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Born in a Strange Shadow	By : Pervymonk Category: +A through F > Fallout (Series) > Fallout (Series) Views: 10605 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own the Fallout games, or any of the characters related to the Fallout games. No money was made from this story.

Chapter List
- 1-Born in a Strange Shadow
- 1
Pickman’s mother, during a time when he had such a thing, used to say he was born in a strange shadow. The two of them lived in a tiny settlement on the outskirts of the Commonwealth, and from a young age Pickman knew he made others uncomfortable. His mother avoided others as a general rule, and Pickman found he had no use for them either. He clung to his mother’s hand and ignored the rest of the world, content to draw on scraps of paper with scavenged crayons or chalk.
Pickman doesn’t so much remember his mother’s face as much as he remembers her light. He couldn’t for the life of him tell someone what her hair color was, or describe the shape of her eyes, but he remembers her as always having a backdrop of sunlight behind her. Beautiful, blinding sunlight that seemed to come from around her, inside of her, blurring her face and making Pickman feel a warm safety he has never been able to recreate, neither in art nor killing. She was meek. She was innocent. She was good.
The only time she fought was when the raiders came for her, but even then it wasn’t enough. They tore her to bits, while she begged and screamed, and that was the day when Pickman saw the color red in all of its awful clarity, splashed against the cabinet doors in which he hid.
After that, red colored his world. It was all he saw when he closed his eyes. He lived in a world of startling crimson, all-consuming black, and cold yellow light. The red fueled him like blood fuels the body, and he cut raiders up for something living to hold on to. The blackness ate at him, calling his name and promising peace. He used the red to fight it back. The yellow was nothing like the warm yellow sunlight that surrounded his mother and instead his days became characterized by the harsh yellow light seen in the eyes of monsters in the dark.
He never saw any other colors until she stormed into his life, all blues, greens, purples.

Pickman’s fist echo as he beats the flesh of Slab. The raider shakes, barely able to hold his gun, and Pickman doesn’t know if it’s from anger or fear. Pickman dodges the pistol whip Slab tries to hit him with, grabbing the outstretched arm and breaking it in one smooth motion. The woman whistles lowly, lowering her gun, as Pickman effortlessly slides up behind him.
“No! No please-” Pickman cuts Slab’s pathetic begging short by snapping his neck. Much cleaner than how Pickman usually did things but it would be rude to keep his company waiting. He hears footsteps and a strangled cry behind him. Before Pickman can turn, a gunshot echoes throughout the cavern, and the raider falls dead beside Slab with a smoking bullet hole in his chest.
“Thank you,” Pickman says formally. The woman nods, hostlering her pistol. There are two individuals next to her that Pickman hadn’t noticed-a woman and a synthetic man. The woman next to her wears a red trenchcoat that he can see doesn’t really suit her. Judging by the horrified expression on her face, she doesn’t see the beauty of red the way he can. The man, all silver and wires, looks vaguely distraught as he keeps his bright yellow eyes on Pickman.
“They deserved a fate much worse than death,” he continues and the woman in the red that doesn’t suit her looks vaguely sick. But the other, the bright one, nods.
“Killers through and through,” she says with disgust lacing her voice. “Ain’t got a use for them.” Pickman chuckles.
“They got their pound of flesh,” he says. “I’ll collect my own again soon.” He looks the woman up and down approvingly. She’s dressed in plain leather armor, clad in black darkness, but it doesn’t consume her colors. Blue eyes sparkle almost knowingly beneath a curtain of light brown hair, and he tilts his head to better see the color of them.
“I owe you,” he says softly.
“You don’t owe me anything,” the woman says quickly. “I would have done it either way.” He laughs again, enchanted by her modest insistence.
“All the more reason to reward you,” he says, reaching into his pocket for the key to his safe. “Come with me to my gallery to look deep into my painting ‘A Picnic for Stanley’, and I will show you my gratitude.”
“Those, er, paintings?” The synth speaks up, uncertainty in his voice. How remarkably lifelike, Pickman thinks. “They’re yours?”
“You disapprove?”
“Blood and viscera are a bit unconventional for art supplies,” the synth says.
“I liberate the pictures from their cages of petty mortal flesh,” Pickman explains.
“Blue,” the woman in red says unsurely.
“Really, you don’t-“ the bright one starts, and Pickman’s brow furrows. He holds his safe key out to her. Hesitantly, she reaches out to take it and he feels the softness of her fingertips brushing against his palm. As if guided by some impulse he could neither name nor understand, he wraps his slender fingers around her wrist and, bring her hand up to his lips, placing a gentle kiss to the top of her knuckles.
“Let me give you my gratitude,” he says against her skin and he is rewarded with her answering shudder.
“S-sure,” she says. “Ok. Thank you.” He nods, releasing her hand.
