Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

War.

War never changes.

It was Cain, the unloved son, who so consumed with rage slew his brother Abel. But the guilt could not be hidden-- for beneath the soil wetted by Abel's red tears, the blood of the brother cried out to God. But not in a plea of mercy for his brother Cain.

No. It was a howl for vengeance.

Roots runneth deep. From that despoiled earth grew mankind, the great accuser. They heard not the voices of God, nor of angels, nor of saints. They went forth and multiplied and grew ever more sinful. Try as God might, tide nor wind nor storm would cleanse the earth of such a plague.

But as mankind defied God, ultimately, their own pride defied them. One bright morning, 2077 years after the son of God's failed sacrifice, four great hands of nuclear fire descended from heaven and immolated all life with a single touch. The seas dried in an instant, leaving only a salty lymph. The earth convulsed as long-sleeping volcanoes erupted, great chasms were torn open in the earth's skin, and towering mountain ranges rose up to pierce the clouds of soot.

God beheld the scorched earth, where the sand and stones still glowed a carnal red from the flames, shrouded in the silent darkness of a nuclear winter, and was sorrowful.

The black clouds parted, and a harsh sun gave light to the earth, showing a dead land no creature could live upon.

From the smoldering ashes, man raised itself up, bones standing stark against charred black flesh. It opened its blind white eyes, and from a lipless mouth, whispered unto a deaf sky.

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

And God was afraid.

Chapter Text

The Vault-Tec representative glances about the dimly lit study, hands gripping the arms of the leather chair.

This was not the first time he had been invited into a potential client's home. Indeed, it happened quite often--well, in the beginning, anyway, when people did not entirely grasp what he was selling. That was when he began seeing more closed doors than faces.

He got used to it. Apocalypticism was not really a subject one usually broached in polite company. And between the economy and the war and the elections, well, was it any surprise--

"And here we are."

The representative gave a start, in spite of himself. He prided himself on nerves of steel, his mettle tested by countless Vault-Tec emergency drills and work parties--but there was something off about this man.

He was just beyond marrying age, and lived alone. He seemed to have a meticulousness towards fashion and grooming, even within the privacy of his own home. The representative’s brow furrows--could this man possibly be what the papers talked about? A ‘confirmed bachelor,’ in the wild?

… And was he in its den?

"Ah, yes--thank you, thank you." The representative takes the cool glass of whiskey with both hands.

"So," the man says, sitting opposite in another leather armchair. His head tilts lazily to the side. "Enlighten me about this so-called Vault. One-hundred-and-eleven, I believe you said?"

---

Major Adam Smithson, Army Special Forces. Son of Seth, son of Seth, son of Keenan, son of Jared, son of Noah. Soldiering ran in his blood more than blood itself, a molten alloy of iron and lead and the tears of widows. Deployed to… well, he couldn’t really say. Operational security. Op-sec, in the jargon of the cannon fodder. But reports of trails of butchered Communists, played on repeat by American news broadcasts, left little to the imagination. Lascaux couldn’t help but glance now and again at Adam’s hands, to see if he had scrubbed under his fingernails.

When the Smithsons threw house parties--and God, they threw them--it would inevitably be brought up. Adam, the leader, the soldier, the hero. The men who were cowardly enough to escape the draft would ask, breathlessly clutching their highballs, for war stories. For tales of his valor.

It was about that time that Lascaux would leave the room. Upstairs. Outside. It didn’t matter. He knew how Adam would react: with humility, with kindness, with selflessness, and finally with an attempt to elevate Lascaux in the eyes of their peers.

“What do you do, Vic?” the partygoers would say, unsure of what tone of reverence to address him with.

“Corps of Engineers. Electricity, water, roads, bridges, fallout management.”

“Oh,” they would say, rolling their eyes and getting another drink.

Lascaux chewed his ice to keep from chewing his glass.

---

“You doing okay?”

Lascaux didn’t look up at Yumei’s voice. He just kept staring out across their backyard, over their pool, into the light-polluted sky.

“Yeah.”

He can’t lie to Yumei, so he doesn’t put much effort into it.

She knows his routine, by now--then again, she caught on after the first time. Lascaux can only take so many hours (well, minutes) of polite, domestic, American mingling before he needs to eject-the-fuck-out like a fighter pilot over Moscow on Victory Parade Day.

So they sit there, together, saying nothing, looking up at blind sky.

She could tell him that he doesn’t need to go to these things--that they’re just a formality, a way to keep the peace with the neighbors, that Adam doesn’t really like it either. But it means a lot to Adam to have Lascaux backing him up--two soldiers amongst soft civilians. So Lascaux bears it as much as he can, every time, pretending to not care and to show up… just because.

“Thank you,” Lascaux says, unsure why.

“You don‘t have to.”

“I want to.”

“Well, I don’t want you to.”

So, from then on, he doesn’t. And that’s that.

---

Before we begin, let us take a look at the one called Victor Lascaux. Not a long look, but enough to understand who he is. Or what he is, at least.

He had one mother, and one father, as was the style at the time. Both loved him, though in different ways, and the mother more than the father, as, again, was the style at the time. Their names are not particularly important, as is the case with most parents.

He was born small and late, and spoke late, and walked late. His parents were concerned, the neighbors whispered, and the doctors wrung their white-gloved hands, but little Victor lived up to his namesake and defied the infant mortality statistics. The U.S. Census Bureau took note, surely.

