Chapter Text
Jack shuffles around a pile of cherry printed skirts and navy blazers to stand against the wall. The entire building is littered with clothing and articulated mannequins like some kind of retail grave yard. He’d been here, way back in his last year of grade school for an American History field trip. It hadn't looked much better then, to be honest.
He lit his pip boy, lifting it up to illuminate the cavernous room. Valentine paid him no attention, focused on a display featuring a green and yellow plastic parrot locked inside a cage. His metal fingers traced the lettering of the plaque affixed to the front of the stand and Jack wondered if he had been here too, before he’d become a collection of cogs and transformers.
It still bothered him, after all these years wandering the wastes, to find so many velvet paintings laying around in the ruins. All those grinning cereal advertisements that hung off the walls and the shitty synthetic cloths that had managed to outlast civilization itself. They had been nothing but the latest flash trends, half out before they had made it in. Julie had loved them, constantly redecorating and arranging new plastic and pleather furniture in the latest patterns.
His entire culture had been whittled down, all meaning and significance shaved off till nothing was left but a sparse collection of plastic doodads and rubber coated bullshit. God, how he’d hated it.
People now though, they worshiped it. They sought out those shitty Cheep-o-Mart brand rubber boot soles and Nuka Cola bottles. They needed them. Couldn’t live without them.
Most of the people he knew could barely read at a 2nd grade level. If there was anyone alive who could tan a hide or start a fire without an old world widget of some sort he hadn’t met them. ‘Old world’ was a household brand now, the only brand name you could trust.
Shitty leftovers. Only thing standing between his species and extinction.
Jack shuffled down the center of the room, illuminating each diorama in turn. The ceiling had collapsed half way up the stair well at the far end. Valentine had no problem navigating the mess. When Jack finally squeezed through into the room, ass first and eyes closed, Valentine gripped his shoulder and held him steady.
Makeshift beds were set up against the far wall, each lined up one foot from the next, except the last, wedged to close to its neighbor by half.
The pip boy illuminated what the cloudy windows couldn’t. A smear of blood, not wet enough to glisten, ran across the length of the room and out into the hallway. The rest of the room was untouched. Valentine already had his pistol out, both hands on the grip as Jack swung the rickety pipe rifle from his back and braced it against his shoulder.
The blood belonged to a man. Nineteen, maybe twenty. It was hard to tell someone’s age out in the wasteland but the boy looked younger than himself. Further down the hall one of his legs lay awkward and stiff among an orgy of half-dressed mannequins and bowling pins. Jack resettled his rifle and waded around the corpse, following Valentine toward the first doorway off the main hall.
They weren’t quite halfway when the wood floor let out a creaking groan from somewhere deeper in the building. Another followed and Jack backed into the wall, taking aim down the hall. Whatever it was, it wasn’t small. Steps - two, three then the silhouette of a large, horned head emerged from the last door on the left.
He held his breath, wondering at the intricacies of fitting a death claw through a doorway as its shoulders flexed and squeezed to fit between the joists. Unprepared, he tumbled sideways through a doorway at the small jerk to his elbow. The brief fumble was masked by a ruckus that sounded in the hallway and Jack carefully rolled off the robot’s chest and onto his knees. He was still trying to pull himself off the floor when Valentine tugged urgently at his sleeve, leading him further into the dark room and guiding him forward into a metal hollow low in the wall. The robot followed, backing himself in and pulled the doors shut.
Yellow eyes illuminated the door enough for him to see the small, thin slats that ran lengthwise across the metal doors. He pressed himself tight against Valentines back and peered out through the grating.
In the room beyond the metal box nothing moved. The death claw shuffled around in the hall, sending mannequins and bowling pins rolling past the door. Valentine had shut his eyes so that when he pulled back to whisper into his ear he had to find it first.
“Do you think it will smell us?”
“You, certainly. Me, not so much.” Valentine paused and Jack could hear him resettle his hands on the thick handles. “Take my gun.”
When the death claw finally rounds the doorway, it’s muzzle twitching and massive horns scoring along the doorjamb, Jack is ready. In the doorway the beast gives a great snort and drops down onto its front knuckles to press its face into the floor before advancing on their little metal hideaway.
Coming, he mouths, lips pressed directly into the shell of Valentine’s ear. He feels braver then he should, with the metal door and the metal man between him and the beast. Moments later it was there, snout to the grating and huffing in a deep, noisy breath. Valentine is stiff beneath him, shoulders locked tight while curious claws scrabble over the grating inches from their faces, catching on the lip of the door and the narrow slats - plucking ineffectually.
Jack tucks his face into the cavernous hole in Valentine’s neck when a gust of expiration rolls over him, moist and rancid. Inside the robot smells like metal and grease and Jack catches his nose in a bundle of wires that runs down the front of the others throat.
Hours later Jack rests his head against the back of his companion’s shoulder and shifts carefully, wincing. I have to pee; he mouths silently into the synthetic flesh behind his ear. Valentine cracks one yellow eye, illuminating the small alcove and twists his neck to look behind them.
In the back, he whispers. Jack twist one shoulder to stare further into the box before, sliding carefully backwards, one hand searching urgently for something. He’s pressed up against the wall of the box when he finally jambs his thumb into a small hole. It’s barely large enough for his thumb, but it’s there and Jack belatedly realizes that they are wedged into a service bot cavity. He glances furtively forward at the outline of Valentine against the slatted door before releasing the placard of his suit and pulling himself out.
Damn it but he should have argued harder with Nick. They could have made it out while the Death claw napped. Jack wasn’t stealthy, but he was lucky. They hadn’t left though, and now here he was, trying to stuff his dick in an exhaust tube for a 200 year old vacu-bot system.
Jack dipped his finger in, checking for blockages. He was withdrawing his hand, cock held at ready, when the pipe gave a hard shutter and twisted. Shock sent him backwards, into the riveted panel behind him. In the yellow light he gaped at the blood pouring from his hand, welling up and overflowing down the thighs of his half opened suit. Valentine was on him, fleshy hand curling around the missing fingers. His other hand pounds on the metal plate behind his head, crushing them both back as the door forward swings open over his shoulder.
Somehow valentine pushes through, rivets snapping and plaster raining down. He shoves Jack into the empty cavity between the two walls and scrambles in behind him. The beast roars but fishes halfheartedly, dangling its long claws over the warped panel. Jack wraps his hand in his shirt and stares at the talons, wedged between Nick and the poly-stud bracing.
In the yellow light of his eyes he can see the robot removing a Stim-Pak from his coat pocket. Jack twists his hand tighter into his shirt.
“Fuck,” he whimpers, pressing back into the stud. Nick’s synthetic skin crinkles around his eyes in sympathy but he still tightens his grip on his wrist and angles the fabric covered hand so that he can jab the pronged tip into the gushing hole where his fingers weren’t.
Jack is crying by the third stim, begging him to stop as he lines up another shot over the soaked fabric. The stims are shoddy, at best. The last one had felt like battery acid, which wasn’t unusual but faithfully unpleasant, and had left him throbbing and snotting at the nose.