“Follow me,” he says, feeling something new creeping up the edges of his vision. He leads the three of them back through to his gallery in silence. The bright one walks next to him, and he finds his eyes drawn to her more often than not. ‘Blue’, her companion called her and he finds it fitting. She carries herself with an odd sort of calm and he feels a strange sort of peace falling into step beside her. Once inside of the gallery, he explains the paintings to them or rather to her. “This one is called ‘Subway Accident’, and it’s the newest piece that called to me.”
“Hands reaching up out of hell,” she says, and he startles at her observation. Her companions look sickly behind her but her bright blue eyes are a light with something past horror.
“Yes,” he says, pleased. They move from his basement studio to his main gallery upstairs, and she pauses in front of a painting he did some time ago, when he first decided to use raiders to quiet the siren song of the mad art inside of him. An angel hangs with harsh yellow light dripping from his wings like blood. He moves past her to ‘A Picnic for Stanley’ (poor Stanley-he never stood a chance against Pickman) and reverently takes it off the wall. Her soft footfalls echo in the gallery and he doesn’t think he’s ever had a creature of such gentle persuasion in his abode before. She unlocks the safe and he watches her with bated breath as she takes his knife-the knife-out of the safe.
“For you,” he says softly.
“Uh,” the bright one says, as if stunned into speechlessness by the thoughtfulness of his gift. “T-Thank you.” He nods, holding his hand out again. She hands him back the key and jumps as he grabs her wrist again. He kisses her hand again.
“Come back and see me anytime, killer,” he says. She nods slowly, and he leans against the wall, watching her leave his gallery.
The place seems dimmer for her absence.

Piper’s already jotting notes down the minute the three of them walk into the sunlight. Nora shudders, taking in several deep breaths to try and rid her nose of the stench of blood and decay.
“How’s this for an opening? ‘We entered with the intent to deal with some raiders, but as soon as we entered that wicked gallery it became obvious the raiders were not the most dangerous thing in the building.’”
“Pretty bold considering you were speechless while we were in there,” Nora says. She tilts her head back, and the bright sunlight almost burns her eyes. “God, I can’t get the smell of blood out of my nose.”
“Give me a statement,” Piper says, finishing off a particularly gruesome description.
“I think he saw our horror and was highly complimented,” Nick says. He shakes his head. “I sure am glad we’re out of that place. That man was some kind of monster.”
“What about you, Blue? You seemed awful chummy with him, accepting his ‘gift’,” Piper says, putting ‘gift’ in finger quotes.
“What did you want me to do? Tell the nice serial killer I didn’t want his gift?” Nora says incredulously at her companion’s disapproval. “Guys, he likes to fingerpaint with blood. He killed a raider who had a gun. With his bare hands.”
“He seemed awfully interested in you, Nora,” Nick says. Piper’s brow furrows at the detective’s words and Nora shivers.
“Jeez, Nick. Thanks. Not like the paintings weren’t enough nightmare fuel,” Nora grumbles, rubbing at her arms as if to chase away a phantom chill.
“Yeah, he did. Don’t go anywhere alone for a while. Okay, Blue?” Piper says, her pen pausing its frantic scribbling.
“Don’t need to tell me twice,” Nora says. “Memorize the sights, kids, because we aren’t coming anywhere near this place for a while.”

Following her becomes a compulsion stronger than his art, and it’s the first time in his life something has called him louder than blood.
It’s easy enough to keep tabs on her. All Pickman has to do is follow the stories of the ‘angel of the Commonwealth’. And she is an angel, helping all who ask for it. She leaves a path of budding settlements in her wake, helping protect the people from monsters both human and mutated. He delights in watching her take bounties on groups of raiders that prey on farmers, and he falls more in love with her when she cuts a bloody swath through a group of them to get back the locket they’d stolen from the Abernathy girl they had killed.
He watches her gun down raiders, and she has an almost clinical detachment. His heart races as he thinks of her cutting into them, of spilling their redness over her hands, over her body. He imagines taking her smaller, more delicate hands in his large ones, and teaching her the best ways to cut into a person. He imagines guiding her hands through, helping liberate the red paint from flesh, of running his hands over her body until he stains the skin with red-
He learns her name his Nora by posing as a settler in the first settlement she’d started, a place called Sanctuary Hills. He learns from a ghoul that she used to live here.
“I knew her, before,” the ghoul says eagerly. “She offered me a place here-can you believe it? She’s a real angel.”
“She seems lovely,” Pickman says, keeping his voice low as he watches her running between settlers, helping to carry long beams of scavenged steel.
“She’s always so busy,” the ghoul says with a shake of his head. “Doesn’t ever take time-or anything else-for herself.”
His heart tightens. She does so much for the wasteland, and gets so little in return. That is when he decides to do something about that. The gifts start small at first. A box of ammo for her favored gun, a shipment of much needed steel for a building project she’s started with this or that new settlement. She’s delighted, if a little wary, by them. But they aren’t personal enough. She will never figure out they are from him, that he is enchanted by her and wants only to fill her days with pleasure born of gratitude.