We will not overdwell on Lascaux's childhood and the trauma within (or lack thereof), for we are not psychiatrists. If you actually are a psychiatrist, well, by now you are used to being disappointed by patients, so this will all be very familiar to you.

He lived a painfully ordinary life. The most remarkable things about Victor Lascaux were perhaps his very neat handwriting, easily mistakable for typescript at a distance; or that he wrote upon graph paper instead of lined all through school. He said the Pledge of Allegiance three times a day like the rest of the children, and partook in the burning of the red-and-gold flag of Communist revolutionaries on Joseph McCarthy Day. He could duck and cover underneath his desk with perfect form when the bombing drills went off, and though he was shockingly terrible at America’s pastime (a psychological result of being picked last every time at recess), he somehow could recall the results of the past fifty American League championships without error. And woe to the schoolyard joker who called him a “French faggot,” for they would soon find themselves sprawled at the base of the flagpole after school. To be sure, he possessed just enough typical deviation from the societal norm to be normal.

Up to West Point, that is. Things changed, then. Because that is when he met Adam Smithson, and life as he knew it became quite different.

---

The unlikeliest of places: Quebec. There, his uncles and cousins taught him in days what West Point could not in years:

How to string a bow and shoot it like a man.

There was little wilderness left in the United States. One had to drive the backroads for hours and hours to see the stars, much less greenery that hadn’t been agonizingly manicured. Aside from the occasional raccoon or opossum or pigeon, there was little wildlife to see within the eyeshot of city lights.

Lascaux had never killed anything before. Ants, cockroaches, houseflies, the pride of schoolyard rivals, but little else. But he wanted to. For what seventeen year old boy, red-blooded and blue-balled, did not want to kill?

The arrow missed the heart.

The caribou ran for a mile, the pain and the taste of its own hot blood driving it mad. And the humans pursued, the thrill and the scent of that hot blood driving them mad. And then, the heaving beast rounded on them--and looked down at them, with pure contempt--and fell.

Steam rose from its body.

Lascaux had killed.

Lascaux would kindle that small solace, whenever Adam outshot him on the range, or outwrestled him in the ring, or outran him in the field, or outdrank him at the bar. It was a solace that required quite a bit of kindling, as you can imagine.

There were no deer left in Massachusetts but for the last nature preserve. So the two of them trekked out between the few remaining trees and set up their targets stolen from the range: red-eyed and befanged Chinese Communists, of course.

"Watch and learn." Lascaux drew, and shot.

Adam, with his characteristic sureness, drew and shot.

It was ugly and raw and beautiful.

"Like that?" he asked, tentative yet hopeful.

Lascaux frowned. "Watch me again."

---

He was reading the letter again. He knew.

"Well?"

Adam's sharp eyes emerged over the folded-and-refolded paper, peering through the smoke.

Lascaux pointed at the letter with his cigarette. "Are you going to marry her or not?"

Adam blinked. Lascaux would remember that for years after as a rare victory. "I... what do you mean?"

"It wasn't a rhetorical question, Smithson. Yumei writes you love letters, perfumed in God-knows-what. You write them back, cologned in God-knows-what you wear, with me as your dutiful editor."

"I don't have a house, Vic."

"Buy one."

"Real estate--"

"Get an apartment. Build a house. Live at home with your fucking parents, even." Lascaux flicked an ember expertly into a waiting ashtray. "There's a war on, if you haven't taken a look the papers recently. Men like you are in short supply, and tend to have shorter lives."

Adam ran a hand through his hair. "I... I want to. God! Of course I want to! Who wouldn't? But--"

"Are you a man, Smithson?"

"I--"

"Yes or no, Smithson. Are you a man?"

A pause. Iron and fire. "Yes." Conviction.

"Then we know your answer." Lascaux flicks away hot ash, forcing himself not to smile.

---

He was the best man at the wedding.

When he rose to his feet to give a toast, his speech was ready in his mind. He cracked his neck. How it would be the perfect blend of commendation and insult. Damnation with the faintest of praise. Enough to get him adopted into the (good) Marx family. Just enough.

But everything came out wrong. He lost the thread and hung himself with it. First he started with how they met, and how they bonded, and suddenly there was a story that made them seem like best friends. And the days at the range with the bows. And then how he helped Adam write letters, and...

Oh, by the end of it, there were tears in the Smithsons' eyes. Even the children, usually playing and restless, had stilled to listen. The guests rose and gave him a standing ovation.

Adam and Yumei clapping the loudest of them all.

---

"... Speak, or hold your peace."

Lascaux was a statue, but rage shook his guts apart.

Chapter Text

Adam and Yumei were making love.

Lascaux was sure of it. He wished he wasn’t.

He regretted buying the house across the street from them—they had convinced him so easily. Good price, rising land value, progressive enough for a mixed couple, quiet neighborhood—

He flicks an eye toward the dark windows of the Smithson residence. No… not entirely dark. Beyond that glass he can see the faint glimmer of candlelight.

Lascaux scoffed at himself, poured himself another glass, turned the radio down. Quiet neighborhood. Sure.

He doesn’t resent them. He damn well contributed to this, didn’t he? Back with the letters. How Adam was so… conservative. Traditional. Boyish in his innocence when all else about him was the template for manhood.

“You want to fuck her?”

Adam had stiffened at that, turning over in his bunk. “What?”

