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We Don't Have To Be Friends (3/3) Characters: Cooper Howard/Lucy MacLean. Summary: 4,000 words, Post Season One -- character study with porn. Warnings: Nothing you wouldn't see in the show. ( Ao3 ) > Part One | Part Two | Part Three <

The fact they had sex didn’t come up when they swapped watch.

Not that Cooper hoped that it would—the opposite, actually. He had nothing to say on the matter, no feelings and the like, but he expected Lucy to ask him about it. She had the air of a woman who’d ask what it all meant, what they were after such an act. But she nudged his shoulder and tilted her head towards the chair in the corner, and he obliged.

Lucy curled up into the sheets, the same ones she’d been clutching earlier, the same ones she’d fouled with come, by his hand and cock. She fell asleep easily, her face peaceful. No words, no questions, not so much as a good night.

Cooper figured she’d ask him about it the following day, then.

He toyed with the questions she might ask in his head, like if it meant they were an item, if he liked her, or if he wanted to marry her. Things in that vein, the woefully naive shit that a young woman might think when faced with sex — especially one who’d been raised in a borderline cult of American ideals.

But she still didn’t bring it up.

Not as they packed their things, not as she brushed her hair, and not even as they headed down to the supply shop next door.

The silence sat between them like friends who were comfortable sharing space without needing the small talk. He never thought Lucy could be capable of companionable silence, not with how uppity she’d been when they’d first met. But she was the picture of serenity, doe-eyed as she was.

As much as Cooper was loathed to admit it, he’d gotten used to having her around.

It was nice to have someone to walk into a room with, to know if shit went south, she’d have his back. A second set of eyes, as it were. And she was capable despite how green still was. Even as they paced the supply shop, they kept close to one another and their heads on a swivel.

He didn’t know if he deserved her company, but that was the arrangement they’d struck. They’d spent a few weeks together, and now they’d slept together… Maybe she had a point: they needed something between them, some unifying thing that meant they could trust one another.

Except that the unifying thing was him fucking her into a stained mattress in a brothel.

But it didn’t feel like that — not that it meant anything to him. Sex was sex, all that shit. But given the little ethics lecturer that she was, he expected her to have some qualms about the act. Like it was a mistake, a misstep, or something to be ashamed of — like he was someone she should be embarrassed even to be seen with.

Again, it’s not that he cared much either way. Plenty of folks made their distaste for ghouls public, a matter of introduction. But Lucy put on the act of how it wasn’t anything, how he was just like anyone else in the wastes, surviving.

She smiled at him as she showed off a box of Fancy Lads to say they were her favorite; she’d fan her hand at a canned good and give her review without being asked. She carried herself with a perky sweetness like he’d helped her move house, some homebody closeness that a friend offered to make your life easier.

She didn’t act like a woman he’d slept with; there was no hint of that brutal moment where he’d bitten down hard enough on her shoulder to leave a crescent moon. Even as she strolled to the front counter to speak with the store clerk, he saw no hint of the woman she’d been last night.

The one he’d eaten her out until she begged him to stop — only for her to beg for more seconds later.

Were it not for the plain-as-day marks on her throat that he’d gripped into her, he’d think he imagined the whole thing. Like some dirty old man’s escapism in the wasteland, he was taking advantage of a girl who didn’t know better.

But she knew better.

Except that it made sense. Cooper and Lucy weren’t much more than traveling companions on the same mission. He didn’t expect to hold hands and skip across the Mojave Wasteland with her. The gap between what happened and daylight made plenty of sense.

A ghoul and a vault dweller—people might assume he was a hired gun who protected her for the caps. They wouldn’t be off base with that assumption, except that the payment was the knowledge that he might get closure on his family.

But it wasn’t like it went deeper than that: transactional.

As it should be.

Cooper tossed a loose handful of trail mix into his mouth as they headed down the street. He’d snagged them from an open barrel while Lucy bartered for a holotape she wanted, and he didn’t want to waste his breath arguing with her about it.

And she didn’t scold him for stealing. He could see the words form on her lips as she lifted her head, but she softened just as quickly. Her gaze returned to the street ahead as she stroked at Dogmeat’s head.

And that was the pace for the next week as they zigzagged through Nevada’s alternating flats and buttes in pursuit of Hank.

Each day was mostly the same: scavenging what supplies remained in the wastes and run-ins with wildlife. There’d be the occasional arguments over whether to help people or let them handle themselves. Lucy always wanted to help people, and Cooper never wanted to stick around. But it varied, day to day. Sometimes, they’d help people, but some were beyond help.

