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Skinless 4i/?
Date: 2012-07-14 06:59 pm (UTC)I have my dad, I tell myself. But there’s something else, too. Something about the injustice of all this, something about the way Gob described what happened fifteen years ago, something about it is boiling in my gut. I feel angry, I feel curious – I feel like there are answers and a solution out there, and I have this deep, incomprehensible feeling that I can find it, if I ask the right questions, if I look in the right places, if I try hard enough.
I look at Gob through the firelight again, and realise I haven’t said anything. He is framed in smoke and flame and more than thirty years of skinlessness, and he has been a part of building something, and now he is a part of keeping it alive. And he left that, walked away from his home, to look for me. To keep me safe.
It means something.
“Where do I fit into all this?” I ask, quietly. Why is he telling me his history? Why did he come after me? Why did he let me get him so angry, when I’m just this idiot kid? Why did he kiss me above the eye like it was something tender and significant, like I was something tender and significant? Why does he care?
Gob looks at me intently across the fire. “Before I came after you, Moira went to get Lucas. He came to the saloon and he told me about you. About your dad.”
My heart stops a little. “My dad?”
“Lucas didn’t say much. He said he was ‘important’. That if James had left the Vault, we had to find him. He could help. He’d work out what was happening, with us, with the ghouls.”
“You said you came after me ‘cause I was nineteen, a kid.” There’s this weird, cold feeling in my stomach. “That’s not it, though, is it? You came after me because of my dad.”
It’s always because of my dad.
Gob gives me a very hard look, and I realise I said that last bit out loud. When he speaks, he speaks slowly, like he’s choosing his words carefully, like there’s something at stake. “I didn’t come after you just because you were a kid,” he admits. “But it wasn’t your dad. I was set to go before Lucas came to see me. You want to know why?”
I nod.
He gives me this wry, sad smile, and he looks old this time, only there’s a still a bit of the young man there. It gives this weird sense that’s he’s looking back at himself, and his eyes are a very bright blue, brighter in the firelight. “Your eyes.” He laughs. “Can you imagine it? There was this look in your eyes like you were a dog that was about to die, but that wasn’t everything. You looked like –“ He pauses again, and rubs the back of his neck. “You made me think of me, the first time I left Underworld. Only I’d been older then, even if I was still a kid in all the ways that mattered. You were like me, only you were younger, you had even less of a clue than I did, and –“
I think he’s broken off for good this time. He looks embarrassed all of a sudden, shy, and he won’t move the hand from the back of his neck. For a second, his shoulders hunch in, and I see an image of a very different man. Then he straightens out again, and laughs.