From The Vault - ( Closed )

[Light Ice]

The air scrubbers had died in the West Quarter again. The trouble had started early in the morning and only grown worse, sputtering and grinding they'd carried on to the painful end until at last the life choked from them and the massive, dust-caked blades of their turbines locked up as they belched deathly soot-filled ebon clouds. Below the denizens of Vault 897 carried on, unconcerned as the faulty machines once again froze up. Victor had helped his father battle the dying machines for the better part of a year and was with him again, posted up in the cramped utility corridors that connected the turbines with one another and the main power conduits three-hundred feet above the streets below.

He was his father's son, sharp as any young man could be and full of the brash courage of youth. It lingered in his heart as powerful as ever but it'd all but abandoned his face, leaving its lean shape to be cut by the sharp angles of masculinity and dawning manhood. The scruff that darkened them gave him the look of more years than were behind him, darkening otherwise bronze skin. He was well-built, stronger than most. The hard tutelage of a mechanic had made him practical and tough, left his hands calloused and scarred from mistakes and missteps in the tunnels that formed the backbone of the dying Vault. He knew it as well as his father, despite his father's thirty years senior in the same corridors. In this, and smaller ways, he was more than his father could have been.

Victor was handsome as his father had been, roughly so. Beauty was for the Uppers in 897, the folks that enjoyed the cleanest air and food and whose streets weren't entirely full of sewage and debris. The closest Victor had come to the Uppers was his stolen moments with the closest thing to an angel he'd ever known.

"What's it look like down there, Vick?" His pa asked, leaning briefly from his work with the battered transformer panel farther inside the corridor.

Victor leaned out and looked down, unphased by the tremendous fall before him. Instead he inhaled deeply, nostrils flaring, only to come back wretching. The failure of the Scrubbers had left the West Quarter smelling more like shit than normal and that was something almost inconceivable if you didn't find out for yourself. Squinting through his eyes as they watered he studied the bodies moving below, shuffling through the decrepit buildings and grime-filled streets. Everything in the Vault had was greasy, filthy in some way. Despair was almost as thick as the putrid stench that filled the air below. A fight broke out over something below, two men hammering at each other with chunks of debris. The fatter of the two managed to strike the other in the back, stiffening him upon the ground. Victor watched as the big one took what he'd wanted and ran off, leaving the other one twitching in a fetid puddle of stagnant water.

The stink of the West Quarter wasn't nearly as bad as the humidity. The West Quarter's heat transfers had given up the ghost for good almost ten years before and so it ran naturally hotter than the other quarters. When the scrubbers failed there was no relief from it and the wretches inside tended to go crazy.

"Vicky?" His dad asked.

He looked back to him, pulling from the duct's edge and back to his father's side.

"Bad. Transformer good?"

"Contacts a bit dirty but that's not what's done it." His dad answered, closing the panel.

His father was bent-backed and approaching fifty. Old, damned old, by Vault standards when you lived in East Quarter. Ancient if you lived in the South or West quarters. Middle-aged by North Quarter standards. He'd greying hair and a powerful, commanding look. His name was Abel and he'd once been tall and strong like his boy, though a bit thicker. If it was broken he could fix it. Including the mess that was the Vault for his boy. He'd have given his left nut to spare the boy the ugliest of it.

Victor knew it.

He wore a mechanics jumpsuit like his old man with a worn leather tool belt belted about his hips. It had a solitary tan pouch held against his right thigh with a dozen of the essentials. Drivers, mostly, along with grips. The rest he carried in a backpack rig he'd fashioned when he was but a boy. It allowed him to carry an entire toolbox while keeping his hands open.

Pressing ahead of his father Victor navigated the corridor further down. They were rounded and he had to bow his head to fit through them. The air here was fresher than below with a constant breeze passing through them.

"Victor?!" His father shouted, resigned already to the fact his son was going on ahead.

"It's the sensor suite again, pa!" He called, breaking into a run.

She was due to meet him up here soon, back near the entrance corridor where he'd told her to be. He didn't have time to wait. His boots thudded softly on the concrete of the tunnel as he sprinted on, ducking down a side passage swiftly and breaking right past another series of panels towards a small grey box further down them.

