays in the dark corner, fisting his cock until he comes in a sticky mess, thinking of her. Of her soft fucking skin. Her stupid little breathy sighs she always tries to hold back as he fucks up into her. He should have just fucked her that last time. It shouldn’t have mattered how she said she felt, her pussy would have been just as good as always.

He scowls, wiping his hand on the fur of the long-dead mammoth, and tucks himself back into his trousers. He doesn’t feel satisfied. He never feels fucking satisfied anymore. He knows, somehow, it’s her fault.

He pulls out a pack of smokes and retreats back to his stupid corner of the Ninth Circle.

He’s been back in the Underworld a little over a week when she stumbles through the door of the Ninth Circle. She catches his eye when she sees him sitting in the corner, and he sees the stoop of her shoulders relax, if only marginally.

Charon nearly drops his cigarette. Something that verges far too close to relief passes over him when he sees her standing in the doorway, alive. He presses his cigarette into the tabletop, joining all the other years of scorch marks, and leaves the butt there when he gets up to attend to his mistress.

Once out of the shadow of the doorway, he can see she’s injured. Badly. He’s never seen her injured, not like this. Nothing more than a few cuts and bruises, usually from her own clumsiness. Or the occasional feral that gets past him and tries to take a bite out of her before he can reach her. Their blunt teeth never go deep enough to really hurt her.

But this time, she’s clearly been beaten. There are bruises in various states of healing up the side of her face. A black eye. Her lip is split, and it looks like it had started to heal and then was split again by path of least resistance.

The worst, though, is the blackened patch of blood up the left side of her vault suit. There’s a hole about the size of his pinkie, frayed at the edges, from a bullet. The stain is dry, crusty. Days old. She hadn’t quite been hobbling as she entered the door, but she’s not well.

Charon finds he doesn’t like it. He usually doesn’t care, not about his employers, not about her. Hadn’t fucking cared every time she’d cried on his cock before this, why does he care about this— why now?

He swallows down the bile in his throat as he lowers himself to his knees. “Did the Enclave do this to you?”

Her eyes shy away from him, but eventually, she nods. “Most of it,” she rasps, her voice rough. He frowns. “I got— I got caught by a raider on the way back.”

His jaw sets. “Did he touch you?”

Her eyes flick to him, and then away. She shakes her head. “He split my lip again, but I was faster.” Her tongue darts out to poke at her wound.

Charon nods, his jaw clenched. “Did you kill him?”

She looks away. Ashamed. No, then. She didn’t.

He would have, even if the fucker hadn’t had the chance to touch her.

He reaches for her zipper. She freezes, her eyes flicking to the bar, where Emaline is standing. Charon grimaces. It’s not fucking anout that, he wants to tell her. He’s not going to fuck her on the floor in front of all these people, even if she weren’t fucking injured.

But her eyes glaze over, and she doesn’t protest as he unzips her suit. Just letting him do what he would with her. He pulls it off her shoulders, down to her waist, so he can inspect her wound. She lets him manhandle her. Compliant. When he’s lifted her tank top, not so far that it bares her to the bar, he can see the red, healing scar that juts up her side. She must have gotten access to a stimpack at some point.

He drops her shirt. But she makes no move to pull her sleeves back up. He looks her over and realizes she’s missing her backpack. And the G.E.C.K. His lips press together. That means the Enclave has it.

Eventually she pushes his fingers away, her voice a rasp as she says, “We have to go. Colonel Autumn is at the purifier with the G.E.C.K.” She wraps her hand around his wrist, her words urgent. But then she drops her gaze, and says, “I’ll make it up to you later.”

It twists uncomfortably in his gut.

As soon as the Enclave officers are dead, the alarms start blaring. Klaxons echo around the room, louder than anything Charon has heard for decades. He grits his teeth, and looks to the two other women in the room with him— his mistress, and the Lyons girl.

Before anyone can say anything, the intercom chimes. “Hello? Hello! Is anyone there?” he hears Doctor Li say through the speaker. He can barely hear it over the klaxons. “Please! Come in!”

Lyons trudges over to the intercom, pressing the button. “Sarah here,” she says, her mech suit straining as she bends over. It’s not meant for precise work.

“Oh thank god,” Li says, her voice tinny through the speakers. But there’s a desperation in her voice that bleeds though. “Sarah, it’s really, really important that you listen to me.”

“I’m listening,” Lyons says, her brows furrowed. “The Enclave are dead.”

“That’s good, but it’s not about that,” Li says. “There’s something wrong with the purifier.”

Lyons presses her lips together, and then looks at Charon and his mistress. His mistress is halfway down the stairs, leaning up against the railing. “Go ahead,” Lyons says. “Tell us what we have to do. James’ daughter and the ghoul are with me.”

