Chapter Text
The door to Desdemona’s office slams shut behind Carrington with grave finality. It startles a small flock of dispersing agents, lest they be accused of eavesdropping. In her hurry, poor little Songbird's coat catches on a pile of folders, tearing the entire stack to the floor in a flutter of loose papers.
"Don't worry," Tommy Whispers says, kneeling to gather up the documents with a wink. "I got you." The stitches in his left thigh twinge at the stretch, but the injury has healed well enough for the ache to be nothing but a minor inconvenience.
The girl's dismayed expression melts into one of immense gratitude, even as she swiftly joins the rest of her fleeing colleagues.
“That sounded like it could have gone better.”
Tommy gathers the papers into a neat stack, not envying the agent who will have to reassemble what looks to be about a month's worth of reports in the end. Dez and Carrington are famous for the rigor of their disagreements, though it rarely gets to the point where they are loud enough to assemble an audience of curious agents.
“It could hardly have gone worse.” Carrington scoffs. He casts his eyes across Tommy’s kneeling form witheringly, prompting a slightly rueful smile and some relief at having built up somewhat of an immunity to Carrington’s scorn. “Not that you didn’t get what you wanted.”
Tommy winces. Never mind.
He expectantly holds out a hand until Carrington relents and helps him back onto his feet in one swift pull, the grasp of his thin fingers pointedly refusing to linger. Carrington’s hands are always cold, which is why he usually cradles a mug of coffee he will forget to ever actually drink whilst sitting at his desk in the lab.
“Me and the majority of agents at HQ, Stanley,” Tommy points out mildly, biting back an addendum about how democracies are supposed to work. Deacon is a terrible influence. Usually, Tommy is rather more patient with Carrington’s moods, but these last few months have been particularly volatile. Tommy feels a twinge of guilt at the thought.
Predictably, Carrington’s brows kit together, as they are wont to do when he is aware of being petty but cannot quite stop himself.
“I am aware that my record with votes is less than stellar. Thank you, Whisper.” He turns on his heel towards the laboratories, not even sparing a last glance at Tommy Whispers. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a democratically sanctioned liability to sign off on.”
“You know full well that’s not what I meant,” Tommy mutters, probably not loud enough for Carrington to hear, following with the fastest hobble he can muster. A sudden stabbing pain in his leg nearly makes him stumble, and he swears under his breath as he just catches himself against the wall. Carrington is instantly by his side again, carefully running his hands over Tommy’s thigh to check his stitches for tears.
“That’s what you get for crawling around on the floor,” he hisses, concern bleeding through so acutely it almost makes Tommy laugh.
“I’m alright, I’m alright,” he says instead, thoughtlessly resting his hand on Carrington’s shoulder for balance. “That looked more dramatic than it was.”
“Still, you should be more careful.” Carrington sniffs, but does not shake Tommy off, opting to take him by the elbow as they continue down the corridor. “I’m not having one of our best agents out of action for longer than necessary.”
Dutchman sits guard outside Carrington’s office, an ancient comic book splayed across his lap. The pages, already thin from wear, are unlikely to survive his rough handling with potato chip-stained fingers. Spotting Carrington, Dutchman jumps to his feet.
“All clear in there, Doc,” he says, swallowing a mouthful of orange mush halfway through the sentence. Carrington shudders at the sight. “You’re just in time, though. I think Mole is starting to crawl up the walls.” Tommy’s worried look quickly makes him elaborate. “Not literally, Whisper. Not yet anyway.”
Carrington unlocks the door and does not stop Tommy from following him inside. Dutchman has a surprisingly healthy appreciation for an easy life for an agent of the Railroad, and consequently has enough sense not to join them. Out of the corner of his eyes Tommy can see him shuffle closer to the door, but that is understandable. There likely is not a single person at the Switchboard right now who is not curious about Mole and his -
Well. His ‘new friend’, as Mole had put it.
Said friend, the gargantuan ghoul, regards them with muted disdain from his post by the desk. By the look of him, he has not moved an inch since Carrington told them to stay put in his office until he and Desdemona figured out what to do with them. At first Mole himself is nowhere to be seen, but he soon announces his presence by banging his head against the bottom of Carrington’s desk in his haste to emerge. If he has hurt himself, he gives no indication of it, welcoming them with open arms and gap-toothed mania.
