Fallout: Fury Blood

Chapter 39: Come Fly With Me

It was back inside him. Visceral, condemning, torturing. In the deep grotto of his memory, it crawled back up to shatter his great fortress and render him it's prey once more.

Danse drifted through his own distorted memory, tearing up air and land in search of Cutler. Blood and sweat was spilled, sustenance cast aside, emotions threatening to betray him each night he closed his eyes on an unsuccessful day. Mornings came with anxious sickness, kept at bay only by the will to push on.

The hive.

Danse remembered it vividly. Death and gore, red and rage, fury from the blood. The sight terrorized his eyes in sharp, fractured memory, flashes stabbing into his brain like a knife and latching on to etch out the images that would forever haunt him.

Human beings, mutilated, severed, dismembered, hung up in gorebags and strewn across the walls, their gore spread in decoration. The filth of it saturated his airways. His every step was over bloody bile, the sound unforgettable.

Squelch. Squelch. Squelch.

He was stepping on people. He could be stepping on Cutler.

Shadows assaulted him and his squad. Heavy footsteps penned them into a tight formation. Mutant laughter boomed off the gory surrounds.

Danse roared his battlecry as the hive awakened.

Dark. Sharp pain in his head. Sharp pain in his chest. Can't breathe. Cold. Shivering. Soaked in sweat... Nightmare.

Danse heaved in air as quietly as his desperation would allow and dropped back into his pillow, staring up at the steel ceiling above him. He was in his quarters, not the Capital Wasteland, he soothed himself as he fought to steady his breathing and the painful palpitations on his ribcage.

He loathed going back to that hive. That dreadful, despicable place, and where it eventually ended. He hadn't been there in a while. It had only been a matter of time before it revisited him, reminding him it would always be inside him. Like a disease.

With a grumble, he chucked the sheets off his body and lay stark still, waiting for the sweat to dry so he wouldn't be dripping his grime on everything he touched. He was freezing, though he knew it wasn't the air temperature. He cringed and sighed as he felt the mattress beneath him stick to his skin, a dampened pool silhouetting his form. When he moved, it squelched.

Danse shivered and crunched his fists to blot out that memory. In vain. He felt his heartbeat retaliate at that mere reminder, the harbinger link to the entire memory.

No. He just got out of it. He wasn't going back into it. Get up. Do something. Distract yourself. Fight it, soldier.

He spurned the urge to wait for his sweat to evaporate and rolled off the bed, standing idle for a moment to endure the hammering against his skull. As he had dreaded, sweat fled down the rolling planes of his muscled body, drip dropping on the steel deck. He rolled his eyes and swallowed the embarrassing inconvenience.

So weak. So liable. So powerless. He was a disgrace. He couldn't even control his own sweat glands.

Noticing that even his briefs were saturated, Danse growled and stomped off for the showers. Just once he would like to awaken without being a drowned rat.