Chapter Text
They find the hostages walking beneath the overpass, getting jabbed and shoved along by some Children of Atom.
“It was a real tip,” Charmer whispers from the bushes, clearly surprised.
Deacon smirks. “I don’t think you appreciate just how crazy these Atom kids are,” he says. “If someone tells you ‘hey, I think some guys in robes just stormed Vault 81 and kidnapped about a dozen people,’ it’s probably true.”
She narrows her eyes, watching them for a few moments. “They’re obsessed with radiation, and they’ve grabbed up the one group of people who’ve been exposed to almost none of it.”
“Probably not a coincidence,” Deacon agrees. “You ready for this?”
“One second.” She pulls out a compact mirror, applying some makeup near her eyes and then immediately smudging it downward. To someone far less experienced to Deacon, he thinks, she’ll look like she’s been crying.
“I think you smeared a spot.”
“Ha, ha.” She sets about hiding their packs behind the tree before smoothing out her vault suit and pulling out the elastic rope, sliding it over her own wrists, and standing in front of him. He falls into character, shoving her forward and out of the thicket and toward the group.
“Hey!” Deacon shouts. “You guys buying?”
“No, please!” Charmer begs convincingly, eyes wide and fixed on the gun in his hand. “Please, please just let me go.”
“Who are you?” The Child of Atom at the front is looking past Charmer at Deacon, guard clearly raised.
“Whoa.” He grins and holds his hands up. “Just a friendly merchant. Word was you guys were in the market for vault dwellers, and I need some caps. Like, fast. How much are you guys paying?”
“Please,” Charmer begs quietly. Her attention starts moving toward the road, like maybe she’s desperate enough to try to run. Deacon makes a show of rolling his eyes, grabbing her by the shoulder and hauling her closer so he can shove the gun under her jaw.
“Don’t waste her,” the man in the robes snaps. “She is untouched by Atom! She needs to be cleansed by his division, like the others. To send her to her death before then would be needlessly cruel.”
“You’re so right.” Deacon loosens his grip a little, and even tosses the gun to the side as an act of good faith. “I’m still a capitalist at heart, though, so whaddaya say to a fair purchase? Say, 100 caps?”
Intentionally low, intentionally doable. Appearing to disarm himself has relieved them enough that they’re not questioning it. The three more suspicious Children, 1, 2, and 4, have switched from hovering their hands above their holsters to checking their pouches for caps.
“Please don’t sell me to them,” Charmer begs, but she goes completely ignored. Her expression of terror matches the other vaultie’s faces pretty well, Deacon thinks, although if anything like ‘impressed’ crosses his face, the jig is up.
“Hey, listen, they might put together some search parties,” Deacon continues. “So if I snatch any of those little blueberries up, where should I bring ‘em to?” He rolls his eyes as the Child of Atom leader gives him a blank look. “Blue? They all wear – ? Never mind. If I catch more of the ‘unblessed’, where do I-”
“North of the most holy ground, in the shadow of the church of the dead god.”
“Between the crater and the steeple, got it.” Deacon nods and swats at Charmer’s backside, scooting her along. “Go on, little mouse. Off to your new home.”
“No!” She shrieks, holding her bound wrists up to her chin as she turns to block their view of his chest. He moves as if to cross his arms, fingertips of his right hand sliding out for the pistol just hidden within his jacket. “Please, mister, I don’t wanna-”
One of the vaulties, to his credit, actually flinches and begins to duck before the gun’s even visible, and thankfully, they accounted for most of the hostages scattering. Charmer’s 10mm, pulled from her boot, cracks out three headshots on the Children of Atom just as Deacon takes out his second.
“Three/two,” Charmer singsongs, and gets to her feet to tuck her gun away and cup her hands around her mouth. “Attention Vault 81 residents! Please reconvene here on the road to be taken back home! The gunfire is over! You’re safe!”