He begins leaving her letters along with gifts. The first he compliments her on her ruthlessness in dealing with those raiders who killed the Abernathy girl, and her compassion in retrieving the locket for her grief-stricken family. He draws hearts in blood at the end of his letters, and starts to leave her works of art. He has to scavenge blue paint-it is an unfamiliar color for him-and the first painting has her as an avenging blue angel cutting through a red sea of raiders.
The painting upsets her, when she finds it-he notices it in the way her brow furrows and the way she holds the painting at arm’s length from her. Her blue eyes are alight with distress and he wants to call reassurances from the shadows. He watches as she scraps the painting, using the wood of the frame to help build a chair for one of her aged settlers.

He follows as she finds yet another settlement taken over by raiders, and his heart leaps in his throat as her stupid, power armored companion raises an alarm that draws a deathclaw to her. Pickman rarely uses guns-he finds them impersonal-but he knows the necessity of carrying one while out in the wasteland. It’s in his hands before he can truly focus on it, the unfamiliar weight of in his hands, and he shoots at the deathclaw rabidly throwing chunks of earth at his beloved.
The deathclaw picks her up in one giant hand, roaring in her face, and Pickman scrambles to find a vantage point that will allow him to shoot the creature’s unarmored belly. He hears the frantic shouts of her companion, and sees her hands grasping for something strapped to her thigh. The deathclaw roars, and blood spurts from its eye, covering her in red. It drops her, and she lands with a hard thud. The solider is next to her in an instant, pulling her behind him and opening fire on the creatures belly with a laser rifle. The deathclaw howls, its stomach burned open and its entrails spilling over their feet. It falls the ground with enough force to shake the ground, and pitifully dies.
“I don’t know why you keep that knife,” the soldier says as she goes to pull it from the deathclaw’s eye. “But today, I am glad you did.” Pickman inches closer, forgetting to stick to the shadows, and sees that it’s the knife, the one he gave her, and his heart soars at the thought of his most favored weapon saving the life of his most favored person.
“It’s useful,” he hears her say as she wipe the blood off on the thigh of her armor. Pickman’s hungry gaze follows that one spot of blood, on her upper thigh, as she turns to her companion. “Waste not, want not.” Pickman had often heard her say such things before. She’d come from before the bombs, in a time of great excess, and had strove to champion the ideals of reuse and self-sufficiency. It thrilled him that she had kept his weapon, that she had found it useful. Pickman steps closer to see her bathed in the harsh fluorescent light of the tower, to see the red that marks her delicious thigh just so, but he forgets himself and the twig he steps on breaks loudly in the silence left by the deathclaw’s absence. The soldier pivots, laser rifle at the ready.
“Who’s out there?” he demands. “Show yourself!”
Pickman stumbles back, not before Nora’s flashlight shines in his eyes with blinding light. Her expression morphs from simple curiosity to brilliant, awful clarity, and Pickman blunders into the shadows, hiding from her sight.
“Hey! HEY!” the soldier yells, but Nora’s hand on his arm stops him. “Nora, do you know him?” Pickman watches as she gives the man a tight, shaky smile, and his heart beats in his chest as her eyes rake over the darkness as though searching for him.
Once they’ve left, he strips several large pieces of skin from the deathclaw to use in his next gift, and leaves a painting of her fighting a deathclaw at her next stop, a place called Croup Manor. The large house at the head of the settlement has been blown out, and work is still being done to complete it, so he watches her from a distances between the skeletal frame that has been put up in place of crumbling walls. She touches the skin of the deathclaw and recoils in disgust, scrapping that painting much like she did the last one.
After that, the next painting he tries is a portrait of her. He scavenges paint of more colors-steals green from Diamond City, finds soft yellow in an abandoned warehouse, braves green and grey supermutants for a cache of different shades of blue, stumbles across a find of brilliant purples and whites.
He tries and tries to capture her visage, but he can’t get it right. In this one, her skin isn’t the right color. In that one, her eyes look too dead. He tries using models, but using dead female raiders causes the painting to come out a sight darker than he meant, and the live ones are too much trouble.
No one looks like she does, and his imagination is too weak to capture her heavenly glow.
He takes up following her again, and catches up with her in a settlement called Tenpines Bluff. It’s a tiny settlement, only about ten people, so he sticks to the shadows instead of trying to blending as a settler. He watches her as she mills about the settlement, sitting in a forgotten blasted out tree. He makes various sketches of her as she helps out around the settlement. Her traveling companion is the synth this time, battered fedora pulled low over glowing yellow eyes, and his eyes stay on her the same way Pickman’s do.
He looks down at his sketchbook in frustration. He’s not close enough. He knows her eyes are an electric blue, set in a gentle face, but try as he might he can’t capture that with his art. Harsh lines and sharp angles characterize his art but they make her look more monstrous than she is. She is an angel, and he wants this gift to show that.
