Another Unoriginal Oneshot Book

The Way Forward

AN: This is my new longest chapter. It's also rated M for dark themes and references, and contains spoilers for pretty much all of Fallout: New Vegas. The next chapter is also rated M. After that, I'll give a plot synopsis of what you missed if you skipped the M-rated chapters.

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Arizona, 2268.

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Despite a year of basic training and over five years of personal combat instruction with the legate, Gabriel was promptly put in charge of managing Qavrok's small gaggle of captives. It was grisly work. His mandate was simply to "deal with them," and that took many forms largely left to Gabriel's interpretation. The contract usually didn't allow a lot of judgment calls, so Gabriel was even further out of his element. As broad as his orders were, he took it to mean simply "Keep them alive."

And that was easier said than done.

Butterfly, whose real name was Audrey, continued to be unfailingly sweet and have no concept of boundaries. She was the youngest of the four, two years older than Gabriel, and had been a prisoner the longest. Her parents' caravan had been ambushed by hungry Fiends and scattered. She'd been unarmed, so they'd taken her, and Qavrok had staked his claim. She was understandably tight-lipped about the incident, but she told Gabriel about her cellmates to pass time between the closet and the throneroom.

Avi had been added only a few days after Butterfly. It took far too long for Gabriel to realize that his second charge wasn't actually a woman. If not for the timbre of his voice and the strength of his attacks, Gabriel might not even have known to ask. Avi had stopped fighting, then, and clarified that, yes, he was a man. He'd seemed so spiteful about this fact that Gabriel had ceased his questioning. (He hadn't meant to be rude, but these people played by different rules than the Legion.)

The Fiend "doctors" gave Avi some sort of injection every morning. He was consistently morose, and like the others (except for Butterfly), he fought when Gabriel escorted him to Qavrok. He was sickly and frail for a man, especially by Legion standards, but his blows were more than just an annoyance, and Gabriel honestly started to hate him for it. The attacks, though, were borne of panic more than malice, so he never retaliated.

Several months after Avi, Violet had been added to their number. Like him, she was a former Fiend who'd crossed Qavrok at the wrong time. Butterfly told Gabriel that she had been quiet, no less sane than the average junkie. Then, after a particularly harrowing session with the Fiend King, she'd started on a downhill slope that still hadn't plateaued. When Gabriel had to escort her places, she bit and twitched and screamed the whole way. He started wearing gloves, unsure what diseases she might infect him with if she managed to sink her teeth in.

Violet was a hard character to figure out (but Gabriel tried, if only for lack of anything better to do). She liked to sing and sometimes did it to calm herself. Avi had taught her some ancient rhyme about a dog in a window, and she would blare it at the top of her lungs, ending with sad little woofs of laughter. When she stilled, Gabriel could see nail marks that he doubted came from Qavrok all over her pitch-black skin.

The final captive was named Xan. She was somewhere in her 20's and looked notably healthier than the others, being a relatively recent arrival. She'd been with a mercenary company hired to wipe out the band of Fiends causing mayhem throughout the area. They'd planned the assault for months, but far underestimated the Fiends' numbers. Qavrok had taken the injured Xan as a prisoner of war. She had a lot of fight left in her, which her monstrous captor had made it his mission to extinguish. She bore the marks of it constantly. Her tongue was split down the middle, and she usually had a broken bone or two that Qavrok's stimpaks couldn't fully heal. Unsurprisingly, she took it all out on Gabriel.