One of the vault women who didn’t make it more than a few yards stares at her. “Who are you?” she asks, gaze flickering from Charmer’s face to Deacon’s. “Where did you get a suit?”
“She’s a blueberry just like you.” Deacon beams. “Just from a different basket, that’s all. Come on! We’re going to help you back west.”
**
“Blueberry,” Charmer repeats a few hours later, when they’ve made it a ways back the road. “I kinda like it.”
“You’re my little blueberry parfait,” Deacon tells her, dripping with earnestness, and Charmer snorts.
“Do you even know what a parfait is?”
“It’s a dessert.” Deacon figured it out from context clues in one of his Old World books. “What? A roguish raider like me can’t enjoy the finer things?”
She flicks her finger at the leather arm guard and smirks. “You must be going soft. Am I rubbing off on you?”
She’s given him openings like that before. By now, it’s habit not to take the bait. “That cushy underground life ain’t for me,” he says, in just a gravelly enough tone it’s clear he’s still playing the part.
“So why’d you change your mind and decide not to sell me, huh?” She elbows him and flutters her eyelashes, matching him with her damsel in distress role. “Got a craving for something other than the cave living?”
Deacon can feel a flush creeping up his throat - a rare tell on something he’s been suppressing for a couple weeks now. He feigns the kind of shifty-eyed look a grunt might get when caught out, and Charmer laughs, throwing a glance over her shoulder to check on the trail of exhausted vault dwellers before smiling back at the wide open road ahead of them.
**
**
Codsworth handles a lot of the scrap. Deacon visits him sometimes, always curious about the Mr. Handy that ended up with so much personality and managed to survive for so long on his own. On the day Deacon brings him the Children of Atom robes, Codsworth is tearing up ruined couches for the stuffing.
“One can hardly go to the craft store and buy batting anymore, Master Deacon,” the old bot says. “Fortunately, Mum has always been a creative problem-solver. I expect we should have them ready by late fall.”
When MacCready gets laid up defending the camp from some super mutants a few days later, Deacon watches as Charmer makes a spot for him in the scrap house with a comfortable sofa with an ottoman for his leg. She teaches him how to sew the criss-cross patterns for the quilts. MacCready grumbles through it, at first, but his hands are nimble enough from trigger work that he picks it up and is almost a decent match for Codsworth by the time he’s healed up. The pair of them get the first blanket done for Mama Murphy and she looks touched enough to cry.
**
**
On one of her more easygoing days, Charmer explains to Deacon how pre-war life often required a lot of its own brand of resourcefulness. She tells him about victory gardens, plentiful in every neighborhood that wasn’t too rich to look down their nose at them. (She references her transition to Sanctuary and Deacon hypothesizes that she must have lived in a lower-class area before moving to this little paradise. He also guesses she didn’t see eye to eye with everyone in her new town. Whatever an HOA is, it sounds illogical and prudish.)
There’s a reason she’s good at looking at scrap with an eye for reuse. Metal materials used to be recycled and re-purposed as often as possible, she says, since ships and planes and power armor ate up so much of it. Charmer describes a particularly clever idea she’d seen in a magazine once, where thin aluminum cans were melted down in one’s own back yard using a home-made furnace. A hair dryer was connected to it to keep the fire oxygenated, and simple cookie or muffin tins were used as molds to pour the liquid metal into.
“A regular household didn’t have much use for aluminum medallions, but it was a smart concept,” she says with a fond smile. “Ours always went to the recycling drives.”
“Recycling drives?”
“Big parties where you turned in your cans, basically. The women would make dishes and there’d be games for the kids. They really tried to make it a community thing.”
They were short on everything. It’s why she knows how to sew, Deacon realizes over time. She’s never followed a dress pattern in her life, if her blank looks at the surviving booklets she finds are any indication, but she can patch with the best with them, saving up squares and rectangles of reclaimed fabric for future scrapes. Settlers who are too old or sick to be any good in the farm are taught to hem. Cold water takes the blood out of salvaged cloth easily enough.
