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He didn’t mean to give her a nickname, especially one so fucking cute. But it keeps slipping and she’s definitely catching on.
The first few times were nothing, a slip of the tongue that he could write off with some quip or another. Hell, a ghoul’s vocal cords can be helpful at times like these. You can cough and shrug and ‘I didn’t say nothing” your way out of almost anything.
So he did just that. He ignored the quirked eyebrow or the puzzled smile flashing his way until the nickname faded out of her memory. If she asked about it, he changed the subject or flirted in a ‘hound dog after nothing’ sort of way and it was easy but... this time? Yeah, this one will be harder to live down.
The day started off normal enough. They split a shitty pot of coffee and washed the taste away with the powdery sweet tang of some stale as hell mentats. Sole indulged for once. She’s more of a high functioning addict, doesn’t take much just for the high of it. But the morning was bright and the company was charming (and buying, who can say no to free drugs?) so she plucked the pale blue pill out of his pocked palm and crunched it between her teeth with a wink that would seduce a sentry bot.
The high got them wandering and the wandering turned to exploring which turned to scavenging which turned to sprinting away from a super mutant encampment. There’s nothing quite like being terrified on mentats. Other drugs, it’s a weird sort of blurry feeling. You’re scared but the fear isn’t all there, or it is but it’s distorted, jumping around the outskirts of your mind like it isn’t quite your own, just an instinct being thrown at your body to keep you alive.
Mentats on the other hand, they amplify everything. They let you feel the fear but they don’t let the adrenaline of it take over. So you’re running, you’re dashing over piles of rubble, turning sharp corners and listening to the steady beeping of an activated mini-nuke and the fucking chemicals pumping through your blood would normally be all you have to distract you. But nope, the mentats keep you clear as a sniper’s scope. You’re running but your mind is running faster, you’re thinking in perfect vivid detail of all the ways this could go wrong, all the ways you might die right now, right this god damn moment.
It’s a trip.
So Sole is running like a bat out of hell. Hancock can hear the mutant chasing after them, screaming because he’s definitely not on mentats and the rush of rage and violence is the only thing keeping him from chucking his activated nuke as far away as fucking possible and Hancock is starting to think they’ve had better ideas.
He’s about three stages away from accepting his fate when he feels a hand grab his wrist and pull. He twists, stumbling into the tightest alley he’s ever seen, half crushed against old brick and half pressed into a sweating and panting Sole (not the first time this has happened and no, it’s never been in the fun sort of way).
Dust drifts down over the two of them, small pieces of cement and brick drop like wasteland rain, pattering against the ground, shaken loose by the 800 pounds of rad green muscle barreling past their hiding place. Heavy footsteps and a rapid beeping fade into the distance. Hancock is acutely aware of the fact that sole is holding her breath and he isn’t. He has his hands pressed against the wall on either side of her shoulders, leaning in like an old-world bad boy seducing the cute girl from across the river.
She looks up at him, eyes bright, pupils blown fucking wide with fear and excitement and drugs.
Thump.
He counts each beat of a pulse, his or hers, he isn’t certain.
Thump.
In the distance, the bomb ticks one last time.
Thump.
Damn...she’s his best friend, isn’t she?
Thump.
The world feels silent as a two-hundred-year-old corpse.
And then...
Hot air rushes past in a compressed explosion. The pip-boy pushing into his shoulder lets loose a string of high pitched beeps, an innocent mockery of the bomb that triggered it. The sound of weight being unbalanced, of crumbling buildings crumbling more, of pure raw destruction follows with the blood-in-your-teeth ear ringing echo of too much sound for human eardrums.
Pressed so closely to each other, it’s easy to feel the tension building. It forms like a tide pool, swirling like a feedback loop between their chests and it bursts when Sole starts to laugh. Or maybe he starts it? Hancock can definitely feel it, the rumbling in his throat, the shake in his hands and his knees. They slump as one, equally held up by the tight corridors and each other.
“Nothing like a near-death experience on mentats, huh?” He can feel her whole body shaking, releasing the trapped adrenaline in violent tremors that seem to originate in her tensed shoulders and jolt down her limbs, little organic electric waves.
“Our near-death experiences are happening so often you should just call ‘em experiences, Sunshine.” Hancock glances out the ally. It seems like the other super mutants hadn’t bothered to follow, letting the world fade from eerily quiet to a familiar shade of still.
“Huh?”
