The Anatomy of Melancholy
First Instar: Lexington Concordance
| You have been warned: This Fallout fanfic in its entirety comes with an EXPLICIT label. Expect the exploration of incredibly heavy themes, including but not limited to acclimating to the onset of disability, grappling with identity and self-agency, sexually and violently graphic experiences, and extensive drug use. This is a horror fic with significant body horror. Each chapter is prefaced with a set of warning labels that for the most part ought to forewarn any difficult topics. (You’re free to suggest any CW’s I may have missed along the way.) Extending him a military contract to facilitate the war effort, the U.S. Army nationalized a Russian chemist as Alan Carey. Carey's martial contributions afforded him a place in Sanctuary Hills's Vault 111, but when the threat of Total Atomic Annihilation™ shepherds the vault into use, he wakes to find he's the only one of its inhabitants who survived the freeze to which none of them consented--if he can even call it surviving. With the end of the world already so far behind in civilization's past, he struggles to find his place again. |
Table of Contents
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1: Brood CXI [0] ↑
"You are the cicada-in-the-earth. You are the shell-in-the-grass. You do not understand what you dream, only that you dream. And when you begin to sing, the song will separate you." CWs: Survivorship, believed isolation, garment-sensory dysphoria, accepting the death of a close friend.
The air shifted from stale to metallic as the gear-shaped hydraulic lift rose to the surface. Alan Carey squinted through the finger gaps of one hand, breathing hard, still clutching the 10mm pistol in the other. He flinched when the lift lurched to a stop. The gradual ascent could not prepare the small middle-aged man for the shift in intensity as he emerged from the Vault's splattered wash of artificial light into the stark, cloudless day. He stood alone in his royal blue gold-edged Vault Suit, grasping to acclimate. Without his hair pulled back, the breeze flicked at his mussed dark shoulder-length ringlets, damp with a cold sweat. He brushed strands from his face, and wished again that he could've used the eyeglasses he'd found on the Overseer's desk. He loathed to have been left broadly blind and clad in only a glorified union suit. At least he had footwear and the Pip-Boy 3000 Mark IV he'd retrieved from that one scientist's remains. The Pip-Boy on his right wrist reflected safe levels of ambient radiation. He opted not to check his vitals diagnostics again. Lingering on bad news gave no room for inevitably worse news. He inched off the margin of the lift platform and headed toward the trail back down to what remained of the suburb below. He hated the thinness of the Vault Suit's fabric—no, more precisely, how it clung to him. The scientists had described the dry wicking and thermal regulation technologies woven into the ultralight materials, but he couldn't recall what all else they'd mentioned. He'd early on tuned out Vault-Tec's shameless self-promotion of its own products, less for the advertisement and more for the requirements for wearing the Vault Suit. Everyone had to remove all clothing and effects: no jewelry, no eyewear, no hair accessories including bobby pins, no underwear, no foundations. ...The way the bodysuit hugged his bare body... At the time, objections had cluttered his throat, in front of all his neighbors, who followed Vault-Tec's guidelines without hesitation. He hadn't known how to justify his discomfort without drawing attention to it outright. It felt so distasteful to have gotten snagged up on such a thing, mere minutes after they'd all witnessed a mushroom cloud consume Boston as they outstripped the blast riding the lift down to safety, and mere minutes after military personnel had held back his roommate Jacob Hawthorne, swearing that the lift was already over capacity, then in the same breath that Hawthorne would be sent down with the next lift group... but then there wasn't another. He shivered, still breathing hard from the persistent, hoary static which clung to him more fiercely than even the bodysuit. He passed skeletons clutching the hurricane fence surrounding the construction area for Vault 111, and lost any trace of optimism of finding Hawthorne alive. Easing along the path, he looked for any signs Vault-Tec staff had come this way recently, but disuse had washed away the dirt path into a deep cut down the hill. "You took Angel with you, didn't you?" He smiled to himself in defeated resignation that he truly was