**
**
They play word games to pass the time. Deacon has a feeling that this is something Charmer only does with him, since she learned about his interest in history. (She probably doesn’t know he also likes the game for the opportunities to impress her, but that’s neither here nor there.)
“Radish,” she challenges.
He scoffs. “It’s like a turnip.”
“That’s not a definition.”
“It’s a food. It grows in the ground like a carrot.” He quirks a brow. “Or, it used to? I didn’t see any in the Capital wasteland. Whatever. Tense doesn’t matter.”
She grins and shrugs. “You’re right.” She hands the bottle over and he takes a sip, not overindulging, knowing he’s better off staying as sharp as possible. After a moment he passes it back and her fingers brush his as she takes it. He pretends not to notice.
“Stapler.”
“Wh- we still use those, dummy. They still work.”
“I’m trying to bide my time for a good one!”
“I’m embarrassed for you. I think we’ve even got a few at HQ.”
“Maybe they were all too rusted to be any good.”
“Next one. Come on.”
She curls her fingers around the bottle and looks out past Sanctuary’s bridge, toward the hazy canvas of stars. “Witness protection.”
“That’s a noun?”
“Yup.”
Deacon thinks back. Those cheesy spy novels he found in the bookstore a few years back.
“Tick tock.”
“Slow down, parfait, I’ve got this.” It’s something to do with… with law. “It’s a legal thing, right? Like in court cases?”
“Yes, but that’s too vague to get a point.”
Deacon holds his hands out, palms up. “Is it the same as cutting a deal?”
“Nope.” She pops the ‘p’ sound and takes a swig. “Sixteen, twenty five.”
“I’m still winning.” He slouches back. “But if you keep using your degree to pull out obscure jargon, I’m going to have to figure out how to rig the game.”
“It’s not an obscure phrase. Well,” she tilts her head back and forth. “It wasn’t.” And that is the point of the game. “Hmm.”
Deacon thinks back to the certificate he found on the wall, with the unfamiliar name emblazoned in fancy cursive. “Was that really your name?”
She frowns at him.
“The one on your degree,” he says quietly, not wanting to say it aloud. Nora. “It’s not the one everyone calls you.”
Charmer looks genuinely unsure how to respond. The way she looks at him is… searching, somehow, difficult to describe and it makes him feel strangely vulnerable. “Not for very long,” she responds.
She could mean because she changed her last name when she got married, but Deacon doesn’t think that’s it. There’s something else.
“You don’t normally ask me questions like that,” Charmer remarks, giving him an opening.
“You’re always nice enough not to ask me any,” Deacon explains with a shrug. “Figure it’s only polite.”
She looks away, silent, and takes another sip before extending the bottle back toward him. It’s clear: you could if you wanted. I might not give you everything, but you might get something.
He’s caught off guard. He takes the bottle and doesn’t know what to say.
**
**
There are things about the past that Charmer never explicitly says, but they’re clear enough. She’s used to using her femininity as a way to hide her abilities, and it’s one of the few crutches she’s having to remind herself not to use anymore. Sexuality still works - god, does it work for her - but these days, nobody’s stupid enough to assume a lady can’t cut their throat or hurl them over a bridge as easily as a man could, and apparently that’s new and difficult to adjust to.
Deacon knows from the books that who you went to bed with used to be a big deal. The fops in the stands still pretend to go by those old-fashioned rules, trying to hide any flings they have with the lower classes of Diamond City, but really, even then the gender of the people involved just doesn’t matter much. If anything a man and woman are more problematic because of the possibility of accidental pregnancy.
Deacon did not know about how unmarried pregnant women used to be treated. Or, for that matter, men who dated men, or women who dated women. Charmer tells him quietly at the campfire one night when they’re halfway to Quincy and Deacon wonders how a world that had everything at its fingertips, every luxury and necessity, could get hung up on such stupid fucking things.