Opening it, Victor pulled out the mass of wires and circuit boards with an almost careless familiarity. His fingers flew over the panels, eyes sharp on the task at hand. They were his mother's eyes, he'd been told. Unique in the almost lantern green shade they took. He found the short immediately where two corroded contacts had caused an arc to fry the plastic conduit between the contacts and melt it black. He worked quickly, pulling the wires free and stripping them before he fetched the new board from his backpack. He'd taken it from a defunct microwave he'd found in the East Quarter dump and cleaned it with rubbing alcohol.

His haste caught up with him just as his father appeared around the corner to watch him. Victor accidentally touched both contacts at once. A blue arc of electricity touched between his fingers as he felt the jolt rip through him fierce enough to tighten his balls and knock spit from his mouth. For a moment he wasn't sure where he was until his eyes registered the tunnel's smooth, arced ceiling and he felt the pitted concrete beneath his back. His father was laughing.

"Go on, Vick. Before you turn yourself into a french fry. I can finish." His dad said, wiping tears from his eyes.

Victor sat up, flexing his fingers to shake the last pins and needles from them. "You sure, pa?" He looked to his dad, the old man with a tenderly handsome face that had softened through the years. Guilt swept through him almost as painfully as the shock he'd given himself.

"Yeah." His dad said. "But be careful. Her dad finds out you've got her in these tunnels and he'll hang me by my toes."

His father's humor only made it worse, if only because her dad would do a lot worse than that if he knew his daughter was running the corridors with the Wrench Spinner's son. All at once he didn't feel inclined to smile at all.

His father must have seen it in his face. "Go on, boy. And don't you feel bad about it. Your mom's dad wasn't keen on me, either."

It was enough encouragement for him to leave the backpack and go, cutting through the tunnels that were he and his father's own. Nobody else in the Vault cared to move through them. Few, really, could take the heights and the cramped spaces without getting uncomfortable. It was, at least for Victor, an acquired skill. The Angel had never really gotten the sway of it, but she suffered them for his sake.

He slid down the ladder to shaft W-37 as if his hands were greased, knees taking the impact at the bottom and bending smoothly with his weight. All at once the eagerness touched through him, coaxing him to break into a jog as he banked his way through the turns on booted feet. He dropped through another shaft and then another, cutting so quickly through the maze-like corridors that in places his boots never touched concrete at al.

When he finally landed in the entrance corridor Victor straightened, only to find she was waiting for him. He adjusted the beat-up old Dodgers cap he wore, the dark blue cap covering a short, tussled strands of blonde beneath. She was in his arms in an instant, her sleek frame pressed to his own as his arms curled about her hips and pulled her into him. Her cheek pressed to his own, dark and smooth, and her lips touched his ear.

[AngelofDeath]

Kira had started to think Victor wasn't coming until she heard the familiar heavy thud of his boots as he dropped into the corridor. She didn't waste a second before she threw herself into his arms and pressed herself to him as tightly as possible. "Gods baby, I missed you." It had been a few days since they had been able to get away to be together. The tension was starting to eat at her sanity. She wished they could be together openly because it just wasn't going to happen.

After the war and people tried to bring their lives back to normalcy things had quickly disintegrated into chaos. Old grudges and buried hate sprung to new life. Her grand father had been one of the first leaders to step up to and bring order to the growing chaos. In a somewhat reverse of American history Blacks and Hispanics were the upper class and running the show. Kira had grown up well fed, educated and pampered. Her hair was pulled back into a thick braid that fell just below her shoulder blades. She had ditched her usual jewelry save the silver studs in her right ears, to minimize the noise she made when she snuck out of her home to be with Victor.

