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FLW/Butch: Nothing and Never
Date: 2012-05-20 05:29 am (UTC)Kinks: angst
Note: Kind of took on a life of its own. Sorry!
Butch said he wanted to go home, so she took him home. There was no point in arguing; this turn of events had been years in the making, and it was all her doing.
Besides, she loved him well enough to know when Butch truly, whole-heartedly believed something. He got this look in his remaining blue eye (he had lost the other one years ago in a bar fight she had started) that told her that she was going to shut the fuck up and do what he wanted for once. He didn’t give her that look often, and when he did, she acquiesced, hoping that a compromise here and there would be enough to keep him around.
It had worked for eight long years, but that was because they had loved each other. Yes, love. She knew what people said about her, but she was capable of love. She just happened to also be capable of blowing up a town in exchange for a suite. And engaging in the slave trade. And poisoning a good portion of the Capital Wasteland.
She supposed it was a good run, considering Butch had quickly outgrown his Tunnel Snake mentality once he was outside of the Vault. With it went he taste for senseless violence. She, on the other hand, grew to relish it. For a while, Butch blamed himself for bullying her in the Vault, then he blamed the Autumn for killing her father in front of her. Neither of those was the reason she was the way she was, but she let him say it because it helped him justify staying with her.
Somewhere along the line, he had run out of excuses, and when he had caught her coming out of the clinic in Megaton, she had known that this was it. She offered no lies or excuses when he demanded to know what she was doing there, simply told him that the fetus had been terminated.
She didn’t even wish that she could take it back, and she thought that that was the straw that had finally broken the Brahmin’s back. She didn’t want a child, not with him, and not with anyone.
And now Butch didn’t want her.
Regret would have made it better, she thought. But all she was left with was emptiness as the Vault door rolled open.
Butch took a step into the Vault, then paused and turned to look at her. She took in the eye patch, the well-worn leather jacket with the faded snake on the back and a bullet hole through the left sleeve. The perfectly styled hair. The bulging bag over his shoulder containing all the things he had bought for the baby they might have had.
“Coming or not?” he demanded.
“I….” She paused, cleared her throat. “No.”
“Why not? Ain’t like anyone in here really knows what a fuckin’ monster you are.”
She felt the phantom flicker of hurt that only Butch could inspire in her. “Exactly. They don’t know, and… I want to keep it that way.”
Butch laughed nastily, a bitter sound that grated in her ears. “I ain’t gonna broadcast it, if that’s what you’re worried about. I’m just gonna drink myself stupid til’ my liver gives out; I won’t be no trouble.”
“Butch….” She said his name like a prayer, her last desperate hope that this wasn’t really happening, that she wasn’t this person. “I… I’ve hurt a lot of people. I’ve done a lot of bad things. I’ve killed… so many people. And I liked it. But the only good thing I had, the only person I never wanted to hurt was you.”
There was no trace of any of the love and passion they had shared for so long when he said, “Well, you fucked that up when you killed our kid.”
She couldn’t help the lump that formed in her throat. She had no conscience, no morals, no remorse. What she had was her love for Butch, and she was losing him.
“I know I fucked up. And that’s why I can’t go with you. I’ll just fuck up again, somehow, if you let me.” She almost said she loved him, but she knew her words would be wasted. He knew. He just didn’t feel the same way anymore.
She thought she could detect a hint of mercy in his blue eye. “If you’d just say you were sorry.” It wasn’t a condition or a suggestion. It was the same weary mantra he had been repeating for years, and she knew her line as well as she knew every scar on his body.
“But I’m not.”
They said nothing as the door slid shut between them. There was nothing to say.
The Lone Wanderer wiped her eyes and turned away. She was not sorry… and she never would be.
Re: FLW/Butch: Nothing and Never
Date: 2012-05-20 07:56 am (UTC)It was so sad and just, ugh.
Re: FLW/Butch: Nothing and Never
Date: 2012-05-21 05:41 am (UTC)Re: FLW/Butch: Nothing and Never
Date: 2012-05-21 03:40 am (UTC)