Not All Who Wander Are Lost
Title: Fairytales
Pairing: Saorise (Courier)/ Boone
Characters: Saorise (Courier)/ Boone
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Hurt/Comfort-Friendship
Summary: Maybe their lives are more like the original Grimm tales, where there were rarely happy endings and often a lot of blood. But it's nice to pretend things can work out ok.
A/N: Apparently, all my RP games are getting this treatment. A series of snap-shots in the life of the Courier and his companions. Much like with my DA series, this will follow all my characters, not just one, and the characters/pairings will be specified in the notes. At the moment, I'm sticking more or less with one primary Courier, though, so there's probably gonna be a lot of him.
Also, you can't really romance the people I would like to in Fallout, and I'm playing on 360 so moding it isn't really an option. Head cannon, however, is. So if you don't like the idea of a non-canon, male Courier/Boone pairing or male Courier/Arcade pairing, then navigate away from this story.
"Once upon a time there was a knight."
"What?" Boone stopped, stared, eyebrows arched. He knew Soarise was a bit...off. Okay, to be fair, everyone now a days was, but the tiny, red-haired imp of a man was flat out fucking crazy. Could convince you the sky was yellow and your pants were your shirt. (And then steal both without you ever seeing a thing.) He was used to the Courier singing to himself, humming, talking, starting one-sided conversations. He seemed to hate silence.
But even for Soarise, this was...weird.
"I said, once upon a time there was a knight. And this knight- he fell in love with a beautiful princess. And- she loved him. The problem was, he was a knight, y'know? Way below her station. And their were princes and suitors just...lining up for this lady's hand."
"...If you are doing what I think you're doing, you'd be really smart to shut up."
"I am telling a story my mom used to tell me. I just remembered it, thought you'd like to hear. Hush and let me talk."
"Do I get a choice?"
"No. So anyway, there's all these high class, high ranked suitors lining up, and the princess doesn't want any of them. She wants her knight. So they ran away together one day. Well, one night, I guess- no pun intended. "
Boone reclined back on the sofa, stretching an arm over the back of it. The suite was gorgeous, he couldn't deny that; nicer then anything he'd stayed in. Didn't mean he had to like anything about this situation. He felt like a pawn, and he knew Saorise did, too. The man was damn good at hiding it, but he was nervous. He'd told him about Mr. House, about their conversations, and it all sounded way too much like House wanted them. Or, better- wanted Saorise.
"Why are you telling me a bed-time story?"
"Shut up, Boone, Jesus. I never thought I'd have to say that to you." Saorise pulls a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, offers him one. He shook his head, wrinkling his nose despite himself. Smoking was never anything he'd enjoyed. Enough ways to die these days without poisoning yourself. "So these two take off. Now, my mom, she loved to tell stories, but she wasn't stupid. She didn't tell me fairy tales. So they're out in the wastes, and those are pretty hard for people like you and I to survive in, let alone the knight and his princess."
And how sad was it that Boone only just then realized how figurative 'knight' and 'princess' were meant to be? He'd always been a thick-headed sonofabitch, though, and he arched an eyebrow, waiting for his smaller companion to go on even though he damn well knew where this was going.
"So they're out there, fighting day in and day out to just- get by. But it's alright, because they love each other, power of love, etc, etc, all that saccharine crap. But one day, the princess gets herself kidnapped by the knight's enemies."
"Saorise, that's enough." He felt himself bristling, felt his temper fraying at the edges. He didn't want to be patronized, he didn't want to talk about this, and Saorise had no fucking right.
"Lemme finish my godsdamn story, Boone." Saorise's laconic tone turned into something sharp, a snap-crack of a whip behind words that had moments ago been amused and lazy. He met Boone's eyes with that straight-on intensity that had attracted Boone to him in the first place, when he'd shown up in that dinosaur's mouth. People had a difficult time meeting Boone's stare, even through his glasses; Saorise, though, never once flinched away. Not afraid of him, not for one damn second, though Boone could have had him dead before he even knew what was happening. Boone was a wolf; or, if you didn't want to go all pre-war, a nightstalker. Something dangerous and feral and lethal, and Saorise as much as swatted him on the nose and told him to stop growling.
Fearless.
(He didn't know it then, but soon he would see just how fearless, watch Saorise stare down super-mutants and nightkin and maniacs, watch him tell Caesar to fuck off and laugh as squad after squad of assassins came for his blood. He didn't know it, because he'd only known Saorise for a few weeks, but he would come to find that the tiny Courier was, without doubt, afraid of no one.)
"So anyway, she up and vanishes. And the knight, he goes on this rampage to find her. Looks for weeks, right? He's a decent tracker, so it's not hard for him to pick up the trail, just gotta keep following it. And when he finally finds them-"
"Saorise. Enough."
"-when he finally finds them, the princess isn't anymore. She's barely even human anymore. She's been raped and beaten and-"
"Fuck you-" He pushed up off the chair, made to leave the room, but then there was a small, slender hand on his wrist. He could have broken that arm, without trying, could have hurled Saorise up and across the room. Could have punched the little asshole right in his jaw, broken it, left him unable to run his mouth for a nice long time.