That was a lesson Lucy had to play catch-up with — the reality that not everyone could be saved. Saving people was so rare that it was hardly worth trying. But she still tried, and Cooper stuck around, for her, for that gut instinct he didn’t know how to quantify.

Like he was responsible for her.

They’d set up camp in whatever spots they thought they could hide. They foraged for canned goods and meds, though their luck varied daily. Sometimes, they joked, but most days, they stayed silent, their mission the unifying thing that kept them in motion.

Lucy was desperate to find her father, and he wanted to know where his family had ended up.

Or where his daughter was. He still didn’t know if he cared so much about Barb, and even if he did care, it hurt too much to labor over. She’d been too instrumental to Vault-Tec for him to let her linger as a sweet feeling in his heart. But he still needed to know if she was in one of those damn vaults she’d been so proud of. If Moldaver was still kicking — if Hank was still around — there was a chance.

The knotted instinct of loyalty and family competed with his reality, where he had an irradiated hunk of roach meat settled beside some jerky he’d scavenged from a merchant who’d died in the last town they’d visited.

“I put some tin cans out on string,” Lucy said as she climbed up the rickety steps into the bed. Her voice was hoarse, distant. She’d been crying again.

Cooper grunted his thanks around a hunk of roach meat.

Lucy watched him with those too-wide eyes as if she were searching for something. If he were to guess, she’d been crying again over that kid they’d found — the one who’d gotten caught in a security door. Little dumbass had been cut in two, doing God knows what — probably looking for food.

Lucy wanted to bury him. Cooper told her it was a waste of time.

She was sweaty, with dirt on her cheek and throat. He didn’t need to ask.

Cooper flexed his bare brow at her, inviting her to speak. He was too engrossed in his meal, his fingers lodged between his teeth as he savored the salty-sweet slick of fried roach. But she didn’t look away, didn’t speak — she just watched him.

Cooper’s jaw twitched as Lucy nudged his foot with hers. Her head tilted at a curious angle as she moved towards the back seat of the bus. Her PipBoy offered a dim glow of green, enough for them to see one another in the hollow shell of a bus. Most of the seats had been pried out, likely for scrap metal.

And then she shoved at the scrap of metal he’d been using as a plate, which clattered to the floor from his loose grip. He'd yell at her if it were not for how Lucy felt across his lap, how quickly she’d closed the gap between them.

The chunks of roach wetly thudded to the floor by his feet, his face slack with resignation. He could brush off the dirt and eat it afterward; not like he’d never eaten jerky off the ground. In a literal sense, he had more pressing matters on his hands.

Because the thing is, they never did speak about what happened in the brothel.

But it kept happening.

Lucy got this look in her eye, something like defiance, and she’d get a little too close, and then things stumbled into intimacy. Like right now, she’d decided this moment was the right one to yank at his belt.

“Can’t let a man eat first,” Cooper huffed out as she yanked his belt open. His voice came out hoarse, more to make up for the vulnerability of being in the middle of nowhere. It wasn’t the same as the hotel, with the walls and the locks.

His anger about his meal being interrupted baked into something deeper, a need to get something out of her to make up for it. Maybe that was why she’d done it, to piss him off, to goad him into crueler movements.

Maybe she just preferred him hungry, or angry, or both.

Cooper’s lipless mouth sought out her pulse, yellowed teeth marked over old hickeys.

He couldn’t tell if this was better or worse, the instinct to fuck with absolutely no words on either side about it. Neither asked first, and they didn’t bring it up after. It had the same privacy as when they’d excuse themselves to take a shit, not spoken, just done. Maybe a head tilt or a jut of his chin.

Except that it was the two of them wrapped up in one another, her suit notched around her thighs as she squirmed and struggled. A few tears rolled down her cheeks, but she’d been crying since they’d seen that kid cut in half earlier today. Wasn’t anything new, her sobbing over some dreadful shit.

Cooper rested against the bus seat, his hands framed against her hips as she lowered herself onto his cock. She’d not had to do much to coax him into a frenzy; there was something about her proximity.

And the dirt she’d been digging in had stuck to the sweat, that cocktail of misery that just about everyone in this Godforsaken wasteland had about them. But he’d had a little something to eat, and this scrawny, miserable woman was straddling him for some distraction.

Cooper could oblige.

It’s stupid how easily they slid into this pattern — not every night, not all the time, but once every few nights.

She’d touched his thigh or arm, and things devolved from there.

In all the decades—centuries, really—of being alone, he didn’t miss sex or women. He was too busy trying to survive, and it only got worse as his skin thickened and his hair fell out. He stopped being a man so long ago; he didn’t have space to want this. As for Lucy, Cooper had zero clue what she got out of this.

