Chapter Text
What you think you want and what the universe sees fit to give you are often two very different things. That’s a fact Lucy is intimately familiar with in the aftermath of the New Vegas battle.
She has no family. No friends. No support system during such a tumultuous time in her life.
Norm could be anywhere by now, and Max is off fighting a different war several hundred miles away. Everyone leaves, eventually. That’s another thing the wasteland has taught her in her time above ground.
The only reasonable thing to do when one is faced with a life-altering fork in the road...is to go searching for her former enemy. So, she strapped on the Pip-Boy she found waiting on the vault floor, got directions to Colorado from the little man inside, and set off to find Cooper.
Lucy only wishes she had made that choice sooner.
So what if he might not want to see her? He didn’t explicitly tell her not to follow him, after all, so that must mean the door is open.
Barbara Howard is her target because that’s who Cooper came to the Rockies to find. "He's looking for his daughter, and she'll be with Barb," House told her before she booted him out of the system. It turns out that finding Cooper, which happens to be the name of the man she wandered the desert with for weeks, never having the guts to ask him herself, is far simpler than Lucy thought it could be. When she steps off the first working rail system since the bombs fell and onto the platform in Telluride, she is accosted by a giant poster of Mayor Barbara Howard, promising to keep the city clean of undesirables. Dry air clogs her lungs, and Lucy sniffles as blood curdles at the edges of her nose. Despite a considerable amount of greenery further east, it’s just as dry as the desert in these mountains.
Her target has popped right up in front of her, and that's a windfall that she’ll happily take. The city itself is like nothing she’s seen outside the vault. People walk along tree-lined streets in clean clothes and with eager smiles. Couples stroll hand in hand, and children’s laughter tickles her eardrums. Little shops sit against a towering mountain backdrop, offering delicacies like chocolate and muffins, clear of rads, or so the sign says.
It is wholesome and beautiful, exactly the type of place that she’d want to set up and raise a family if she had that choice. She hopes that Cooper has found his own happiness after such a long search. Maybe he’s in one of those houses clinging to the side of the mountain, or a little cottage just off Main Street, helping his daughter with her homework or playing fetch with the dog.
Lucy may be harboring a few unresolved arguments since she last saw him, but one thing she's certain of is that he's earned an idyllic life, and she can only hope that fate has been kind to him during their separation.
When she walks into the Mayor’s office, a bell jingles on the door, and the receptionist peers over her glasses with a harsh look of concern. “Can I help you, miss? Would you like to sit down?”
“No, thank you. I’d like to speak to Barbara Howard, please.”
“Is she expecting you?”
“No, but I’m a...friend of her husband’s. I’m looking for him, actually.” The other woman’s brows raise. “Oh, not for any nefarious reasons, I assure you. I just wanted to check in for a friendly visit. You know, as friends do.”
She’s given a nod after a disapproving frown and then left to pace the orange floor until she’s in danger of wearing a rut into the linoleum.
Why did she come here? It was stupid. If it was so easy for Lucy to find his wife, then surely Cooper found her as well, and that’s a good thing. A miracle, really, considering how long he’s been looking, but that means he’ll have no place for Lucy in his life now, and she would only be intruding.
Presumptuous of her, she scoffs in her head, to assume he’d have a place for her, anyway. Ridiculous as it might be, the only time she felt truly alive was when she’d been wandering the desert with him, and so maybe she wants to rekindle that spark again and see if he can help her figure out what the hell she’s supposed to be doing with her life. Now that she’s here...in his wife’s office, knowing that they’ve probably set up a cozy home together and are living out the dream he’s been chasing, she only feels foolish for inserting herself.
With a shake of her head, Lucy gives in to her hesitations and heads for the door. She isn’t about to sour the good thing he has going.
“Can I help you?”
