Nobody was born nosy, but some people were certainly born nosier than others.
For Piper, one of her earliest memories took place in an older, more impermanent version of home. A couple of the shacks had started to poke up in Diamond City, and there were plenty of people who recognized the strategic, defensive potential of it. But most people only saw it as... a safer place than most. Not a home. Home, in the wasteland, was a hard concept to imbue in somebody and an easy one to destroy. Her parents saw Diamond City as, eventually, a far better home than their little settlement on the outskirts of the Commonwealth. But to Piper, it had been somewhere else, and the settlement had been home.
In retrospect, her 'home' had been built on worse soil, had weaker defenses, and fewer people to protect it than Diamond City. The loss of a couple key figures had broken it up as easily as a hand grenade would have broken up a beehive. Increasingly, as you got older, the image of what was 'home' shifted from what was best around you to what was unlikely to be pulled out from under you.
Anyway, the memory. Her old home had been half-shack, a quarter squatting, and a good handful of tents and ambiguous 'other' when it came to living situations. Places with thin or incomplete walls. Even then, it was curious - looking back - how privacy had simply been assumed. Not that everybody expected to not be heard, but that they expected to not be listened to. If she'd made it to adulthood - hell, even made it that deep into puberty - it boggled her mind how she would have been able to just say whatever it was she had to say without questioning who was going to hear it. People argued, flirted, and talked about business all with the kind of openness that people in Diamond City reserved only for small talk. Of course, people still cheated. People still went behind each other's backs. That, at least, was reserved for trips out of town or more secluded corners. But even then, there was no true wall that could be put between you, no true door that could be shut. Even secrecy had implicit externality.
Most secrets, it turned out, were only interesting to the specific person or people that they were intended to be secret from. The cuckold, the jilted business partner, the person left out of the sweetheart business deal. As a divorced third party, especially as a kid, the idea of the secret was far more enticing and romantic than the secret itself ever was. The same as a pointless lie. Romantic entirely to yourself, and only so in the abstract of
having
.
So she remembered, from a young age, finding excuses to take long, winding walks around the settlement to where she was going. Taking twice as long on a bathroom trip or to clean up as other kids. Not spying, lingering. Situating yourself in places where information found you. And by extension, she could remember things - now pointless - that she both had and hadn't told people. Arbitrary distinctions between what mattered, what hadn't, what had seemed like it mattered, and what had seemed like it didn't. Right was not the same as useful, and wrong was not the same as useless.
It was both correct and useful to tell little Timmy that he shouldn't leave the city because the super mutants might eat him. It was correct but not useful to tell him that his mom had made him with somebody other than his dad. On the other end of it, it was wrong and useful to tell the townspeople that you had seen the mayor (who wanted to shut your newspaper down) harboring a synth. It was wrong and useless to accuse any of the mayor's cohorts of being that synth. As a member of the press, your responsibility was not solely to tell the truth. You couldn't guarantee that you always were unless you were omniscient. Your responsibility was that, if you wound up being wrong, it at least was in a useful way.
All of this to say, and not to put too fine a point on it, when Piper heard the sounds of an argument starting up in Sanctuary and made her way over to listen just out of sight; she wasn't 'snooping'. She was just collecting potentially useful information.
Cait was, for all intents and purposes, not the kind of person that Piper was happy to have around. Polite enough? Sure, in the right circumstance. Handy enough? Sure, better with both a monkey wrench and a screwdriver than just about anybody else in Sanctuary. Trustworthy enough? Well...
Just because Cait hadn't done anything to make Piper or Nora regret trusting her yet didn't mean she wouldn't. It wasn't even necessarily Cait. You turned your back on a person, but you never turned your back on a drug.
And yet. Nora trusted her. Seemingly completely.
It didn't make sense. Perhaps this was something that Piper was allowing herself to be nosy about more than the average thing. Nora was probably the smartest, most level-headed person that Piper had ever met. It was something in the pre-war water, or maybe it was whatever the 'law degree' that Nora talked about was. But that didn't mean she was naive. Anything but. She saw through Mama Murphy's thinly-veiled mysticism and begging for narcotics. She saw through most anything Piper was planning or trying to get over on her. But by some quirk of nature - animal, vegetable, mineral, transactional, sexual, vibrational, etc - Nora simply seemed to trust Cait wholesale.