“We’re on letter six.” Lascaux lazily drew the number in the air with his cigarette smoke. “Most people your age fuck on date three.”

His expression… grew guarded, pensive. He twirled the fountain pen in his fingers—Lascaux’s pen, because God as his witness Lascaux would not let Adam write with a fucking ballpoint.

“You told her you liked kissing her.”

“That’s different. You don’t—write things like that. Say them, sure. But write them?”

Lascaux shrugged. “That’s how you feel, isn’t it?”

Adam makes a noise.

“Say again, Smithson?”

“I said no.”

Lascaux’s blood froze. And from those veins, slow as a glacier, came anger unbidden. “You—you—!”

“Animals fuck, Vic. Johns fuck hookers. Yumei—” He said the name with a careful reverence, his tongue not touching the syllables as they left his mouth— “She deserves more. I want to make love to her, Vic. In a real bed. With candles, and oil, and roses, and music, and, and—”

Lascaux raised a hand. He pointed with his cigarette to the pen.

“Tell her. Not me.”

He remembers that night vividly. Smithson was so wound up after putting that thing in the envelope he had to jack off three times.

After that, Adam would start omitting certain parts of Yumei’s letters. Lascaux didn’t have much of an imagination, but he didn’t particularly want to imagine Adam entwined with some woman anyway.

And yet there he sat, in his house, his whiskey glass cool and his face hot, as Adam and Yumei entwined themselves over and over again, just across the street.

He downs the glass. Chews the ice. Works at his belt, eyes closed.

---

There was some difficulty, of course, in the beginning. Letters with a return address with a Chinese name? Adam’s record was like polished chrome but they summoned him for questioning anyways. Letters to a sweetheart? Even worse. A white man and a black woman could live in peace in the more civilized parts of the nation. But a white man and a Chinese woman? A white military man? The boys in Psy Ops swore that every Chinese vagina was an opium-laced honeypot, citizen or no.

Lascaux began to route the comings and goings of Smithson’s superiors—where they were and when. He dug a bit into their histories—marital problems, children known or unknown. It was an idle entertainment.

Adam returned from interrogation. The letters continued, unmolested.

Lascaux lost interest in Smithson’s superiors.

---

When the Smithsons have house parties and Lascaux makes a tactical retreat upstairs to escape the triviality of civilian life, sometimes he passes by their bedroom.

And sometimes he looks at their bed. A lot different from the bunk, he would think.

He knows that, were he more brave and less wise, he would dare to touch it.

But he doesn’t. He looks, and carries on down the hallway, ignores the muffled voices and laughter and music below.

---

“We… don’t really know how to tell you this, Vic.”

They’re sitting in the living room. Adam and Yumei on one couch, Lascaux alone on the other. The couple are holding hands—tightly, their rings all aglow in the morning sunshine. Lascaux holds his glass of bourbon tightly, too.

“We haven’t told anyone else,” Yumei continued, her eyes bright and wet. She cast them down to the carpet, heaved a sigh. “But… it’s you. We love you. I think we can tell you.”

They’re Communists. Oh my fucking God they’re Communists. You’ve spent the better part of a decade in their life and you never noticed. You gave Yumei the benefit of the doubt since she was born stateside and claimed there wasn’t a thing left in China she cared for and even with all your Psy Ops training you didn’t notice a thing. That’s why they share so much with you, it’s collectivism. Oh my fucking God.

Oh my fucking God.

But Lascaux did not feel outrage or betrayal. Instead, he wonders how he will help keep this from the neighbors.

“We’re pregnant,” Adam and Yumei said together. They looked at each other in surprise, laughed, held each other closer. They were both crying in happiness.

Lascaux’s eyes feel warm, dense, like there’s something behind them. “About damned time,” he says, lifting his glass.

Chapter Text

The first trimester was simple enough. Oh, certainly—morning sickness, vomiting here and there, and the cravings, of course. Not chocolate or strawberries or, God forbid, Nuka-Cola—Yumei had never really cared for sweetness—but smoked sardines, of all things. And the occasional Kalamata olive, albeit pitted, to her annoyance. Adam meant well, but he could overworry sometimes.

If it was bad for Yumei, Lascaux could commiserate—no smoking in the Smithson house, at his own behest. So whenever he was over there, which was quite often, he’d find himself chewing ice until his gums went numb.

Of course… there was the increased sex drive. It went unspoken, of course, for there’s no need. Lascaux could see it in the way Yumei looks at Adam with a possessive pride, arrays herself archly in his presence like an odalisque. The way Adam is languid and smiling and his face smells of her—

Lascaux continued chipping away with the ice pick. The ice in his hand took shape.

---

When Adam had to leave for D. C. for unexpected advisory work, Lascaux slept on their couch (the comfortable one, not facing the window). He wasn't too concerned about Yumei, vomiting or not, she can take care of herself—but it’s for Adam’s peace of mind. And a happy Adam is a happy Yumei. So he stayed.

The Smithson house looks different at night, though. And in the quiet, in the dark, memories emerge.

"Treason against the federal government in a capital crime, Mr. Lascaux."

The pistol feels curiously light in his hand. He cocks the hammer.

He aims—right between the eyes—and fires three times.

The white room is now the red room.

His ears ring.

"Highly commendable, Mr. Lascaux."

Let freedom ring.

“Hey.”

Lascaux jerked up violently, hand groping for a pistol that’d left him a long time ago.