His mistress has a haunted, hollow look in her eye as she stares down at the body of Autumn.

“I’m really, really sorry,” Li says, her voice straining, “but the purifier is going to blow. I don’t know how it happened,” she says, almost out of breath. “Sabatoge, or just— incompetence from those men, but we don’t have much time left.”

He sees Lyons’ jaw clench. “Okay. Is there anything we can do to stop it?”

Charon gives the girl credit. Most of the Brotherhood are just playing at being soldiers, with their made-up ranks and their scavenged power armor. This one, though, she shows real promise. She’d have been the kind of girl he’d have been happy to serve alongside back in the day. Probably would have enlisted because it was the right thing to do.

“Someone has to turn on the purifier. Now. I’m sorry, but we don’t have any time,” Li says. “The airlock chamber is flooded with lethal radiation. Whoever goes in there will die. But if no one does, you’ll all die. And maybe more. I can’t—” her voice chokes, “I don’t have the time to do any real calculations, but it will be bad. Nuclear explosion bad.”

He sees the Lyons girl’s eyes flutter shut. “Got it. See you on the other side, Li.”

She stands up, her power armor groaning as she does. Charon doesn’t have much time to think. Lyons is wearing power armor. T-51, if he rememembers the late models correctly. It has better radiation shieling than the earlier models, but not by much. Her chest plate is shot up with bullets, and she doesn’t have a helmet— it won’t matter how much lead lining is in the body, without that helmet she’s not really sealed in.

She’ll hardly fare any better than his mistress would in her vault suit.

Still, Lyons flicks her eyes to the door. She laughs, “I didn’t think I’d go out like this. I kinda thought it would be in a blaze of glory, fighting Super Mutants. But this is good, right?” she looks to him, like she needs his approval. He wants to snort. Maybe she really is just a child playing pretend. “I’d be saving lives either way. That’s good enough.”

He sighs, closing his eyes briefly. He doesn’t owe the Lyons girl anything. He could pick up his mistress, toss her over his shoulder, and book it out of there. The Brotherhood girl would do it. She’d walk into the purifier and turn it on, sacrificing her own life for the better good.

“What’s the code?” Lyons asks, turning to his mistress on the stairs. It’s 2-1-6. Charon had listened in on the conversation between his mistress and her father, weeks back. It was from a bible verse or some shit, something people haven’t really cared about since the bombs fell.

But when Lyons turns to the stairs, his mistress is gone. Out of the corner of Charon’s eye, he sees her at the airlock chamber door. She’s about to press the button.

Fuck.

Absolutely not.

Charon doesn’t even have time to make the conscious choice. He lunges for his mistress, wrapping his arms around her middle. She’s such a little fucking thing that he doesn’t even strain as she struggles against him. He’s too late, though, the chamber begins to open, releasing with a whoosh. He can feel the radiation seep into the air.

“Charon!” she practically screams, struggling in his arms, “Let me go! That’s an order!”

He scoffs. Not even close to what he’s required to do for her.

He throws her back at Lyons, who stumbles back even with her power armor. Lyons eyes go wide as she catches his mistress, bracing herself as the girl is thrown at her.

“Hold onto her. Do not let her go,” he orders the Lyons girl. Though she clearly tries to hide it, putting on a brave face, he sees the stark relief of not having to sacrifice herself flit across Lyons’ face.

“Charon!” his mistress screams. Angry, desperate. Full of tears. It’s nothing he hasn’t heard from her before, and it’s easy to ignore. He can see her thrashing as the airlock door hisses open. “Let me— Sarah let me go!”

Wide-eyed, the Lyons girl holds his mistress tight around her middle, watching as Charon inputs the code, and the world goes white.

For two weeks, Charon sits at his mistress’ side in the cordoned-off clinic in the Citadel. He thinks the only reason he’s allowed in there at all, chock full of radiation as he is, is because he saved the Elder’s daughter from certain death. Not that it matters much. Both Lyons and his mistress still haven’t woken up.

He watches his mistress sleep. Through IV changes, as the red rim of her eyes lightens by degrees as they pump her with RadAway. Watches as the skin of her face knits itself back together from the fight at the Enclave, until her skin is as vault-fresh as it was the first time he saw her back at the Ninth Circle.

He hears the reports the Brotherhood scribes give each other in hushed voices. No permanent damage. Brain swelling has gone down. No internal bleeding.

Still, she sleeps.

The only sound in the room is the soft, monotonous beeping of the twin heart monitors, from his mistress and Lyons. Sometimes the Elder will join them in the room, sitting at his daughter’s side, her pale skin growing paler by the day. He never speaks. Just sighs, squeezing Lyons’ hand, and retreats without sparing Charon a glance.

