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1 - Charon
“Charon.” Ahzrukhal beckons over the bar. It’s evening. Darker than usual, the stink of booze and cigarettes. “Charon, my love. Come indulge me for a while. I have a request for you.”
Charon stiffly approaches. Ahzrukhal pours him a drink. Whiskey, the thin cheap kind he keeps for the drunks whose caps run dry.
“I have a new order for you,” he wheedles, rancidly sweet. Charon focuses on the space above his head. “I trust you have seen that pretty little thing fluttering about? The little vault dweller desperate to make you another charity case?”
Charon does not reply.
Ahzrukhal growls.
“Answer me.”
“Is that a command?”
It’s his usual deadened timbre but he knows, painfully, who Ahzrukhal is talking about. He usually just sees the booze sweated bar and the stone walls and sometimes sharp, painful strobes outside his eyes, but he recalls the kid. The kid who keeps shirking past, who kept trying to talk to him. The kid who made his brain itch.
“Yes, dearest.” Ahzrukhal wags his withered finger. “I want you to find that little child when he wanders into our wonderland. I want you to hurt him. Not kill him, that would be crude but take him somewhere where he cannot be found. Hurt him. Ruin him a little.”
The filthy sinkholes of Ahzrukhal’s eyes flitter down the extended line of Charon’s shape. It is a usual taunt, one he is accustomed to, but the itching in his brain weevils down to his trigger fingers.
“As you say,” he replies.
Later that night, he makes his play for the kid in the main rotunda. The surrounding area, minus their indoor city, is a waste of grey rock and broken bone, papers and scattered exhibits. Cavemen and space travel. Ancient Rome and wall paintings. A mash of universal history, crushed together by the falling ceiling and split paving.
He doesn’t wait long. Sees the shape of the kid emerge from up the double doors, mutts shuffling at his side, darting up to be greeted by Snowflake and his jerky.
Charon waits until the dogs are through the doors. Not part of the order, so not his problem. He’s lurking by the far wall, sunk in the shadow. He’s good at that. The kid comes shuffling along and he snaps out his arm, grabbing a handful of the soggy scruff of the kid’s multiple collars.
Kid still has the vault in him, so he can twist until he sees Charon, and his eyes bulge, round and flared with relief, then confusion, then realisation.
Charon says nothin’. Talking ain’t part of the order.
The kid’s sodden boots squeak on the flagstones as Charon drags him to the offices. Ferals droop and cower as he strides past, stomping scuttling radroaches under his boots. Nothing here looks at him, only to flee. Everything except the weirdly silent kid.
Finally, he drops the kid behind a stack of old cache boxes brimming with papers. Ink, running with age. History, history, history.
The kid shucks back on his ass, tatty jeans worn at the rear and knee, his poncho hooked under his stomach and hiked up under his chin. Just the eyes, huge and blue, the tall spike of his gun stuck out from his spine.
Charon looms over him. Runs the ruin of his thumb over his skinless lips, finding the bone there and biting down, tearing the leathery flesh and filling his mouth with metallic blood.
The kid goes to open his mouth, to call or cry out, but silences, shrinking down as Charon unholsters his gun.
“I’m gonna…” He chokes on the words. “I’m gonna hurt you now. Nothin’ personal.”
The kid draws himself up. Pity or not, he’s no fool. Or maybe he is, the way tears are bubbling up over his cheeks.
Charon wipes his bloody fingers down his shirt.
“You…” He clicks his gun. “You look like a girl.”
Silence.
The kid blinks. Once, twice, thrice.
“Your hair is too long,” Charon continues, rasped monotone breaking out of his throat. “Your clothes don’t fit. You can’t punch. You can’t run. You just kind of…flail.”
The kid closes his mouth.
Charon sniffs.
“This hurting you?”
There is no plea in the statement. That is impossible.
He swears he can hear the kid’s brain click like a Geiger counter, before -
“Yeah.” The kid nods quickly. “Y-eah, it really hurts.”
“Good.” He sniffs. “I shall continue. You are too skinny. Your arms are like sticks. You smell like the dogs that walk with you.”
The kid swallows. That last one must have stung.
Charon stands up straighter.
“You ruined?” He gruffly states, lightly kicking the kid’s leg to pay attention. “This ruins you?”
“Yeah.” The kid flails like a rag doll. “Yeah, I’m totally ruined. Devastated, in fact.”
“Good.” Charon turns on his heel. “Then my work here is done.”
He marches out. The kid hobbles after, trying to keep up.
Charon pauses by the doors that lead back into the sanctuary. He lifts his thumb to his teeth, bites brutally to the bone, and turns, finally, back to the swollen-eyed kid.
“Stay away from the bar,” he says, almost tearing his vocal cords to utter it, then he is through the door and gone.
On the way back to Underworld, he finds the remains of a toilet and is violently, bloodily, sick.