Yumei was leaning against the threshold of the living room, arms crossed. Her eyes seemed to reflect light from nowhere. “Can’t sleep either, I see.”

“Evidently.” Lascaux moved over on the couch to give her some space. Yumei didn't move.

“If…” The word hung until dead. She sighs, begins anew. “You can’t sleep here, can you? Not—” She gestured to the room. “Like this.”

Lascaux looked away. “I’m staying. I’m not leaving you.”

Yumei crossed the carpet on bare feet and turned on one light. Then another. And another. With each light, she coalesced into view, clearer and clearer, her swollen belly somehow as natural a part of her as her ears or toenails.

“The neighbors will talk.”

“Then let them choke on their tongues.”

Lascaux surprised himself with his laugh.

---

Lascaux and Adam never really told each other about… what they were doing, out in the field.

It wasn’t some adherence to confidentiality, or paranoia, or anything like that. They simply knew well enough what each other’s work life was like—the blood and guts and gunsmoke and torture and taunts in broken English over a supposedly secure radio frequency—and they would talk about anything else.

Electricians don’t talk about burns and plumbers don’t talk about shit.

“So, now, just between you and me—”

There is no ‘you and me,’ Lascaux thought dimly as he retrieved his daily inoculation of advertisements and propaganda from his mailbox. He glances sidelong at Mr. Wagner, who was leaning on his white-picket fence (my fucking fence), his evening rum and Nuka-Cola in hand.

“I think something serious is going on in the upper brass,” Wagner intoned with the assuredness of a civilian talking out of his ass. “Of course, you and Adam, you’re close, you know this—but he’s been gone more and more. Must be very serious,” he declared to Lascaux’s mailbox.

“Huh.”

“It’s a real shame. Lovely wife, baby on the way. Man can’t enjoy the simple things in life.” He drank. Smacked his lips. “That’s the cost of being a patriot, though. He’s a real American hero, to put his life on the line like that. Boy’s got tricolor blood.”

“Huh.”

“It must have been something,” Wagner said pensively, looking at the rim of his glass. “Going to West Point with the guy. Seeing him in action. They'll make movies about him, when this is all over.”

Adam and Lascaux were never deployed together, but this neighborhood couldn’t seem to remember that beyond a day. So Lascaux said nothing.

“I regret it, sometimes, going to Columbia. Going into the business. Part of me wanted to enlist, but…” Wagner moves his body in what Lascaux presumed was a guiltless shrug. “Plans. Family. Expectation. Reds are a plague, God damn them, but you can’t throw all that tuition away, you know?”

“Huh.”

Wagner clapped a hand on the fence. “See, this is why I like you, Victor, you talk sense. You try talking politics with Roger—” He made a spiral motion with a finger. “Like a broken record. Reds are already in the government, Reds are putting mind control dust in the water, Reds are putting Marx in the schoolbooks.” He drank, again, and was perplexed to find his glass empty. “Well! That’s enough talking shop for tonight. Have a good one, Victor!”

Silhouetted by the sunset, Mr. Wagner walked across his immaculate green lawn to his front door. In a practiced motion, Lascaux drew an invisible pistol and aligned the invisible sights with the man’s balding head.

The ‘BANG!’ didn’t ring out in Lascaux’s mind. His arm dropped, clutched at his mail. He fucking despised Wagner, fine—but he was the first person in the neighborhood to greet Adam and Yumei when they moved in. The first one to share a pew in church. The first to induct them into the Neighborhood Communist Watch. The first to threaten Roger with a broken nose when, after a few drinks and halfway into a game of billiards, Roger pondered aloud if Yumei had a slanted cunt, too.

Had Wagner said nothing, Lascaux would be in prison for shoving a pool cue through Roger’s skull, so in a way, he was in the fat bastard’s debt.

Fuck him for it.

Chapter Text

Lascaux begins the morning with a cigarette and a finger of bourbon, as he usually does.

Not just any cigarette--one of the Lucky Strike Golds that Smithson had managed to smuggle in for him from DC. Good shit. And not just any bourbon, but the 2064 Maker's Mark, also a gift from Smithson when he was inspecting fallout bunkers in Kentucky. Good shit. Contraband always tastes better--the pastor's daughter, a friend's Playboys. Thank God he wasn't born during Prohibition, what a tragedy that would have been.

Smithson made him breakfast, Lascaux muses as he peers out the window, and not for the first time. Well, he'll pay him back. Not any time soon, of course--months, or perhaps years. But good shit begets good shit.

The neighborhood is quiet. Charles is out walking his dog in the morning dew--that military German shepherd that flunked out of attack dog school. Lascaux sneers.

He turns on the TV and turns on the radio. He listens to the morning propaganda, brain carefully parsing through for anything of true interest. Nothing, usually. For the best, perhaps, but he is a man at heart, and what man does not desire action?

The weather in Moscow, the weather in Beijing. Little of interest, little to dwell upon. Lascaux supposes that knowing that Muscovites are cold is supposed to make Americans feel that the world is just.

---

Yumei was getting big.

Well, part of her was, anyway. To see her meander through the house or the yard, balancing her usually athletic body with a suddenly ponderous belly, was almost comical. Almost--as the look of grimness on her face thoroughly chilled any humorous observations from the neighbors (and, perhaps too, the hovering shade of an equally grim Lascaux). She finally had to relent from wearing pants and resign herself to dresses. Maybe it was good that Adam was out of town, otherwise he would banging his dick on every doorframe in the house.