so alone in that moment. Vault-Tec had lied about almost everything. The pods into which the scientists had instructed the residents to enter were not decompression chambers intended to lower them deeper into the Vault. Their possessions would not be returned to them, dead or alive. And they had no intention of cultivating Better Living, Underground. Evacuating from the tomb which sold itself as Vault 111, Carey had still quickly skimmed several of the terminals throughout the property; from them, he'd gleaned that Vault-Tec had hidden consent verbiage in the fine print of their reservation paperwork. The scientists had full permission to cryogenically preserve the Vault's residents, from the residents, and had full permission to disclose nothing. Vault-Tec could have made the decision to incinerate the residents' belongings rather than store them, or the restless security staff, but it didn't really matter either way. He couldn't find comfort in the one twofold truth he could isolate from his hasty investigation: Hawthorne had had a reservation, and that reservation had gone unused. It really was all over, wasn't it? How long had he been on ice? None of the date stamps on the terminal entries had made sense, and he couldn't blame the refrigerant leaks which threatened asphyxia if he lingered too long. Due to the extended absence of scientists in the Vault who could care for the cryogenic arrays, that equipment underwent a series of malfunctions and failures which cost all the residents their lives save Carey, and damaged him chemically every time he partially thawed only to be refrozen. He couldn't understand what factor had spared him. DiPietro, Russell, the Cofrans, the Whitfields, the Callahans, the Ables, even the Murphys with their newborn. Everyone who hadn't gotten into the Vault had surely died. Miss Rosa and her kid, Jahani, the Sumners, the Parkers, the Donoghues, Hawthorne... He doubted any of the Vault-Tec staff who had evacuated with Angel only six months after the bombs had any better luck than those unfortunate enough to have not got into a Vault at all. Had all Vault-Tec Vaults frozen its residents? Fuck, he hoped not. And yet, the possibility felt like his best bet ever encountering another living human. At the bridge over the creek behind Sanctuary Hills, a pair of crumpled skeletons clutched at luggage. His mouth became a line. Carey despised the affirmations of the desolation which the bombs had wrought. He didn't need to see well to recognize the stand of balding, gnarled trees which swaddled the settlement, or hear well to notice the absence of birds. His head hurt. His everything hurt. The sound of the creek had once soothed him, but now it only amplified his dread. He rounded the cul-de-sac in horror. The detonation had reduced the once idyllic suburb to little more than a dozen mounds of steel and concrete, the cars to rusted husks of their former selves. Trees and street lamps had toppled every which way. He could tell no one had come this way in a very long time. He clung to the desperation that the bombs may not have taken out his chem station–or at the very least, the lead lined safe he and his roommate had shared. The remains of a Chryslus Coupe lay on its side at the foot of the hill. Carey lost even his pessimism of finding Hawthorne. He stood staring at the bare bones of what remained of his house on 103 Old North Lane. Their house, he told himself. Time had corroded away many of its modular panels, and the bombs had destroyed the rest. He could see straight through front to back without looking through the spaces he thought once had windows. The rust encrusted mailbox still somehow legibly read Hawthorne, if only barely. A spherical robot rounded the far corner, through the downed picket fence. He gawked at its cephalopodesque tripodal gait, unnerved deeply to see it moving mechanically rather than hovering by its thruster flame. The pistol dropped to the sidewalk, and its clunk punctuated his jaw falling open. The robot noticed him, and its triplicate ocular lenses perked his direction. In an instant, it ignited the pilot light of its thruster, and flew toward him. Its trio of mechanical tendril-like limbs pivoted at its waist to produce a variety of different apparatuses at each terminal node. The soothing mechanical British intonation of a Mister Handy was unmistakable. "Mister Carey...?" "Angel, you're still here." "Oh my stars, it really is you! I just knew you hadn't perished. Oh, I knew it! I made the right choice, then, to come outside the Vault and occupy myself nearby." He glanced past it, down the street. "Is Codsworth