Charmer teaches him some of the roundabout euphemisms people used to use for these things - confirmed bachelor, unwed mothers - and some of his books make a little more sense now, are a little more concerning than he had first realized.
**
**
Deacon pulls the metal thing out of the rubble and holds it up triumphantly. “This,” he says, interrupting what was previously a very important hunt for glowing mushrooms for something that is much, much more important. “This is the thing. From last week? I was describing it perfectly and you looked at me like I was crazy?”
Charmer looks up from her pack, squinting, then moves a couple steps closer. “Deacon… that’s an egg-beater.”
He looks at the dual-spinny handle turny thing and tries to imagine how the fuck it interacts with an egg. “How do you crack an egg with this?”
“An egg-beater. It’s -” She’s hiding a genuine smile behind her hand, trying not to embarrass him, and he’s too shameless to give a fuck that she thinks he should feel defensive about not knowing this. “You put them in a bowl, and,”
Deacon interrupts her by turning the crank wildly, making some rust crack off in messy little shavings. It’s comically bent out of shape and squeaky. “You’re making that up.”
“I’m not,” Charmer cries out, legitimate tears in her eyes now. “You…” She mimes cracking an egg, too choked up in laughter to speak, and 'dumps’ the egg in an imaginary container. Her hands shake as she pretends to beat them with the weird tool.
Deacon stops cranking the thing he’s still not convinced is an egg beater. “Oh, after they’re cracked open.” That makes more sense. “But why not just use a fork?”
Charmer shrugs helplessly and wipes at her face, gasping for air.
“We’re keeping this,” Deacon whispers meaningfully. “It’s clearly an important relic.”
“You-” She heaves in another breath. “You put that back - I can’t -”
“It’s necessary for survival,” Deacon retorts, cranking menacingly at her. “We can’t waste valuable forks stirring up eggs when we’ve got this… this specialized old-world gadget made just for -”
“Stop,” Charmer begs in a squeak, kneeling down and finally sitting on a pile of rubbish in the ruined pantry. She’s hunched over and still wiping at her face, taking deep, slow breaths in an effort to cool down. Deacon realizes with a lurch that he genuinely wants to move in and kiss her. Stifling panic, he puffs out a sigh of resignation and stuffs the egg-beater in with the mushrooms, turning away and heading down the stairs to see if there’s anything worth collecting in the basement.
**
**
“Hey, hey, stay with me.” Deacon crouches over her and holds the third stimpack to thigh, counting down the seconds in his head until he can use it without risking giving her pulmonary failure. Her skin is deathly pale and he’s weighing the benefits of those extra twenty-six seconds versus just jabbing her now.
“Make sure it’s dead,” Charmer says again, and Deacon shakes his head and waves that idea away impatiently with his free hand.
“Half its head is blown off, it’s,” he twists around just enough to prove he’s looking at the deathclaw, that it’s definitely dead, before turning back to her. “Don’t worry about that. Just talk to me, okay? Tell me,” Nineteen, eighteen. “Tell me about being a lawyer. It’s really boring, right? A lot of studying?”
Charmer coughs and makes a pained face, slouching further against the tree and tilting her head back up to look at what leaves are left on it.
“No, no, hey,” Deacon nudges her. “Did you put people in jail or did you keep them from going to jail? Those are different kinds of lawyers, right?”
“I didn’t,” she says softly, nine, eight, seven. “I wish you’d stop asking about it.”
He doesn’t know what that means. He’s not sure if she’s making sense. Three, two. “One more stim,” he says, and jabs her again, watches the wince in her eyes as she takes a deep breath and arches just a little toward him, fingers curling, and they’re going to make it through this one. They will.
**
They hole up in a church that night to rest and she sets their sleeping bags next to each other, no space in between. When she turns to her side and presses her back against his arm he lets himself accept that he wants this. That he wants this and he’s terrified.