"Innocence Drowned"

A/N: I had intended this to be a more fully-fleshed, fully realized story than it has turned out to be; my muse decided that it should be more of a set up, almost a series of vignettes, for a New Vegas story. And I've learned not to argue with my muse. She's feisty. :

~#~

My doctor told me that if I wanted my three score and 10, I must go to bed early, keep out of social excitements, and behave myself. You can't do that in Washington. Nobody does. -Mark Twain

~#~

Thirteen months ago...

Honoria Meservey stood in the daylight for the first time in her life and cried. Sunlight blinded her; the horizon, interrupted though it was with jutting bluffs and shattered highways, stretched further away from her than the end of the longest hallway in the vault. Her eyes hurt from trying to adjust to the sudden new depth of field and the pain lanced along her skull in an instant headache.

And, also for the first time in her life, she was alone.

She stumbled to a nearby stone outcropping and sat, face in her hands, allowing herself a few minutes to weep and her eyes to adjust to the light and distance. Then she wiped her tears and forced herself to think. Where would her father have gone? And why? She checked her Pipboy; the radiation levels here, at least, were safe, and her health seemed stable. The map function still worked even out here, and a small marker indicated concentrations of structures that the Pipboy determined likely to be settlements, or at least points of interest. She struck out for the nearest one, and tried not to look back.

~#~

2279 AD

"You all right?"

Honor realized she had been standing, gazing back down the hill at the little outcropping in front of Vault 101, and she shook her head in apology. "Sorry. Just thinking about when I left there. The first time."

Unsurprisingly, Charon said nothing, but Dogmeat bumped her hand with his nose in sympathy. She smiled at them both. "Sorry."

"Apologies are unnecessary."

She clambered up the broken road to his side. "Northwest...makes sense. I'm getting damned tired of breaking up these nests. You'd think they'd get the hint that they're done and move on."

"There is no profit in moving on."

"Well, there's no profit in staying, either; we're all seeing to that pretty well." A pair of mole rats ambled up the hill in front of them, but after some careful snuffling, decided to leave them be. Honor was glad; she hated shooting the poor things just for being what they were. Happily, whatever she had learned taking care of Dogmeat seemed to have affected other animals' reactions to her- feral dogs and mole rats no longer attacked the trio on sight. Maybe they smelled enough like Dogmeat now that the animals thought they were kin. Whatever the case, she was grateful.

"The Enclave don't give up easily," Charon growled, "or at all. Their last man will stand and die sooner than admit they've lost the capital."

Honor wrinkled her nose. "Idiots."

He almost smiled. "Agreed."

She trudged across the radiation-seared hills almost by rote, Charon at her side, Dogmeat following or bounding ahead to sniff out something to chase. She'd been up and down the Capitol Wasteland so many times, she thought she might be able to map the thing out from memory. Their intelligence- gathered by Reilly and her crew, and supplied to Honor via the Brotherhood- indicated an Enclave holdout somewhere near SatCom Array NW-07c. They'd been up there plenty of times before, and found the area to be a whole lot of nothing- but then, several thriving settlements and bunkers around the wasteland were surrounded by a whole lot of nothing. "Whole lot of nothing" pretty much described the entire wasteland once outside of DC proper.

A few days, a few nights, a handful of radscorpions dispatched more or less with ease, and they reached the latest nest of vipers to eradicate. It looked unassuming, a crooked metal door implanted deep in a crevasse in a rocky outcropping, but Honor and Charon were geared for yao guai anyway. Surface appearances meant nothing- it was whatever was deep inside that concerned them. She wished for the umpteenth time that they could have some backup on these little excursions, but she knew well enough that every peacekeeping force in the area was damned busy with other problems. She and Charon had plowed their way through plenty before, but it would be foolish not to always wish for better odds. "Dogmeat, stay here." The wolfdog whined but sat, his bushy tail thumping twice on the ground as he watched them adjust their gear. They dropped their extra packs beside him, taking only weapons, ammo, stimpaks for Honor, and irradiated water for Charon. She took point, hacking the tiny computerized panel on the door to slide it open for them.

Beyond the door, a dim corridor stretched, lit by occasional bulbs along the wall. At the end of the corridor she hacked another lock, granting them entry to the bunker proper. She slipped back into the shadows and crouched down in the blackness when she got a glimpse of the bunker, Charon following suit. She bent her head close to his to whisper. "It looks like Raven Rock."

"Implications."

"Huge. Populated. Active."

He pulled down his shotgun. "Make a stand here. Make them come to the doorway to face us, two at a time. Even the odds."

"Agreed. All kinds of agreed." She gestured him back a few yards the way they'd come, then crept back into the bunker to find someone to chase her.

She could have sent Charon, but the thought didn't occur to her; it never did. She would no more risk his life to spare herself danger than she would have Reilly's, or Sydney's, or anyone else's she had fought beside. Her father had raised her to be responsible for herself. Of course, now she wondered how much of that "responsibility" and "self-reliance" he had taught her had been because he knew he was going to leave her. In the end, though, it didn't matter. She supposed she was happy enough with the daughter he had raised- the person she had become.

She located a few inhabitants- a scientist, a pair of soldiers in power armor, typical Enclave flunkies. She dropped one of the soldiers with a head shot, then turned and ran. She heard heavy clanging footsteps behind her. She shouldered her rifle and pulled a couple of mines from the pack at her hip. She armed one with each hand and dropped them into place as she leapt through the doorway and ran into the darkness.

She misjudged her distance and collided hard with Charon. He didn't so much as budge, but the blow winded her and knocked her onto her rump. A split second after she fell, twin blasts from behind pelted her with tiny bits of power armor and Enclave soldier. She spat dust and metallic tang from her mouth and stood up.

"Found someone, I see," Charon said. She grinned at him in the darkness.