"There you are!” He cries. “About damn time! Can't wait to get out on the road again. Me, Shannon, the open road. We're made for that shit, Stan. Dunno why they locked the door. Weird shit that, but I'll forgive, yeah sure.” His voice drops to a booming whisper, and he leans in, trying to cup his hand to the doctor’s ear. “Not sure about Shannon but I betcha I can talk him down.”
Carrington deftly sidesteps Mole with a grimace, lifting his hands as a shield between them.
“And this is precisely why-” Carrington stops himself, casting his eyes towards Tommy as though to plead for help. He tries again, aiming for stern and only barely missing angry. “First of all, his name is Charon, Milo. You know this. Hell, his damn paperwork says so.”
Technically, the initiative the contract hails from was codenamed ‘Charon’, with the subject’s name represented by an encoded serial number. At least that is what Tommy could glean when he, as one of many curious agents, had a chance to cast his eyes across the much dog-eared document before a horrified Carrington confiscated it. Certainly, one of the more outlandish pre-war artefacts Tommy has come across in his time, and half the reason he voted to keep Charon and Mole as part of the Railroad. A bit close to home, really, considering the whole ‘saving synths from indentured servitude’ thing.
Mole tilts his head.
“Shannon doesn’t mind. He’s my friend.”
Across the room the ghoul emits a near inaudible growl of displeasure, and Tommy abruptly feels even more sorry for him. He has known Mole longer than anyone else in the Railroad, and though he has no end of affection for the little man, he appreciates that he can be, well, a lot. As far as Tommy recalls the details of Mole’s latest mission, they came all the way back from Maryland. That is a long way to wander with somebody like Mole, especially if you cannot tell him to shut it.
Tommy should know: he has very, very vivid memories of that time Mole roped him into coming to Amarillo with him for a very special delivery.
“So, when do we start?” Mole rubs his hands together like an eager kid. “Do we get to take apart the toasters? They don't bleed, but the coolant looks all blue and alieny when you cut the fuckers open.”
“Oh no, no, no.” Carrington sits behind his desk with all the gravitas of a man who is hoping that the gesture alone conveys enough authority for him to regain control of the situation. “You are not to go on any missions until you and your- your rogue element have had a full evaluation. Medical and psych. Hell, I am getting Tinker Tom to bloody well scan you both for whatever bugs he thinks you might be carrying. You’re getting the works, Milo. The works!”
“What.”
“Trust me, you are getting off much more lightly than I would have preferred.” Carrington has found his feet in the conversation, for better or for worse. “Walking in here after a month’s worth of radio silence with...” he gestures vaguely in Charon’s direction, evidently not just wanting to say ‘a ghoul.’ “…a stranger whose - frankly bizarre - condition would make him an excellent spy for the Institute if he were to ever fall into their hands, as though you’d been out to get milk and cigarettes. I don’t care how good your record is, Milo, agents like you and Deacon are a liability, and the reason the Railroad’s position remains precarious to this day. One step forward, three stumbles back. I really am at my wit’s end with you.”
Mole stares at the doctor, and the change that has come over him during Carrington’s speech is almost frightening. All his energy has melted away, leaving nothing behind but quiet, unassuming fury. Even Charon is looking at him with something like curiosity sparking in his marbled blue eyes.
"Heeeyyy Carrington." Mole drawls slowly, stretching out the words like taffy. "Hey Doc, why the bullshit? Why the killing of all my joy, man? You know I hate being locked up here, Carrington. You know how it makes me twitch. And what’s all the ‘liability’ bullshit about? You saying I don’t give a shit about the Railroad? ‘Cause if I think that that’s what you’re saying, man, you and I are gonna have some words. You really, really don’t wanna make me twitchy, Doc.”
“Mole…” Tommy does not quite dare to touch Mole, not when he gets like this, his hand hovering just a few inches above Mole’s shoulder as he moves in. “That’s not what Stanley was saying at all. He-”
“It’s quite alright, Whisper,” Carrington says evenly, eyes still fixed on Mole. “We’ve both said our piece, haven’t we, Milo?”
There is no reply, only a rising tremor in Mole’s small body.
“Never speak to me like this again, Milo.” The doctor folds his hands on the smooth plastic of his desk, slightly leaning forward. “I do mean it. Never. I am well aware of what happens when you lose your temper. You can talk to our enemies that way, Milo, but not to me. Understood?”
