Off the Map (Hearts on Fire series)

[raptureofthemoon]

#4 from this prompt table.

Charon watched her from the doorway. She had her supplies laid out on the bed in front of her. Rations, cleaning and repair supplies for armor and gun, extra ammo for Polaris—Security Chief Harkness’s plasma rifle—bobby pins, underwear, some spare shirts and light pants, and a few odds and ends, including the medicine bobble head she’d taken from her dad’s desk almost three years ago, on her flight from the vault.

She met Charon’s eyes, waited for him to call her crazy, foolish, stupid.

He only grinned—that small, lazy grin that on anyone else would look like a cross between a grimace and a smirk—and told her to move her ass unless she wanted to miss Crow.

Everyone else had called her crazy. Asked her why she wanted to leave her home.

She couldn’t quite find the words to explain that as much as she’d come to love Megaton, as much as she’d come to get to know and enjoy—at least some of—the people of the Capital Wasteland, it wasn’t home. Home was the place she’d grown up, the place she’d thought she’d been born in, that lay mere miles from her Megaton doorstep, shut off to her forever.

Home was the man who’d raised her, who’d taught her how to hack into her first computer, how to splint broken bones and mend tears in clothes as well as skin. The man who’d kissed her forehead and then left her to the tender mercies of the citizens of Vault 101 when he thought the time had come to finish the work he’d started before she was born. The man who she had followed across the wasteland and back, hoping for just a few moments of time, of explanation, of apology.

The man who died in front of her, leaving a gaping hole in the fabric of her being and a shadow over every action she took.

Her home was gone.

And for a while, she’d wished she was too.

Charon knew. He’d kept silent watch those late nights after Project Purity was taken by the Enclave, as she’d chased Med-X with whiskey, whispered stories to him about her father. Stories that ran the gamut from hero to villain. He’d watched as she’d grown more and more careless as they traveled the wastes, picking up the odd job or bounty.

At some point, he must have had enough of watching her try to kill herself. Or maybe he’d had enough of her whining. You never quite knew with Charon. But as they’d settled by their fire for the night, under some nameless overpass, and she’d unzipped the Roosevelt Academy pencil case she used to stash her Med-X, Charon had come out of the darkness like a demon, wrestled the case from her and thrown it into the fire. The needles were silver scratches in the air, falling like stars.

She’d tried to dive for them—and would have, straight into the fire—but he’d wrestled her to the ground, rolling so he was beneath her. He’d trapped her arms at her sides and held her back against his chest, legs hooking around her knees and holding her still until, minutes or hours later, exhausted, she’d sobbed herself to sleep against his shoulder. He whispered in her ear, reminding her of the unkept promises she’d made. To him. To those ragged people at the Temple of the Union. Even to that little idiot in Girdershade. His voice followed her down into the dark.

A few weeks after that, she’d finally gotten her shit together. Faced life without her father. Filled promise after promise. And finally faced down the Enclave, which had very nearly killed her. Irony that, since she’d just decided she’d wanted to live.

But the Brotherhood’s medics knew their stuff and it was only a few weeks before she was up and moving again, albeit a little more slowly and her recover necessitated a lot of time spent holed up in her house in Megaton, where she seemed to receive visitor after visitor wanting to see the Savior of the Wastelands. She finally had to resort to asking Charon to turn them away.

But still the shadow of not belonging remained.

She’d caught wind of the California New Republic from some members of the Brotherhood. Some sang its praises. Others cursed it into the atomic fire.

And then she’d met a trader, part of a new run out of Canterbury commons, who’d come from the West; he was full of stories about places that had been mostly untouched by the nuclear fallout. Places full of animals and food and clear, clean water.

Charon offered to go with her. His heart wasn’t in it. It was with the nice ghoul lady he’d met at Gob’s bar a few months back. But he would have gone, if she’d asked. Not due to the obedience of a contract but the loyalty of a friend.

He’d already saved her life more times than she could count. She couldn’t ask for more.

By the time Charon escorted her out to meet Crow—weaving her through the crowd of well wishers come to say thanks and goodbye or even cry a few tears on her shoulder—it was nearing sunset and Crow and his guards were tightening the packs strapped to the brahmin.

“Be safe,” Charon said, the words coming out more of a threat than a request, as if when he found out she wasn’t being safe, he’d take it upon himself to stalk across the greater United States and beat some sense into her.

“Of course.” She smirked back at him, reached into her back pocket and withdrew a slip of paper, pressing it into his hand.

He shook his head when he saw what it was. “I can’t take this. I don’t want it.” It means you won’t be coming back. The words were left unsaid, but she could see them in his eyes. It had taken a while, but she could read him now. Most of the time, anyway.

“I don’t want anyone hassling you or Letty while I’m gone. You have the deed, that means the house is yours. I come back, we can talk terms. Kay?” Kay meaning “take the deed or I shove it down your throat.”

Charon’s mouth set in a grim line and for a moment she thought he would argue with her, but then his shoulders loosened and he shook his head. “Fine.” It seemed like he was learning to read her too.

She hesitated a moment, then threw her arms around his shoulders, having to stand on tiptoes to reach. He tensed for a second, but then his arms caught her around the waist and squeezed back.

At the sound of the brahmin moving away, she took a deep breath, proud of herself when it didn’t shake, and stepped back, giving Charon a little wave, sending a thumbs up to Stockholm up in his nest, and followed the Caravan north.

She stayed with Crow’s caravan long enough to reach the old MD-193 and, after a warm, cuddly and rather watery hug from Crow—who tried to subtly wipe his eyes while his face was over her shoulder—she headed west.

The journey took the better part of a year, brought her into contact with settlements and traders of all types. She’d thought, at first, her goal might be the NCR. After hearing the Brotherhood speak of it, she’d gotten curious. And she wondered what the Pacific ocean looked like.

But the further west she went, the more she began to hear about a place where bombs had never fallen. A shining city of the Old World that had withstood the fires of the apocalypse, with thanks to the strange, enigmatic leader who people claimed still existed but who no one ever saw.

Along with these stories, she heard tales of a roving army, snatching up women and children, decimating native tribes, burning settlements, leaving their flags to flow over the rubble. A stark reminder of their power.

She thought of the Enclave flag flying over Project Purity, thought of its soldiers bleeding the small settlements dry, the abandoned homes of Big Town and Arefu. She scratched at her left arm, the burn scar beneath her jumpsuit.

Changing course, she sold herself as an armed guard for a caravan making its way to New Vegas.