still...?" [1] "Don't worry yourself with such dark things! Come inside, Sir. You require medical attention!" Carey welcomed such fawning attention, comforted by the familiar sweet-gas aroma of Handy Fuel, and entered the ramshackle remains of his home. He sat on the dark red dilapidated leather couch, now of uncertain coloration. The flame-floating robot followed him inside with a faint and gentle rhythmic sibilance. With a slouching sigh, he appreciated the pistol retrieved and returned to him. He set it on the arm of the couch, and lifted his chin to unbuckle the collar of his Vault Suit. "Stimpak, Melancholia, and Addictol, if you could, please." "Locality of administration?" "My left leg. Bastards had teeth." Angel pressed a pneumatic syringe to its owner's calf, and as its contents hissed into his veins, a second arm provided an inhaler against his lips, which he wrapped around the mouthpiece. It counted down from three, then depressed the trigger while stowing the syringe node in its first arm in favor of its default tong-like pincer. Once Carey had taken in the briny vapor mix in a deep inhalation, he focused more on the cotton feel of his skull than the prickling heat of the injection. The third arm of the Handy provided him a bottle of liquid to drink, a dark claret colored substance, which he took gladly, not unlike a child to a bottle. He didn't care how much it tasted like cough syrup. He remembered enjoying the flavor at one point, but not what they were for. He only concerned himself with the heavy low of the medicated meal replacement beverage. "This is the first normal thing that's happened all day, Angel." His eyelids fluttered, head so heavy that he couldn't manage investigating the state of his bed, in the likelihood it had not survived the fallout. He laid down on the couch, comfortably drowsy from the opiates in his cocktail. He wanted to vent his approximate understanding of what Vault-Tec had done to him, but he didn't want to worry Angel needlessly. He was too tired to let himself get animated anyway. And he had to be honest with himself: Even he didn't fully comprehend the things that his vitals diagnostics indicated. He was a chemist, not a doctor. Cold metal nudged him to raise his leaden head up off his arms a moment, and when he did, Angel tucked a stuffy pillow under his head. The exhaustion stifled any inspection of stains, let alone complaints. "...Spasibo."[2] "Of course, Mister Carey–but remember to say it in English! Ha-ha! Goodness, how I've missed this." "I feel like I've already slept a hundred years. Why am I... so tired." He failed at kicking off his boots. "There isn't a blanket, is there. I'm not cold. I just feel. Exposed." Before Angel could reply, he was out cold. Laser fire awakened Carey. He scrambled to grab the pistol to arm himself. A frantic scan of the room located no source of the sound or the burnt smell. "I'm sorry, Sir. I think I've lost them." In the living room floor now existed a smoldering pile of ash which Carey assumed had been another of those awfully huge mutated cockroaches. The irony amused him, that his robotic assistant thought it had failed to exterminate the pest, since the physical proof no longer resembled it. He wondered whether Angel could mistake someone or something else for him. "Do tell me you rested well. You've always had such trouble sleeping uninterrupted. I couldn't find a blanket for you, but hopefully the pillow helped some." "I didn't expect there was one when I asked. I slept as well as to be expected. Thank you. It's... I'm all right," he lied, trailing off. Angel had already snuffed its thruster flame to crawl again. Carey checked the safety on his pistol and set it on the couch, then stood to investigate the laundry room on a hunch. "Angel, you must be low on fuel. Come let me top you off." "This is the best day I've had in so long. I cannot thank you enough for coming back for me." Angel deposited itself in the middle of the living room. Carey dragged the petroleum gas canister to where it sat, and sat cross-legged to work Angel's gas cap loose with the screwdriver he'd nicked from a repairman's toolkit in the Vault. A few cap clicks and dilations later, and he could connect the tank to Angel's. "I'm sorry it took me so long," he said at a hush. Angel wouldn't say it, so he asked while he held the refill line to the nozzle: "Entertain me, though, if you could, please. How long has it been since we last saw each other?" "According to my calculations..." Angel's ocular lenses dulled out of focus a moment before honing back in on him. "Approximately two hundred years." Incredulity