(no subject)

[calmhrtprevails]

The door opens on a vista of rocky landscape punctuated here and there by yellowed, rough-edged grass and low, scrubby brush. There's a hint of coolness on the breeze in the otherwise warming air, and a scent of distant rain. "We are," Fawkes rumbles, "some hours' distance from the Citadel. We're likely to stop at the town of Megaton first, and then make for the Arlington route the rest of the way."

Comments

[cantdiequiteyet]

"Alright," Teresa says.

She can move faster than someone holding that, if she needs to.

"Anything else?"

[calmhrtprevails]

"I think other weapons will pose little danger to you," says Fawkes. "Not after I've seen that sword of yours in action."

There's a noise like the clearing of a throat from behind them. Wadsworth must've been programmed with that sound clip long ago, because the robot hasn't got a throat. What it does have is a stack of small objects marked with various emblems and warnings. "Your electron charge packs, sir," the robot says. "Use them in good health."

[cantdiequiteyet]

Teresa gives a small smile in response to this. Other weapons probably won't hurt, he's right. And she can handle these ones now she knows.

"Thank you for showing me," she says. "It will be useful."

[calmhrtprevails]

"I had hoped it would be," Fawkes says as he accepts the electron packs from the robot. "Now, unless someone else feels the need to speak to us here, we should be on our way."

[cantdiequiteyet]

Teresa nods, and steps back for him to lead the way out."

"You travel a lot?" she asks. She noticed he didn't live here. And it occurs to her that most people do have a home.

[calmhrtprevails]

Fawkes nods. "Between here and the Citadel, most often," he says. "And whenever my friend has need of assistance, I travel with her in the Wasteland. There's much of the Waste I haven't seen yet, and I think I'd like to."

[cantdiequiteyet]

"Is there anywhere you call home?" she asks. "The Citadel?"

[calmhrtprevails]

"Not especially," says Fawkes. "I stay here in Megaton more often than anywhere else. For now, I'm welcome at the Citadel because I'm helping with their plans. That may change, once we've taken on the others of my kind in Vault 87."

He'd smile, if that face of his were capable.

"One place is much like any other, when you can move about freely. It hardly matters where I spend the night."

[cantdiequiteyet]

Teresa will smile for him, in that matter.

"That's how I lived," she says.

Although she'd never admit that this wasn't exactly by choice. Nothing in her life was.

[calmhrtprevails]

Fawkes nods. "Before this," he says, "I was confined to a cell for as long as I could remember. I'm told that's probably close to two hundred years. To be able to be anywhere else is a great thing, after that. I hope you found freedom as welcome as I do."

[cantdiequiteyet]

She shrugs.

"I suppose it was better than training at the Organization. I never liked it there."

[calmhrtprevails]

"The Organization?" Fawkes echoes. "I don't know the name..."

[cantdiequiteyet]

"Oh," she says, "The Organization that trains my kind and sends them out to hunt yoma. That's all."

[calmhrtprevails]

"I see," says Fawkes. "Curious as I am about how your kind come to be, I suspect that's a question I'm not entitled to ask."

[cantdiequiteyet]

Teresa shrugs.

"You can ask. But I never learned. Someone discovered that if you combine the flesh and blood of a yoma with a human, they develop the strength needed to fight them. I don't know how that discovery was made."

And, from the casual tone, she never bothered to ask.

[calmhrtprevails]

Fawkes nods. "Perhaps someday," he says, and leaves it at that. There are many questions in the world, and not all of them need answering.

From there, the road winds downwards towards the remains of the Potomac river. Fawkes takes the pair away from the road and over open country instead, past the heaving pile of ruins that used to be Grayditch, along the outskirts of Fairfax. A low, squat complex ringed by barbed wire is given a wide berth- "Home of the Brotherhood Outcasts," Fawkes notes. "They wear red and black armor, and have quick trigger fingers." And other buildings, factories mostly, are passed as well.

Eventually, they come to a sunken road choked with the burnt-out hulks of long-destroyed cars. "The area should be clear," Fawkes notes. "From here it's a straight road to Arlington, and the Citadel."

[cantdiequiteyet]

Being dead, Teresa doesn't think she'll ever get an answer to that question, and so she never intends to ask it.

She's quiet for most of the walk now, occasionally asking a question, but content to walk on silence. As a warrior, she was used to walking long distances on her own.

[calmhrtprevails]

The road dips down slowly into the landscape, walls rising on either side. At one point it passes under a fenced bridge, and then a great, unreachable elevated road. Beyond lies a building of mostly intact, aged marble, fronted with pillars- the Arlington Public Library, if Teresa can read the English carved over the door. To the left of the building lies a pile of rebar, the sign of a crashed vehicle stripped of most of its parts, save for one rotorblade cracked in the middle and protruding from the ground.

Beyond that, the wreckage gives way to the form of a massive building. True, it's only five floors high, but its bulk goes on and on and on, barricaded and fortified at every opportunity. Armored figures patrol along the roofline. "That," says Fawkes, "is the Citadel. Our entrance faces the river- it's around the corner there, on the building's fifth side. The guards tend to be gruff, but they know me by now."

[cantdiequiteyet]

It's one of the biggest buildings Teresa has ever seen, if not the biggest. She pauses to stop and look up at it, taking in its huge bulk.

"Are there many buildings of that size in this world?"

[calmhrtprevails]

"Once there were," Fawkes says. "Most of those that remain aren't as big as this. This one was built more than a hundred years before the war that destroyed everything else."

[cantdiequiteyet]

"Oh."

Another of those silences falls - the ones where Teresa absorbs new information about a world and expands her worldview to accommodate it.

She follows him around to the door, never looking away from the building that looms up above them.

[calmhrtprevails]

There's a human in heavy armor at the door, his reddish-brown hair pulled back from his face; he's carrying a Gatling laser like the one Fawkes showed off back in Megaton. "Welcome back," he says to the mutant, and then glances over at Teresa. "Who's this?"

"A volunteer," Fawkes says, "for the Safecracker project, from outside the Wasteland."

One of the man's eyebrows rises as he looks at Teresa a little more closely.

[cantdiequiteyet]

There's very little reaction from Teresa; she's used to being stared at after all. She just looks mildly back at the man, with that self satisfied little smile of hers.

"Is there a problem?"

[calmhrtprevails]

"I suppose not," says the man doubtfully. "Not if Elder Lyons is letting civilians into the Citadel these days."

"In this particular case," says Fawkes, "I doubt he'll have an issue. My companion resists radiation rather better than most humans."

"Is that so?" The man shakes his head. "Never thought I'd see the day... All right, go on in. He'll be down in the lab."

"Thank you, Paladin Bael," Fawkes says, and steps past the man and through the doubled gates.

The building's outer walls are enormously thick, possibly because the building itself is a huge five-sided ring with an open area at its center. It is this open area that Fawkes and Teresa step into now. On the other side are soldiers in different types of armor training- some doing push-ups, some boxing with each other, some fighting with sticks. Some are firing on targets with lasers or weapons that spit green fire. A few are striking at crude, large mannikins the size of Fawkes, some with massive metal gauntlets over only one hand and others with hammers not unlike the one Fawkes himself uses.

"This," Fawkes says, "is the Bailey. The Brotherhood's soldiers train here, before they go out to practice in actual battle."

[cantdiequiteyet]

Teresa looks around, and nods.

"They look old for trainees," she remarks.

It's true; most Warriors are definitely children when they're training.