Work Text:
i.
He had wanted to see the world. Not just the parts he had moved through barely conscious: from Alabama, to Georgia, to South Dakota, to Montana before the age of ten, picking up pieces of twang from here and there, and the places in between. He would gaze at the Rockies, pink and purple from the dawn light, seated on the back of a horse and dream of it. What did other mountains and skies look like? What was it like to live in places that weren’t just great expanses of land for cattle, on and on forever? What were the people there like? Their lives and dreams?
This was the promise of the Marines. But that turned out to be smoke and mirrors. All Cooper saw there was blood and snow.
What’s a cowboy to do? “You could be in movies,” Maya, one of his fellow soldiers had said over a shared cigarette as their days in Alaska dwindled. He had laughed big and hearty at that. “I’m serious,” she continued. “My wife is a script editor. They’re always looking for people like you.”
“What, a corn-fed country boy with eyes as big as saucers hopin’ for a spot in the limelight?" He plays up his accent; bats his eyes. "I’m sure they’re desperate for more of that.”
“No,” Maya had said, “Like, not as an actor. Like stunt work. Okay, so: you’re an average build.” (“Thanks.”) “You’re tough. You’re good with horses. And I’ve seen you work that rope.” Power suit warfare didn’t give much space for lasso-ing, but Cooper supposed he had entertained the troops with enough old tricks on Kentucky bathwater fueled nights for Maya to know that much.
“Well, what’s that got to do with it?”
“You’re like a real cowboy.” Maya puffed the cigarette and handed it to Cooper. “You show up to a place full of fake cowboys, and people are going to notice.”
“Maya, you’re sweet, but celebrity ain’t really for me.”
“Woah, I’m not saying you need to write your Oscar’s speech. I’m just saying that it might be a good way to get some free tickets the hell out of America and see the world, at least before we blow it all up.” He laughed at this. “If you do it, look me up, and we can set you up with a place to stay before you get rich and famous.”
Cooper goes home. Spends a week staring at the Rockies on the ranch. Buys a ticket, takes a train ride. Then looks her up and spends six months sleeping on an uncomfortable box-spring mattress in the spare room of Maya’s worse-for-the-wear Laurel Canyon bungalow.
She’s right, though. Work comes easy to a real cowboy. It's a steady living in Hollywood, for years. And then he hears: "Hey, you!" on the set of whatever B-movie is he lassoing good guys for as Henchman No. 3. “Why don’t you say this line?” He says it and is in a screen test the next day; an origin story that will be retold as silver screen legend for years to come.
Lucy reads it in one of her dad’s “collector’s edition” Hollywood fan magazines as a girl. She can’t help but think it’s funny her favorite hero started out as a villain.
—
He had wanted to see the world. He saw it alright, didn’t he? The Ghoul stares at what is left of the Rockies. Time is a circle. The middle parts are all a fever dream. Things have gone on for so long. What does it matter, anyway?
He lets Dom Pedro do it. The cat and mouse game they’ve been playing has ceased to be interesting. Cooper is tired.
Underground is where a corpse belongs.
ii.
Cooper Howard the actor was a Western star, with a few noirs thrown in along the way for intrigue. Cooper Howard the stunt-man was an agent of fortune, and, in between the fortunes, he typically found himself doing stunt-work for the sludge of low-budget horror movies Crest, Universal, and Fox churned out for matinees and drive-ins. It wasn’t all bad—Boris was a pleasure, and it beat shoveling horse shit back home; but to say he did not miss it when he went A-list is an understatement.
Cruel trick. He thinks of those sets—tacky, gory, and decrepit—all of the time now. The bombs had remade the world, and him, in their image.
They hadn’t touched the moon, though.
He looks forward to seeing it every year when Dom Pedro digs him up. A pale light in the darkness, unbothered by the bullshit. Untouched, save for those flags they planted on it centuries ago. The years it is covered by the clouds make Cooper feel more dead than usual.
Dom Pedro always treats him to a stiff drink and a bloody, candle-light meal before he takes what he wants. At least he took me out to dinner first, Cooper can’t help but think as the Dom slices a chunk of his irradiated flesh to swallow. Cooper isn’t one-hundred-percent on what the deal here exactly is—something about immortality, maybe? People are making up all sorts of stupid shit these days. In Dom Pedro’s eyes, the Ghoul is a great and mythical beast to capture but not tame, siphon from but not kill.
At least it’s an easy way to get his meds.
Take a bite out of me, Cooper finds himself idly thinking, already drifting back into stasis behind his eyes, as he watches the Dom chew a piece of his upper left arm. Everyone else already has.
The world is, and always has been, all piranhas and vipers. From the ranchers who’d break your back in return for pennies, to the military, to the Hollywood agents who would bleach your smile and cap your teeth so you couldn’t bite back, to your wife, to the press for whom a divorce—even if quiet—is like blood in the water. Lucy never reads those articles because Hank doesn’t keep them out of respect to his boss.
When the bombs fell, Cooper was already inside out.
iii.
Lucy MacLean takes a bite, too, but he gets to bite back. An honest exchange with his little killer, the little ingenue.