A stern voice stops her hand from turning the knob, and when Lucy turns around, she’s met with the beautiful, unlined face of Cooper’s wife. “Hi, hello. I was hoping I could visit your husband. Cooper. We’re friends. I mean, technically, friends might be reaching, but we traveled together for a while, and I know how eager he was to find you. It’s been some time since we parted ways, and I wanted to see how he’s doing.”
She half expects to get thrown out the window instead of the door with the way Barb’s face falls. “He isn’t my husband.”
“What?”
“That thing wasn’t my husband. Cooper died when the bombs fell. Whatever that monster was, it wasn’t him. I’m sorry, I can’t help you.”
“Wait, you saw him? He made it here?”
Lucy’s having a hard time processing what she’s hearing. It sounds an awful lot like Barb was lucky enough to be reunited with the man she lost centuries ago, and instead of embracing her good fortune, she rejected him.
Barb looks away with a nod. “He showed up here a few months ago. Don’t worry, I ended his suffering.”
“You what?”
With three quick strides, the other woman steps in close, grabbing Lucy by the shoulders. “Ghouls do not have souls. They do not think or feel, despite how skilled they are at pretending otherwise. They’re demons. You cannot let them sway you! You think you knew him, but you didn’t. That wasn’t my husband, and you’d do well to try to forget the version of him stuck in your head.”
Lucy flinches back, nearly stumbling on a chair as her inhales grow ragged and her stomach clenches. The world is spinning, and she might fall flat on her face at any moment, but the receptionist grabs her before she can, guiding her to sit and put her head between her knees as bile rises in her throat.
There’s whispering between the two women, one scolding the other for working her up in her condition, as if she might implode right here and now.
Cooper is dead.
He is gone.
His own wife killed him, and Lucy wants to grab the pistol on her belt and do the same in retribution. Two hundred and fifty years of effort all wiped away in an instant. What a waste. What a horrible, tragic waste.
“There’s a hotel across the road,” Barbara says quietly. “You should get a room and rest. You’re welcome here as long as you need to stay. We even have a doctor just up the road. This town will always be a haven for those seeking to avoid the corrupted.”
“I want to pay my respects,” Lucy swallows hard, straightening up as she wipes at her eyes with the back of her hand. “Please tell me where I can do that.”
“There’s a cemetery just outside town, about a mile north. It’s the only plot without a marker.”
Her only friend in this godforsaken world is in the ground. Cooper is indestructible, and the idea of him succumbing to something as common as death doesn’t quite compute yet.
“You’re wrong. He had a soul, and he held onto it so he could find you and Janey. It was all he cared about. He loved you, and you killed him for it.”
Lucy doesn’t wait for an answer. If she does, it’ll turn into an argument, and her blood pressure is already high enough to be concerning these days. She wants to get out of this suffocating place and cry in the privacy of her own space without the judgment of strangers hampering her effort.
As she exits onto the sidewalk again, she rubs her lower back with a wince, watching the whole town sway in her vision while she steadies herself on a signpost. She put a hole through Cooper’s chest with a pole once before, and he came out of that as if nothing had happened. How on earth did Barbara Howard manage to kill someone who’s so darn durable?
It is then, as she’s walking north down Main Street, that a slim thread of hope flourishes. She should have asked Barbara how she did it. Was it a bullet or a knife? How did she get the upper hand? Did she make sure he was dead or just assume?
Lucy doesn’t have many caps, but what she does have is enough to buy several of those coveted, small amber vials from the general store, along with an IV line, a length of rope, and enough tranquilizers to take down a mutated elephant.
If there’s any chance that he might still be alive down there, she can’t go unprepared.
Not that she plans to dig him up.
Not that she’s dismissing that option entirely....
***
The thing about deciding to visit your former friend, who wasn’t actually your former friend’s grave, and being on the fence about digging them up, is that one needs a shovel to complete that task. Lucy does not have a shovel, or the strength to make it six feet into the ground by herself in a single session.