2 - Uggy
You are Mutt. That is your name. They call you Mutt because they call Dog Dog, and you are not Dog, because he is big and you are scared, so you are Mutt and he is Dog.
Dog bites off one of your ears when you sleep, so the pink hole left itches around the skin. You are as green as sky and ground and grass. You were small before they took you. They made you big, but you are small inside, that's the problem.
Your handler wants to call you ugly but can't say it cos his lips fall when he talks. So, you are Uggy. Uggy Mutt.
Your limbs are long and big, and your teeth are long and big, and your limbs are long and big and you are hungry all the time because Dog gets food first and you are scared all the time from ear bites and beatings.
"No good," says Handler. "Need attack dog. Got attack squirrel instead."
They laugh and your one ear perks. If they laugh, that's okay. You want to make them happy. You are a good dog, even if you can't run and bite. Your stub tail can wag, and you can roll around and fetch things. When they are bored, they throw logs, and you fetch them. Anything that beeps you don't fetch. It always explodes before you reach it. No fun. No fair.
One day, you hear Handler shouting. You were sleeping instead of watching.
That's worth a beating, they would say, except Handler has broken three ways like three big green logs. You chew on the leg because you are sad. Hungry too, but sad is important.
Everyone is logs except Dog, who ruffs and trots away when you try to follow. He's not bitten the new handler. Or the log maker, you are not sure, only that the new body is small and shuffling in rags, tiny bird bone fingers ploughing through Handler's pockets.
You howl because that is Handler's, even if he whipped your back because you played with the mole rat instead of eating it, he was still your Handler.
The new body sits up. His rags fall away. He is small and you can smell blood on him.
He opens his bare hands, and you see food. You see the sharps at his belt and the boom sticks on his back. You lie in your belly and wag your stub, crying. You are hungry but he has sharps. You know what this game is.
The New Handler stands up. Takes off his sharps and booms, and lies beside him. Opens his hands again.
He smells of something else. When you were small, you knew that smell. A small woof smell. A kindly smell.
Your stub somersaults as you dash to him. His eyes widen but he doesn't touch the sharps. You roll by his feet. Beloved Handler, who lies a shivering mittened hand on your big green belly.
Later, you are full of juicy radroach with a small flag around your neck. New Handler has cleaned your pink-holed ear. It stings but the fire in it has gone. Dog watches from afar. He has not bitten the New Handler. It is the only time you think you will bite back.
"Come on, Uggy," says New Handler, and you like your name. You chase after him. Beloved Handler! Your stub wags in a windmill. "Let's go, now. Good dog."
3 - Bewdley
He had been in the library for what he was sure was an eternity, but according to Rothbart, the circulations of the earth had rounded over two hundred times, therefore, he must have been sweating and swelling for two centuries.
Such a pity. Eternity was so much more - well, poetic.
He has been a poet once. It had seemed like ages, regardless of what dinged repeating rat robot Rothbart said.
Well, no, not a poet. He had studied poets, but he had been a scientist first, and after that, the most vaulted literacy critic in Boston. As his mother said, bless her sweetheart patterned apron - don't put all your eggs in one basket.
Now he had so many more baskets. Considering one half of him stretched from the fantastical section to the homely arts and crafts portion of the library for bored housewives, well, and the other - happily, the part with the orifices he gingerly called a face, as he was yet to develop another one - took up most of the classical section. Why, he was now so huge his knowledge and mass could take up most baskets.
Why he had gotten so formidable was a subject he preferred not to broach, although dingbat Rothbart liked to consistently ask, as his infuriating experimental "personality chip" told him it was polite to make conversation.
He has a vague memory of the woman who installed it. An engineer with a sad smile and a big bump under her anorak. Rosie or something. He only remembered her because the second name had been "Dickens" although she had preferred engineering booklets and dull newspapers to the rich worlds her namesake bore.
If only more of his prewar companions had literary names, he would recall more of them.
He wasn't without companions. Many came eagerly, searching for knowledge and providing easy meals. The Raiders have an unfortunate taste. Chemical and rough, like gas station sandwiches. Wanderers he occasionally spares, if they are polite enough or bring news of the outside world.
But like all connoisseurs, he has his favourites. He so loves recalling Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table as he unwraps those struggling, howling, self-bumptious brotherhood. Clean living and exercise provide tasty, tender meat. Free range and well bred. Yum.
Rothbart thinks it is most unbecoming. Rothbart can fry a wire for all he cares.
It is on one of his hungry days that he is woken by something small, sharp-bodied, poking around by his lower bulk.
It's a morsel. No, not even that, barely a bite. For what he has taken as a bent, chewy ghoul under wrapping reveals a most different character.