“Yes, Doc,” mumbles Mole, a different flavour of childish. As he speaks, the brief flash of teeth seems stained ever so slightly red, as though he has been biting the inside of his cheek too hard. Though he remains subdued, some animation is creeping back in. “Tests, huh? Some loop-de-loops you put us through before we get to smell that sweet, sweet smog of the great outdoors again. Fine by me, Doc. Fiiiine by me. ” He puts his hands under his armpits and starts to rock on the balls of his feet, to and fro, to and fro. “We dismissed then? I wanna show Shannon the mess before we start with the jumping and shit.” The smile he flashes seems to be for poor Charon only. “Best Salisbury steak you had in 200 years, pal. Stuff never seems to get old, does it?”
“Dismissed.”
Carrington sighs.
“Milo...”
Mole is already halfway out the door, stopping abruptly to glare over his shoulder, his badly bleached locs whipping across his back with the motion. “Yeah?”
Carrington wearily cards a hand through his hair.
“I know you care, I really do, it’s just… it’s beside the point.”
Mole drums his fingers on the doorframe, once, twice, thrice, getting faster each time.
“You comin’, Shannon? Wanna share some Dandy Apples after?”
“I am happy if you are happy,” Charon replies, resigned, following his current master without complaint.
Quietly making a shooing motion for a wide-eyed Dutchman to make himself scarce, Tommy closes the office door behind them.
“That… definitely could have gone better.”
Carrington groans, firmly pressing his palms against his eyes.
“Please do not mock me, Tommy.”
Silence falls thickly between them.
Carrington has not used Tommy’s given name in months, and even now it holds a lingering touch of intimacy. Crazy, really - everybody else calls him Tommy.
“Sorry,” Tommy mumbles, hobbling across the room to flick the switch on a small hotplate. There is a stash of tinned instant coffee on the top shelf, kept safely out of sight behind moldy anatomy textbooks. “What did you expect, Stanley? You know how Mole gets if you coup him up inside.”
The brown powder he spoons into two mugs smells vaguely of rot, but that is to be expected from two hundred year old military rations. Hasn’t killed them yet.
“Milo is ill, Tommy.” Carrington sounds tired now, tired of making the same argument over and over again. “I know you and Dez subscribe to the idea that we need all the help we can get, but I really cannot see how we are meant to operate like this. Not in the long term. It’s all just so, so bloody precarious. If anything goes wrong, we go wrong. If Milo loses it, we will have a bloodbath on our hands. If Tinker Tom loses it, we will be accountable not just for the damage he creates, but also for having driven one of the best minds of our generation to its breaking point. If Deacon-”
“All arguments come ‘round to Deacon.” Tommy bears Carrington’s withering look with good humor. It is an old joke of Deacon’s own making, and not one of his funnier ones. The man is full of pre-war trivia, which he will dispense to people regardless of whether they are asking or not. At some point he became strangely enamored with the phrase ‘All Roads Lead to Rome’, but swiftly gave it a significantly narcissistic makeover after he realised that most people these days barely know where or what Rome even was. The idiom stuck, because as far as the Railroad is concerned the sentiment is true more often than not.
“C’mon, Stanley.” The steaming mug Tommy slides across the table seems a poor peace offering, but it will have to do. “You brought that one on yourself. I mean, he’s not even here.” Now there’s a thought that nearly makes Tommy Whispers bark a laugh into the largely empty office. The look on Mr. Wannabe Super Spy Know It All’s face when he’ll be the last person at HQ to hear about Mole and Charon should be absolutely priceless. Maybe they can persuade Tinker Tom to fix up a camera?
After a token moment of defiance, Carrington gives in and warms his hands, turning the mug this way and that.
“You’ll find that’s rather the point.” He sniffs. “Neither Desdemona nor I have the faintest clue as to where on earth he’s gone off to again.”
“The price of good intel, I suppose.” Tommy smiles mildly and pulls up a chair. All arguments do, eventually, come around to Deacon. Especially arguments with Stanley Carrington, who may well be one of the cleverest people Tommy knows, despite the fact that he has yet to notice that the mere mention of Deacon’s name in front of him is likely to completely derail a conversation. Even if he was the one mentioning it in the first place.
“Oh yes, I’m looking forward to his report,” Carrington huffs, finally taking a minute sip of his coffee. “He does get so creative with his nonsense.”
Sanctuary Hills is haunted, they say.