Charon knows he could be spending his time doing something useful. Anything. He knows the Brotherhood would have been grateful for the help, even from someone like him, a mutant. Or he could go outside for a smoke break. Drink a beer in the mess hall with one of the Lyons Pride boys who have been treating him like one of them.

Or—

Trying to figure out what the fuck is wrong with him. Why, after all this time, he’s feeling guilt about his mistress and their situation. What the fuck it means that it suddenly bothers him the idea of fucking her. But instead, he shuts down. Like a feral going dormant, or a Mr. Handy powering down in it’s charging pod.

He only really comes back online the second he sees her eyelids fluttering. With intent, this time, not just the flutter of the dreamlike coma she’s been in this whole time. Her eyes open with slow blinks.

He sees her register her surroundings in real time. Her wide eyes, staring at the ceiling, tracing along the unfamiliar walls. But when her gaze falls on him, she crumples.

And that—

That sours in his gut.

When she speaks, a rasp, she asks, “Why wouldn’t you let me do it?”

“You mean why wouldn’t I let you kill yourself?” Charon says, and he realizes he sounds angry.

By now, he sees her actions for what they were. A suicide attempt. He’d seen it on the faces of soldiers who have lost everything. In the aftermath of the bombs— volunteering for suicide missions hoping they wouldn’t make it back as the world crumbled around them.

He catches a glimpse of the scribe by Lyons’ cot placing her clipboard down, and exiting the room, the door shutting softly behind her. He snorts. She knows what’s good for her.

His mistress looks up towards the ceiling, tears pricking in her eyes. He has no sympathy for her. Not for this.

“There’s nothing left for me,” she says, a quiet sob. “You should have just let me do it. It would have been worth something.”

His teeth clench. “Dying when you don’t have to isn’t worth the price of salt,” he tells her, harsh. She flinches back.

“My father wanted me to finish it,” she tells him.

“You think your father would have wanted this for you?” he throws at her. It’s meant to wound. He knows all about her, by now. It’s nothing she’s ever told him, not in so many words. But she talks to people. People who aren’t him. But he’s always there, listening.

“You don’t know what my father would have wanted for me,” she says, but he can see in her eyes that she knows what he said is the truth.

The tears in her eyes well over, leaving a streak down her cheek. She doesn’t reach to brush them aside. “There’s nothing left for me,” she repeats, her eyes still glued to the ceiling. “My father is dead, Charon. He’s the only person who’s ever cared about me. Everyone else just wanted to use me,” she says, and it’s an accusation. She’s not wrong. He’s used her over and over and over again. “I’m so, so tired of this place, Charon,” she says, her voice quiet, like it’s a secret, just slipped out. “I just want to go home.”

He presses his lips together.

She turns over, her back to him. He sighs, staring up at the ceiling. He knows there’s no home for her left.

She’s different, when they get back on the road. Aimless.

She’s all healed up, much better than the Lyons girl. They don’t leave the Citadel until the other woman wakes, though, weak and just barely able to sit up. But Lyons smiles at his mistress weakly, squeezing her hand, and mouthing a thank you at Charon that he doesn’t deserve.

She still doesn’t have a backpack, and whenever they step through untouched ruins, she doesn’t stop to pick through them like she normally would. It makes Charon frown. He picks up the canned food she passes over, putting them in his own bag. At night, she pulls her legs to her chest, saying she’ll take the first watch. But she never wakes him.

After that, he stops sleeping entirely.

The bags deepen under her eyes, and somewhere on the edge of D.C., he sees her pull out her pistol for the first time. It’s not the same one she had, he doesn’t think— that one was lost to the Enclave. She still hasn’t told him what happened.

She’s a better shot than he thought she’d be, with how she used to cling to his side every time an unexpected feral pop up in the metro. But her eyes are hollow when he sees her aiming at the feral. It’s so unexpected he doesn’t shoot— he lets her do it. When the pistol fires off, the sound echoing throught the narrow tunnels of the metro, she stares ahead. The feral falls dead at her feet, a hole in it’s head, dark blood oozing from the wound. Even though she’s fighting, he can tell her heart isn’t into it. Not really.

Charon doesn’t know how to offer comfort.

He’s not built for it. He’s never wanted to do it before. But now, as he sees her as she is— as he’s made her— he wants to offer it.

He doesn’t, though. He’s not who she would want it from, if she would want it at all.

On the road, somewhere between the GNR building and Megaton, they run into Crazy Wolfgang. His mistress seems to know him, by the way he waves at her, jogging over to their side. “Hey!” he says. “Got any of that good stuff for me?” he asks her.

She shakes her head. Wolfgang’s eyes travel to her back, her pack missing, and then over to Charon.