Or, more to the point, why she’d want such a thing from him. He didn’t mope about how he looked, frankly, he couldn’t give a fuck. The hole in his face matched with his calloused skin. He could pick a hundred things about him that she’d have every right to flinch at.

But she hated herself enough to forgo better judgment — something Cooper could identify with.

He slid a rough thumb along the indent of her hip, lower, idle as he toyed with the pubes just above her slit. He gripped her ass with his other hand, forcing her hips to an easier angle so he might have a chance at making her feel good.

He’s a goddamn martyr.

“You’re in a goddamn rush, sweetheart,” he said, his head cocked to the side as he looked her in the eye.

Lucy scrunched her face like it might kill her to meet his eye.

Cooper leaned side to side, eager to catch her gaze. He withdrew the hand on her hip and caught her jaw when she kept angling away. His fingers and thumb dug into her jaw tighter than he meant to. “You bury that kid?”

“If I was their mother or sister, that’s what I’d want — to know they at least had a — a burial…” Lucy swallowed so hard he felt it in his palm.

Cooper rattled a growl from low in the back of his throat. The pace of his hips slowed, softer, to allow some space for whatever this augment was. “Dangerous — doing all that on your own, not saying shit to me ‘bout it.”

“You weren’t going to help,” Lucy said, which was more than she usually spoke when he was inside her.

Then again, he usually went so easy and sweet on her. He let her take the physical things, the sex, without so much as a please or thank you. It didn’t matter much to him so long as he had fun, and he figured it was the same with her. But he couldn’t piece it together, this ritualistic need to bury the dead.

Cooper shoved at her jaw with the flats of his fingers so hard that Lucy recoiled. He shifted, hands back to her hips — then turned a whole lot more to pin her against the seat he’d been on. Her back hit the worn leather with a soft thud; her breath was knocked out of her.

But he didn’t push back into her as much as he wanted to. To his dismay and surprise, he was pissed that she’d put herself in danger. His cock pressed against her soft skin, notched against the curve between her thigh and ass. He slid his hand down instead, fingers crooked and buried inside her.

Lucy arched, lips parted with the complaints he would surely hear in a second.

“I didn’t help you… do what? Didn’t help you fuck around in a sand pit?” He growled by her ear, his body heavy on hers. “You’re pissed ‘cause I spent my evenin’ getting food, makin’ a spot for us to rest up?”

Lucy looked like she might cry again, but her breathing softened. She felt stranded between desperate attempts to get off and get away from him. She chewed her inner cheek, avoiding his eye like she did when she was mad at him.

“Told you t’leave it,” her slim figure was too limp and complying, given her atrocious mood, but it didn’t matter. She was warm and soft and wanted him, even if it was such a shallow thing as a body to take a bullet for her. Or to act as a distraction, some substitute for thought.

“It didn’t take that long,” she caught his wrist but didn’t push him away, like she wanted him to pick up the pace, to stop picking at her over her dumb choices.

Cooper’s hand slid free of her cunt, his slick fingers pressed and pried together. No matter how much they fought, it’d be the same shit — she’d be wetter than he thought anyone had the right to be, as she needed him to be angry with her to get off or something.

“He — was just a kid,” Lucy gasped, teeth bared like a cornered kitten.

“Oh, well, in that case — who gives a fuck, Vaultie? He’s dead all the same,” Cooper snorted as he caught the backs of her thighs to yank her closer. Her foot tangled in his duster, and a sharp tear cracked through the otherwise quiet evening — nothing new. The thing was falling apart and had been for years.

Her instinct is to sneak off in the dark and dig a hole alone… Any manner of things could have found her, heard her, and she’d have been dead along with that waste of space. She’d have ended up dead in that damn grave right alongside that bisected kid. But that wasn’t how she saw it, even now, weeks in the wastes.

And, if she died — if she went missing…

Cooper notched his chin against her neck, mouth by her ear as he picked up where they’d left off. “You that desperate t’join him? Get your ass jumped by some raiders or a Deathclaw on the prowl?”

“I was safe — ”

“Nah, you was diggin’ holes in the Mojave for brats you don’t know. Ain’t even do that for your own mother.”

“You know how it is — with ghouls,” Lucy exhaled by his shoulder, her nails dug into his duster.

Cooper laughed — honest to God laughed — as Lucy said that. “Yeah? How is it with ghouls?”

“I meant,” Lucy winced, her face pinched like she’d licked a lemon. “Feral, when…”

Cooper shook his head, and a hand snapped to her mouth. He clamped her jaw shut, sick of the conversation, sick of how she’d argue and never just admit when she’d fucked up. He was almost done with her but couldn’t bring himself to do much about it. But her eyes stayed wide over the curve of his hand like she wanted to apologize.

