Foreword

No longer a one-shot. Still mildly an Alternate Universe, just a few things changed.

Scene-by-scene rather than chronological order - think of it as told by a mind recalling each one by what's remembered rather than what's recorded.

Horrendous formatting fixed. Enjoy!

Diamond City was about to be host to an interaction between superhumans. By this time, the Sole Survivor had acquired an amount of skills, capabilities and abilities that defied expectation. Some even defied explanation at all. Nate himself, he who near single-handedly broke the raiders of the old Boston Wasteland, had slight psychic capability among these abilities.

By no means could he read minds like the myths about him made him out to be. But there was always the option of getting faint warnings, like small hey-listen clues to future events.

He didn't see the bombs dropping, after all. All he felt was the need to be in his armour again. Neither did he see any of the events during the Reclamation, as the time before his pacification of Boston.

But one thing he saw very clearly was the spine-chilling, gut-blow misery that would come with the arrival of an evil yellow sun. His friends in his settlement laughed and joked; spirits were high as the distant speck on the horizon slowly turned into a figure with advanced green armour in the style of Pre-War riot gear. The lookouts' smiles and easy relaxedness turned into concerned caution when Nate had been discovered nearby, statue-still with a look reminiscent of a Deathclaw in the light of a Mini Nuke.

Then the Survivor pulled himself together. These men and women looked up to him, and he couldn't let his own troubles infect them.

The figure came up to the gates. Introduced himself as 'Courier Six' delivering a package to one of the Minutemen, which happened to be a letter and care package from a relative. Nate's gut screamed a fight-or-flight situation, the strengthened emotions a side effect of his psychic gift. Long practice at suppressing them let him keep cool, and personally permit the guards to let him in.

Some time after the outsider's business had been done, Nate found the man at the Power Noodle stand, inspecting the robot. While the helmet may have fooled some, Nate could tell much from the simple lines of one's armour. The Courier spent as much time elbow deep in wires and lubricant as Nate did. They got to talking. A pleasant chat, finding out who they were. Boston's Survivor and Vegas's Courier sitting at a noodle stand? Sounded like a set-up for a joke.

In the background, Nate's power was tightwaving him exactly what the thing he was sitting next to was. The man died traversing the Divide, many years ago. The nuclear detonation which tore apart the growing nation killed him too. But rather than simple ceasing of existence, something else happened. Something which occurred in the lines between night and day, safety and danger, sleep and awakening, and of course death and life.

Radiation, made manifest as sentience. Born when the atom was first split in the deserts of Nevada, when the rays first pierced the sand that had been thrown up by the bombs of the Old World. At first it was a howling, tearing, uncontrollable monstrosity feeding on the lives of the tens of thousands it was unleashed on. But with advancement came understanding.

By using it, man taught it numbers and letters, logic, art, astrophysics, commerce, technology. One could easily see the fear man had for the atom in its culture and theatre; a prime example being the many musical numbers that toned down the danger of it in order to make it more favorable in the public's eye. But by then it was too late. The atom's strength ran through the lifelines of the world, containing the knowledge of millions and supporting the life of billions.

Atom's eyes were opened every time there was fission. From the smallest microfusion cell to the great spears of the Old World, its presence could be felt. And through it, the minds of those touched by it. Through the mutated, atom experienced the world. Through the ghoulified he experienced life in a phantom network. He was well aware that the ones that weren't feral were the closest thing to immortality that could have arisen. Excluding machines and the victims of the Forced Evolutionary Virus, that was.

Binding itself to the body of a determined package courier was a last-ditch effort to rid itself of the endless cascade it had lived within. Through the ghoulified it had seen friend after friend fall or leave, and ages pass as it saw one funeral after another. Failure after failure, with the few successes doing less and less to numb the losses. The unlife inside Courier Six was a voluntary blindness in exchange for casting away the pain.

At first the new man was aloof and a braggart, and because of it he was disliked by many in the initial weeks of his time in the Mojave desert. But then a select few pierced the veil, and discovered the grievously wounded soul that was only beginning to heal in its voluntary blindness. Outsiders saw a supremely hostile waste of life and wondered for what reason those few put up with it. But for those few, in their times of need there were no more loyal.

A moment of kindness had gained them bonds of brotherhood for a person that would offer up even his life in place of theirs for the hungry maw of the wasteland's war machines.

In the days after the second Battle for Hoover Dam, it briefly seemed like things would go well for Courier Six. Under the grating but beneficial control of the city under the New California Republic, it was at first all parties and rip-roaring shenanigans as the Courier's Eleven - as they came to be known - were raised up as heroes and stuck around to ease the growing pains of New Vegas's many miles of ruined city, even as those ruins began to be rebuilt.

Then the Eighty-Eights struck the Mojave.

A raider band numbering in the hundreds of thousands, it would be more accurate to call them human parasites as they raided settlements, raped what survived in the wastes for all its resources and moved on every time. Not even all the might the Courier could have brought to bear even phased them. Indeed, death was an old friend to the raiding tribe - they killed more amongst their own quarrels than even the most vicious of the Legion's warmongers could have hoped to have wrought.

The newly arisen Vegas branch of the Mojave Express Courier Company proved to have a swell in business at that time, much like its sister in Primm. Like the legend they emulated, Couriers delivered all sorts of packages. Sometimes that package just happened to be death. But one by one they died. One by one all his friends met their ends. Always bloody - the Eighty-Eights would allow no other way for anyone combatting them to pass away.

Six killed by the zounds, just like he had in the first decades of his existence. But while he was for all intents and purposes immortal, the rest of the Mojave met their deaths in the following years.

Six took to wandering, on a lonesome road once more.

Nate pulled his awareness back as the being next to him ordered another round. It would be a good idea to keep such capability around.

The night went on as a job offer was aired...