Fallout: Fury Blood

Chapter 129: A Ghost In Armor

Home.

Danse was becoming part of the landscape. The Capital Wasteland was subsuming him, day by day, night by night. He remembered why it was home and why it was also a lie, but he could no longer wrap his thoughts around the complexities of it.

Where did he begin and end?

He was walking circles, hoping for something, seeking an old memory, but he couldn't remember the why and the what.

A darkness was fomenting across the wastes. Crashing in like rabid water, it gave birth to creatures of rage. Innocents fled, hastening to reach the safety behind his aegis. Danse stood a lone obstacle, waiting for the black wave to crush him, wanting it to. He would drag it down with him.

"Where are you?"

That voice. He knew it. Whisper-soft, with a youthful spunk. A lilting dew over a bed of thorns.

"Who are you?"

Her voice hit him just before the black wave.

"I'm home."

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Home.

Kelly could feel her bearings shift in her blood and bones. With each kilometre the vertibird drew nearer, she drew further away from Danse. His pull on her was a subsuming ache. She thought it might wane with the distance, but it only intensified until she became prey to doubts.

Was she making the right choice? Should she turn back?

But then the pull of home swelled in her heart, and the pull of her son. The memory of him in her arms, so frail and little, so warm and pure, was imperishable. Whatever he had become, he was still her son. She wanted to see him, to understand him, and if possible, to make him understand her. She wanted to love him.

That aside, Shaun may be the only person that could help Danse. But what if he wouldn't, or couldn't? What if revealing Danse's existence to the Institute only doomed him? What if Maxson was right, and her son refused to let her leave, or made a synth of her?

She couldn't ignore the Elder's annoyingly sagacious warning: she could be the key to undoing the Commonwealth. It was her that was spinning her webs in every facet of the war. And it could be her that would give the tug to bring it all crashing down.

But she had to try. She had gone to too much effort to back out now. The Elder of the Brotherhood of Steel was high on chems and the Prydwen was last seen on a wayward journey for the Capital Wasteland under his delusions. Whether Maxson would remember her manipulations or not, he would surely come to the only conclusion possible.

And then all hell could break loose.

Inside her boots, Kelly could still feel grains of desert sand. They passed through the Glowing Sea unscathed, ravaged by storms that were said to be nothing on the Red Menace when she cracked her whip over the Bloodlands. The acid rainstorms were bad business, Kelly couldn't even imagine a firestorm reigning wild.

Part of her still believed it was just a myth.

Yet the Red Doom, the mother dragon summoned by the Red Claws, had not been a myth...

Never mind that place. It may have it's hold on you, but you're home now. The radiation can't get you here.

The weather over the Commonwealth was tepid, the sky sagging with moisture. Kelly welcomed it in all it's moods, stretching her hand out into the wet winds as she stood holding her balance from the overhead supports. The water streamed down her fingers and flew thinly off her nails, creating patterns when she moved them as though she were playing keys on a piano.