---

They pass a rather reflective window on the way out of the hospital.

Yumei laughs her kind of laugh--steel knife on a bronze bell. Lascaux looks up from an irritating scuff on his boots. "What?"

"We look so serious." She gestures to the window. "People probably think we're on our way to tell our parents the bad news."

Lascaux huffed something almost resembling a chuckle.

---

It became less humorous when the blood tests came back and showed elevated hormones. She was gaining weight too quickly.

When Yumei phones Adam about it, of course, he wants to drop everything and get a ticket for Boston first thing. But Yumei and Lascaux alternate the phone between them, eventually reassuring Adam that no, his wife's uterus is not going to go critical mass and explode and leave a Sanctuary-sized crater.

"I don't know how you stand him, sometimes," Lascaux mutters, hanging up the phone. He glances at the clock--they had been going back and forth for thirty bloody minutes.

She fans herself, frowning. A bead of sweat travels down the bridge of her nose. "Because he's stubborn and never admits defeat?"

"Because he worries so much. He's like a Jewish grandmother, without the cooking."

"That's his nature." Yumei rises from the couch, sliding open the living room window with a grunt. "I think he worries about you more than me."

Lascaux makes a carefully dismissive noise. "Right."

---

He's smoking more. It's the stress, probably. From the baby.

He's not sure why he's so stressed over offspring that isn't his.

He calms himself down with a sliver of bourbon. Yumei won't benefit from his hysterics, after all.

Lascaux turns on the TV.

HUAC got another one. Family, two kids. Ukrainian, funneling intel back to Russia.

They were to be executed during primetime, for maximum exposure.

He flips a coin to decide whether he'll watch it or not.

George Washington stares back up at him.

Chapter Text

After some consideration, Lascaux has determined (to 99.875% accuracy) that no one in Sanctuary is a Communist.

It took about a year of careful observation, study, and stalking, but the moment Smithson tossed him the key to the new house--well, operational security comes first. In the conventional military, they call it 'opsec.' (You know this already.) In Lascaux's circles, they call it... yardwork. Raking the leaves, mowing the lawn, walking the dog, whatever.

Wagner, Moore (no relation to Roger), Diaz, Kjellman, Grant, Alexanderson, Turner, Rodriguez.

---

Lascaux turns the TV off whenever they show the Communist internment camps on the news.

Well, they call them Communist internment camps, anyway. When you have 400,000 people locked behind electrified razor wire, you're bound to hit a few false positives. Spiteful neighbors, spurned lovers, bored spouses, employers in general--people just want excuses to make certain people disappear from their lives. In the beginning, it was mostly those with Slavic or Chinese last names. Mostly. But the lure was too great for the rest of America to resist.

For some reason--when they have the cameras showing people behind the bars--Lascaux can too easily imagine Yumei on the TV screen. They could never break her--with labor or degradation or anything else, Lascaux knows what--but something roils and rages in him at the thought, between his heart and his lungs, between where he keeps his hate and his love.

---

The neighborhood talks.

Lascaux slams shut the door of his car, circling to the trunk to heft out groceries.

He can feel the eyes through the windows boring into his back, curious and bewildered.

No doubt the rest thought he subsisted on liquor and cigarettes with the occasional cigar. In truth, aside from the hundreds of rations Lascaux has stocked in his basement, most of his nutrition was derived from Adam and Yumei's shared dinners.

So to see him grocery shopping, doing something so mundane, so domestic... how it must have amused them so.

He grits his teeth and thinks of other things. He thinks of Adam arriving home, chilly and weary and saddened at the cruelty of the world--but arriving home to a warm house and a warm dinner and Lascaux shucking his coat and Yumei consuming him in a fiery kiss.

Lascaux holds onto that thought and carefully puts it away deep inside himself.

---

Another appointment. Second trimester. These doctor's visits are becoming more and more frequent. They make him grind his teeth and he finds nail-shaped red gouges in his palms when he looks at his hands.

It's not the appointments themselves. It's the possibility that anything could possibly be wrong.

As Yumei speaks with her doctor, smiling and nodding and being the very image of normal social interactivity, Lascaux sits in the corner, legs crossed, arms crossed, staring a ballistic wound cavity through the doctor's skull.

The doctor’s platitudinal droning is broken with the word 'ultrasound,' and Lascaux glances up. The two stand--Yumei, with a bit of difficulty--but when Lascaux rises as well, the doctor raises a placating hand.

"It's fine," Yumei says, touching Lascaux's arm. "I want him to come with us."

The doctor schools his scandalized expression and leads the way.

---

It’s twins.

Yumei has a hand to her mouth, shoulders trembling. Lascaux holds her.

“I knew it,” she says softly. “I knew.”

He will never admit it, under torture or death. But he cries, too.

Chapter Text

A camera in every television set. A microphone in every radio. A tracking chip in every car.

He had wondered. He had suspected.

But never anything like this.

---

By the time the third trimester came around, Lascaux was sure he had grown his first grey hair.

---

He checks once a day. Perhaps that is excessive, but Lascaux is thorough.

He opens the small compartment underneath the desk in his study. The machine there has printed a slip of paper.

He takes it in trembling hands. His eyes parse the code automatically.

"DEFCON ALPHA."

---

He lay there, shivering, gasping, twitching, fingers clawing weakly at the polished metal of the floor.

The first to thaw was his blood.

The second, his tears.

---

It's so fucking cold.