She’s already broken a sweat just making it to the cemetery with all the supplies in the middle of the day, and now here she is, in front of a single plot without a marker. His awful ex-wife didn’t even give him a gravestone. Did she come with him to his final resting place, or send him off with some stranger? Did Janey even get a chance to say goodbye?
In it's place, at the head of the grave, is Dogmeat. Her tail thumps heavily as Lucy scratches the space between her ears. This dog was more loyal than his human family. Lucy would be crying right now if she wasn’t so fudging angry. She frowns down at the loose dirt with her hands on her hips before getting to her knees with a groan and then pressing her ear to the earth.
“Are you in there?” she whispers, as if he might yell back at her.
Surely, if he were still alive, he would be making noise in his coffin, scratching at it perhaps or letting out those awful feral noises. The ground underneath her is quiet, though, and so she tries again.
“Cooper? Say something so I know if you need help,” she calls out a little louder.
“They’re usually beyond help at this point,” another voice replies, startling her upright again.
One of the groundskeepers stares back at her with a curious frown, wiping the earth off his overalls.
“Have you heard any sounds coming from this plot?”
“Oh sure. I hear ‘em all the time from quite a few of these graves, but that’s normal. Eventually, they calm down, never to be heard from again. Off to a better place.”
That’s normal, he says, as if such a horrific thing ever could be. It’s confirmation that her theory might not be so far-fetched, and the fresh wave of hope is a welcome thing she latches onto while her pulse races and her nerves tingle. “I require assistance digging him up, please.”
“You won’t find anything in there you wanna see.”
“I’ll take my chances. I can pay you. Not much, but I can offer some caps.”
The man lets out a long-suffering sigh, bracing on his shovel. “The Mayor would be mighty upset if she found out I dug up the one she put in.”
“I’m fully prepared to accept responsibility for any repercussions.”
“I don’t think I can...”
“Oh, fudge it, never mind. I’ll do it myself,” she growls, turning back to the grave, dropping to her knees and digging her fingernails into the dirt to rip out large clumps. It’s been long enough that grass has begun to grow in sparse little clusters, and they rip away like carpet.
She’s wasting precious time arguing with someone who has no vested interest in Cooper’s well-being. If she starts now, she might be able to reach the coffin by tomorrow morning, give or take a day. Maybe she can steal his shovel when he leaves his shift for the night...
“Alright, come on, stop that. Jesus. I ain’t gonna be responsible for you busting a blood vessel or losing the—”
“Thank you! Thank you so much,” Lucy says, sitting back to wipe the sweat off her brow with a dirt-covered hand.
She must look like a lunatic, but if her current state grants her the help she needs, then so be it.
"You take the damn dog with you when you go. That's the deal. I've been feeding her but she eats like a horse. Scares away the other vistors. Dug down into this grave twice already and I had to refill it."
It's easy enough to agree. She planned to bring Dogmeat along one way or another.
Only now that she’s minutes away from seeing Cooper again, Lucy is overcome with hesitation. If he’s alive, then he’s most definitely gone feral by now without his chems. The danger aspect of that scenario is only one factor to take into consideration. The other, more concerning aspect is that she has no idea if it’s even possible to bring someone back from a feral state with enough drugs. Has it been too long? Is there a cut-off time, and she’s missed the window?
Then there’s the very real possibility that she will rip open the coffin lid and find him decomposing, long dead from whatever method Barb inflicted. She isn’t sure that she wants to have that image of him in her head for the rest of her life. She would rather think of him the way he was when she last saw him, all soft eyes and swagger, tipping his hat as he saved her life. She’s about to risk trading that memory for something so much worse, and all of a sudden the tears that wouldn’t come before start to well in her eyes.
If the situation were reversed, he wouldn’t leave her in there without being sure, and so she has to try for him, too. There is no other option. When the shovel scrapes against the box, Lucy flinches, her eyes growing wider.