“I see you were able to get this guy’s contract,” he says, instead. Trying to make conversation. Ah, Charon thinks. This is how she knew of his contract.

His mistress nods, slowly. She doesn’t look at Charon when she speaks. “You don’t need an extra caravan guard, do you?” she asks him, her voice rough.

“Lookin’ for work?” Wolfgang says with a laugh. It dies down when he sees the look on her face. “Uh,” he says, and looks at Charon. “Still, no, sorry. I think the Rivet City guards have been having trouble with their Aqua Pura caravans, though, if you’re trying to offload him.”

Charon freezes.

His mistress nods.

She’s not asking for work, he realizes. She’s trying to sell his contract.

It makes Charon irrationally angry.

His fists curl at his sides, and his jaw clenches as his mistress walks away from them. Wolfgang’s eyes flick to Charon, giving him a half smile that looks more sheepish than anything. He’s not in the mood.

But when he glances back at his mistress, she’s toeing at the dirt. There’s a flower growing up between the cracks there. Something she might have picked up before. Rattled off some fact she read in a book about it, before tucking it into her bag to sell to a chemist. Or behind her ear, if it’s no more useful than a decoration.

Now, though, she leaves it where it is.

“Do you have a backpack for sale?” Charon asks Wolfgang, tamping down the annoyance for now. “Her size?”

Wolfgang looks back at his Brahmin, loaded high with trunks and packs. “I think I’ve got something.” When he’s handed over the bag— a canvas, military surplus rusack— Charon pays him the caps, and goes back to his mistress’s side.

“Here,” he tells her, shoving the backpack at her. She takes it on instinct, but narrows her eyes at him. “You needed a new one.”

“Why? What do you want from me?” she asks, accusatory.

He sighs. He should have expected it. “Nothing,” he tells her. “Not everything has to be transactional,” he mutters, though he’s the one who taught her that it did. “Let’s just— go,” he huffs. He doesn’t wait for her to follow, but he hears the rustle of fabric as she pulls the bag over her shoulders, and the scuffle of her footsteps behind him.

That night, as he builds a fire in the grassy plains in the ruins of the D.C. suburbs, just hours away from Megaton, she sits on his sleeping bag. He’d put his foot down when they’d made camp. She was sleeping tonight. She’d just turned her head, hadn’t said anything. Had barely touched the Dandy Boy Apples he’d tossed at her.

His gaze keeps flicking to her. Eventually, she lets out a huff of frustration. “Just say what you want to say,” she tells him.

“What are you trying to do?” Charon asks her. “Sell my contract?” he accuses.

She doesn’t look at him when she answers, drawing in the irradiated dirt with her finger. “I don’t need your services anymore. I found my dad.” And then, “Why does it matter? You don’t want me anymore. I don’t have anything else to offer you. All my caps are gone.”

He lets out a frustrated huff. It’s not that he doesn’t want her anymore. It’s just everything fucking else.

But he’s not going to tell her that. She’s confused enough as it is.

“Just— go to sleep,” he tells her with a sigh.

She looks away. “You said that last time, and then when we woke up, I was taken.”

Accusatory.

“I’m not going to let that happen again,” he growls.

She presses her lips together, but settles down on his sleeping bag. Doesn’t crawl inside it. She rests her head on her hands. “You said we’d talk about it in the morning, too, but we didn’t.”

He grimaces. He’s not going to have this conversation with her. Not right now. Not when she’s trying her damnedest to get herself killed in the stupidest ways posible.

“Well,” he says, “we might have if you stopped trying to get yourself killed.”

“I’m not,” she says. Grumbles. He snorts. “I’m not,” she says again. Huffy.

“Then what are you trying to do?” he asks her.

He knows she doesn’t have a good answer for him because she turns over to face away from him. He sees the soft raise and fall of her chest, and thinks she’s finally asleep, but then she breaks the silence again.

“I just want things to mean something again.”

When they arrive at Megaton, they head for the bar that barely passes as a restaurant, the Brass Lantern. She clutches at the straps of her backpack, not entirely empty anymore. The night before, when she’d slept, he’d divided the contents of his bag into her own. It’s only fair, he reasons, trying not to think too hard about it. She’d been the one to give him the shit he carries around in the first place.

It’s not a lot, but it’s enough. A couple of simpacks, caps, and the few tins of food they have left. He took the sleeping bag back, letting her think that he cares about that. He’ll put it back out for her tonight, though, if the common house is full.

She scowls when he pays for their food. He thinks she doesn’t like the perception of owing him anything.

He doesn’t know what they’re doing here in Megaton, not exactly. She hadn’t said, days back, setting course on her Pip-Boy for the settlement. She picks at her food, pushing it around her plate with her fork. But he’ll sit here until she eats it, though. He has all the time in the world.