….Fuck.
Sole’s smile turns sideways, the crooked one she gets when she’s trying to figure something out. It’s not something Hancock loves having directed his way.
“Did you just call me Sunshine?” She snorts and the heat in the ally goes from running on a sunny day to boiling in a summer rad storm in an instant. Can ghouls blush? Hancock fucking hopes not.
Instinctively he looks away, up, down, anywhere but at her which, sandwiched in such a tight alley that she could probably count each one of his ghoulification scars, looks real suspicious.
She’s watching him closely now, the mentats more likely than not piecing every little slip of his traitorous tongue together from some dismissible half-memories into a real damning case.
“You’ve been calling me that for weeks, haven’t you!” She laughs, a little incredulous chirp that would be charming if it wasn’t directed at him. “Where did that come from?”
Hancock squirms. That is exactly the question he didn’t want her to ask, mostly because he actually has an answer. It isn’t just some affectionate nickname, the type that springs up and then sticks, flourishing like some stubborn weed. It came from a very definitive moment that he would be very happy with her never knowing about.
But she’s got the attention span of a stubborn two-hundred-year-old survivor on some very mind stimulating drugs and he is a radstag caught between two wild dogs. Frozen, scared, and with nowhere else to go.
Oh, and screwed. Can’t forget that one.
He’s got nothing but the truth to tell her. It’s not like he can lie, not at this point. Not to her and definitely not with the damning evidence still ringing in both of their ears.
“Well…, fuck, do you even remember a few weeks ago? You swung by and I had this skull-splitting hangover.”
He’d been on a bender. She’d been out of town for weeks and Good Neighbor had been runnin’ smooth. He hadn’t had much to do other than crack a canister of buffjet open, mix it with some day-tripper, squirt a syringe of med-x in and see what happened.
“And do you know what happened? Because I still don’t.”
She snorts and it’s endearing enough to distract from the teeth pulling pain of explaining this story.
That night is long gone but the memory of the following morning is preserved like an old-world painting, hung high in the corner of his mind.
He remembers waking up, fourteen hours later with one shoe on the wrong foot, four feet away from where he’d taken the damn concoction with the worst hangover of his long drug-addled life. And that’s saying something.
To top it all off, the hangover sticks around like nothin’ else. Sounds are deafening, everything hurts and his heartbeat makes a permanent move from his chest to the lining of his skull. It takes all his energy to drag himself back to the couch, pull his ratty curtains shut as tightly as possible and huff two full canisters of good old, classic, mildly hallucinogenic jet.
And then he sits there and waits for the good drugs to kick the shitty ones out of his system. He waits... and waits and waits.
By the time Sole comes in, he is itching for something, anything to kick in. She pushes the door open just as he is shuffling around the table, one eye squeezed shut, half laying on the couch, one leg swung up over the armrest for balance, searching for the syringe of med-x he is sure had been there yesterday. Not the most dignified look for the mayor but hell, she has definitely seen worse.
“Hey.” Her voice is friendly in tone but assaultive in volume. He groans a response.
“Rough night?” Her blur comes a little closer and he squints up at her, trying to decide if her smile is sympathetic or sadistic. Knowing her, it is probably a little bit of both.
She’s a good friend, the type that helps ya back up when you fall but snickers a little when you go down.
Her face finally comes into view and yup, bemused. He grins back, no shame, teeth bared in an exaggerated smile.
“How can you tell?” The med-x is halfway across the table but he finally manages to snag it and press the needle to his skin. It is half empty and the needle is a little bent. Still, it is enough to send soothing warmth up his arm, enough to give him the strength to fumble a loose mentat out of his pocket and toss it into his mouth. Or at least try. It hits his cheek and rolls into the folds of his coat.
Sole chuckles.
“So you took too many drugs and your solution for suffering the consequences of those actions is...take more drugs?”
“Oh yeah. Hair of the dog, friend, it’s the only way to go.” He rasps, tugging his coat open as he searches for the missing pill. The new concoction in his system is starting to kick in. Sole has always had bright eyes, even off the drugs but not that bright. He can see warmth spilling down her cheeks as she smiles, the affection in her expression gone literal with the jet in his system.
“Yeah, I don’t think that’s quite right. Here.’ She moves and the world moves with her, the colors of the room clinging to her outline like she’s the center of it, finally returned to complete the space. He watches her dizzily, trying to decide if this is a pleasant view or a little terrifying. She presses a pair of eyes into his palm. No. Sunglasses. He laughs as he struggles to put them on. He decides it’s a little bit of both.