“The rest of this is all you,” the groundskeeper says. “I hope you got weapons.”
She swallows hard. “I do.”
“You need some help getting down in there?”
“No, thank you.”
It’s not six feet like she assumed, barely three if she’s estimating correctly. It’s a slight struggle to maneuver herself down into the plot, standing atop the casket with her hand on the upper portion, ready to flip the lock open.
This is crazy.
She has no plan for what the heck to do with him if he’s actually moving around in there.
She could be risking her life.
She could find him withered away and half eaten by bugs and never get that picture out of her skull. Right now, Cooper is in Schrödinger’s coffin, both alive and dead until she makes the choice to see for herself.
“You know, if he’s the reason that you’re in...such a state...he’d probably want you to move on. Live your life. Find some peace,” the groundskeeper tells her gently. “You don’t have to do this.”
“He’s not the reason,” Lucy shakes her head, gathering her resolve and curling her fingers tight around the lock. “And there can be no peace until I know for sure.”
Quickly, and before she can talk herself out of it, she yanks the lid open.
What she finds is a combination of all her hopes and fears swirled up together. He lies motionless in what’s become his final resting place. There’s a sick hollow to his face that hadn’t been there the last time she saw him. The stuffing from this fancy coffin covers his chest from where he ripped it out, trying to escape. The eerie silence overwhelms her, and she swallows a thick lump in her throat, trying not to sob right here on this wooden box. She’s too late. He was alive, terrified and hurt, trying to claw his way out, and she hadn’t been here to help. Hadn’t been here to stop it from happening at all. She waited too long to come looking, and he paid the price for her hesitation.
There’s a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead with the metal still peeking out of the gash that explains exactly how his ex-wife attempted to end his life. For someone who seems to think they know everything about ghouls, she clearly didn’t realize how resilient they are.
Lucy reaches out to ghost a tentative finger against the rough lines of his face, her voice carrying enough sorrow that it strangles every cracked letter. “I’m sorry. I should have come sooner.”
Her touch is like an electric shock, and his eyes snap open, stealing her breath and forcing her to scramble backward as he lunges for her. The deep growl in his chest proves that he’s not himself at the moment, and she tries to exit the grave only to struggle when he curls a decaying hand around her ankle, attempting to drag her back into its depths.
“Little help!” she screams over Dogmeat's barking.
The groundskeeper grabs her arms and hauls her out of the hole with Cooper hot on her heels.
Cooper does not have the same problem climbing out that she did. He’s on her again so quickly that she can hardly keep him away before his weight begins to crush her.
“The gun in my bag! The bigger one!” she calls out as she wrestles with the only person she wants to see, wincing at the sour breath he huffs into her face and the spit dripping down onto her chin from where he snaps his teeth, trying to bite her nose off.
The discharge of the weapon comes quickly, six trigger pulls deep before the barrel is empty, and all the tranquilizers she filled it with course through Cooper’s system, causing him to collapse on top of her in an unconscious heap. She shoves him away, gasping in a hard breath, struggling to her knees again as she tries to recover from such a traumatic ordeal, but it’s not like she wasn’t fully aware that it could go like this. She just didn’t quite expect someone in his condition to be so strong.
With a huff, she sits on the grass, offering the groundskeeper a level stare as she wipes Cooper’s drool off her neck. “I require some additional assistance.”
***
When she traveled from New Vegas to Colorado in search of the ghoul, Lucy expected she might find him happily enjoying family life, or at worst, he would be despondent and in need of a little cheering up if his journey had been unsuccessful.
She’s good at cheering people up. He might be prickly and unreceptive, but she’s persistent, and it’s not like she has much else to do these days. Lucy had been perfectly fine with the concept of becoming his self-appointed pep talker if that’s what he needed, but she never considered that she’d be in an abandoned house watching him sleep while he’s tied to the bed instead.
This was most definitely not on her list of possible outcomes.