He didn't.
He stopped.
"-And dying." Saorise, holding his stare, holding his gaze, like a snake, like a spell. "Sit down, Boone. It's just a story."
"I don't want to hear anymore of it."
"I think you should. Sit down, Boone."
"Get your hand off me or I'll break your wrist." It was a warning and a promise; the only one Saorise would get.
"I'm ambidextrous. Sit down, Craig. Please."
A long moment of silence came over the room. It was made even more eerie, even more tense by the gloom and fragile stillness around them; even Rex wasn't barking. He could see the big cyber dog, in the doorway though. He was on his feet and bristling, ears back, teeth flashing white in the shadowy corners of the suite. Already Rex was damn protective of the kid. He wondered if that was because the King had told him to be, or if the dog just liked Saorise. He knew without needing to check that if he made a move against the Courier, Rex would be on him like a wild thing.
"Craig."
Snap. The silence broke like a rubber-band pulled too far, and he jerked his gaze back around to where Saorise still sat, still holding his arm. No one moved for a long time. Then, softly-
"See, how it ends. The story, I mean- how it ends is that the knight is too late. He kills the slavers and he goes to her, but she's already mostly dead. She dies in his arms, too weak and too hurt. And the knight, he goes a little crazy. It's not a happy story, Boone." Holding his gaze, holding it, firm and unflinching, his hand locked around Boone's arm still. Like time had stopped around them.
"He goes a little nuts, and he starts hunting the people down who took her. Them, their wives, their kids, friends, family- he wipes them all out. And then he finds the people who sold her, and he kills them, too. And their families. And their friends. And then everyone is dead." And the hand let go. Slipped from his flesh like water.
"And there's no one left to blame or hate but himself. So the knight takes his gun and eats it."
"Your mom had shitty taste in bedtime stories."
That got a startled bark of a laugh. "Yeah, well, she also spent most of her life so high on chems she didn't know who I was half the time. But this- this had a point. Like all the good stories, it has a moral."
"Okay, Aesop. Hit me." And he flopped back down in the chair. Saorise's expression flickered like an old holotape- surprise, amusement, thoughtfulness. He was positive Saorise was surprised he knew who Aesop was. Most people assumed he was kind of stupid, because he preferred to shoot his problems instead of talk them down; because words were hard for him. People thought because he didn't talk a lot, because he was as cheap with his words as a miser, that he must be dumb. He was blunt and straight-forward, too, and people thought that meant he took shit at face value, never looked deeper.
It was one of his biggest assets. He got underestimated, constantly. People tended to speak more freely around him because they assumed he was too damn stupid to be a concern. Sometimes it pissed him off; usually it just amused him. He'd always gotten irritated when Clara had done it, because sometimes even she would talk down to him and I'm not stupid, I hear you. It almost never happened, and he barked at her about it even less.
And here was Saorise, looking at him in surprise because he knew the name of a long. Long dead author and had willingly sat back down. Though, okay, maybe it was fair of him to be a little surprised on that last part. Boone was surprised about that last part.
"Moral is," Saorise finally went on, so softly, "that he who hunts monsters should be wary not to become one himself. The knight in the story let himself be eaten up by hate, and grief, and guilt, and vengance. And he became the same damn thing he hated; a murdering, twisted, broken person. So torn up by what happened to his princess that he lost his humanity, and then he lost himself. The princess never would have wanted to see him become that. She would have been heartbroken, to see her strong, brave knight fall that far." A small shrug, and this time Saorise stood up. Stretched, yawned, stubbed the cigarette out.
"Which isn't to say he was wrong for killing the people who killed his princess. God knows anyone would do that. Except there is justice, and there is vengeance. Kill Caesar. Kill the Legion. Kill every godsdamn Legionary you see and I will happily help you. But what happened to your princess- don't let it kill you. Knight in the story was alone. You aren't." A hand dropped down onto his shoulder, brief, squeezed it.
"C'mon, Rexxy, bed time!" He chirrped, brightly and sing-song, as if he'd never said any of that. The big dog jumped up, barking loudly, the sound ringing off the walls and making Boone cringe. "And don't you dare try to hog it, either, you sleep on the foot of the bed-"
And just like that, they ran out of the room, door clicking softly behind them. He could hear them fucking around in the master bedroom, wrestling from the sound of it. He put his face in his hands, took a slow breath. Tried to make some sense of what he was feeling in that moment. Anger at Saorise, for prying. Hurt, sorrow, exhaustion...
...and something that felt almost like relief. A little voice in the back of his head whispering how he didn't have to shoulder everything himself anymore, could unburden, could- trust-
No.
No. He couldn't. And even if he could, he didn't deserve to. This was his punishment.
This was his retribution.
Saorise was wrong. He was alone, always would be. Always had to be.
Still. He smirked to himself as there was a yelp and a thud from the bedroom, followed by rowdy barking. Still, it was nice to imagine, for the night, that his story could end differently.