Stolen moments were all they had lately and even they weren't fully satisfying. If his father wasn't calling for him, her mother or brothers would be calling for her. It didn't matter if he was a good man or that his father was just as good and they were hard workers. They were just a step above the filth that filled their streets and on bad days their air to him. Xavier Cross would give his daughter anything she wished for, but never the young man she was in love with. She hated it, hated it almost as much as she hated life in the Vault. Kira had grown up with stories of the outside world, of grass, of sunlight, clean air; well cleaner. Maybe others were content to stay down here forever, but she wasn't. There had to be something left of the old world out there. Pulling back she brushed her full lips over Victor's, hazel eyes staring into green.

The two of them had almost grown up together. Abel couldn't really afford a baby sitter and so had brought young Victor to work with him. As children often do, Victor had wandered away from his father and gone exploring, the same was true for Kira and the two had met that way. Kira of course had been lost and the younger version of her lover had become her hero by showing her the way out. Since then Kira had made the effort to sneak away and spend time with Victor. As they grew so did their friendship into love and passion. "I can't stay long, Daddy is having a dinner party and I have to be there." She hated the parties, all it was was her father and his friends flaunting and bragging about their place in life. Kira also didn't like feeling like she was being put up on display for the son of those friends. Lately her mother had been dropping hints that it was odd to some people that she hadn't shown interest in someone.

"I had to see you though, going days without seeing you was starting to make me go crazy." She kissed him gently, pressing her body to his again. Just another stolen moment together. Never enough time for anything wonderful, Victor had also told her that there was no way in hell he'd be with her in the tunnels. It made her love him even more that he cared, but truth was there really was no place for them to be together. There was too much chance they'd get caught if she took him home or someone seeing them together and they couldn't go to his place. While Abel was understanding of their relationship, someone wanting to try and bend her father's ear their way would rat the young couple out in a second.

She laid her head on his shoulder with a soft sigh, "I don't know how much longer I can do this Victor. I need you and not having you, all of you hurts so much."

[Light Ice]

The light was a dim flicker here, a pale yellow that strained against the dark and grime to show the pair the youthful glory that claimed them both. She, lean-bodied, with trim hips and graceful legs carried with her modest, but firm breasts. He, square-shouldered, with a trim waist and a powerful set of rough hands. In this moment, and all others, the love between them is a palpable warmth within an otherwise grungy corridor. The brightness of the pair serving to make every place in the Vault seem fitting, enticing, tempting. But he thought too much of her for it, for a rut in the dark to be their first experience.

But he heard every word, knew every frustration. He felt it as well, now more than ever as she pressed her sleek frame into his own. Between them his prick hardened, an impressive stretch of his thick flesh against the elegant length of her thigh that betrayed just how badly the want was becoming. For his credit Victor fought it down, choked it away as he released all but her hand.

"I want to show you this, Kira." Was the only answer. "Besides, if I don't get you out of here I'm going to make a mess of your clothes."

She broke then, smiling. He saw it etch its way in the fine lines of her face and felt her give his hand a warm squeeze before she whisked after him, ascending the shafts and winding their way through the corridors once more at his reckless, wild pace. They climbed, tunnel after tunnel, before he spun her and pressed her back against the ladder in an ascention chamber to press his lips to her own. He felt her arch under him, soft body surging with unsated wants. The track of his hand along her hip had her coo gently against his mouth, before they broke again, climbing further.

Here the tunnels were less used, cleaner for it. He lead her, turning, twisting, until finally they came to a hatch above them in a small, isolated corridor. All at once the good humor and affection faded from his features. Victor looked at her, felt her draw into him.

"You must tell nobody, Kira. What you see here, what I'm showing you, you can't tell anyone. Especially not your father." He didn't mean to be so firm.

[AngelofDeath]

It had taken awhile, but by now Kira could keep up with Victor with only a little trouble. He feet would be hurting, but it was worth it. It meant she had actually got to spend time with him. Even if most of it was spent trying to find an area where the air didn't steal their breath or the floor beneath them, slick with god only knows. Kira smiled knowing she wasn't alone in her want. What she wouldn't given for just a few hours and clean bed. It didn't take them long to get to the hatch, even with the small stop for Victor to steal her breath with another kiss. The tone in his voice told her it was serious, but he should have known by now she wouldn't tell her father anything.