The groundskeeper suggested this place and then dumped Cooper in a wheelbarrow to transport him here. Good thing, too, because there’s not a chance she could have dragged him the half-mile journey alone. Her feet are already swollen, her back hurts, and she has a migraine the size of the Mojave, but none of that matters as much as it otherwise would because she’s sitting here with Cooper after thinking him dead, and she can’t take her eyes off him. He is the best thing she’s seen since the last time he walked away.
The slow, rhythmic lift of his chest draws her attention to every inhale, every cough, every gasp that escapes his lips. After twelve hours of IV chems Cooper is still sucked deep into whatever reality sits behind his closed lids. Lucy tells herself that it’s the tranqs keeping him down, but every second that ticks by only ratchets up her worry.
If he doesn’t wake at all, if she’s too late and the drugs won’t work, then she’ll have to end his suffering. How the heck is she supposed to do that? The very idea makes her nauseous. She only just found him again. What a cruel joke it would be to have him ripped away.
With a frown, she leans forward, bracing her elbows on her knees as Cooper’s occasional grumblings grow more frequent. All at once he explodes in a series of twitching, grunting cries, screaming something unintelligible from deep in his lungs while he strains against the ropes.
Lucy scrambles backward, having to grab the side table to keep from falling. Her worst-case scenario is coming true. He is too far gone, too feral, for the chems to work, and she’s only succeeded in resurrecting something that isn’t him anymore. His fingers scrape against the bedsheets, wrists twisting against the rope fibers as his awful pleas echo through the room.
She’s going to throw up all over the dusty wood floor. How is she supposed to do this if a bullet to the head wasn’t enough to kill him? With trembling fingers, she grabs her knife, unsure of what she plans to do with it when she’s close enough. She creeps forward as Cooper struggles, telling herself that it’s better this way, even if it’s hard. Even if she wishes she didn’t have to see him like this. It would be worse to let him suffer in that coffin for who knows how long until he finally faded into dust.
He would do this for her. He would help her find peace somehow.
So she steps forward again with her resolve clear and her spine straight, raising the knife directly over his heart just as a single word passes through his lips.
“Help.”
With a clatter, the blade falls to the ground, and she sinks forward, sitting at the edge of the mattress. Feral ghouls don’t talk. They have no vocabulary whatsoever, so if he’s speaking, that means...
Relief brims in the corners of her eyes as she slips her hand through his, letting his palm curl around her instead of twisting in the sheets. “I’m here, I’m here, you’re okay.”
Any recognition she hoped to see is a fool’s dream. His stare bores a hole through the ceiling as the tendons in his neck strain, his screams only growing louder and more distressed. If he even notices her hand holding his, she’d never know. His blunt, broken nails scrape her palm while his other hand tries to rip the sheets apart as if he’s still inside that casket trying to claw his way out.
“You’re already outside again,” she says softly, leaning forward. “Cooper, look at me.”
She’s grateful that they’re in the middle of nowhere, with how loud he’s become. At this rate, the whole town would have converged to try to snoop with all the commotion. The bed rattles on the old, rusty screws holding it together, and she places her other hand on his chest where his shirt hangs open. The heat of him caresses her skin, tingling like a lit flame while his heart tries to exit his ribcage.
She whispers soothing words into the space between them that go unheard while feathering her thumb across the bulging veins in his skin and gripping his hand tight in her other palm. She is talking to the wind at this point, but she can’t sit by and watch him suffer without trying, so she keeps going as every terrified scream burrows into her heart and clenches hard.
How long did he cry out like this while underground and no one heard him? How many days was he fully aware before he turned feral?
For someone who spent months buried, Cooper has a concerning amount of energy at the moment. At this rate, he’ll give himself a heart attack if he can’t calm down. Maybe another tranq dart from the two she has left would be a benefit if only to reduce his panic a few notches. She reaches for her bag, left with little other option than to further medicate him, when the dog offers him the comfort Lucy can't. Dogmeat curls up against his chest, resting her chin over his collarbone, her whole body thumping in time with his thrashing until the contact of her fur sinks into his mind to spark recognition and he goes limp.