contorted his lips. He knew he'd been cryogenically frozen, but it was so unreal to hear for how long. From what he knew of military progress, cryogenics was still a pipe dream before the nuclear exchange, and two centuries? He couldn't believe science, in the state he'd last known it, could have achieved what it had, if true. Yet, the amount of time he had been frozen had certainly done him no favors, no matter how long that may have been. "That's... remarkable." "Remarkable is not a word I would use for your vanishing act, Sir. Still, I'm overjoyed to be here for your return." It went quiet a moment. "I've let myself fall into such disrepair. No one has come this way in ages, and I saw such little need to do upkeep on myself for appearance alone... I wanted to believe that you were still alive... Wanted so dearly to believe it...! My hopes had grown so thin as of recent. It started to feel less like groundskeeping and more like gravetending." "Stay with me, moy Angel. I'm here. And I'm going nowhere without you, if this pleases you." "Of course I'll stay with you, Sir. I can't beg your forgiveness enough, that I locked myself out of the Vault and couldn't tend you myself all this time." The pressure gauge indicated the tank had emptied into Angel's. Carey unlatched the line from the nozzle. "Right. You don't have a keyprong to interface with manifests. Only a port by which to be interfaced... I know you'd have come back in if you could. I don't fault you for what they did to me." His voice broke. "What they did to everyone." They yelled at me to keep running for the platform, to waste no time. They promised Hawthorne would be on the next lift down. The Vault-Tec representative had sworn we both had reservations in Vault 111. But it's not like it matters that he didn't get inside. He straightened, deranged a spell. "No guarantee he would have survived. I don't even know how I survived." Angel reignited its flame again and floated before him. "Such awful things you're saying. You are the last resident left alive, then, I'm guessing, from the sound of it. And you're talking about Mister Hawthorne, aren't you, now. You can't blame yourself for the mechanical limitations of Vault-Tec's equipment. If anything, the federal requirement that I accompany you at all times cost him his footing on the lift that day. I was following my programming, and the military personnel were following their admission protocols." "It should've been him," Carey sniveled, haunted. "I didn't deserve to live. Not at this cost." "You did what you had to do. Most living things, to my recollection, are programmed for self-preservation. Mister Hawthorne would without question have wanted at least one of you gentlemen to survive." "And Codsworth?" He looked up to Angel when it didn't reply at first. "You lost your friend to this apocalypse, too, didn't you?" "I ventured to Concord some time ago, in the chance I might encounter you on your way to work. There were people frightfully interested in dismantling me for scrap. I'm quite certain I found the remains of our dear Codsworth littering the thoroughfare there. I dismantled the eye of one of those scoundrels before making my exit. They were... quite rude." "I'm sorry, my friend. That sounds awful. It seems we're both wrought with survivor's guilt, in our own ways. I might be the Sole Survivor of Vault 111, but I'm not the last man alive. Is that what you're telling me?" "Unless they've taken another swing or two at that Total Atomic Annihilation you lot were on about before the War. Ha-ha!" The sky blue Mister Handy offered its tendrils to help its owner stand again. "Come now, Sir. The house furnishings may have all rotted away with the ages, but surely there's something for us to salvage around the neighborhood for you. Let's go see what we can scare up. We'll go together." "It feels like a lofty order, to say I'm interested only if there aren't more of those horrifyingly huge cockroaches. They're roaches. Of course they survived the nuclear exchange." "My records indicate they aren't the worst thing I've encountered since we last met." "Right." Carey grabbed his 10mm again. "Lead the way, then. Together." FootnotesI:1-0 [0] Brood CXI. Broods of cicadas are numbered, and are grouped by the cycles of years during which they have and will emerge(d). CXI is 111 in Roman numerics. I:1-1 [1] Angel vs. Codsworth. The Murphys bought Codsworth in 2076, as a butler to help care for their new baby. The DIA appointed Angel to Carey in 2066 when he was inducted as a Lieutenant of the Deenwood Pharm Corps. The two Mister Handies were very close. |