They’re sitting outside at the bar, on the weather-worn stools. He’s finished with his own food, choked it down while it was still hot, burning the back of his mouth. She’d eaten the little bit of pastry crust off her pot pie, pushing around the vegetables as she glances towards the bomb in the center of town, but mostly ignores the rest of it.

He excuses himself to go take a piss in the outhouse behind the bar, but when he returns, she’s left the restaurant. He sighs, grumbling to himself. He doesn’t have to spend much time tracking her down. Charon finds her just a few meters away, standing ankle-deep in the irradiated water of the bomb.

The Children of Atom sycophant who was preaching to the air has since left. She’s crouched over the cover panel on the side of the bomb. It might have once been yellow, but age and force have worn it down to just streaks of paint. There are Hanzi across the panel in black lettering. He doesn’t know much Mandarin— mostly things like fuck you— but he guesses it’s a warning.

“What the hell are you doing?” he asks.

“What does it look like I’m doing?” she says, trying to pry off the panel. She’s got her fingernails under the cover, but even though the screws are loose and rusty, they’re fastened tight.

“It looks like you’re messing with a nuclear warhead.”

She glares at him over her shoulder. “Go wait outside the town,” she orders him. He can tell it’s an order because he feels the pull at the back of his brain. But this isn’t a combat situation. He doesn’t have to obey. The only pressing danger here is her.

“No,” he says. “I’m not going to let you blow yourself up with the whole town.”

Something like hurt flashes across her face.

“You think I’d kill all these people?” she says. And no, he doesn’t really think that. But he can’t imagine what else she might be trying to do. “Because you think that I— that I have some kind of death wish? I’m trying to disarm it. Simms asked me when I first came into town. He said he’d pay me.”

He presses his lips together. Looks over the bomb. He crosses his arms, “What do you even know about explosives?”

“I know some things,” she says. Bites her lip. That tells him she knows nothing. “I think I can do it,” she tells him. “A couple months back I read Duck and Cover! all the way through.”

He braces himself above her, his hand on the bomb. His shadow covers her almost entirely. “You think or you know?” Her lip trembles, and she looks away. “That’s what I thought.”

“But I came all the way here to do this,” she tells him. Pouts. It echoes in his brain. It would mean something.

And then he sighs. “Just— just stand back, I’ll do it.”

Ideally, she would leave the fucking city in case his skills are more rusty than he remembers, but he doesn’t think he’ll be able to get far with that idea. He pries the panel off. At this point, the bolts are little more than rust, and with his strength, it’s easy work.

She regards him with suspicion. “Why?”

“So you don’t fucking kill yourself and all these people,” he says, looking into the spaghetti mess of wires, but he’s an old hat at this. They didn’t have him do bomb drills blindfolded for nothing.

“Why do you care?” she asks.

He reaches in and yanks out a wad of wires, shorting it out. Just to avoid the question.

Why does he care?

She sucks in a breath, her eyes wide. “There,” Charon says, pressing the bundle of wires into her hands, “are you happy now?”

When he looks over at her, she’s looking up at him with wide eyes. Any hint of annoyance has dropped from her face in surprise. She looks almost— awed, clutching the tangle of wires to her chest. He hauls the cover plate back up, slotting it into place so it doesn’t look touched. He imagines the Children of Atom won’t be pleased they messed with it.

She keeps sending him shy little glances as they trek up the hill, even as he knocks on the mayor’s door.

“How did you learn how to do that?” she asks him.

“US Marine Corps,” he tells her, “circa 2065.”

“Gosh, you’re old,” she says, but when he looks over, she’s got an almost bashful smile on her face. He snorts. Of course, out of all the fucking things he’s done for her, she would be impressed by this.

But the second the door swings open, her face drops back into a scowl.

It drops like a stone in his stomach.

The last time a girl had smiled at him like that— all sweet, teasing looks with nothing else behind it— was probably back in Missouri before he’d enlisted. Taking the truck down to the lake to kiss his high school girlfriend before her daddy got home from work.

It’s been a long time since he’d wanted anything from a woman besides a warm hole to fuck.

Fuck.

Fuck. Of course he was bothered by all of his fucking actions towards her— he likes her. This goody two-shoes absolutely fucking slip of a girl, wet behind the ears, who is determined to get herself killed in the stupidest way possible. Who he ruined.

Fuck.

He’s not even paying attention to her conversation with the mayor until Simms jogs back inside to fetch their reward, reappearing at the door. Charon is expecting a bag of caps— maybe a couple hundred— but instead, it’s a key. The key is attached to a little Nuka Quantum shaped keychain. He vaguely remembers them being given out as promotions on his last leave before the bombs.