---

The elevator reaches the top.

The sun is too big in the sky. Too bright. The air burns.

He falls to his knees.

---

"Codsworth, I--" Lascaux worked his throat. "I can hardly walk. I--I need--"

"Well, fear not, sir. There's enough refuse strewn about that I may be able to furnish a carriage--"

"Cods--"

"And hitch it to me. Now, as long as you tell none of this--"

"Codsworth, no carriages."

"I am relieved, sir."

---

"I have become quite fearsome in solitaire, if I may say so myself. Nearly as much as fifty-two pickup, thanks to all these recent gales."

Lascaux looked down at his cards.

"I'm sorry, Codsworth."

"I too, sir. I too."

---

His legs did not forget so easily. Or, perhaps, they remembered fiercely. Either, or.

---

"Wait, so how did they keep the lions and tigers from eating everything else?"

"The enclosures," Lascaux said tiredly. "They were all separated."

"En... closures?"

"Cages. Big glass cages, bigger than a house."

"Wouldn't they break the glass?"

"Thick glass." Lascaux holds his palms flat, a foot apart. "Like so."

"Oh." Nat's brow furrows as she concocts the scene in her head. "Wow."

"Yeah."

"Doesn't glass get hot?"

Lascaux sighs.

---

Nat watches Lascaux's back as he disappears into the neon night. She waits for the door to swing shut on over-oiled hinges, and then...

"I can't believe you almost asked him to live with us."

Piper gives her sister a stern look. "It would've be a short-term thing, Nat. Maybe a month, at most."

"A month?"

---

It's been two hundred years.

Of course cigarettes taste stale. Everything in this world is stale, now.

Until Lascaux finds Vault 81, anyway.

He sits in his room, stabs another butt into the ashtray on his bed. The polished metal ceiling is obscured by a canopy of smoke, now.

He remembered this tasting better. Different.

Maybe the cryostasis damaged his tongue. Or his mouth. Or his lungs. Or his brain. Or all of him.

He takes another drag, slower. Somehow, it's even less satisfying than the last.

---

The catheter itches. Of course it does.

It lies too close to the ulcers lining his inner arm--parting gifts from the Psycho, the Med-X, the mainlined Buffout, God knows what else. They've mostly scarred over. Rupture now and again, leave streaks of lymph criss-crossing. And that damned catheter seems to be setting them off like a recruit in a minefield.

But Sun said not to touch it.

So he doesn't. He just sits and smokes and lets the ion-bonding solution drip into his vein. Watches the fluid in the bag ebb down, drop by drop.

A distant memory rises out of the glacier of his mind. Of all things: Chinese water torture. They stripped him down and strapped him down, in pitch blackness, and let body-temperature water strike his forehead for... well, seven hours, thirteen minutes, and seven seconds. So... twenty five thousand, nine hundred and eighty seven seconds. Almost broke twenty six thou.

"The Reds might use acid," one of his instructors posited. "But I'm sure you get the idea."

Lascaux didn't say anything. Just blinked up at the fluorescent lights.

"Polygraph reads normal. Not bad. You just might be cut out for this."

He opens his mouth to speak, but the sound of water is all that comes out.

"That'll subside. Cigarette?"

---

He makes himself another sidecar.

Alone. Cait wouldn't want to see him like this.

---

"Well, your biopsy and bloodwork came back."

"And?"

"Albumin a standard deviation below average, as is your bilirubin. Your liver and kidneys are in questionable shape."

He didn't need a doctor to tell him that. "Lungs?"

Forsythe sighed. "Look, son, count this as a blessing… there's nothing wrong with your lungs."

Lascaux stared at him blankly, before lifting his halfmask. "Then what, this thing is a placebo?"

"The Vaults aren't exactly hermetic, Victor. Over the course of generations, the population here has been exposed to the outside atmosphere--the altered air composition, the fine particulates. But you... well, you're essentially pristine."

That's a word he never thought he'd wear as an adjective.

"I'm sorry, Victor. Aside from the corticosteroids, there's nothing more I can do. Your bronchioles are abnormally sensitive, and they may remain that way."

Lascaux nods. Disappointment has become a familiar feeling. Even so, this feels different. "Right. Yeah. This is appreciated, doctor."

---

“Lipomas, myomas… nothing to be concerned about, really.”

Lascaux wracked his memory. His medical screenings back in the army. Those words… did sound familiar.

“Heightened neutrophil volume... hm. It has, of course, only been a year. Your metabolism has only just returned to its normal pre-cryostasis rate… And your body is not acclimated to the atmosphere, or these ambient levels of radiation. Exercise caution.”

“Yes, I know.”

---

Cait screams.

She screams and screams and--

"Open the door!" Piper shouts.

Lascaux beats his fists against the terminal. "It's fucking locked, I can't--"

She screams.

"God's sake, L! Open it"

"I can't!"

And as suddenly as it started, the screaming stops. The door slides open.

Lascaux and Piper glance at each other, then barge into the room.

Cait is limp in the chair, eyes open and staring. Blood runs from her nose.

Lascaux is there, ripping the restraints from her wrists, her legs, her neck. He pulls her into his arms. She's sheened in sweat... and cold. Piper presses two fingers against her neck.

"Cait," he whispers.

Nothing.

"Cait," he whispers. "Cait, Cait, Cait." He listens. For a heartbeat, for breathing, for... "Come back to me."

Silence.

