sideways | scissors paper rock

Title: Scissors, Paper, Rock

Rating: PG

Series: Fallout 4 (original characters)

Wordcount: 750

Summary: “What did you tell them, Alex?”
Warnings: Descriptions of hand injury

Remarks: Quick fic for a friend for whumptober, featuring our characters; prompt was 'torture'.

Rachel takes the steps to the upper level in six long strides, leaving Jerome to puff behind her as he hastens to keep up. Outside the doc’s door, Alex’s creepy little forever girl has her nose pressed to the grimy window, but she takes one look at Rachel coming along the landing and scrambles down off the crate, disappearing in a flash around the nearest corner. It just about makes her Rachel’s favourite person of the entire fucking week.

It’s obvious why the synth kid's stuck outside: the moment Rachel pushes the door in she’s greeted by a raw, yelping sound, the same noise made by the rib-skinny feral dogs any time someone gets a good kick in. Alex is a bowed shape in his chair, head buried in the bend of his own elbow, arm held stiffly out in front as Doc patiently pulls another swollen, crooked finger back into line.

Rachel grinds her teeth so hard she can almost feel the migraine aura pop in front of her eyes.

“It was an easy trade,” she says. “How do you fuck up an easy trade.”

Alex lifts his head slightly. If there’s any expression on his face, it’s impossible to pick out from the landscape of disasters crowded across it. One eye is little more than an overripe mutfruit, puffy and deep purple, and flecks of dried blood are still crusted around his nose and the splits on his eyebrows. He's so mottled with bruises he looks like the mouldering Old World portraits hanging inside their rotting mansions.

It’s Jerome who speaks up from his position against the doorjamb, leaning into it with arms loosely folded. “Trade never had a chance. Priya reckons the Roscelli brothers are dead, and I’d say it's likely. Dunno who these new jokers are, but they don’t got an easy manner."

Priya’s dead to the world on their one cot, sunk into unconsciousness with her blown kneecap bound; the only other member of the ill-fated trading party to come crawling back. Rachel’s lost a load of Alley goods and three people, and been left with crippled scraps.

“They let them go,” she says, nodding at the pair.

“Made their point,” Alex says - quietly, carefully, the words mushy and slurred out of swollen lips. He doesn’t meet her eyes, instead watching the doc unroll a strip of fraying grey gauze.

“You mean they got what they wanted.” Three broken fingers; not even an entire hand. She takes a step forward. “What did you tell them, Alex?”

He looks straight at her then. They both know he hadn’t wanted to go on the trip at all, had argued it to the last moment - he hated leaving the Alley for any reason, even if he was the first one to start sighing and whining if a party came back with anything less than the perfect matches for his shopping lists. She’d been nursing a headache the size of Boston, and a bottle of Nuka Cola hurled high over his head had ended the debate.

In the same flat monotone he uses to announce the latrine roster, Alex says, "We’re falling apart. Selling off more than we can afford just for food, hardly any good guns left. People are restless and scared.” A beat, his breath stuttering slightly as Doc grabs his wrist again. “And we’re lead by a violent, crazy woman no one trusts.”

They hold the gaze a long moment; Jerome glances between them with an eyebrow raised, but is smart enough to keep his mouth shut.

Rachel snorts, relaxing.

“Just give him one of the stimpaks already,” she says, waving an impatient hand as she turns on her heel. “He’s about as useful to me with one hand as nipples on a mudcrab.”

On the ground floor of the Alley, Rachel stops, rakes a hand back through her hair. Takes in the guards perched high on the walls, alert and ready. The civilians plowing out a thin strip of ground for the next tomato crop.

“How much do we have left of the stash we took from that last Brotherhood shipment?” she asks.

Jerome rubs his neck, thoughtful. “Depends how loud you’re looking to be.”

Her fingers are itching, wanting Sunshine’s weight. Whoever these newcomers were, they’d dug their own grave the second they’d snapped the first finger. Her Alley. Her people. Her shit.

“I want them to hear me on the other side of the city, Jerome,” she says. “I want a fucking crater.”