“Thanks for that,” Simms tells her, rubbing the back of his head. “I just can’t get behind raising my kid here in the city with a live bomb, especially after you told me that Burke was trying to bribe people into detonating it.” Charon stares at the back of her head. Someone tried to do what? But Simms just chuckles, holding out the key. “Well, here’s your key. Welcome to Megaton, citizen.”

But she doesn’t take the key. Instead, she crosses her arms, looking away. She jerks her head in Charon’s direction. “I didn’t do it. He did it. It’s his house now.”

“Oh!” Simms says, surprised. He looks to Charon. “Here’s your key, I guess.”

Charon takes it. He doesn’t need a fucking house.

Clearly she wanted it, though. Enough to risk a bomb. But, he thinks, maybe to prove she was worth something, too.

As soon as he’s pushing the door open to the shack just on the hill overlooking the bomb, she brushes past him, collapsing on the old, ratty sofa in the middle of the living room. When she drops down on it, it gives off a cloud of dust. The whole place is covered in dust. He’s just settled his bag on the floor by the door when she speaks.

“Why are you determined to take everything from me?” she asks. She isn’t looking at him, her arms crossed over her chest. But she’s not crying, either, which he thinks is a marginal improvement from the last time they’d had this conversation.

“Just take the stupid key,” he says with a sigh. He doesn’t need the house. Doesn’t want it.

“No,” she says. “You earned them.”

“Not everything needs to be earned,” he tells her. She presses her lips together, but still won’t take them. He tries another approach. “Are you still going to sell my contract?” he accuses. “Because I can’t own a house if you do. Can’t take it with me if I’m a caravan guard.”

He’s trying to guilt her. Into what, he’s not quite sure. Not selling his contract? Taking the house?

“Fine,” she says, holding out her hand. He drops the keys into her palm. “We can share it for now.”

Somehow, it doesn’t make him feel better.

He doesn’t want her to sell the contract. Not now.

He sits down next to her on the dusty old couch. He can see dust floating into the air. She sits up properly, making room for him. She shrugs off her backpack, kicking it away, underneath the coffee table laden with old magazines.

Charon looks around the room. There’s a powered-off Mr. Handy on the charger in the corner of the room that he thinks will clean this place up if he turns it on, but for now, he leaves it be. There’s a rug under the couch, some cans and boxes in the corner kitchen, and a lot of old bottles. It’s not anywhere close to the worst place he’s ever set up base. He bets that if they look upstairs there will even be enough rooms for the both of them.

He’s about to suggest that she goes and figures out which one she likes when she speaks.

“It’s just— what’s the point? I did all of this, and there’s no one left for me. Dad is gone, and the vault is closed off, and you don’t even want me anymore.”

He sighs. Not this again. “You don’t want me. You’re just—”

“Stop saying that,” she says, arms crossed. “I know it’s fucked up. I know you’re not a good person. A good person wouldn’t have—” she says, and she doesn’t have to finish the sentence for him to know what she means. “But I still don’t like the idea of you leaving. It doesn’t make me feel good when you say you don’t want me. I didn’t like the look of— of disgust when you looked at me. What did I do wrong, Charon?” she asks. Her voice is quiet. Pleading. “Is it because— is it because I like it? Did you like it better when I didn’t?”

He grimaces. “No,” he tells her.

“Then what it is?” she asks, her wide eyes pleading at him. “What changed? I just want—” she looks away. “I just want to feel cared for. You’re the only person who’s taken care of me at all since my dad left. Even if you do it for bad reasons.”

He can’t give her what she wants. He doesn’t know how. Not anymore. He’s hardly ready to admit to himself that he likes her, much less to her. But she’s sitting there, pleading for him. He can’t give her comfort, not the way she really needs, but he can do something for her.

He sighs. And then he reaches for her. He pulls her into his lap, and like a marionette, she goes. She watches him with cautious eyes. Her hands fall at his sides, like she doesn’t know what this is, where to touch.

“I did,” he tells her.

“What?” she asks, eyes cautious.

“I changed,” he tells her. “I wasn’t disgusted with you in Vault 87.” He looks over her shoulder, schooling his features carefully blank. “I just realized I was turning into something I didn’t want to be anymore.”

He feels her hand on his jaw, turning his face back to her. He can feel her breath on his face. His eyes flick from her eyes to her mouth, just barely parted. She leans in, pressing a kiss to his mouth. He knew it was coming, but still— his mouth parts in surprise when she kisses him. She’s clumsy, far too eager for it to be good, but—

Fuck he wants her.