But then again, they are mostly caravanners, and while caravanners are quite useful for rumors and gossip, Deacon knows to take most of the information he gets from them with a generous spoonful of salt.
It does help that he knows the ghost at the heart of the town to be nothing but a jacked-up Mr. Handy who keeps pests and raiders away, but still. Never ceases to amaze, really, the stories people choose to believe.
Deacon is fond of stories, always has been, and crossing the old wooden bridge into an abandoned Sanctuary Hills beneath the watchful eyes of a monument from a time dead and gone centuries even before the bombs dropped makes him feel pleasantly strange. The phrase burdened with history comes to mind, but he’s nowhere near that sentimental. There are only scraps of paper and old holotapes rattling in the suitcase he carries under his arm.
Meanwhile, the ghost of Sanctuary merrily chips a fine hail of twigs and thorns from a dead rosebush.
“Aaaah, Mr. Martin!” The robot trills, swiveling around to cast his sensors across Deacon’s shape. The alias is from a letterbox some four houses down the street. Lazy, sure, but so far, the robot has not called him out on it. If he really thinks Deacon is some pre-war suburbanite, or just hasn’t noticed is anybody’s guess.
“Codsworth! How are you holding up, uh, old chap?” It feels right to doff his cap, he’s seen folks do it in old movies. “Love what you’re doing with the garden.” Deacon only drops by Sanctuary three or four times a year, but every time he does the place looks a little bit sadder. Codsworth means well, but one damaged Mr. Handy just cannot keep up with it all, and much of his efforts to clean and prune the apocalypse away just make matters worse. Like trying to mop up an oil spill with a wet tissue.
“Why thank you, Mr. Martin!” The robot’s lenses refocus in a way that makes him look thoroughly pleased with himself. “You are too kind, as always.” His jet-thrusters hiss as he hovers, bobbing up and down for a moment. Genius piece of engineering, really. No wonder pre-war folks got so obsessed with the atom, considering the things they could build with it. “I’m afraid the family is still not back from their, uh…well.” Codsworth’s eyes blink slowly and Deacon imagines a few more tiny specs of paint flaking off as he does it.
“Would you like to leave a message?” The robot tries tentatively, evidently not sure how to marry the reality of ruined houses and decay with the programmed image of picket fences and security that keeps him from…from short circuiting or something. Can robots lose their minds?
Anthropomorphizing machines is one of Deacon’s worse habits, and one he is careful not to indulge. There is too much of him that kind of gets Glory’s affinity for Gen1s and Gen2s, but though he is perfectly aware that this kind of thinking is likely to get them dead very quickly in their kind of work, he cannot help feeling a pang of sympathy for the old tin can.
Deacon comes to the rescue.
“Not to worry. I’ll drop by some other time.” He smiles encouragingly, casually leaning on the bent up old letterbox. He runs a thumb about the faded red letters, just about still spelling out IC NS. “How’s the pest situation coming?”
The way Codsworth blusters almost makes him laugh because the righteous huffs about something so insignificant reminds him of Carrington having one of his moments back at HQ.
“Oh Mr. Martin.” The low hiss of Codsworth’s servos would be concerning if it didn’t happen to be accompanied by an indigent swing of his arms, the saw blade stuttering threateningly. “Do not get me started.” People know better than to venture into Sanctuary Hills, but there are plenty of roaches, bloatflies and other critters to keep its lonely guardian more than occupied.
“You’re doing god’s work, old chap.” With an indulgent smile, Deacon gives a little wave by means of goodbye and resumes his track down Sanctuary Hill’s only road. “Keep it up!”
The air is spring warm, but the wind tears at his flannel shirt with enough velocity as to prick his skin with goosebumps. Determined not to lose another fight against the volatile Massachusetts weather, he quickens his steps against the chill. True enough, the floor of the house he ducks into is covered by the sliced and singed remains of several giant bugs, and he must be careful not to ruin his sneakers on the way to the bedroom.
There’s a safe inside the Martin’s house. A great big hunk of metal set into what remains of the wall. Untouched, by some miracle, since before the war until Deacon took a crack at it some years ago on his first visit to Sanctuary. He’s got a rule about safes, and it’s a simple one: if he can get in, it’s not safe enough to use as a storage space. Oh no, the box he is after is safely hidden under vinyl tiles, floorboards and dirt. It takes him a good half hour to dig everything out, and once he’s done it will take much longer yet to make the bedroom seem undisturbed again but coming here is an indulgence anyway. He can spare the hours a few times a year.
