"You should probably worry about it," Leena says, dreamily.

"Shut her up." The bandit starts undressing. 

Another puts his hand over her mouth.

Leena giggles behind it.

Another roar, and then a wall shatters - the shack they've dragged Leena into cracking apart as a Deathclaw rampages through, bellowing.

"The fuck is-" is all the lead bandit has time to say before he is picked up and thrown into the wall. The deathclaw grabs the other bandits, ripping them apart, tearing off heads with its teeth.

A few try to escape, running past the creature, but it catches them every time, and blood begins to stain every wall.

Leena laughs as blood splatters across her, and waves at the bandits as they are pulled apart. It's almost...pretty.

The last bandit gurgles around a claw through his throat, and dies. The deathclaw huffs, and throws the man to the ground. 

It then turns to look at Leena, growling softly.

Leena remains lying where she is, but waves cheerily at it. "Hi! Thank you! They lied about the Jet!"

The deathclaw huffs.

It then picks up a bandit, and stalks off back the way it came, chewing on it like a snack.

"No, where are you going!? I don't know where I am!" Leena calls after it, pouting. She struggles to sit up, watching as the deathclaw walks away, not even sparing her a backwards glance. 

She pouts. "Rude."

She slides off the bed, her dress righting itself as she does, and starts going through the bandit's belongings and corpses. Guns, eh. Ammo, worse, food, whatever.

Caps? Okay, she can keep those. But her real goal-

"AHA! Yessssssss," she hisses victoriously, coming up with several inhalers of Jet. A shake of each proves they're all full. She uncaps one and takes a full breath in. The tingling is slight, she doesn't feel it much, but her brain immediately relaxes and her skin stops feeling so tight. "That's better. Okay. Time to get moving."

She takes the least blood-stained bag and fills it with her new belongings. She swings it on and exits the shack.

"Hmmmm," she says, closing her eyes. She spins on the spot, fingers pointing out. A couple of seconds, and then she stops, and opens her eyes. Empty wasteland stretches out in front of her. "This way." 

She threads her thumbs through the straps of her bag, and sets off.

Elsewhere...

"No...no, fuck!" 

Hawke takes another last, desperate look around the room. Clearly a former Institute lab, abandoned when it was clear the Capital wasteland didn't fear them the way they were further up the coast. She'd been raiding them for months, searching them inside and out, tearing them apart for any clue, any sign-

They told her this was it. They'd found him. 

She picks up a terminal and throws it against the wall, howling in fury.

Hawke takes several minutes to calm down, and once she is, most of the lab is destroyed. Which, she surmises, is fine. Less chance of the Institute finding anything if they return. 

Perhaps she should leave even less.

Half an hour later, she is walking back out into the wasteland, and an explosion rips apart the smelting factory behind her, destroying every last trace of the lab.

That night finds Hawke in the bar of a nearby town, on her third glass.

A woman in a mismatch of knitted clothing approaches the bar, and sits next to her. Orders the same thing as Hawke, and another for her.

Hawke catches sight of the lantern tattooed onto the woman's wrist. 

"He wasn't there," she mutters darkly, and throws back the rest of her glass, accepting the new one straight after.

"I figured, since you're here throwing whisky back like water."

The woman nurses her own glass, looking at Hawke out of the corner of her eye. "We are sorry."

"Sorry doesn't undo the last year."

"We know. We are trying. We don't want anyone taken against their will, let alone someone with a life."

The woman takes a sip from her glass, pursing her lips afterwards, like the taste was wrong. Not a drinker, then. "We just seem to always be a few steps behind."

"Please, by all means, give me more excuses. That will soothe the pain of hunting my husband's kidnappers for a whole fucking year."

"Hawke, we are giving you every bit of information we get. We swear."

"Every time I turn up to one of these places, it's been abandoned for months. Months. Nothing. No sign." Hawke drains the entire glass of whisky.

"You're right. They are a few steps ahead. So far ahead, you're not even in the same race anymore."

"That's true. You're exactly right. We need more informants in places the Institute can't touch."

Hawke scoffs. "No shit."