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The pain was a white-hot iron, driven into his thigh and his side. The radscorpion venom worked fast, a deep, radiating burn that felt like his marrow was being boiled, organs marinated in acid and left to sizzle on a griddle at max heat.
He lay sprawled on the filthy hospital floor, the world swimming in and out of focus between waves of nausea. His heart thumped to the rhythm of retreating footsteps, his vision undulating with every beat, blackening rapidly at the edges.
Each heartbeat also brought with it a wave of pain, radiating outward from each sting. It was like he could feel each individual molecule of poison scraping through his bloodstream.
More prescient than the pain, though, was the fury.
That stupid, naive, reckless little fool.
She got him into this, and now she was leaving him here?
Sure he'd been rude, but so what? This was stupid. She was stupid. An easy target. Gullible. Optimistic to the point of folly.
And as his vision finally faded entirely, he hated her more acutely than he'd hated anyone in a long, long time.
-
He’d heard the screaming. Of course he had. But it was more or less like background noise.
Lucy, however, had stopped, her head tilting like a confused puppy. “Someone’s hurt.”
“People have been screaming for help out here for two hundred years,” he’d grunted, barely breaking his stride.
She’d planted her feet, a stubborn fire in her eyes. “Well, did you ever consider that if someone helped them, they might stop?”
Before he could offer one of his dozen cynical retorts, she’d stomped off toward the derelict hospital. He’d watched her go, her ponytail bobbing behind her like a portent of doom. After a long beat and a longer sigh, he’d cursed under his breath and followed, Dogmeat at his heels. Letting her charge in alone would teach her quick, but he could've sworn one of the cries of despair had been ‘please, WE need help!’ And he wasn't keen on leaving her outnumbered.
At least, that's what he told himself.
Inside, they’d found the source of the screams: two figures in ragged, blood-stained tunics, bleeding and clearly in serious pain.
Deserved, in his opinion, no matter the source.
The woman was folded on the floor, the man resting against a pillar.
“Tunics, huh?” the Ghoul had gone for his normal, mocking tone, getting perhaps a little theatrical for the sake of teaching his companion a lesson.
Lucy ignored him, crouching at the woman's side and assuring that she was there to save her, that she had one stimpak left.
“That would be a profound misallocation of resources. People in them clothes ain't worth saving,” he said in that same tone, at that same volume.
Yet again, she ignored him.
He silently urged her in his mind to just ask. To humble herself to admit what she didn't know. To be open to understanding that there were some folk in this world that were just too far gone.
To think of all the times he'd indulged her. The gangs, the merchants he'd let her at least try to handle her own way. He was offering caution he'd normally let her blow right past and he wished more than anything she'd ask why.
She continued to ignore him. “Don't mind him,” she murmured to the woman, and that snapped something inside him.
He approached the male Legionary. The man’s eyes held a flicker of hope as he was offered a hand he all too eagerly took. A fatal mistake. In one fluid motion, the Ghoul had drawn his knife and slid it across his throat for a mercifully quick end. Better than the man deserved, in his opinion. To further prove his point, he’d sliced off a strip of flesh from the man’s arm and shoved it into his mouth. A reminder. He knew she balked at the cannibalism, and he mostly abstained so as to not offend her delicate sensibilities. Or, well. He at least abstained from eating fresh and within her line of sight.
This, too, meant something. That these people were subhuman to him. He waited for it to click in her mind as he chewed.
He’d coughed it out a second later, the taste wrong, tinged with something. Poison. Venom.
And then the skittering from the ceiling vents began. The radscorpions, drawn back by the fresh blood and movement.
Chaos. Stinging. Shooting. Lucy was attacked first as a baby leapt from an opening in the vent, the Ghoul scarcely able to look in her direction before one flung itself at him. That one, he easily shot down. But then there was another. And another.
And then the mother radscorpion was breaking down the kitchen door, bigger than the both of them.
He took one sting to the leg diving under a prep table, then another, searing, to his side as a claw closed around his uninjured leg to haul him out from beneath his scarce cover.
He'd reached for his pack, having skittered across the concrete floor in the shuffle, and barely closed his fingers around it as the radscorpion descended, its gaping maw within chomping distance of his face. With all the strength he could muster, he shoved a grenade in its mouth and kicked it away. Just in time for the thing to splatter green and black chunks across the room.
The fight left him, draining out with the venom, replacing itself with sheer agony.
“Stimpak,” he’d ground out, his vision tunneling. “Now. Hurry.”
