Fallout: Fury Blood

Chapter 115: My Little Deathclaw

Release. It was a controversial sense of release that Danse felt from authorizing the woman he loved to unleash her darkness. It stroked something foreign in him to unchain her from her bonds, to stand back and just witness her devour and destroy. And that something in him had infiltrated his final bastion of honor, and eaten all that was whole. He felt divorced from reality, without the will or even desire to stop her.

My little deathclaw, he had once blithely thought of her. Now look at her.

Now look at me.

Danse knew, as he stood and supervised her sin, that he would never come back from this one moment.

After Kelly was done with the shaman, sick of his screams or simply growing bored, she kicked him to the edge of the Dark Blood river, where it hissed and spat flames from it's metal trench. "Time to dine with your demons," she murmured in a voice sweet with malice.

The shaman moaned wordlessly, in protest or support, Danse could not discern. Kelly had dislodged his jaw when she tore free his molten fangs to brand him like he had his victims. That had only been the beginning.

She moved with a killer's grace toward her prey, but as she reached him, her motions sharpened and carried the coiled strength of her rage. As her blade slit across his throat, her eyes dined on the outpouring of blood that she forced into the river, her lips skinned back from her teeth in savage satisfaction.

His blood flowed with that of his countless victims, careening off the metal river to fill the carved shafts throughout the walls like the veins of a great breathing, bleeding rock. With the oil in the blood set aflame, it was like a sauna. A tainted, haunted sauna.

When it was over, she let the corpse slump and stood over it in weary silence, blade weeping blood at her feet. As though in mourning that the devouring was over. Her battle garbs were sliced with blood from battle, and the red paint on her body was smudged, mingling with the blood and the sweat and the fury that was her.

Danse resolved to speak first, but the words were barricaded in his throat. He realized that he didn't lack the will to speak, just the right words. What could he say that wouldn't cement the immorality of this moment? He settled on something simple. "We're done here."

As though waking from a dream, Kelly stirred at his voice. Her gaze fell down upon her blade, admiring or despising the blood there, before she swiped it on the fabric of her loincloth and sheathed it at her back. Beneath a fall of dark hair, she scoured him intently on turning to him. He felt the object of judgement, just as she was under his matching stare. It was her judgement of his reaction to what she had done.

This was an unfamiliar dynamic in their relationship. Where he found himself regularly judging her choices and actions, whether as her mentor and former commanding officer, or as her paramor, he had never before felt the same weight of judgement from her. At times she took him with a grain of salt when he expressed his unique, and admittedly, skewed opinions, but she had never amassed them into a canvas of who and what he was; she took him how he was as though with blind eyes.

But now, that judgement was all-consuming. To say that he feared where to tread next with her was an understatement. Although he felt as though he needed to say "I'm not your enemy," instead he said, "we need to go."

Kelly nodded in agreement, fleeing from his gaze to console Gallago before wrapping her arm around her shoulders to lift her. One moment a savage demon, the next a mothering angel. Danse lifted Durand and Kip over either shoulder of his power armor, and took Fowler in his arms, all of whom were barely conscious. On the way back through the tunnel system, they looted and then stripped the clothing of the raiders they had killed and dressed the Lieutenants, giving them at least some sense of dignity.