The walk up the hill afterwards is short and a little disappointing. Not much of a view up here, Deacon decides for the dozenth time, shielding his eyes against the light. He does not like to linger here, stepping into the beat-up trailer with the control panel as soon as he is reasonably certain he is unobserved.
Deacon marvels at the endless confidence of Vault Tec engineers. Prepare for the future, indeed. Lock your family into a giant underground bunker for a few generations! It’ll be perfectly safe and inbreeding-proof, never mind the fact that any idiot with a PipBoy can open a vault.
Deacon counts himself among those idiots, though a little prideful part of him wants to believe that he might have been able to figure out how to break in even without the pilfered piece of pre-war arm candy. Not that it’s not a useful little thing to have. Even as the (flashy, ridiculous) Vault 111 elevator rises laboriously to the surface, Deacon takes a moment to study the map, just because he can. Shame that using it on the regular would be about as good as painting a target on his back. Lucky he didn’t grow up with one strapped to his arm every minute of the day, he thinks, stepping onto the platform. He might never have learned how to navigate the wasteland without it.
The elevator shakes to a halt, and without its screeching and alarms the world feels eerily quiet. Deacon automatically flicks on the Pipboy light, even if it isn’t strictly necessary. The air smells stale, befitting a catacomb.
He descends further into the vault, feeling the hairs on his arms prick to attention even though the temperature is much more bearable down below. A huff of laughter escapes him, shockingly loud in the otherwise abandoned metal corridor. Good to know that he’s not fucked up enough just yet as to be unaffected by the presence of, oh, a few hundred corpses. Well, one hundred and eighty-four, to be precise, but the presence of copious amounts of well-preserved human remains makes him feel inclined to round up.
The skeletons are alright. Deacon spends a lot of time trawling through abandoned buildings, both to scout out potential new safehouses and in the hope of finding some lead on the institute’s location, and the bones of poor slobs who dropped shortly after the bombs are his constant companions. The seemingly endless pod lined rooms filled with vault suit clad popsicles are a bit harder on the old stomach. The worst thing about them is that they are perfectly preserved, with skin as fresh as the day they went under and eyes wide in surprise or horror. There are files on each of them, barely encrypted on the Overseer’s terminal, and Deacon has devoured them all during his visits, trying to piece together who these people were out of some morbid fascination with a world that ate itself alive.
Even now Deacon steals passing glances at the corpses in their pods, but he does not linger at any of them until he reaches the last hall at the end of the corridor. The pod in the corner is like any other, except the small panel at the front indicates a heartbeat. Slowed to a crawl by the cryogenic treatment, but a heartbeat, nonetheless.
“Hey there, sleeping beauty.” The man inside the pod continues to stare ahead unseeingly, mouth open in something like anguish and his fist pressed against the glass. The pod across contains the body of his wife, a small bloodstain and bullet hole beneath her breastbone.
There is a story here, a history. The wasteland is full of places like this, full of little intriguing scenes that are the shadows of something terrible having happened at some unknowable point in the past. Deacon loves these places for the puzzles they are.
He runs his fingers gingerly across the glass, allowing himself this small indulgence and wishing, not for the first time, that he had the capacity to wake this man and speak to him. About the war, about the world, about the murder of his wife or about anything at all. There was a note about a baby son, too, who is conspicuously absent from the vault. Deacon has read Adam E. Dickens’ file so many times he almost thinks of him as an old friend, one he could ask about what it was like to go to a real baseball game and what chocolate tasted like. But the cyro pod is a complicated piece of tech, and though Deacon considers himself a rather competent tinkerer, he would hate to ruin a place like this by pressing the wrong buttons.
His back turned to dear dead Rosie Dickens, Deacon sits cross-legged on the floor and finally starts unpacking his case, spreading a few dozen numbered holotapes out on the metal floor before him. Eyes still trained on the heart monitor; he slowly sharpens a pencil. There are other places he could write his reports. Hell, Tinker Tom has a perfectly good holotape player in his workshop somewhere. But there is a strange thrill and comfort in digging up the PipBoy every once in a while, and checking on Adam.
Deacon is a man of many secrets, but these days most of them belong to the Railroad.
But this? This is one of his.