"Oh, God," Piper groans, voice thick.

And then Cait gasps for air like she's being born.

"Not so... tight," she chokes out, squirming in Lascaux's embrace. "Can't... breathe."

Lascaux loosens his hold, drops his head to her shoulder, and sighs.

He feels Cait's fingers in his hair.

"Ya worry... too much."

---

"Thank you for releasing me, Monsieur... ?"

"Lascaux."

The robot's pupils dilated. "Par hasard, êtes-vous français aussi?"

He felt something flicker in his intestines. Shame, perhaps. "No, I don't... I don't speak French." Not well. Not like how he knows Russian and Mandarin.

The pupils returned to the usual size. "I see."

---

The door flies open, and he's already got his pistol up.

But it's not Death come to collect. Rather, it's Piper. But considering the expression on her face, well.

"You fucking lied to me."

Lascaux stares up at her blankly, the Colt going limp in his hand. He blots out his cigarette. "I... What?"

"When we--" She slams　the door, draws　a shaky breath, hands balled into fists. "When we first met, and you gave me the interview, and said all that stuff about rebuilding and hope--"

"I didn't lie."

"Yes, you did! You didn't believe a word of that! You still don't! And you sit there and you--you--"

She paces. Lascaux looks down at his lap. Dusts off some ash, gets some under his fingernails.

"Why do you think--?"

"You fucking told me, L! A month ago, in the Dugout! And I've--Jesus, I've had a pin in it ever since, but you know what?" She leans down, nearly touching noses. He didn't meet her eyes. "I told you how I felt about the truth. You told me that people deserve to know. That they have the right to know."

Lascaux looks away. Lets a dusty sigh deflate his lungs, long and suffering.

"You don't believe it, do you? You just said what I wanted to hear. What people wanted to hear."

"That really bothers you," he mused.

"Obviously!"

What was he going to say? He isn't sorry he lied.

"I'm sorry--"

"No, you're not."

Shit. "Piper, I--"

"I know why you did it." Her anger hasn't subsided. It's become a smoldering red thing, redder than her jacket, still hot enough to brand. "Because you felt like people needed something to believe in."

Lascaux feels an urge to pull her in close, like they did on the cold nights in the Wasteland, hidden beneath blankets and camouflage. But that wouldn't do any good, now. She'd burn his skin right off. "As it is... You're right. I wasn't... entirely forthcoming."

"Wow."

"Fine. I lied."

"Thank you."

"I lied because these people needed a lie. Most people do, Piper. You--you, of all people, have seen this, know this. What was I going to say--that the Old World was worse than this one? That given enough time, this'll all happen again?"

"You said we should've all died."

Lascaux stared at her.

"You said," her words were slow. Incisive. "That the bombs should've just killed every last person alive. That... that would've been better." She sits down next to him, takes his pack of cigarettes, strikes one against the back.

He shakes his head. "... I must've been drunk."

"Drunk, with Med-X still in your veins. Cait and I had to carry you home."

That night seemed distant. Every Wasteland night seems like it'll be the last, after all. "I wasn't..." He stops, lifts a hand, lets it drop.

"You've got a good poker face, L, I'll give you that. Make Takahashi look expressive." Her cigarette burns away, untouched. "But alcohol brings everyone's secrets out, eventually. Trust me."

Lascaux looks at the wall of his house, the wood and metal and cinderblock and plaster. He wishes it wasn't there, so he could just stand up and walk away and let Piper's voice bounce off of his back. But instead he reaches out, and touches Piper's hand.

"I... I'm glad you and Nat and Cait and everyone were born," he says unsteadily. "Even if it had to be into this world. You're the only friends I've ever really had."

Piper holds his hand tightly.

"I mean that," he whispers, and for once he wished he was lying.

---

He pulls down his halfmask, lets it hang loosely about him like a noose awaiting a neck.

"You didn't think about it, did you?"

The accusation rings out, clear and cold and hard.

"Just another mission, just like any other. Collateral, irrelevant. Just needed the children, so the parents could go. More tallies to scratch on a receiver. You didn't even think. Your gun thought for you."

"You were there--didn't seem too concerned at the time." A beat to let the barb land. "And how many orphans have you created, I wonder?" Kellogg's voice rises from over the terminals. "What will you tell them?"

"That their parents were killed by someone better. Where are they? Are they safe?"

"I'm curious--why? Why do you care? They're not even yours. They wouldn't recognize you."

He fights to keep his voice neutral. "I'm their God-damned godfather. So forgive me for having a vested interest in them being in good health."

Kellogg laughs. It's an uneven sound, as if warped from disuse. "If I didn't believe it before, I would now. You are from the Old World."

"You didn't answer my question."

A dismissive snort. "They're healthy kids. You know how kids are--impatient. Full of wonder, empty of fear. Ready to take on life. Not a single mutation."

Lascaux's guts clench painfully. "I will be very disappointed if I find you have lied to me. Now, where?"

"You know where. You made it this far."

A pause, suspended in the heavy air. And then:

"You could have just stopped."

Kellogg tilts his head, just slightly. The synths arrayed about the room shift about, their metal phalanges scraping loudly.

"No one forced your hand. Where you are now--it's not an accident." Lascaux's voice echoes throughout the command center, oddly hollow. "The money. The challenge. The thrill. None of that ever really mattered. Choice. You made that choice. And you have a choice right now."

"As do you, right before you."

"No. I don't."