Obviously, or at least obviously to Piper, something else was going on there.
This was, give or take a few details, how she came to find herself crouching back in the bushes looking in through the doorframe of Nora's shack house. Cait and Nora had come back from a mission, and judging by the look in Cait's eye, there was about to be an absolute heater of an argument between them. Nora, on the other hand, seemed almost wilfully blind to it. For the first few minutes of them being back, Nora went to her own shack while Cait stalked around hers for a moment, stomping and cursing under her breath. While Nora seemed calm, Piper could also see what looked like a sort of mental preparation. Nora sat down in the well-preserved pre-war chair that she seemed to love more than just about anything or anybody else on the planet. She closed her eyes and took several deep breaths, sipped at some water, rolled her neck and her shoulders.
Finally, as Cait stormed out of her house and into Nora's, Piper watched them both tense up in a way they hadn't before. All three of them knew a fight was coming. She got out her notepad. The yelling would be pretty easy to transcribe, but she'd have to dust off her lipreading for some of it.
"We're the fook are they?" Cait starts.
Piped frowned and, after a moment's consideration, decided to avoid any phonetic or eye-dialogue transcription of Cait's accent. She couldn't even begin to guess where the redhead had gotten it from, but as a writer you either had to choose not to bother or to second-guess if you'd gotten every sentence down with consistent patterns as you made the work unreadable. Much better to just not bother.
"We've talked about this-" Nora responds. Her expression is almost condescending, something which makes Cait's cutting her off make more sense.
"Aye, and I've had an absolute pisser(sic?) of a day, something you should well know(sic?)." Cait responds, her pale face is almost flushed red as her hair.
Piper wondered for a moment how to transcribe the bits of slang (assuming they weren't just pure Cait-isms) and settled on just leaving them with her best guesses.
"Nothing we went through today was worth undoing your progress," Nora's voice immediately becomes sympathetic. Her experience dealing not just with the chemically-dependent, but the volatile among them is clear. According to her, the skills came up a lot in 'Criminal Defense.'
"Says fucking you," Cait responds angrily. She's one of those people where arguing with the calm, rational voice of sense only makes her angry. The kind of girl who gets mad at the brick wall for not headbutting back. At this point she turns, and her next comment isn't loud enough to make out.
Piper craned a little through the bushes. She had considered a spot by the wall of the shack, but the hole would have been thinner to look through. There was even a spot up on the roof that was decently concealed and easy to get to, but any shift of her weight would have made the whole building creak. She had picked what she was pretty sure was the best of the bad options, though it did leave Cait's back to her a frustrating amount of the time. She wished she could move the whole bush closer. Maybe set up in a discarded crate or box or something right next to the door, something with eyeholes. But it was like they always said, voyeurs couldn't be choosers.
"I know, Cait, I was there with you." Nora pushes her point with the patience of a saint. "We made it through fine."
"Yeah, obviously we made it through fine, I wouldn't be fucking asking if we didn't." Cait's voice rises high into a banshee-like wail as she pushes. She steps a bit closer to Nora, then takes a step back and turns away. Her next words are mumbled, her head is turned down, but the lip movements look like "Fine and okay aren't the same."
"Hey-" Nora rises from her chair and takes a step over, but as soon as she puts a hand on Cait's shoulder, the angry woman whips around. Fortunately, her voice is loud enough to be clearly discernible.
"Nah, fuck the comforting," There's a suddenness and intensity to the anger that seems completely out of nowhere. "And fuck the no-passion Dr. Vault Dweller shit. You can be so fucking cold you drive me right out of my mind, you know?"
"Would you prefer if I yelled at you?" Nora's patience seems to slip, if just for a moment. It's something nobody at the camp - or at least not anybody watching the argument - has seen. "Is the toughness of the love really what matters here?"
"This ain't about love, darlin," Cait puts so much emphasis on the pet name that it sounds like an insult. Her sneer is so icy, so passionately angry that it seems like she's ready to throw punches. "You're no fucking wasteland doctor, you're no fucking sobriety messiah. You're not exactly a fucking teatotaler(sic?) yourself if you haven't noticed. You've plenty(sic?) vices you're not exactly proud of."