He waits until darkness crawls along the sky, chasing away the sun, and watches through an open window as she gets ready for bed. There is no glass in the window-at best it is just a hole in a shack wall-but it gives him unhindered access to looking at her. She rolls her neck, rubbing it with a hand, and begins to strip out of her armor. Pickman’s breath catches in his throat as he sees her exposed skin. The fluroscent light of the shack shines harshly on her skin but Pickman doesn’t find her any less beautiful.
She looks softer than Pickman imagined that she would have. Curves define her figure instead of the sharp angles of most wastelanders. She has a bit of pudge to her stomach, and Pickman licks his lops as his eyes trail downwards to patch of curly hair between her legs. She looks healthy, and although she hadn’t been in the wasteland long, Pickman can see traces of more than a few healing scars. The ones across her belly surprise him. She had a child. He wonders what happened to the child, if raiders took Nora’s child away from her the same way raiders took his mother from him.
She slips into a thin nightgown. It’s sheer, clinging to her frame like a lover’s grip, and he watches with shadowed eyes as she dims the lights and lays down to sleep. He risks moving closer to watch the even tell of her breathing, but soon finds himself standing over her bed.
He blinks. He vaguely remembered coming in through the window, holding himself delicately so he wouldn’t make a sound, but none of that seems important now that he was in front of perfection itself. She sleeps peacefully, as though unconcerned with his presence, and he can make out the shape of her face by the weak light of the moon. He’s never seen her look so at peace. Soft brown hair covers her face, and Pickman wants to commit the sight of her to memory, to immortalize this moment with his art.
Absurdly, he imagines that he is one of her traveling companions, and that’s he’s about to follow her to bed. In his fantasy, they’ve just cleared out raiders from attacking another settlement. They won, victorious, and she just wanted to rest afterwards. He watched her as she tore through the raiders, an avenging angel bent on cleansing the wasteland. She looks beautiful like this, and Pickman wonders how he could ever do her justice. He reaches a hand out, hesitates before deciding, and he caresses the top of her head. Her hair feels oddly soft against his fingers, and he curls his fingers in her hair.
She wakes up with a strangled gasp, and hair hand grasps his wrist tightly.
“Hey, killer,” he says affectionately. She gives a strangled shout, pushing at him with all of her might, and he stumbles back with a grunt. He hears a muffled curse come from somewhere close, and he moves to the window. He turns back to see her looking at him with her eyes wide, and he smiles at her before fleeing back to his gallery.
He had a painting to finish, and it comes out beautifully. He painted her sleeping, with warm yellow sunlight pouring through the window. He leaves it across the doorstep of her house in Diamond City, along with a note full of sweet nothings.

She’s very rarely alone after that, always having one of her dear companions near. Pickman doesn’t like the way they seem to admire her (some seem to idolize her) and he is particularly wary of the dunce in power armor that follows her like a lost puppy.
However, it turns out that he is not the one that has captured Nora’s affection. Her affection belongs to one who isn’t human at all, who doesn’t even look human-black coolant runs through his veins instead of warm red blood, and Pickman doesn’t know that he can stand watching the way the automaton treats her with such quiet reverence.
Pickman should be the only priest to worship at the altar of her bloody church. He stays in Diamond City, finding it much easier to blend in, and watches as she stays mostly within the city walls, only straying to leave with the detective. She works as his partner, and Pickman feels a strange sort of jealousy. She should be his partner in art, not running around working cases with a machine. One night, Pickman watches the two of them after a particularly easy case. They’re outside of the Detective Agency, and the synth mills around almost anxiously before Nora asks him what’s wrong.
“I, uh, I got you a present,” Nick says, almost shyly.
“A present?” she asks with childlike glee. “What’d you get me? What’d you get me?” Nick reaches into the folds of his trenchcoat and pulls out something made of blue fabric.
“Almost debated on not giving it to you,” he says. “I found it at Fallon’s Basement, and, well, I thought it would suit you.”
“Nick,” Nora says, almost reverently. She holds the dress out in front of her. It’s a deep shade of blue, twinkling purple with sequins in the harsh red neon light that shines from the Valentine’s Detective Agency sign. She smiles brilliantly at the synth, a smile that Pickman would have killed to have directed at him, and something ugly breaks in his chest.
“I love it. I’m going to put it on,” she says excitedly. Nick chuckles, and she continues. “We should go out! A dress this nice deserves a night on the town.”
“Where would we go?” Nick asks. “More importantly, who would take you?”
“You would,” she says. “I mean, you got me the dress. It’s only fair you show it off with me.”
“Nora,” Nick says, his voice impossibly gentle and almost sad. “I’m not exactly the best person to take you out on a date.” How dare that automaton act as if it truly felt for Nora? It had no idea the depth of love Pickman had for her-it was just a pretender.
“It doesn’t have to be a date,” she says quickly. “Just friends having noodles?” Pickman hates the way the synth looks at her, with something like love lighting up those monstrous yellow eyes, and finally Nick says quietly,
“Could never say no to you, sweetheart.” She smiles again, all blue sky and bright yellow sunshine, and darts past him to go inside of Nick’s detective agency. The synth sighs, lighting a cigarette-an affectation of a previous life- and doesn’t move until she comes back out. She gives Nick a shy smile, the blue of the dress bringing out her eyes, and Nick forgets to exhale his cigarette smoke for a moment.