She is almost like those starlets in perfect studio hair and perfect studio make-up. They’d be paraded up to him like prizes in their high heels and designer dresses: his next leading lady, freshly nineteen from Nowhere, USA with a five-picture contract already.
Only half ever made an advance, and, of those that did, only one or two made it a problem when his answer was no. Most of them were relieved. It was subtle, usually. The tension that would drain from their body, the tears of embarrassment and rejection blinked away to reveal eyes full of hope at being taken seriously as an actor, a person. This industry was fucked up. These poor girls only did what they thought they had to in order to make it.
Once that whole rigmarole was through, Cooper took pride in serving as their mentor, their guide, their protector. He knew that their perfect studio hair burnt their scalp with chemicals. He knew those designer dresses weren’t theirs to own. He knew about the diet pills, the uppers and downers, the booze, the blackmail. He couldn’t fix it, but he could give them a road map. “Stay away from him, watch out for her, ignore them.” He could share a cigarette with them between takes, reminiscing about the South, the Midwest, the Mountains—wherever they came from. They could even use their real accent, if they wanted to.
He loved it when they made it, staked out a place for themselves amongst the stars. He loved it when they didn’t, too, if that was for them—when they finished their contract and got the hell out of dodge with the cash.
He was too fucking nice then. It is a foreign concept now. He tries not to think about it. It doesn’t matter if he was a friend, if he served them well. They were all dead anyway. All roads would always lead to here:
Staring up at the moon with Lucy in a radioactive wasteland.
iv.
“Well, well, well—last I heard you was underground,” the ghoul who is holding them by gunpoint drawls, drool unceremoniously dripping out of his sagging jaw. “Dom Pedro got you all chained up.”
As far as taunts go, it’s almost nothing—except that it lights Lucy’s big eyes up with curiosity. The Ghoul sighs. He will deal with her later. They’ve got a shootout with an idiot to win.
Later, Lucy does not ask. But he knows she’s curious. She is curious about everything. Lucy wants to know what this does. Lucy wants to know what happened there, and here, and why? Who is that person? What did this used to be? What was it like, before the war? What did chocolate taste like? What did lavender smell like? Was it nice to be outside in the rain, before it developed the ability to burn you? How big were horses? Were they nice to pet, like Dogmeat is?
The Ghoul hates how he teeters between annoyance and genuine pleasure at her questions. The chatter is better than the three days of heavy silence—punctuated by quiet, nightly sobs—that followed them after they left the Observatory. It also provides more entertainment than traveling alone, although he is loath to admit it. The mental exercises—the analysis, description, and snark—that it requires to answer some of Lucy’s questions feel like stretching an old, atrophied muscle. Like his fingers twitching back to life when the coffin door opens.
It helps that she is good at avoiding questions he does not want to answer. Nothing about his family. Nothing about his life. She knows his name by now, and that’s already too much. Of course, she’d seen his fucking movies.
But she doesn’t ask about Dom Pedro. Probably files it away under ‘the Ghoul’s life: off limits’ in her pretty little noggin. He is thankful.
She is teaching Dogmeat how to roll over. She was a teacher, back in Nowhere, USA, she told him once, and he can see it in her measured voice and reassuring tone. She’d be great with kids. Patient. Smart, too, probably better at imparting lessons than any teacher he had ever had. He would have just loved her. Janey would have just loved her.
Dogmeat rolls over, and Lucy cheers and claps. “Shut the fuck up,” the Ghoul growls at them. Its sudden enough, on an otherwise calm night, that he catches the flash of indignation and hurt in Lucy’s eyes. Her nostrils flare, but she doesn’t say anything. She knows he knows that she knows to be quiet, and that she wasn’t in danger of attracting any attention with her celebration. He knows she knows that he knows.
She knows there must be something else going on in that skull of his. He hates it. He hates that she’s right. And he hates how he is beginning to want to satisfy her with a real response.
Cooper misses the coffin. He misses its cool darkness, its silence. He misses being able to slide out of himself, away into nothingness. He hates this role. He wants to break his contract. Get the hell out of dodge with the cash.
He is a Halloween decoration put out too long in the autumn rain. He is a movie monster waiting in his crypt for the scene to start. An undead cowboy will really sell this season.
Lights, camera, action!
v.
“I’m a vampire, sweetheart,” he told her. “Casket’s where I belong.”
They had been on the road to New Vegas long enough that Dom Pedro had been brought up not once, not twice, but three times by fiends and fellow bounty hunters that didn’t know what was good for them. The topic was beginning to weigh heavy between them. He could feel it fray the trust they had built from the inside out. So, he had gotten ahead of it and told her. Brave?
“But I don’t understand,” Lucy responded, so earnest. “I thought you were looking for your family?” That’s right, he thinks. And I went underground. Now she knows I’m a coward.
“Two hundred years is a long time with no leads, Vaultie,” he says instead. He means this as nonchalantly as possible, to get her off his back, but as soon as he speaks, he knows it’s a mistake. Brave? Lucy, who is so easy, easy, easy to read, still, practically grabs his hand as she walks through the realization that this journey is truly consequential for him, too. That this isn’t just another adventure in whatever fucked up storybook tale she’d been cooking up what his life was.