The young man shakes his golden hair free. His eyes are big, blue, innocent save for the dark of experience dragged under the lid. He is so thin Bewdley can wrap his additional digits several times around his torso. The little piece of munch jostles in between his lengthy claws, so distracted by something as not to notice the big, brained behemoth stirring.
"Hm." Bewdley fixes his wire glasses at the end of his nose with one of his additional hands. It's the only part of him that kept human proportions. Useful really, as he may have nineteen extra limbs, but he still requires spectacles for everyday tasks. Give him five anuses but no extra eyes. Huh, comical. "Intriguing."
The snack opens his petal mouth.
"Hello," he has a small voice, deeper than he expects. “My name is Leaf Green."
"Bewdley," the lazy introduction is by habit. He cannot be blamed. His food doesn't usually initiate conversation. "Charmed."
"Are you...?" Bewdley raises an eyebrow (if he still has enough hair for one.) "Are you the librarian?"
Ha! What a name! A title. He is thrilled, but it is too telling to show.
"Is that what they call me?"
"One of the politer titles."
"How sweet." He sits him gently down. His appetite is a little lacking. A bad raider from last night. "And what can I do for you, Mr Green?"
He should be expecting fear, not the way the gilded head is gliding to and fro as if trying to take in all of the room at once. Not Bewdley, but the stacks of books, lovingly curated, as only a true bibliophile can.
"I came..." he clears his throat. "...to see the collections here."
Bewdley blinks his only two eyes.
"You came here to read? Not pillage? Prospect? Raid? Hurl sharp metal objects into my tender masses?"
"No." Leaf turns his periwinkle eyes back to Bewdley. "I came here to read."
"Even with the knowledge of some salivating, insatiable beast at the helm?"
Leaf furrows his brow. He really is very pretty, that same artistic splendour in his pale face and hands that draws to mind the ethereal youth from Death in Venice.
"Where is he, then?"
Oh, stop his multiple hearts! And kidneys! And endless squelching bladders!
"Not around now," Bewdley spins out his claws to hush the child. "Now, Mr Green. We have quite a splendid selection here. What may I interest you in?"
Bewdley is gifted with the sight of that remarkable child ploughing through his books, carefully opening each as if it is a prize. He wonders if the care belies the morsel’s education.
"Might I ask, little morsel?" The entirety of his preponderance creaks as he towers over the child. His newest companion seems unafraid, as if knowledge is akin to goodness. Why, a sweet conception for a wastelander. He may be a beast now, but he recalls a time when people placed their lives into the hands of so-called men of science, faith and education. A grand psychodrama, a gaslighting of public funds and opinion that led to the sight that haunts his windows. "Where were you educated?"
"In a vault." Morsel crosses his legs by Bewdley's fifth limb, which is eaten by pulsing flesh to the knee. He doesn't offer it a second glance. "My father was a doctor there."
"Vault education is limited by design," Bewdley delicately cleans his spectacles with a rag of Brotherhood uniform. "The whole purpose of such a place is to cull discovery and imagination. You must have been self-taught."
Morsel lifts his diaphanous face to peer, quizzically, at the creature. Bewdley doesn't know why he classifies himself as such in his mind, but even ignorance and wit can falter before truth, before beauty. The great thing he is shifts within the bloated, swinging bag of his skin.
"I read because..." Morsel pauses, skimming his teeth on his exquisite lips. Maybe, once upon a time, Bewdley may have been distracted for a different reason. Alas, such things are now an impossibility. The less focused on such matters, the better, at least for the question of taste. "It helped me escape. I didn't fit in the vault. I could go to different places, and be different people. Do you understand?"
In the grand length of the French windows, Bewdley - even with his centuries-old eyesight - can see the vague reflection of himself, lined out like a pencil drawing, an unforgiving sag and squelch of mass and protrusions, and by his side, the image of that perfect boy, arrow chin perched up toward him.
"Yes." Bewdley sighs, almost gently. For a moment, he is grateful for his two meagre, human eyes. "I suppose I do."
4 – Fawkes
Bean is crying.
The world is coming apart, the young woman evading him and speaking of grand things, like fate and destiny and acting defiantly, but all Fawkes can see is the child hidden in the hero, like the man sheathed in the monster.
He knows Bean has a name. He calls him "friend" and "Leaf" in the right circumstances, but in his mind, something as tiny and tough reminds him of the green, ruddy beans he would grow in the corner of his cell, a nutrient-rich alternative to the rotting meat and bones thrown through the door by his brethren.
In reality, his skin is elephantine, strong enough to withstand radiation that can curse skies and cull civilizations. But Bean saw beyond that. Bean saw the man in the monster, and he likewise allowed the child in the hero.
Where is the father, he wonders, then who shares skin with this child? Where is the protector who left a cool duty for his child to perform? Fawkes never had a child, that he recalls, and if he did, then it is long lost to history or alive as one of his brethren.
