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Why had he kept himself alive for so long, even though he could have left long ago, simply because a human life wasn’t meant to last several centuries? Why did he keep trying to stay alive, to avoid turning into a mindless, feral beast? He actually had his reasons, and they were, quite clichédly, triggered by sentimental things. Somewhere out there in the vast, devastated world, his daughter Bree lived. At least, that was the story going around, that she was still alive. No one knew if it was true, rumors were worth little more than rusty bottle caps in the wasteland, yet this one had been enough to keep him alive for over two hundred years. After the bombing, she had been taken to one of the underground cryochambers. Hermetically sealed capsules, filled with coolants and life-support systems, designed to instantly plunge a human into an artificial deep sleep. The body would no longer age, the heartbeat would slow to a barely measurable minimum, and even decades or centuries would feel like a single blink of an eye to the person inside. While outside the world burned, wars were waged, and entire generations came and went, practically no time passed for the people inside these capsules... at least, that was the theory.
Whether the systems still functioned after all those centuries, whether the power supply still existed, or whether the chambers had long since become icy sarcophagi… no one knew. Perhaps Bree had died in the very first days... perhaps she had never survived, but perhaps at this very moment she was still sleeping deeply and peacefully, unaware that the world she had known had long since crumbled to dust. And as long as that perhaps existed, he, too, could not give up, for if she were to actually open her eyes one day, she would have no one left.
Bree had come into being at a time when Poison had been a sought-after, famous musician, yet one who was used for propaganda purposes and couldn’t defend himself against it... well, it might sound subtle.. he could have simply walked away, but that hadn’t been easy, and he’d rather fight to ensure that at least a few of his fans understood the truth he’d hidden in his lyrics.
Don’t follow the stage....follow the silence between the songs. If they make me sing their anthem, count the words I never say. The loudest truth is the one they force you to whisper.
When he was 21, he finally met a young woman; back then, he’d had absolutely no interest in getting involved with a fan… But this woman had understood him, had seen him… had deciphered the truth, and this realization led one thing to follow another. He knew about the pregnancy; he knew about the birth; and yet he was only allowed to see his child four times. It wasn’t the mother who was the problem, but those who didn’t approve. When Bree turned 7, he was offered the chance to protect the child and her mother in case the world was struck by a nuclear attack, and Poison agreed only because, at that moment, he saw no other way to protect his child, and he knew the bombs weren’t a myth… he knew they would fall. Then the world fell silent, and with it, for many years, the hope that his child was still alive. Time passed somehow… it passed far too quickly, and only a small note in one of the abandoned Vaults gave him renewed hope and made him vow to keep going until he knew what had happened to Bree.
In all those years, he had never given up looking for her, that was the main reason he had taken on the toughest and most brutal headhunts to gain access to the abandoned vaults, and yet she remained missing, like a myth that merely resonated beneath his skin and kept his heart alive. There were other times when he wanted to give up, but his stubbornness and obstinacy prevailed. He didn’t know if he would wake Bree… morally speaking, it would be torture to bring a human child into this world. She probably wouldn’t survive long on the surface, she carried no mutations, and even if there was now a serum that made humans immune to radiation, that didn’t mean she could survive this. She would be dependent on a life in a functioning Vault… that would be cruel, and whatever awaited her out there would destroy her either slowly or very quickly.
How was he supposed to make a decision? Would he manage to cut the power to the chamber and say goodbye to her forever, or would he act selfishly and convince himself that he could keep her alive and finally raise her? Even though he thought of her every day and lived only for her every day… he didn’t know the answer and simply carried on with the things he was used to. He scoured every corner of this earth… bit by bit, killing enemy raiders, cultists… but most of all those who still clung to something that had once caused humanity to lose a safe place to live.
They said that being a father meant, at some point, putting your own life second to someone else’s. That for the first time, you felt fear.. not for yourself, but for someone who didn’t even understand why yet. That every little success of the child felt bigger than your own, and every defeat hurt twice as much. He didn’t know if that was true, he had heard her laugh, he had held her little hands before she could even grasp things properly, he knew what her voice sounded like when she called his name excitedly, and how she asked for the same bedtime story every single time, even though she’d long since memorized it. He’d experienced all of that.. except for one thing… being a father. Others taught their children to ride a bike, argued over too many sweets, or waited nervously for the first day of school. They were there as a child slowly became a person in their own right. He, on the other hand, had to watch as that very time was taken away from him. Everything that actually made a father a father had been robbed from him before he even realized how precious those ordinary moments were.
I am not afraid to keep on living.