He figures, maybe it’s fine if she knows. They’re already in too deep anyway.
Or, rather, he is. She has him so badly, pinched between her sweet pink thumb and necrotic forefinger. She’s the sweetheart at the general store checkout counter you flirt with when you go into town with your pop to pick up supplies. She’s your favorite co-worker, the crafty tech who knows the weirdest shit and regales you with her facts while on break out back. She’s the plucky starlet who says ‘no’ when the studio asks to bleach her hair and still gets the leading lady role. She keeps trying to do the right thing, and she’s still surviving. She’s everything he tried to be but wasn’t. She’s, frankly, nice to be around. And she’s Hank MacLean’s fucking vault-dwelling daughter.
Cooper is a coward.
vi.
“What was it like? Underground?” she asks him as they traipse through the chaparral. She’s getting bolder.
“Why don’t you tell me, Vaultie?”
Lucy scoffs. “Well, that was different. We had books and movies and stuff. What did you—” She pauses. “You know, do?”
I wrote great poems, and epics, about everything and nothing all at once and never. Nothing beside remains. Round the decay, boundless and bare. It’s not his voice that says it in his head. Barb’s, maybe. “I napped.”
vii.
Lucy MacLean sees right through him, he thinks. And, my god, he hates it.
He feels absolutely radioactive under her gaze, more-so than he actually is. He feels like his bones are glowing with the irradiating heat of the bomb, like she can see his skeleton burning through his skin. His insides are on the outside, more-so than they actually are. It’s stupid, and it’s dangerous.
Starlets never did this to him. Only Barbara (“Call me Barb,” she says, her face so open and kind). She could pick him to pieces. Read his deepest desires from the curve of his penmanship, his deepest fears from the width of his smile. And she would ask him, “Do you want to do this? Are you sure you want to do that?” A moral compass made of skin, hair, and teeth to keep him grounded. She was his best friend, and his bride, and the mother of his child. He loved her so much.
And he couldn’t return the favor for her. Or, maybe, she couldn’t return the favor for him. That felt even worse, sometimes. To think that, despite everything, she had never really loved him enough to understand him.
But maybe that wasn’t it at all. He doesn’t know. He still doesn’t know.
Lucy is asleep on her bedroll, curled up beside Dogmeat. Her affection for the dog is plain even when she is unconscious.
Cooper used to be like that, too. He could act, sure, despite his career being largely accidental. But the minute the cameras turned off, his bleeding heart was back on his sleeve.
He thought he had ripped it out by now. But he’s beginning to think maybe that was just acting, too.
viii.
Cooper thinks of the horror movies, of their sets in between takes. The beauty and the beast would sit in their chairs, cackling with memories of shared parties and scenes, friends in common, plans for the day. It had always made him chuckle to see a guy in full haunted fun house make-up, prosthetics dangling from his cheeks and horns atop his head, making chitty-chatty with whatever sweet, young lead the studio had scared up for this one.
The cameras were off, here, too, although the weird little house they’re camping in might as well be a horror set. The blood stains and broken windows are almost too perfect, and any sound engineer worth their salt would have killed to reproduce the way the wind howls through the rafters.
Lucy doesn’t seem to notice. She’s too busy scooping Cram into her mouth. He wonders if they have any scary movies down in that vault of her’s.
“Take a picture,” she says. It snaps him out of his sulk.
“What?”
“Take a picture,” she repeats with a smile. “It’ll last longer.” And when he doesn’t reply, she follows up with: “You were staring at me eating the Cram. I thought, maybe I could use it as an opportunity to practice the surface-skill of ‘joking.’” Her eyes are bright with mischief.
“You call that a joke?” he asks with a friendly sneer, and from there they go at it. It’s easy trading barbs and jokes, cackling quietly over shared memories of days on the road, or crazy Vault-Tec shit, or crazy Wasteland shit.
The cameras are off, Cooper thinks, But there’s no make-up to peel away here. He didn’t spend hours in a chair to look terrifying. This is his rotted face. His vicious hands. His rough, cruel demeanor. He can’t clean up and grab the car ‘round back to pick her up, take her out on a proper date. Not that she’d even want that in the first place, maybe. It’s hard to tell. It’s wishful thinking.
It's her big smile and closed-eye laugh. He wants to hear it forever.
ix.
Lucy gasps in awe when they ‘round the corner. They’ve been braving mountains for a while now, but rarely do they get a view so picture perfect: pristine, stunning, wide-open, huge. Almost untouched by the bomb, if you squint.
She probably wanted to see the world in that little Vault of her’s, Cooper thinks as he watches her react from behind. Now she gets her chance.
Time is a circle. The middle parts are all a fever dream.
Lucy casts her gaze back at him. She throws him a smile that is so inviting—that it grabs him by the hand and walks him through it— that it says: “Come here.” It says: “What are you doing back there, silly?” It says, “I want you by me.” It says, “I always want you to be right by me.” It says, “Hi Coop, I love you.”
There’s just no fear in it. She’s looking right at him, through him, and then back at him. And she likes it. Understands what she sees, and still likes it.
She knocks on his coffin door and holds out her hand.