"Let me," he puts his massive hand on Bean's shoulder, who twists his head back to gape at him. The Lyon woman hisses at the contact. "We all have our destinies, our endings. Allow me to alter yours, as your beginning is yet to occur."
He steps into the chamber.
5 - Father
He observes his child through the window. Leaf with his face gaunt, his eyes wild and rounded and blue like filtered water. His hair escapes thick and straw-like under his hood, curled around the features delicate and hollow like bird bones, and he sees her, for one moment, a haunt somewhere in the shadow of his suffering, and no, this is not Catherine, this is Leaf.
There is glass between him and his child, but it is merely a physical barrier as opposed to the walls he concocted throughout the years.
Years buried beneath the ground. Years with a shadow at his side, small then stout then stretching to his shoulder, still little in his mind eye.
He is the end, and Leaf is his beginning, and hopefully, he can begin somewhere far, far away from here.
He wants to say he is sorry. He wants to say he fears the six-foot shadow at his side, his reflection dimmed in the cataract blue of the mercenary ghoul who closes in close for his child cannot stand any longer. He sees the blood crusted around the cuticles of his only boy and the gun heavy on his back and wants to apologise for the monsters he has made of them both.
He wishes to say he is sorry, again. That he loves him. But it is not Leaf’s name that leaves his lips. It is the breath of the code that will save them all, and in his final breath, he is given his final answer.
Porter Gage, Monster
Gage is woken in the dark of the night by a tremoring in the bed. He thinks for one moment the damn woof is biting his leg again, a goddamn flea-bitten mess of four limbs, he knows Pidge has said he has sprayed them a dozen times, but he doesn’t fucking believe it, oh no.
At least Uggy isn’t on the bed. Loving and dumb he might be, but radioactive kisses first thing in the morning are something nobody wants. He doesn't fancy growing an extra ear. Another eye he could ride with.
But Woof 1 is sat up at the end of the bed, ears pricked and head twisted, ruffing confused, and there is Pidge, shivering and weeping like a calf, and as Gage reaches for him, there breaks from the body a rising howl like something possessed and Gage swears, hears the worried rustle of the innkeeper outside who’d squinted at the two of them over her desk, and made sure Gage had heard the sharp click of her assault rifle as he passed her on his way to the bar.
“Easy, Pidge,” he whispers as he closes his arms around him. Gentle like cos he did this once before and ended up with Pidge’s elbow up his nose. “Come on now, love. I’m here, c’mon now.”
Pidge, between deep gasps of air, opens his big water eyes and Gage don’t believe in live dreamin’ or whatever the local tribals say, but he swears he sees somethin’ else, someone else, in Pidge’s iris, only for it to fade and fizzle as his Pidge relaxes in his arms.
“I am Alpha and Omega,” Leaf’s - Pidge’s voice - rises out of the dark, worn and clear, despite the wracking of his body. Gage pauses, rolls a memory around his head like a dull marble. “The beginning…”
“And the end.” Gage finishes it for them, cradling Pidge’s golden head in his big, scarred hand. Cigarette butt burns marks on his knuckles, a dull knife slash across the back, a thin wire pinch immortalised on his baby finger from when he caught it on the farm gate as a nipper. Monster scars, monster hands, save that last one. “The first and the last.”
Pidge tries a smile. It’s watery, almost warped up his pretty cheek.
“Revelations.”
“22:13.” Gage drops his head like the dog’s. “Surprised you, huh? Ma had a thing for that big overboss in the sky.”
It’s a shit joke, but whatever he can do to cut through all that heavy Pidge carries on his back. Some persons didn’t carry that hurting visible like - Pidge has so many hurtings he’s had to develop hidden pockets to carry them all, like that tumorous bag he rags around all the time.
“My father.” Pidge blinks back his tears. They cling to him like blood on hair. Water is better. “He loves - loved - that phrase.”
“Mighty poetic of him. Fancied the waters of life too, I reckon?”
Pidge’s snickering is sweet and wet.
“You’ve been listening to me.”
“Well…” Gage risks taking his hands off his bun. Pidge don’t blink. Ah okay, good. “Only some parts. Y’know, the violent bits.”
Pidge laughs. Woof 1 nuzzles him, relieved.
“There is little else.”
“Right. Well.” Gage yawns. “Fuck all that shit though about the end. We’re just at the beginning, and I need…”
Pidge kisses him so hard their teeth clatter and Gage swears into Pidge’s bloodied tongue, rocking them back into the sheets. It ain’t a sex kiss. It’s too needy for that, funny enough.
“C’mon now,” Gage disentangles the kid, who’s whimperin’ again, trying to wipe the tear on Gage’s lip. Huh, he’s had worse. “C’mon now, kid. Sleep now, okay?”
He ain’t good with the comfort. Not now, not yet not ever. But all he has are his monster arms and his monster hands, and as Pidge disappears into him, it seems to be enough.