He didn’t want an apology. It wouldn’t do much, anyway.

If it’d been meant to hurt him, it hadn’t. He shared the sentiment that people would reach a point where they weren’t people anymore. They’d lose whatever made them human; they were all a liability.

The strangest part was that Cooper had lost that part of him long before the bombs fell in front of a Vault-Tec camera.

All the back-and-forth lost luster, but Cooper was here to play. She’d put in the work to get him on edge; she’d seen him into some mood, so he wasn’t about to pout and pull out. He kept a firm hand on her mouth, though he inched it back enough to hook two fingers into her mouth. He used the leverage to yank her head to the side, to bite at her pulse.

“You think you know how it is with ghouls, girl?” He scolded, his voice hoarse as his hips set back into the same pace as before. Before they’d gone back and forth about the grave she’d dug, where she’d tried to play as she knew better than him.

It wasn’t even worth the words — to explain to her that every time they fucked, there was a small part of him that thought it might be easier to bite down hard enough to keep her still; to bite hard enough to end whatever life she thought she might have.

It wasn’t worth the energy to bridge that gap for her. He was hungry and tired, and he’d been playing with his food for too long. His hand remained fixed to her jaw to keep her from arguing with him. She gnawed at his fingers harder when he drove his hips into her a little too rough.

But she wasn’t trying to get away from him. Maybe this was her way of proving that she saw him as more human than a ghoul, like an exception. Or maybe she just preferred him when he was too pissed to speak to her when he used her.

Cooper’s hand slid down from her jaw, his finger slick with spit as he gripped her throat. His bitten-down nails notched into her skin, and she had this sick, distant smile. But she didn’t meet his eye, and he didn’t fight her. He just kept his hips in motion, eager to round out whatever the fuck this was.

He grabbed at the shell of the bus, neither of them eager to speak — they were back to that part of the exchange where they didn’t even want to talk to one another. They just needed each other, in a sense, in whatever the fuck this was.

The slim column of her throat flexed with each thrust, her wide eyes scrunched tighter at each inch that he pressed into her. Any concern for her, of whether she was enjoying herself or not, went out the window when she brought up that ghoul shit.

You know how it is with ghouls , he repeated in his mind like a brand.

He did, actually. He knew crystal clear. And he would be fine by her until that inevitable point where he tipped into whatever her mother had been, whatever feral, mindless mess he’d devolve into.

As if she weren’t writhing and hungry beneath him now, thoughtless and shapeless as she gasped and moaned and mewed for whatever he’d give her. She tensed and mouthed words she couldn’t speak. Her ribs fanned and flexed with each rock of his hips.

Cooper picked at her with his mind — when would her hair fall from his scalp and her skin turn to leather? It happened to everyone on a long enough timeline if they didn’t die in some ridiculous way. She could be one of the lucky ones who died pretty and whole, only to be left in a ditch or a shelter to turn to dust.

There were no graves. Nothing was better for people in the wastes than to rot alone, untouched.

Cooper’s fingers cracked into the rusted shell of an old bus as Lucy let out a pained cry—pained from how she tried not to make any noise at all but couldn’t. She rode out a dirty climax, the repeat tense and release, guttering, messy, her suit dangled limply from her ankle.

He didn’t stop in pursuit of his own bliss. Why not? He deserved it — more than her, he’d argue, for all the shit she gave him. He pressed a hand against her jaw, his fingers dug into her cheek as he kept pace. Her dopey, gentle face remained empty as he thrust into her, over and over, because she’d gotten her relief for the day.

He got it, of course, and they separated with the same silence as always, like they hadn’t picked at each other like vultures over a carcass. Lucy fixed her suit and cleaned herself up, and Cooper didn’t do much beyond tucking his cock back into his slacks.

And she didn’t apologize, and neither did he.

The following day, she was crouched by a fire outside with a beaming smile as she prepared some of the leftover roach meat from the night before. It was uncanny how different she looked in the daylight rather than by the dim glow of her PipBoy as if she’d left everything on the bus seat where she’d come.

Like the very act of sex with him was some penance, that she came out the other side free of the bullshit she’d leverage at him. But he didn’t challenge it, same as ever. He let her drift on that cloud, and her chin lifted high as they packed up.

Cooper’s gait slowed as they passed a freshly turned mound of dirt a few dozen yards away from the bus they’d camped out in the night before, where a piece of wood had been crammed into the dirt along with some wispy, dead flowers.

And they still didn’t talk about it at all.

#oh my bad there's a third part #vaultghoul #my writing #lucy maclean #cooper howard #cooper x lucy #my bad #nsfw #shruge emoji

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