Pickman’s gut twists in jealously. She’d thrown out all of the gifts he’d left for her and this broken synth hands her a gaudy piece of fabric and she fawns all over it. He follows them to the noodle stand, keeping his distance even though he can’t stand the way she walks arm in arm with the synth. They sit, ordering noodles, and the two of them make easy conversation. Pickman sits on the other side of the noodle stand, watching them through the lights strung up around it. He has a steaming bowl of noodles in front of him, but he pays it no mind as he watches her laugh at all of the synth’s jokes, and once leans over to kiss his metal cheek. The synth stutters over what he was going to say next, and looks at her with an expression of awe.
“Sorry,” she says quietly. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”
“You didn’t, sweetheart,” Nick says. “Just out of all the people in the Commonwealth you could kiss, I can’t imagine why you’d pick me.”
“Because you deserve it,” she says quietly. She leans over and Nick tentatively offers his cheek for her to kiss. Her lips land on the corner of his mouth. “You’re a good man, Nick.”
Pickman breaks the chopsticks in his hand. He didn’t particularly care about hurting synths. He never saw the appeal of destroying something man-made and inorganic. Breaking metal wouldn’t mute the colors the way breaking bone would. But that night he goes home and he paints, spilling gray, yellow and black across a worn canvas in the form of broken metal limbs wrapped in a faded trenchcoat.
He leaves the painting across her bed in Diamond City where she is sure to find it.

Pickman doesn’t startle when Nora storms into his gallery, all bright blue anger, (as he knew she would-the painting was an invitation, after all) and only looks up from his painting at the sound of her yelling.
“Pickman!” she shouts. “Pickman, you son of a bitch, get out here!”
“I’m here, sweetheart,” Pickman calls, trying the endearment the synth affected. It tastes like bitter copper in his mouth, like the scent of the red paint he used.
“Don’t call me that,” she snaps. He moves up the stairs to the main gallery, and sees her back turned to him as she struggles to follow the sound of his voice.
“You let the machine call you that,” he says almost petulantly, as he hides behind a large pillar before she can see him.
“You leave Nick alone,” she says with a fierceness he thought she only reserved for raiders. “Don’t you go near him.” Pickman keeps his footsteps quiet, once throwing a piece of fallen debris from the ceiling to lead her away from his position.
“Are you here alone?” he asks as soon as she is on the other side of the gallery. He crouches down, hiding behind a display case partly filled with human bones-his newest project, one that he abandoned when he met her.
“I didn’t want to risk you hurting anyone,” she says. “I don’t need help to take you down.”
“Will you kill me?” he asks, moving as she turns frantically, trying to follow the sound of his voice. He has never been as grateful for the acoustics of the gallery as he is in that moment. His voice echoes off of the walls, as if it were going to consume her. He likes the idea of her being eaten alive by his voice, of her being suffocated by the love in it. She falters at his question.
“Not if you leave me, and my friends, alone,” she says. Ah. She is trying to talk him reasonably. He had seen it work for her on more than one occasion. But a man in love is immune to reason, and he readies his gift for her in his hands.
“Killer,” he says. “You are an avenging angel, and I am like a moth drawn to your flame.”
“Don’t-“ her voice falters. “Don’t call me that.”
“It isn’t anything to be ashamed of, killer,” he says. “I’ve seen the way you cut through raiders.”
“I don’t enjoy it,” she says, her voice barely a whisper.
“You should. Does killing them mute the colors for you, too?”
“What?” she asks.
“You understand me, killer,” he says, twisting his fingers around the syringe in his hands. “No one else has looked at my paintings and seen what you have seen. No one else goes after raiders the way you do.”
“I’m not-I don’t-“ she says as he sneaks up behind her. She can feel his presence and turns, but it is a fraction of a second too late. He sinks the syringe into her neck, and she yelps deliciously in pain.
“I would let your light burn me,” he whispers as she struggles to stay conscious. “I would let the blue of your light wash away this awful redness that has drenched my soul.” He nuzzles the spot of her neck where he’d ruthlessly pushed the syringe and holds on to her as she falls into panicked unconsciousness.
He carries her up the stairs to his bedroom, where he has a gift waiting for her. It’s a bright, blood red dress, and a little unconventional by his standards. He hadn’t been able to stand the thought of her draped in the synth’s gift, the blue of the fabric overshadowing Pickman’s love for her, and so he’d scoured the Commonwealth finding one to replace it. He gently sets her on the mattress and reverently begins to disrobe her.
She’s just as beautiful as he remembers, but he doesn’t touch her in that way. Not yet.
He allows himself to savor the feel of her skin, running his knuckles up her side, as he slides the dress on her. He gently lifts her head to tie the top of it to rest on the base of her neck, and shudders at the view of scarlet against her neck. He smooths the dress out over her curves, more to feel her than anything else, and sits next to her to wait until she wakes up.