His hands snake up her thighs, bracing on her back to press her against him. She startles, her mouth opens wider under him, and he takes the opportunity to lick into her mouth. She tries to respond in kind, her eager movements mimicking the way she grinds her hips against him. He wonders if she’d ever even kissed before. Just like fucking, he’ll show her what’ll make her moan against him.

His hands lower to her ass, and she moans into his mouth when he squeezes. She’s not usually so vocal— he wonders how much she was holding back because she didn’t want to like it. He finds he likes her much better this way. Allowing herself to enjoy it. When he’s not being such a fucking bastard to her.

She’s got herself worked up, sliding against him as her tongue explores his mouth, her hand still cupped on his jaw. She groans as he thrusts his hips towards her, pulling her down on him so that her voice hitches when his hardening cock brushes against her clit. She’s fumbling for the zipper of her vault suit when he lowers his hands on her thighs, hooking them under. And then he’s flipping them, so her back is on the couch underneath them, legs splayed out.

She gasps out, her face flushing. He’s partially kneeling between her thighs, one leg braced on the floor. He reaches for her suit. He’s never taken it off her before, not fully. She always does it. She was always the one coming to him. Letting himself think it wasn’t a problem because she chose it.

He pulls the sleeves down her shoulders, kissing down her chest as he goes— her neck, her collarbones, the crest of her tits just over her bra. Her breath hitches when he kisses lower, down to the ridge of her hip bone. He has her lift her thighs to pull down the suit over her hips. He’s got to finagle her boots off her feet, and then he pulls the suit off, tossing it to the side. It won’t matter where he’s tossed it— in this little house that belongs partway to both of them.

She’s looking up at him with wide, bright eyes and a flushed face. She’s reaching behind herself to unhook her bra, tossing it off to the side with the same care. He thinks it disappears somewhere under the coffee table.

She’s so different than the girl he fucked that first time. Indignant. Unhappy. Desperate. Frightened.

He’s not going to fool himself into thinking things will be entirely different now. He’s still a bastard, and he still wants to fuck her over every surface of this place. Eventually, she’ll finish growing her spine and realize he’s bad news, even if he’s the one protecting her.

But Charon is inherently selfish. He’ll take what she’ll give him for as long as he can, and run with it.

He’s pulling off her underwear, hooking his fingers under the grayed material. The fabric between her thighs sticks to her cunt, sticky with her. Her legs fall open, her eyes on him. He knows what she’s waiting for— for him to stick his cock in her, for him to fuck her on it until she comes, incidentally.

But that’s not what he’s here for, not this time. Not yet, anyway. Like he said, selfish.

He spreads her thighs with his fingers, looking down at her wet cunt. And fuck she’s wet for him. When he looks up from her cunt, mesemerized, she’s looking away. Flushed. He smirks. This is still too much for her, then. They probably only ever taught fucking with the lights out, missionary style, in the vault. He bets her old friends would be appalled to see all the ways he’d fucked her.

He knows this will really drive her wild, then.

He leans down and licks a stripe up her cunt. Drinking ambrosia right from the source. She jolts up, but he’s faster. He holds her down as he takes her clit into his mouth, sucking. “Charon!” she says, her voice breathy. Around what’s left of his ears, her thighs tremble. He licks at her, at her folds, down between her lips, into her cunt.

She’s trying to squirm away from him. “What are you doing?” she asks, breathy. “This isn’t—”

“Eating you out,” he says, and dives back down. With one hand still holding her hips in place, he presses two fingers into her, curling them to press against the bundle of nerves at the cradle of her hips. “Pleasuring you,” he says, as he lifts his mouth off her. His cheeks are wet with her. “Do you think you can only use your mouth on a cock?”

“But— why?” she asks, and that makes him pause. When his eyes flick up to her, she’s got a guarded look on her face again.

“Sex isn’t just— getting off,” he tells her, even though he’s mostly shown her that it is. He’s off her hips, though he keeps his two fingers inside her. He kneels over her again, and presses another kiss to her mouth. She must be tasting herself on him, as he kisses her with his tongue in her mouth, his fingers moving inside her.

He lifts off her mouth. “Ah—” she says, but his kneeling back down between her thighs, spreading her legs again. He pulls his fingers from her, gripping her thighs, using his thumbs to spread her apart. He wants to see her, her clit nestled among the hair at her center. He aches to slide inside her. But he wants her to come on his tongue first. And then he’s going to make her come again on his cock.

Charon kisses her cunt with a wide-open mouth, licking her folds and against her clit. He laves at her nub, scraping at her with his teeth until she’s trembling. He’s always fucking loved the taste of a woman’s cunt, the musky smell of it. He pushes his fingers inside her again, watching as they disappear into her quivering hole. He leans in to lick around his fingers, and he can feel as she jolts against him.