“Sunglasses aren’t great for ghouls, babe.” Noses are few and far between with long term radiation victims and the plastic lenses slide lamely down his face as if to demonstrate the fact.
“You kickin’ a man while he’s down?”
She laughs, steps closer and cups his face with both hands, gently tilting his head back until it rests against the back of the couch. Her hands are warm fur, softened leather, a heated pistol after a perfect shot. He sighs, closes his eyes against the headache and lets his head fall.
“You about to snap my neck or something?” His words are mumbled. The colors behind his lids are dark and murky. It makes him think of the last time they visited the island, the hard crash of waves, the icy froth soaking through his clothes. He shudders, suddenly acutely aware of the chill in the room.
“Yup, Hancock. This is the end. You never even saw it coming.”
The sound of cloth rustling, her quiet exhale of amusement and then warmth. Blissful warmth. The movement behind his lids bursts into a kaleidoscope of colors. Pinpricks of light dance serenely in geometric patterns, shifting constantly, then burst into a whirlwind of chaos. Distantly he realizes it’s because she’s pulled the curtains open again. He protests but it’s mostly the principle of the matter.
“Hey, I shut those for a reason.”
“Shh. Keep your eyes shut then. It’s cold as hell in here.”
There’s a bottle of water in his hand and another warm touch on his forehead now, fingers freshly callused from a new world that demands it. Her touch dissolves into the sunlight baking into his skin, transforming a single point of contact into everything. It’s an immensely intimate sensation.
He feels held.
“You trying to make me go soft, Sole?” If she notices how he turns his head into her palm as he talks, she doesn’t comment. A thumb brushes where his hairline used to be and, god damn, if he doesn’t nearly purr.
“Not to sound like an old lady but that’s the problem with the commonwealth. Nobody knows how to be gentle.” Her voice is sunlight now, a physical thing. Rays of it drip down his shoulders, melt along his spine.
The couch beneath him is sinking, turning to thick, clinging liquid. He might drown if it wasn’t for the light keeping him afloat. It feels familiar, like the dusky indecisiveness that had dirtied his mind the weeks before she stumbled into town, bright and unapologetically noble.
He’d been so lost, so damn fearful he’d been sinking into the tar pit of unchallenged power, the inescapable ego of control. And then there she was, bursting into his world like sunlight. Not violent, not forceful but still absolutely undeniable. She illuminated everything he was too ashamed to look at, too blinded to see.
To him, she has been sunshine. Warm. Healing. Enlightening. True.
The vision of this realization took him like any good jet trip did, caught the idea of it as a spiraling prism of thoughts, coming to conclusions, looping back, finding new ways to word it and settling on a final solid conclusion.
And there it was. Sunshine. He hasn’t been able to escape the thought since.
...
Now, as she looks up at him, watching as the mentats still buzzing in his system turn a quick explanation into something intricate and brutally honest, it hits Hancock just how much of a confession this is.
You can’t realize someone is your saving grace, equate them to the life-giving warmth of the fucking sun and not seem head over heels for the person, now can you? He grimaces, all the usual charm, the casual flirtation in their conversation having been ground out beneath his drug-fueled accidental come-on. The tension in the air is thicker than the rads still ticking away on her pipboy so he grasps for straws, searching for some verbal retreat to balance out the mentat quality honesty.
“So, long story short, I took some jet and gave you a new nickname. Want me to stop?” He grins, trying for some sense of their normal back and forth. “The nickname I mean, no way in hell am I givin’ up the jet.”
Sole snorts, matching his half-smile with one of her own and does the one thing she’s never done with him before. She hugs him. They’re already pressed close in the ally so it’s an easy motion, barely even a change but it feels immense. He returns the gesture awkwardly, entirely unsure what it means.
“I love you too, you idiot.”
She breaks the hug, reaches for his hand instead of his wrist and pulls him back out to the street.
“Now let’s get out of here before that guys’ buddies come looking for us.”
Hancock stumbles after her, half stunned. Love is a big word, a four-letter one usually and if she means friendship or something else, he isn’t certain. But as she climbs over the new rubble and dashes across the ruined street ahead of her, Hancock is sure of one thing.
Whatever the fuck she meant, whatever that means for him, for them, he’s going to be basking in her light for a hell of a lot longer.