She’s more groggy than anything, her eyes taking more than a few tries before fluttering open. She’d dreamed of Nate, of their home in Sanctuary before the war. He’d been making breakfast, smiling at her brilliantly, and it’d been enough to make her forget the past few months. It’d been enough to make her forget the raiders, the blood, even Nick and-
Pickman.
Her eyes startle open, and he’s there, smiling at her.
“Where are my clothes?” she slurs, her hands feeling unfamiliar fabric draped over her body, hugging her curves. A dress, she thinks and she doesn’t know if she wants to laugh or scream. The thing that pushed Pickman over the edge was a dress, of all things, given to her by Nick, and he just had to give her one of his own. The dress is a bright wine red, almost scarlet like blood.
Pickman tilts his head as though admiring her. It feels so good to see her draped in his color, though it doesn’t suit her the way blue does. The red brings out a harshness in her eyes that sends delightful, terrifying shivers down his spine, and he indulges again in the fantasy of helping her cut into flesh, of running blood-stained hands across the length of her body-
“Have dinner with me,” he says instead of answering her. He helps her up, and she wants to laugh at the absurdity of it all. She’s drugged, he’s been stalking her for months and now that the spider has the fly within its grasp, it decides to be a gentleman.
“What did you give me?” she asks harshly, tripping over her words, and he shushes her as he helps her over the ancient debris littering the floor of the building. He sits her down at the head of an ancient, decaying dining table, and she sees a bloody steak of something sitting on a plate in front of her. A glass of deep red wine sits next to it, and she thinks of an imaginary serial killer from her time, one who enjoyed art and opera and who ate people who displeased him.
She wonders if Pickman eats the raiders he kills.
Pickman sits down next to her, a gentle smile on his face. The expression on his face reminds her of Nate with its aching sincerity, and she finds that she hates him. She should have never come her alone, should have at least told Nick-
Her thoughts drift to Nick, and her heart aches. Nick. She can’t let Pickman have him.
She won’t.
She grabs the steak knife, the crafty thing, and within moments she’s trying to stab him with it. He briefly considers letting her, if only to see the red of his life’s blood spill over her fingers, but the knife is long enough to kill him, if she tries hard enough, and so his sense of self-preservation kicks in. He grabs her wrist, twisting her arm behind her back. The pained groan she makes sounds delightful in its defiance and, with his free hand, he reaches up to undo his tie. He slips the fabric-bright red, to match her dress-off of his collar and grabs her other wrist as she fails in vain for another weapon to use. He ties both of her hands behind her back with great difficulty. He turns her so she faces him.
"I like your enthusiasm, killer," he says and, in one last act of angry desperation, she spits at him. A glob of spit hits his cheek and he laughs, wiping it off with his sleeve. He wraps one hand around the back of her neck and presses his lips to hers.
She tastes of hope and bright yellow sunlight. He can see the color blue behind his eyelids as he tastes her and he wants to suck out her very soul. His kiss is a punishing one, all hard edges and sharp teeth, and she bites at his lips until blood flows over both of their chins.
He knocks the dishes to the floor and sets her up on the table. She tries to kick at him but he catches her ankle and holds it tightly. He braces his other hand on her knee, holding her other leg down, and presses his lips to the inside of her calf. Her skin feels warm against his lips, and he kisses his way up her leg, pushing the hem of her dress up. She howls in rage, but his hands hold her legs down steadily. He idly thinks it must be uncomfortable to lay on her tied wrists, but he nuzzles the juncture between her thigh and her sex in an effort to comfort her. She moans, a low and desperate sound, and Pickman doesn’t know whether it is from pain or pleasure. He presses gentle kisses across her skin, mouthing her sex through the thin white panties he’d left on her. His hand snakes up from her knee, and he pulls the fabric to the side before pressing his lips back to the hot heat of her.
“Don’t,” she says, her voice a hoarse whisper, but Pickman can’t help himself.
“Shh,” his says against her folds. He carefully laps at her with his tongue, swirling it around her clit. She bites down on her lip but soft breathy moans spill out anyway. He presses his mouth over her more fully, sucking at her lips greedily. The sharp taste of her fills his mouth, and he likes the way she quivers when he moans against her. When he closes his eyes, he sees blue and the soft sounds she tries to stifle make his heart thump wildly in his chest. Her legs twitch, as if she’s trying to decide whether or not to kick him, and he likes feeling the weight of them on his shoulders. His hand idly wanders up past her thighs, pushing the fabric of her dress up. He teases one breast with his hand as he works at her with his mouth, sucking and kissing her. She pushes her face into the table to muffle her moan, but it doesn’t work. He sucks at her as she shudders on the table and when he pulls away he smiles at the feeling of the cool air across his wet lips. Catching her defeated gaze, he idly runs his tongue up her slit, roughly pushing his tongue inside of her as he holds her attention, and she lets out a small, overwhelmed groan that he feels all the way down his spine.