She must be close, he thinks, as she starts to rut her hips up into his mouth, chasing the sensation of him. “Charon—” she says, this time a breathy sigh, not a warning shout. He buries his tongue inside her as far as it’ll go, with the flat of his face brushing up against her clit, and she jumps, coming against his mouth. He fucks her through it with his tongue, and finally, when she’s boneless and sighing, he looks up at her.

He half expects her to be covering her eyes, but when she looks down at him, she’s smiling. Fondly. He tamps down the guilt in his chest, opting to ignore it entirely when she’s grasping at his shoulder to pull him up to kiss him again. He lays his whole body against her, pressing her into the sofa. He kisses her like that, languid, as he rocks against her slowly, his cock hard and throbbing.

He’s reaching down to unbuckle his belt when she stops him. “Charon,” she says, her voice small. He freezes. When his eyes travel back to her face, she’s looking away from him, like she’s afraid to voice her concern.

“What?” he asks, his voice a rasp. “What is it?”

“Can you—” she asks, and then she’s looking down at his body. “Can you take off all your clothes? Please? I’ve never seen you, and I— I want to.”

He sighs.

“Nevermind,” she says, quickly. Like she’s afraid of taking up too much space.

“No, I’ll do it,” he says. He doesn’t really give a shit about what he looks like. His body has never been anything but utilitarian to him, even when he had all his skin. It’s always just fucking easier this way, to take off as little clothing as possible, to slide into whatever hole is waiting for him. People don’t usually want to see what he has to offer.

But she’s not just anybody.

He figures it’s only fair.

He pulls off her, ignoring her whine as he does. She wanted this, and he’s got to pull off her to take off his fucking clothes. He pulls his shirt off his head, first. Pulled by the nape of his neck, tossed to the side. That’s a problem for future Charon. He kicks off his boots, and then pushes his trousers down. He doesn’t wear underwear.

His cock bobs between his thighs, thick and leaking. He figures she’s never really gotten a good look at it, by the way she’s shying her eyes away. He kneels over her again, and reaches for her hand. She’s startled by it, and her eyes fly to his. He guides her hand to his cock, to wrap her hand around him. He guides her strokes up his cock, her hand struggling to reach around him. He presses her head into her shoulder, groaning when she tightens her grip, starting to pick up the rhythm.

He lets her stroke him for a little while longer, but then pulls her hand off. He lifts her legs, splayed over his thighs, and presses his cock against her entrance. “Look at me,” he tells her. She obeys. And then he pushes inside her.

He loves this part— sinking into her, as her cunt wraps around him, fluttering to accomodate him. Watching himself disappear into her until there’s nothing left and he’s buried so far inside him that it’s impossible to see where he ends and she begins. And then he starts to move.

He lowers himself to brace on top of her, kissing her mouth, as he fucks into her slowly. He pulls from her, enjoying the wet heat and the sounds she makes, the grip of her pussy. Her lips stretch around him, quivering. He presses his fingers against her clit, and her breath quickens in his mouth. He tries to keep his pace slow, but she’s so fucking tight and it’s been weeks since he’s been inside her that he can’t keep it up for long.

Before long he’s snapping his hips in rhythm to her own weak thrusts, his fingers twisting her clit between his fingers. It doesn’t take much for her to come the second time. She clenches around him, a quiet sob leaving her mouth. But when he looks, she doesn’t seem upset. He keeps fucking her.

Eventually he feels the rise of his orgasm building, and he holds her close, gasping into her mouth as he spills inside her. He fucks her through his shuddering orgasm, until he’s bottomed out into her, his balls empty.

He presses his face into her neck, still inside her, as the words come out, unbidden. “Don’t sell my contract.”

When he looks up, her eyes are guarded. “Why not?”

“I can’t make you any promises. I’m still a fucking bastard, but I’ll— I’ll stick around. Protect you, if you want me to.”

“I don’t have anything to offer you,” she says, cautiously. She never has any caps, she doesn’t drink, or smoke, or gamble. The only vice she has is that she let him fuck her, over and over and over again.

“I don’t—” Charon says, with a sigh. “You don’t have to offer me anything.”

“Then what are you getting out of this?” she asks.

He’s not going to tell her that she smiled at him and shifted his whole fucking worldview. It’s far too close to a confession.

And if not that— what is he getting out of this?

He thinks of her, his little scavenger. Picking caps from corpses, knowing what fucking rock to look under for valuables, jimmying locks open. Handing him his share of her spoils— canned meals, chems, cigs. Making sure he had something to carry them in, a sleeping bag of his own. Even when she knew he’d just turn around and push her down on it and fuck her later.

“You take care of me, too,” he tells her.

Her expression softens, even if only marginally. “We’ll take care of each other,” she tells him.

And that? That sounds nice.