Fallout: Fury Blood

Chapter 144: All's Fair In Love And War

His was a prison of labyrinthine wrath, a fragrant darkness of memories and lies, origins and falsehoods. One path decreed ignorant bliss where another offered freedom in torment.

In the exeunt of his metal monotony, followed the carnal unravelling of him. The bliss and torment speaking the same voice of paradox, colluding into something cruelly familiar.

A trauma resting dormant found refuge in his roots, the memory stain of a psychopathic rage and the shadow of blood on his hands.

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Danse lost himself in that labyrinth. He could breach the aura of his slumber only momentarily, where he could differentiate the dominions of memory from dream. But it was only ever a fleeting interlude. Constantly he tried, harder and harder with each failure, drawing from his years of training and experience, ingrained in him to never accept defeat, never give up in the face of adversity. Ad Victoriam.

He could launch from himself like a missile from a smoking muzzle, sent on a predetermined trajectory, his consciousness in distant orbit over his head. Up there, out there, he sought for tangible matter in which to grasp onto. Strategic footholds to provide his respite with more mission time. The wind of a voice, scent of a shadow, taste of a touch.

He felt her absence like a cold crevasse, an empty song of sorrow filling his doomed expanse. He battled to scale his void, but gravity was a fickle thing within and without him, an indomitable ploy to drag him back down, down, down. There, at the bottom of himself, he would waste away under the deceiving mantle of his icy tomb, brittle but biting.

Was this Hell? Was this his punishment for what he had done to that raider? To Cutler? To all those scientists?

If so, it was rightly earned. If so, he would accept his fate with dignity. With honor. Let them be done with it and discard of his body.

But then he thought of Kelly. Always Kelly. How alone she would be, at the mercy of the Brotherhood of Steel and Elder Maxson, the Institute and her son, the Dark Bloods and their warlords. Had his dreams, nightmares, of her returning to the Institute been based on truth? She couldn't possibly think that her son would restore him, a synth, without expecting compensation.

The self-serving want to expire and escape this stagnant suffering was vehemently cast aside in place of determination. So cogent it branded his being incandescent. He continued to resist the influx of memory and trauma, searching and sweeping through his labyrinth for an escape route. He only ever found fallback points in which to recover his breath, tend to his wounds, but they served enough to keep his mind from overloading and burning out.

But the pathways behind his progress were burning up, crumbling away from the heat of his efforts, irretrievable. Soon, he would burn away everything until there was nowhere left to go.

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The curtains over Clay-Crawler's mind parted with reluctant cajoling. The smoke was the culprit, storming his airways and setting his lungs afire with a fresh burn. He coughed himself awake, prying his eyes open to greet whoever was pouring the smoke in him.

"Awaken, Dragon-Rider. Return to your fleshy vessel once more."

Pandora's-Box was a spectral rain over him, ranting and raving in red divinity. The stench of blood and sweat was strong on her skin, effusing the ritual smoke into a hedonistic flavor that tinged his tongue, filled his ears with silent sound, brushed against his brain with a violent whisper.