He kisses his way up her body, pressing his lips reverently to her skin and running his tongue over the stretch marks that cover her thighs, her stomach, her breasts. She whimpers softly as he closes one mouth over her breast, and he runs his fingertips over the red marks his beard left on her skin. He massages her other breast in his palm as he releases the one he’d been working with his mouth with a loud pop. He kisses his way up her chest, over her neck. Her cheeks are wet; he can taste salt and the mascara she’d scavenged. She liked to put on makeup on the mornings she stayed in her settlements, but Pickman thought she looked more beautiful with it running down her face like paint.
He reaches up with one hand to unbutton his shirt, keeping his other hand on her body. He runs his fingertips over her skin, over the dress bunched up around her shoulders. He cups her cheek, and she moves her face as if she could move away from him. Once he’s done unbuttoning his shirt, he unclasps his belt. He doesn’t imagine the whimper that pours from her lips at the sight of his arousal, and he feels that delicious electricity run down his spine again. He leans over, trailing his lips over the skin of her neck to her jawline as a lover would.
“Just…” he hears blow past the top of his head. “Just get it over with.” He enters her in one swift, hard motion, and gasps in pleasure as she almost sobs with her eyes closed. She’s soft, in ways Pickman could have never imagined. So hot he feels she could set him aflame, and he would happily burn.
He finds an easy rhythm once he’s inside of her. He thrusts deeply, in and out, and he doesn’t know if she lifts her hips to meet his or if she’s trying to pull away. All he can feel is her warmth, her muscles clenching around him, and he can’t stop the steady way his fingers find her clit. He rubs her clit in a rough, unforgiving manner, and delights in the way she almost keens. He grunts in time to his thrusts, his breath hot next to her ear, and he whispers awful things to her that she pretends to be too out of it to understand. Killer, oh killer, I love you so. I’ll never let you go. Come for me, Nora.
“Nora,” he groans, his breath scorching her ear, and she hates herself for the wail that tears from her throat, echoing throughout the dining room. He pauses to better enjoy the way she clenches and unclenches around him, and pushes himself up on shaking arms.
Her skin is flushed, almost darker than her dress, and her eyes shine with an unfocused electric blue. She’s panting so hard he can feel her breaths shoot from his groin all the way up his spine in sharp waves, and he sees her fingers flex from underneath her lower back from where they’ve been tied. He leans down to kiss her, sweeping an arm underneath her to pull her up against his chest. Her breasts rub against the hair of his chest, causing them both to shiver. She kisses him back, but with defeated lips. She has none of the spark, or the fight, she’d had earlier and the thought almost saddens him. He wraps his arms around her, undoing the tie that binds her wrists and rubbing his hands up and down them.
“Wrap your arms around me,” he says against her lips. He can’t deny the pure malice in her eyes, as much as he tries to. He wants to blame it on a trick of the light, or his own proclivities, but there is no denying the pure unadulterated hatred that makes her blue eyes shine. Wordlessly, she wraps her arms around his shoulders, shifting in a way that pulls him further into the hilt of her. He groans, starting to move again. His hands burn a trail down her sides until he grips her hips tightly, and his fingers dig into the soft flesh there. He pulls her closer against him, bring her ass to the edge of the table, and changes his angle so he can push himself deeper inside of her. He keeps kissing her all the while, and thinks that this must be what happiness feels like.
“Nora, love,” he whispers against her lips. “Nora, call me by my name.”
“Pickman,” she says flatly, and he shakes his head violently. She hisses as he tightens his grip on her hips, his fingernails cutting into her skin.
“No,” he says. “No, love. My name is Richard.” He keeps thrusting deeply into her, feeling the hot wet heat of her tighten around him as though trying to consume him, and his chest aches with a love he’s never known before she stormed into his life.
“Please,” he gasps, not sure anymore what he is begging her for. “Please.”
“Richard,” she says quietly at first, almost so quietly he can’t hear her over his own desperate groans. “Richard, oh Richard.” Frantic, almost despairing groans fall from his lips, and he begins babbling his love to her, telling her how good she feels, how right. Her hands grip his cheeks and she presses her lips to his roughly, as if trying to drown out his voice, and he howls hopelessly into her mouth, spilling his love into her soul as he spills his seed into her body.
She shines with a color he had forgotten existed, exploding behind his eyelids and smothering the siren call of the redness that haunts him.
He presses her forehead against hers, panting, and presses gentle kisses to her lips in between breaths. He idly thinks about taking her to bed, to lay next to her with his arms wrapped vice-tight around her, but she’s shoving at his chest.
“Get off me,” she says, her voice sounding clearer than it had in hours. “Get off of me, you son of a bitch.” He pushes himself up, pulling himself out of her, and reaches out to brush away a lock of hair that sticks to her forehead. She slaps his hand away with a panicked, snarled ‘don’t you fucking touch me’ and the light behind her blue eyes is that of the caged animals he sometimes saw raiders torture. He backs up as she sits up fully, shaking and retching.