Lucy crouched between him and the woman, her one remaining stimpak in her hand. Her face was a mask of horror and revulsion, pale under the grime. She looked from him, writhing in the filth, to the weeping Legionary woman.
“I… I only have one,” she'd repeated feebly.
“Give it to me,” he ordered between gritted teeth, hand outstretched, pain searing up his spine. “Now.”
She floundered for a moment. He'd expected that. Her eyes flitted back and forth, her breath rabbit fast in her chest. “I… I…”
“Please,” the Legionary gasped, and that was what won Lucy over in the end. With barely a moment's hesitation, she crawled closer to the woman, jamming the stimpak into her side.
Outrage bubbled up within the Ghoul, so profound and jarring that all he could do was laugh in sheer disbelief. “Golden Rule, motherfucker,” he coughed out.
“That rule is for people,” she snapped as she helped the Legionary up, tucking her under a protective arm, her voice cracking with a finality that chilled him more than the poison. “You’re a monster. Cruel. Disgusting. I am nothing like you. Which is why, once I get her somewhere safe, I’ll come back for you.”
He didn’t bother calling after them. The pain was too great, the blackness at the edges of his sight too insistent.
“I wouldn't worry about him,” he heard the echo of Lucy's voice distantly as they left the hospital.
“I wasn't,” the Legionary answered, and the Ghoul huffed out a single, bitter laugh, before his body gave up the ghost.
-
The darkness wasn’t complete. It was a fever-dream haze, and in it, the pain from the venom transformed, melting and reshaping itself into another, older agony.
He was standing on warm, weathered flagstone, barefoot in his backyard. The air was soft, tinged with the smoky-sweet scent of charring tri-tip from the grill. The sky above the Hollywood Hills was a watercolor wash of orange and lavender, the first bold stars pricking through all the light pollution.
“Daddy, look!”
Slowly, he turned. Janey, six years old and all endless legs and bouncy brown curls, was racing across the lawn, Roosevelt at her heels. Her laugh was a pure, unbroken bell of sound, the kind that made you believe in happy endings. She launched a slobbery tennis ball an impressive distance well across their yard, sending the dog into a focused sprint.
The fragile, cool stem of a wine glass was pressed into his hand. He brought it to his lips without thinking twice. The Moscato was ice-cold, the bubbles leaving tastes from his childhood on his tongue. Peach and honeysuckle.
“Cooper, eyes on the grill!”
Barb’s voice, warm and teasing, laced with the affection that hadn’t yet curdled into calculation. He turned to the patio despite her warning. She was setting the table, her movements efficient and graceful. She wore a simple buttery sundress, her hair catching the last of the sun. She caught him looking and smiled, a real one, the kind that crinkled the corners of her eyes. The jasmine and citrus of her perfume mixed with the grill smoke as she made her way over to his side. She rose on her toes and pressed her lips to his stubbled cheek. The touch was soft, dry, and held the promise for more. Later, once Janey had been put to bed.
“You’re burning it,” she whispered, her breath warm against his ear, snatching the grill tongs from his grip with a triumphant giggle.
He laughed in return, a sound so foreign to his own ears without the jaded lilt to it. He watched as Barb flipped the steak, the sizzle a satisfying punctuation to the perfect evening. Janey crashed into his legs, wrapping her arms around him, smelling of grass and dog and innocence. Roosevelt barked, circling them.
“Is it ready? I’m starving,” Janey proclaimed, looking up at him with his own eyes, full of absolute trust.
“Almost, kiddo. Everything good is worth waiting for.”
He believed it then. He believed in the script of this life: the successful actor, the beautiful wife, the brilliant daughter, the hillside haven. He believed the conflict was in the editing room, the drama safely contained on a screen. He had no idea the lies were already threading through his marriage, that Vault-Tec’s sleek promises were a poison slower and more thorough than any radscorpion’s. That Barb may have had her reasons, but she'd taken a red pen to that script, gradually marring it to the point that it was no longer readable.
The memory was so vivid he could feel the balmy summer breeze, the weight of his daughter in his arms as he carried her to the patio table. It was a perfect, captured moment of a peace he didn’t even know he was living.
And that was the true, deepest sting. Not the memory itself, but the catastrophic distance from it. The loss wasn't just of the people, or the place. It was the loss of the man who existed there. The man who could feel that sun, taste that wine, trust that kiss, believe in that simple, unguarded happiness.
Although he knew it was fleeting, he felt that happiness again. Just for a moment, like he was there. The irreplaceable warmth of a mundane family meal, burning into a poignant scorching in his veins.
