Fallout: Fury Blood

Chapter 145: Serpia Desolation

The walk.

It had been Danse's remaking. His hardening. His trial. Through hot and cold, through rain and drought, through thunder of weather and weapon.

This walk from the Commonwealth to the Capital Wasteland was a series of garish flashbacks under a radioactive sun. His dreams were tinkering with the lock of his memory, meshing and hazing indistinctly until he surrendered to it's discord. He envisioned the sky he travelled under, a faded patch of pain. The dirt and sludge he tracked through, dead layers over a tomb for thousands. Cities and highways nothing but broken ascents to heavens scorned. To his new eyes it was a kingdom of wild life and ancient death in bewildering bedlam.

The Railroad agent escorting him was fleet of foot and a deadly sharpshooter, but he wasn't the most digestible of people. The man had a penchant for chatter that M7-97 was unaccustomed to. He was discovering more and more about his own dispositions and psych profile, thanks in large part to the agent, who called himself Pongo. Long weeks together had cemented a bond of mutual trust and comradeship, but also chafed on the nerves until they grew raw.

"You given any more thought on your new name?" Pongo had obsessed over this particular problem. According to his expertize, it was imperative that a synth undergoing a mind-wipe and relocation chose the preset of their new identity, to retain some semblance of choice in their new life. M7-97 thought the concept moot. Once his mind was wiped and he awoke anew in the Capital Wasteland, a fresh set of memories in play, a name would matter little while survival dictated his every choice from then on out.

"No," he managed to respond with, hoping the agent would drop it this time.

He observed as ahead of him, Pongo deliberately scuffed his boot through the soil in obvious protest, knocking a small rock loose. "Pal, you really gotta sort that out. Like pronto. Don't make me come up with a name for you. You'll regret it in your next life. That I can promise you."

M7-97 grunted in response. During the calm crossings of open plains such as this, he preferred the solitude of silence. The further inland they travelled, the more arid of life the landscape became. Trees and low-lying greenery faded into obscurity, replaced by radioactive wastes and cratered industrial sites. Hummocks of scorched Earth buried structures so blunt and crude to his eye that he found it difficult to imagine a humanity before now worshipping such ugliness. Perhaps his perspective had been too tainted by his refined surroundings in the Institute. There, all had been fluent, clean and simplistic. Here, all was ungainly, a maladroit expanse of wasted potential.

His psychopathy was never far from his mind, implanted and curated by the horrors of the Institute. Every chance to still the simmering rage in his depths, he grasped at, and often this was by observing the overground and getting lost in awe and wonder. But losing control of himself and inflicting his rage on this Railroad agent was a constant fear, and at times he wondered if the agent was attempting to have it rear it's ugly head for nothing more than his amusement.

The loose ginger hair of the agent swayed in the breeze around his shoulders, oily and tattered from weeks without washing. Beneath the bandana he often wore across his mouth and nose to protect from radioactive dust, he had grown a smattering of ginger facial hair that refused to breach the full width of his jaw.

For this M7-97 was envious. His own hair and beard had grown beyond anything he had ever experienced. On his head it had snaked down his neck and constantly tickled the tops of his shoulders, or flopped down into his eyes, sticking to his cheeks when the day was hot and his skin humid. On his jaw it had spread like an insulating blanket, collecting sweat in the heat and itching his skin beneath. He dreaded the time in which he would have to ask Pongo for assistance in removing it all. He had never had the need to undertake the task himself before.