The screams die in his lungs, and his hand in hers relaxes from the hard clench bruising her flesh. With a heavy exhale, Lucy reaches up to press her fingers to his pulse, finding it racing but still active.
“I dunno if I can do any of this without you,” she admits softly. “And I’m still a little mad about how you left that day, so...you have to be okay because we haven’t argued about it yet, and I came all this way to do exactly that.”
When she's gifted no response, she hangs her head, moving back to the chair at his bedside, hoping that the next time he opens his eyes he’ll be able to see her face instead of several miles through it.
***
“Am I dead?”
The rough, dry words hit her ears like a lightning bolt, and Lucy sits up quickly, finding Cooper looking straight at her.
Every ounce of her that felt lost without his presence calms in the wake of that familiar, graveled tone. “Hey, do you know who I am? Do you know what day it is? Are you okay? Can you talk? How many fingers am I holding up? I was so worried, you have no idea.”
He groans. “Ah fuck. I ain’t dead, am I?”
“No, no, you’re okay. It’s just us here. We’re safe, I promise.”
It takes him a moment to realize that she’s touching him before he jerks in the restraints as if she were infecting him with some sort of contagious disease. She pulls away, giving him the space he so clearly wants, hating every second because all she desires is to fling herself into his arms and sob against his chest. She thought he was dead and gone, and now here he is, like a manifested second chance.
“Lemme get these off you,” she chokes out, busying herself releasing the ropes that tie him to the bed.
There’s a hint of fear that turns her movements stilted. She’s seen him at his worst today, and it’s difficult to forget how close she came to losing her jugular.
Cooper lies motionless even when he’s free, perhaps too far removed from the ability to sit upright again that it doesn’t even occur to him anymore.
“Want some water?” She holds the canteen up to his lips as he tilts his head to the side, a flicker of shame in his eyes as he lets her tip it into his mouth.
The moment the liquid comes into contact with his tongue, something in his system reboots and he grabs her wrist, then the canteen, lurching up off the mattress to guzzle the water in a frantic effort. It spills down his face and onto the sheets while he drains it dry, searching for more with a panicked effort until her firm hand against his chest stops him.
“I’ll get you more,” she says. “There’s plenty. I don’t think you should be walking just yet. Take a minute, okay?”
There it is again, that recoil on contact that has him flinching backward from her touch until he’s pressed to the wall. “Why did you bring me back?”
It’s a tattered, broken question, spoken with so much sorrow that for a moment she feels guilty. “You were buried alive, Cooper. I couldn’t just leave you there.”
“You should have! You should have fucking left me there! What do I do now...what do I...how can...fuck, fuck, fuck...” He presses his head into the heels of his hands as silent, fat droplets fall onto his bent knees. “How long was I in there?”
“A few months.”
The pistol, full of bullets instead of tranq darts, sits on a table just out of reach. When his gaze lands on it, the hairs on the back of her neck stand at attention. He lunges for it at the same time she does. Her only advantage is his slow reaction time, allowing her to grab it first and step away.
“Just do it, sweetheart,” he drawls sadly, his fingertips grazing the healed-over scar on his forehead that marks where his ex-wife shot him. “Aim for the heart this time. Don’t stop until all the bullets are gone.”
“I will do no such thing,” she hisses. “You aren’t yourself right now. You need some time to process what’s happened, and making such rash decisions at a time like this is...unadvisable.”
Defeated, he slumps onto the bed, his gaze falling to her stomach. “If you ain’t gonna kill me, then I have a question.”
“Of course, go ahead.”
“Why the hell are you pregnant?”
She tilts her head in confusion before glancing down at her swollen belly, the size of a watermelon. “Oh, that. It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it.”