“I thought you enjoyed it,” he says quietly and she makes a broken sound, like she doesn’t know if she should laugh or cry. She seems to almost implode in on herself, crumpling like a dying star, and Pickman wants to run from the fact that he did this to her.
“You took something of mine without asking,” she says shakily. “That’s what raiders do.” He feels sharp pain in his chest at her words, and burns with shame at the truth of them.
“Will you kill me?” Pickman asks again, for the second time that night. She looks up at him, and in the flickering light of the lantern he can see the truth of her words. Her tears shine with tears and ruined mascara, her lipstick smudged in a bright red gash across her lips. But her eyes are alight with a wrathful sort of defiance, and he takes solace in the fact that it would take more than him to break the spirit that he loved.
“There is something broken in you, Pickman,” she says almost gently. “I don’t make it a habit to kill broken people.” Her eyes flash dangerously as she pulls the broken strap of her dress up, and her voice becomes harder, tempered in the fire of what he had done to her.
“But if I ever see you again, around any of my friends, or if Nick gets so much as a scratch he can’t account for, so help me God I will come here and I will end you.” He nods.
“I find I would want that,” he says, and she shakes her head.
“No, no I’m done with you.” She pushes herself off of the table, standing on trembling legs. “I’m done. I’m not like you-I don’t kill for sport.” He watches as she storms up the stairs, gathering her armor, and doesn’t say anything when she walks back down fully clothed and armed. She pauses in the doorway once, and her gaze flails him alive, tearing apart his skin to expose the beating heart underneath. She’s coming to a decision, and he watches her as she does. Her hand quivers over the pistol on her hip, and he half-hopes she’ll end this terrible, all-consuming pain he feels in his chest, but she shakes her head and flees out of the door.
Pickman goes down to the gallery, staring dully at the paintings on the wall. He feels an inky blankness he can’t name creeping over his soul, erasing the red that’s haunted him his whole life. It greedily consumes the blackness that he’s tried so hard to keep from owning his soul. It darkens both the yellow light of monster in the dark and the soft yellow sunlight that shone from his mother. The last color it takes is blue, and though he tries desperately to hold onto it, he knows he doesn’t have a claim to that most beautiful and wonderful of colors.
He doesn’t know when he started screaming, or why he stops. He rubs his hands over the broken frames of his paintings, ignoring the way the splinters slip past his blood into his skin. His gallery lies in ruins around him, the torn paintings blending together to form a hideous mosaic of monstrosity. Wordlessly, he wanders down into the basement, as if in guided by something outside himself, and he begins splashing gasoline on everything that will burn.
The fire makes it look as it the hands of ‘Subway Accident’ really are reaching up out of hell, and he raises his own in response, an invocation to a god who quit answering his prayers when he was young trapped in a cupboard painted with red.

EPILOGUE
Nick sighs, crushing the butt of his cigarette underneath his heel. He doesn’t want to talk about how many that’s been, though he knows his choice of company wouldn’t begrudge him for it.
“Mother fucker,” Hancock swears, and though Nick usually isn’t a fan of such language, he finds the sentiment isn’t strong enough. “That mother fucker.” Nick had asked the ghoul to travel with him to the North End, where they had found the Pickman Gallery burnt to ashes. He had a case, but he hadn’t wanted to bring his partner with him.
Something akin to his heart clenches in Nick’s chest as he thinks of his partner. Woman is tough as a deathclaw, and damned crafty. He’d known something was wrong when she came into Diamond City after being gone for a few hours, tightly wound and jumpy. He hadn’t pressed her, just let her sit in his office and hold his hand for most of the night. But she’d seemed off and, as much as he hated to go behind her back, he’d used his detective skills to find out what had happened to her when he wasn’t around.
It turns out he hadn’t needed to dust off the old casebook-Deacon, of all people, had been the one to fill him in. The railroad agent had been grim when he pulled Nick aside, and for once Nick believed every word out of his mouth, if only because of his somber tone.
“There’s nothin’, not even fucking bones,” Hancock says irritably, kicking some ashes into the wind. Nick doesn’t say anything as the ghoul inhales a dose of jet. “That fucking bastard. Fuck! Nora would have been well within her rights to off this slimy bastard. I don't know why she didn't.” Nick wants to say he doesn’t know either, but that would have been a lie. It was the same reason Nick had found himself falling for her.
She’s gentle, far too gentle for a former lawyer, and killing tears her up.
“It’s Nora,” Nick says. “She doesn’t like killing.” Hancock shakes his head, and responds,
“Oh, I think I’ll like offing him enough for the both of us so she won't have to worry. Let's get this guy, Nicky.”
“We’ll get him,” Nick says. He thinks of Nora, back in Sanctuary, of her smile and her soft blue eyes that make something spark over what passes for his skin, and makes a promise that he intends to keep.
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Born in a Strange Shadow