Nuka Girl, Nuka'd World

Power Play

The sun is beginning to set over Nuka-World as the tram rolls into the station. Gage and Vanessa leave the tram station, and she gazes up. The sky is streaked with pink and gold and soft white clouds, "hiraeth," she sighs, invoking Gage to look down at her, resting an arm around her shoulders, looking up, "hmm?" She leans into his side, and he follows her gaze to the sky, things that always seemed so trivial, or things he always ignored before Nessie, had a way of being so beautiful when he saw them through her eyes.

"Hiraeth," she repeats, "longing for a home to which you cannot return or never was. The sky hasn't changed in two hundred years, it always makes me homesick."

She is beautiful in his eyes.

"You miss your home?" He shuffles a little, looking at her out of the corner of his good eye. He can't help but worry about things like this, he always thinks about how, in his opinion, he can't even begin to compare to the life she had before. The familiar insecurity began to crawl beneath his skin.

"My home? My home is still standing, more or less." Gage didn't know this, he looked at her with eyebrows raised, "really?" "Well, it depends which home you mean, apparently our family manor is still standing, just outside Boston, but I've never been to visit it. But if you mean the home I had with Nathaniel, it's just up the road from the Red Rocket, and it's got some broken windows but that's all."

Gage wants to ask something else, and it's as if she reads his mind, standing in front of him and taking both of his hands in hers. "I don't miss him," she says firmly, "I weren't thinkin' tha'." They both knew he was. "I'm not saying you were, I am saying I don't miss him. And even if I was offered to live my old life in my own time, I wouldn't, not if I had to have him instead of you."

He tilts his head to the side and cups her cheek with a hand, sweeping his thumb over her lip, just enough to smudge her lipstick slightly over the scar on her top lip. "Let's go put down them fuckin' dogs." It's not sentimental, but Gage is always better with actions than words.

It's quiet outside Nuka-Town. Too quiet.

Vanessa thanks MacCready for putting that phrase into her head as they walk through the streets, Operators and Disciples alike are tending to each other's wounds. It has a lovely war-time feel to it which does nothing to soothe the homesickness Vanessa is feeling for the world of 200 years ago. One of the Disciples notices their arrival and runs over, Vanessa would know that psychotic giggling anywhere.

"Dixie."

"Well howdy, Overboss. Are y'all here to help exterminate our lil' pest problem," Vanessa rolls her eyes and folds her arms over her chest, she likes Nisha, and has had decent conversations with Savoy on occasion, but she for whatever reason, cannot stand Dixie. Maybe it was the fact she tried to stab her the first time they met, or the fact she actually cut her the second time they met. But however you looked at it, to put it quite simply, the blondes hated each other.

"Obviously we are, Dixie. Where are Nisha, Mags and William?"

Gage smirks at the response from his Overboss, he always found it amusing when she broke that polite, loveable, housewife routine. The Disciples raider pulled off her mask and pouted, "no fair OB, you gotta let me play," "I don't gotta do anything. Go make sure there are no Pack anywhere else in Nuka-Town or around it." Dixie huffs and folds her arms over her chest, pulling her mask back on, "fine, Nisha and those fancy tie-wearin' assholes are cooped up in an old buildin' outside the power plant, Mason has taken the damn place over and tried to fortify it."

"Time to put bullets in faces."

Gage reloaded his rifle as punctuation, and was rewarded with a smirk from his overboss, who pulled out her sword in response.