"I haven't told him about you have I? Told him about sneaking for stolen moments? I won't tell him Victor. Or anyone else." She crossed here index finger over her heart slowly. Whatever Victor wanted to show her had to be big. He hadn't been this excited in a long while. Not since the first time Kira had told him she loved him before stealing a kiss and rushing off home. Her hormones were racing and part of her wished it was some hidden area where they could finally be together. There was a point where hands and mouths weren't enough and they were just about there.

Kira wished she could simply tell her father to fuck off, but she knew he would kill Victor without a second thought and lock her away. "So what's on the other side of the hatch?" Her own curiosity was starting to get to her. Just what had Victor found? Whatever it is it had to be really bad or really good. Now she was beginning to wonder if even his father knew about this. Victor would never do anything dangerous, well no more dangerous than his job, but worry was starting to creep in next to curiosity. The serious look on his face didn't help matters either.

[Light Ice]

The hatch's wheel was rusted. The deep red crust lay in flakey layers along the old steel, freshly broken from when he'd broken it free the day before. The hours since then had run like one long countdown until he'd had her here, his ebony angel. Her skin the deep soft hue of milk chocolate, flawless. Beautiful was more than a rarity in The Vault. It was practically extinct. Of all the girls that passed as pretty she shamed them all. An angel. He loved her so intensely that to Victor the only human in their stinking world, aside from his father, he'd ever cared to show something shattering like this was her.

It gave with an audible protest. The creak of old steel on old steel, grinding and grating before the hatch finally yielded. Victor was strong but it still took the full of his weight to push it open, going stubborn in the dim light of the tunnels.

Sunlight. Pure, natural, radiant sunlight along with the freshest air Victor had ever known. That either of them, hell that anyone in the Vault had ever known. Beyond the hatch was the wilds of a world slowly healing from man's greatest moment. The moment where he proved beyond any doubt that God had long ago died and that the power of the atom was beyond anything in nature's control except time.

But time had marched on. Years had gone by. The world outside the Vault had healed here, turned fresh and green and wild and beautiful. Within the Vault it was dim and dark, grays and browns and black. All the evil colors, dirty filthy colors. Here they were gone.

Instead, Victor showed Kira a beauty that for once came close to her own. The sky a brilliant blue filled with fluffy, cottonball clouds. The greens in heady shades of emerald and pine, softened by the reds of trees and bushes. Wildflowers had detonated along the grass plain leading up to the vault, exploding violets and oranges and brighter colors than they had ever known.

An entire world, fresh and untouched, stretching out before them towards a dense wood and the rising face of a mountain. Snow crested its top, pure white.

Victor didn't ruin it by speaking. He reached for her. The strong stretch of his fingers smoothing against the small of her back, rolling up the sleek hollow at the base of her spine and up between her shoulder blades. A tender caress, a warming touch to serve conduit to the feelings the vision invoked.

[AngelofDeath]

Kira just stood there, her mind couldn't process what she was seeing. It wasn't possible. Everyone knew the outside was as harsh as the inside. And yet here she was looking out at the world. It was so bright and the colors! Vincent's hand was pretty much keeping her upright at this point. For some reason Kira had the strongest urge to just climb up and out. To run around and feel the sun on her face for the first time in her life. To feel the grass beneath her hands and feet. the only thing holding her back was her father's voice in her head. Leaving the Vault was absolutely forbidden. She wasn't sure if her father knew about this. It wouldn't surprise her if he did. After all the one with the power controlled all the knowledge.

"How? When? I mean you know as well as I do that this is forbidden. Then again so is our relationship. It's beautiful Vincent. I mean this is better than anything any of my grandmother's stories." Turning Kira leaned up to give him a kiss. "I didn't think it was possible for any place to be so bright...so clean." She chewed her lip slowly as she looked at him, "Do you... do you think we could go out there? just for a little bit Vincent?"

Kira knew she was asking a lot and there was also the fact that she wouldn't want to leave all of that beauty to return back to the darkness that was their home. "Nevermind, forget that I ask. Just being able to see all this is enough right now."

She sighed softly and leaned into him a bit more. It really was a beautiful sight. "How did you find this?"