On the next exhale, it was gone.
-
He woke to a rough, wet tongue rasping against his cheek. The world was orange and purple. Sunset pouring in through broken windows, warm against his weathered face. Dogmeat whined, nudging his shoulder with her nose.
Lucy wasn’t back.
The promise echoed in the silent, corpse-strewn kitchen. She said she'd come back for him. Lucy MacLean kept her promises. If she wasn’t here, it was because she couldn’t be.
The fury was gone, burned away by fever. In its place was a cold, heavy dread that settled in his gut, heavier than the venom.
What the hell had he been thinking?
He'd let her traipse off to Legion territory, the very evidence of what she could become tucked protectively under her arm, more than willing to lead her right back to hell.
She didn't know what the Legion did to women like her. Women with fire and principle and no concept of true evil. They’d break that principle first, then the fire, then everything else. The image of Lucy in Legion chains, that light in her eyes snuffed out, hit him with a force that finally got him moving.
With a groan that ripped from his throat, he rolled onto his hands and knees. The world tilted violently. He hacked a thin stream of bile and radiation-tinged spit onto the floor.
He crawled first, pathetically, toward the reception desk. Long picked clean of Med-X or Stimpaks. He found a half empty bottle of vodka in the bottom lefthand drawer and drained it, the burn a welcome distraction from the deeper burn. In a skeleton’s coat, he found two crushed cigarettes and a single, precious cartridge of Jet.
Not enough. Nowhere near enough.
But still, it was something.
He shoved the Jet into his inhaler. Took a hit. The world snapped into extreme clarity. The dust motes, the cracks in the wall, the pounding of his own heart. He next found a crumbling box of Buffout in a janitor’s closet, dry swallowing three pills. His muscles trembled, then tightened, a false strength flooding his limbs. There were two left in the packet, which he pocketed.
He stood. Leaned heavily against the wall, his breathing ragged. The cocktail of chems and alcohol was a temporary dam holding back a tide of agony and toxin. He knew the crash would be brutal. He didn’t care.
Something about that brief taste of the world when it was good in his venom-addled fever dream must've rattled something loose in his head.
Because he knew he couldn't leave Lucy to the Legion. Even if she'd walked right up to Caesar himself with her unwavering optimism and chipper demeanor, it didn't mean she deserved what that would lead to for her. She needed to be saved from her own stubborn adherence to her stupid fucking Golden Rule.
More than that, she deserved to be saved from something she never would've gotten herself into had her traveling companion been a little fucking clearer.
Yeah, he felt guilty. He didn't like it. A genuinely foreign sensation at this point. One he thought he'd left behind long ago.
Standing straight now, albeit with a slight limp, he made his way for the exit. Back to the main road. A start to his search for clues.
Dogmeat trotted ahead, nose to the ground, then stopped at the edge of the scrub, looking back. The trail was clear: two sets of footprints leading away from the road, toward the jagged canyon shadows that served as a backdoor to Legion patrol routes.
Every shuffling step was an argument against his own instincts.
Her fault.
Her choice.
Walk away.
You’re in no shape.
This is a suicide run.
But the image wouldn’t leave him: Lucy in a rough-spun slave tunic, that stubborn light in her eyes being systematically, brutally extinguished. The Wasteland took everything, but the Legion made an art of it. She didn’t deserve that. No one did, but especially not her.
Not her.
That became the persistent thought in his head. Another puff of Jet and it matched his steadying gait, his racing heart.
Not her.
Not her.
Not her.
He reached the canyon mouth. He could see signs now—a scrap of fabric on a thorn, a disturbed stone. Ahead, the faint glow of firelight reflected off high canyon walls. A camp. Or an outpost.
Guns blazing was off the table. He was one poisoned, chem-fueled old ghoul against an unknown number of fanatics. The only cold comfort was that this clearly wasn't their main camp. He slumped behind a boulder, the false energy already beginning to ebb, the pain waiting to reclaim him.
He checked his gun. Two rounds chambered, a few dozen more on hand. A knife. Two more tabs of Buffout, maybe three more puffs of Jet. A head full of two centuries of bad ideas.
All the pieces were there, in need of a plan to put them to good use.
He wasn’t Cooper anymore. He wasn’t even the Ghoul, not really. He was just pain and purpose, old and new cobbled back together for a purely utilitarian purpose.
He looked at Dogmeat, who stared back, loyal and silent. “Alright, girl,” he whispered, his voice raw. “Let’s go get our idiot.”