"There's always a choice, Lascaux."

His blood runs swift in wide veins. "Not really. Not for me. But for you…"

Lascaux raises his hands, walking slow into the doorway, clear in view.

“Adam and Yumei… are forgiving. More than me. I would’ve shot you dead by now… but for them, I’ll give you a chance.” He ignores the sounds of disbelief from his companions. “Join me, Kellogg. Fight for me. Kill for me. The Institute can’t give you what I can.”

“And what’s that?”

“Purpose.”

A snort. “Get back into cover. I want this to be a fair match.”

Lascaux ducks back. He racks the charging handle of his Browning AutoRifle. “It isn’t. You’re already dead.”

---

Lascaux stands over Kellogg's body.

He's killed, what, a hundred people in the past two years? What's a hundred and one?

He looks down at the dead man. He sighs. Lascaux lifts his Colt M2011 and empties the magazine into Kellogg's chest. Even when the slide locks back, his ears ringing, he keeps pulling that trigger. Click. Click. Click.

"Hey!" MacCready grabs him roughly by the shoulder. "Stop!"

Lascaux, in a daze, looks over his shoulder. Piper, Cait, Valentine... they're looking at him like he's...

"S'over," Cait says, coming forward and easing his shooting arm down. "S'over, now. He's dead."

"I..." Lascaux swallows. This is never over. His mouth is full of dust and death and nothingness. "I need to make sure." He gestures to MacCready. "You saw it yourself. You put a .400 through his stomach and--and he kept going. That's beyond most mutants. I need to make sure."

“It only grazed him,” MacCready snaps back.

"Let him go," Valentine says tiredly. "Let him have this." Lascaux can sense that inflection, that tiny note of disgust and understanding. Because in the glow of Valentine's golden eyes there's that blast shadow, that Edward S. Winter shaped outline that will never fade away.

So they do. MacCready scoffs and mutters, Cait squeezes his arm reassuringly. Piper comes forward and rubs his back.

"L," she intones. "It's okay."

Lascaux shakes his head, back and forth and back and forth. He pulls his hatchet from his belt loop and sets to work, because he needs to make sure.

The rest give him space.

---

Before, Cait and MacCready couldn't stop crowing about how they'd celebrate after Kellogg was dead.

After, the lot of them trekked in an awkward and uncomfortable silence back to Diamond City.

Lascaux doesn't like it. He likes silence--sometimes--but not these kinds of silences, the ones he's responsible for, the one where everyone's eyes are boring into his back.

They still think he's sore about Kellogg.

Lascaux, in a rare moment, is honest with himself when he knows that he really doesn't--didn't--give a shit about Kellogg.

Embittered mercenary with a feud against life. Pure stereotype, pure cliché. Dime a fucking dozen, pulp noir half-price on Mondays. Just another red cog in a red machine that was happy to be a dumb, dull cog and nothing more. Good fucking riddance.

It wasn't Kellogg that was bothering Lascaux. It was the dead end, staring him in the face, somehow accusing and apologetic at the same time.

---

Lascaux places the cooler on the table.

Dr. Amari looks at it knowingly, her mouth a thin line.

“You know I need to know.”

Piper looks away when he lifts the lid. “Jesus, L.”

---

Not just ten, always. Twelve fingers. Or maybe twelve toes.

Not just thirty two, always. Thirty four teeth. Sometimes thirty six.

Some short. Some tall. Women half his age he had to crane his neck up to see face-to-face.

An extra vertebrae. Eyeshine. Hair like silk or hair like wire. Some born bald, some growing hair so fast they cut it and sell it as twine every market day. Eyes of every color, every shade. And most rarely, a short, fleshy tail, often amputated after birth. The new world's circumcision.

Two hundred years. Two hundred, and these humans were no longer Lascaux's humans.

---

Thistle. Dandelion. Pennyroyal. Dutch clover. Purlsane. Bittercress. Nettle.

Warped, larger, discolored. But there.

They had survived, despite humanity's best and last attempt.

---

“I remember you,” she said.

She said it with such conviction he almost believed her.

“You were two years old, Alice. You don’t remember me.”

“I do,” she said, an edge creeping into her voice. “And I remember Mom, and Dad. All of us, together.”

Lascaux sighed and looked away.

--- --- ---

"What did you do? Before the war, I mean."

"There was no 'before,' if you want to be technical." Lascaux flicks some ash. "That year, that day--that was when it all ended. That was the logical conclusion to years of proxy wars and trade embargoes."

"... L."

"Right. Sorry." He drags on the cigarette. "I'm--I was in the Corps of Engineers." He pauses. "They didn't have us fighting. Not in the beginning, anyway. We... kept things together. The roads, the rail lines. So supplies could be moved back and forth."

Piper nods, jotting down notes.

"Made sure that there wouldn't be flooding or wildfires if the Reds sent a bombing squadron our way, or something." He sighs. "So much for that."

--- --- ---

It began with Hawthorne. He was well aware of his mortality.

Sullivan. O'Malley. Cardinal. Fitzgerald. O'Neill. Morrow. Walsh. Breen.

One follows the other. McDonough didn't promote Sullivan for a fearsomeness or vigilance--he was kind. Sinners cast their eyes down when Sullivan came near. And a kind request for aid in regards to laying down the law was far better received when it came from a Sullivan kindness rather than a Lascaux coldness.

--- --- ---

(The raid on the colosseum goes here.)