Fallout: Fury Blood

Chapter 142: Science and Secrecy

Time was a figment that could make or break a woman. Kelly had learned that the hard way, like most of her life lessons.

It filtered her days and nights with an illegible blur, hemming and hewing her perception of it until she lost reverence for it's reign. There was a solace in it. A willingness to shirk the rough edges of reality for the soft spectra of surrender.

And maybe it was good for her. Maybe it was just what she needed. Or maybe it was nothing but an optical illusion.

"Today is my day of reckoning."

"Should I run for the nearest vault?"

Skinning her dead husband an unrefined grin, Kelly shook her head before returning her attention on the sedate view of the water features from her apartment balcony. The only thing missing was a fresh breeze. "I finally get this fucking cast and moonboot taken off and start physio." Sealed up in her new suit, she attempted to test her returning flexibility in the affected limbs. "Still won't be fit for action until the muscles build up again, but at least I won't be a cripple."

"Physically," Nate took the liberty of pointing out from the bench across from her. "Mentally, well, the jury's still out."

Angling him a pithy glare, Kelly shoved a bite of bagel into her mouth and chewed at him resentfully.

She was living on bagels. Bagels smeared with all the toppings. That, and Institute coffee.

For several weeks, Kelly had regained some of the weight that had deserted her since Danse's injury, and with a prescribed course of addictol, her cravings for jet had been blunted to a distant white noise, like the sound of faraway waves raking a shoreline. The injuries from her fight with Maxson had healed up from the intensive course of stimpaks Doctor Volkert also had her on. The suckerpunch to the face-still a sore spot that needed repayment.

Shaun had been dodging her as best he could. Her access to him had become increasingly limited as his work grew more pressing. The night he confronted her half-naked drunkenness out on this very balcony still weighed on her conscience. She needed to rectify not only that, but remedy the estrangement between them, find a way to salvage something from the wreckage she had left their relationship in.

Only then would he help her with Danse.

The problem was, how the fuck did she go about doing that?

She had never gotten the chance to be a mother. Not really. A few precious moments holding him as a baby in her arms had been crystallized in the amber of her past, forever bottled and sealed away in the museum of her memory. But he wasn't that baby now. Kellogg had repurposed him. The Institute had mothered him.

"Any advice?" she asked her husband, rinsing down her last bite of bagel with a gulp of lukewarm coffee.

Nate assumed a look of thought in his backward-leaning posture. "You're asking someone who's in the same boat as you are. I never got to play big daddy long enough to figure it out either."

"That's the thing, though. Shaun doesn't need me to step into my role as mother. It would only humiliate him, like him acting paternal over me humiliates me. Probably him, too," she added with a shrug.

"Guess breast feeding your way back into his good-books is out of the question, then. Not that it would have worked, anyway. Those titties aren't what they used to be."

"You know, I don't remember you being such a cunt."

"Maybe you never really knew the real me."