because there aren't enough stories out there about fiends.
God, he's so pretty.
It makes me wish I was one of those NCR whores so I could grab him by the hair and kiss him hard on the mouth. It's too bad Candy already bashed his head in, 'cause there's no way in hell the brains running down his face are gonna make for a good smooch. Dammit. Candy had giggled like a little girl when I told her what I'd do to him.
The sun's hot as balls and making me antsy, nervous, and we're standing on the edge of the NCR/Fiend National Don't-Cross-This-Fucking-Line-or-You're-Next Line. It's right on the outskirts of Freeside, or Westside, or Shitside, whatever; by all those rundown, boarded up buildings and motels that nobody gives a damn about, unless you're Jed and you like to take girls in there sometimes. There's that bridge too, by Camp McFuckbag, god, it's so annoying. They stand out there, probably sweating their dicks off in those ugly uniforms, holding their little guns and walking around like they're doing the entire Mojave a gigantic favor by just being alive. Oh my fucking god.
"Don't you do it," Candy advises at my side when I bend down to stick my hand in the cute soldier's pocket. His cute little ugly ass uniform pocket. "Don't do it. He'll explode."
Candy's not the same bright-eyed young girl she used to be, to say the least. I heard she spent a lot of time back in Vault 3, and when she came out, she was never quite the same. Man, Motor-Runner is a cute son of a bitch, but the thought of that place rubs me the wrong way. I hate the sun, but I hate those dark metal hallways more than anything. Just dark metal hallways and cute boys and more drugs than you can fit up your cooch. Drugs for days. It sounds like a dream. Yeah, right.
"Sure he will, Cand," I mutter to her. I pull the cigarettes out of his pocket and toss them to the ground. Useless. The packet hits the ground with a soft plop and I see Candy flinch like she's been slapped.
"He's exploding!" Candy screams. She turns to run, and I shove the five caps I found in his side pocket into my own.
As if on cue, a gunshot rings through the air from our left and I slam my body against the dry, hard dirt, scooting against the corpse and trying to use it as a shield. He's still warm to the touch.
The rhythmic gunshots continue for a couple more seconds, and then complete silence. The Mojave takes a deep breath and then holds it. Fucking snipers taking potshots. I raise my head slowly, like some pathetic, cute little animal that's about to be eaten by a hawk peeks out of a hole, and look around. Far into the distance, almost to the point where I have to squint my eyes, I see the glint of metal carried by brown blobs and wonder why I even bothered to look in the first place.
Candy didn't stand a chance. They got her in the back while she was running. An easy target; screaming her fucking head off and running in that dazed lope, like drunk people do. Her skull helmet is empty because pieces of her head are scattered in the dirt. Blonde hair and brown eyes. Fuck... I can't find the metal pipe I had in my right hand, the one I used to smack up pretty-boy before Candy did him in. Pretty-boy, who's blood is all over my left shoulder now. My hands are bloody and covered in dirt and shaking and I can't find my damn metal pipe. Fuck!
I crawl over to her on my hands and knees. God, she was cute. Candy was adorable. My best girlfriend. Jed's gonna be so pissed. I wonder where he is now, as I suck down the jet that I find in the back pocket on Candy's corpse.
I like to go to that doctor sometimes. The asian bitch with the Japanese-sounding name. Doctor Usa-blahblahblah.
I can tell she can tell I'm a Fiend. There was enough tension to carve the fucking Mojave in half when I came through the door for the first time. I mean, I have enough decency to take off my skull helmet before I go inside, like a proper lady, but she looks at my black spikes, - "Fallen Angel" is what D-V called the hairstyle when he gave it to me. About four years since that. - she looks at my Fallen Angel spikes and just fucking knows. Hell, she's a doctor; I wouldn't even go to her if she couldn't tell a Fiend from a wanderer, an elbow from an ass. Nah, actually, I'd probably still go to her, at the end of the day.
Just for Stimpaks, though. She won't let me have anything else, the bitch.
She has about five thousand guards inside (okay, just two), like always, and they're ugly as all hell. The one on the sofa jumps to his feet like his ass is on fire when I open the door.
"Stimpaks for me, doc," I tell her, leaning over the counter and presenting my backside to the guard by the sofa. Yeah, right here, buddy.
Doc turns to look at me and I see her hand twitch to the gun at her side before her eyes flash up, to my Angels, and she takes a step back.
"How many will you have today?" Her voice is sweet, like always, but I can tell she hates my guts. I'm a damn Fiend, what the hell else should I expect from a little townie, Follower of the Pussies like her.
"One for my brain, one for the psycho I just slammed, and one for my broken heart, sweetie." I just like to fuck with people. I love it.
She clears her throat to dislodge the nervousness that I just put there. I turn in a lazy circle while her little clickety-clack heels carry her into the back room. Dude on the sofa has nice eyes. They're staring at me like he either wants to get some, or drain the blood from my veins. Hell, either way, I'm down.
Three stimpaks, no charge. So nice, those Followers. Doc even demands to see the track marks on my arms to check if my veins are okay or something like that. I don't know. I stop listening to her honeyed voice half way through.
She asks me if I'm going to take the Stimpaks back to the Fiends, and I shrug like I don't know what she's talking about. This is the first time she's addressed the bighorner in the room, first time she's called me a Fiend. "I shouldn't even be doing this, I hope you know. There's no reason for me to be doing this. I hope you appreciate that this is all out of the kindness of my heart," she says. Like I'm a damn child.
Oh, shut the fuck up. "Charity."
Candy needed some fucking charity before she got-
I scream in her face that Candy needed some fucking charity before the NCR fucked her sideways and spit on her rotting corpse. I almost throw the Stimpaks under my feet and crush the little syringes and ruin the damn things. I almost stab the syringes into her eyes. I almost pull the pin of a grenade and drop it in the center of the room. I almost do a whole bunch of things, but I don't. My mouth doesn't taste like jet anymore and I wish it would.
Her guards are grabbing my arms and dragging me towards the door because of my little outburst. The sofa-guard has a nice, strong grip on my bicep. I ask him if he jacks off his dick with a grip like that.
Doc tells me not to come back as the door slams shut, but she's told me that about a billion times before so whatever. She's nicer than God and we both know it. I'm just shitty enough to take advantage of it.
The midday sun is still melting what little armor I'm wearing into my flesh, but I jam my helmet back on anyways, feeling the hair-sprayed spikes bend neatly underneath. I end up lingering out by the door, not because I want back in, no, fuck that, but because I don't feel like moving much. My ass hits the fractured concrete of what used to be a road by the clinic, and I place the Stimpaks in a nice little line on the hot road in front of me. Three little pigs all in a row.
Dandy, Candy, and Jed. Two dumb bitches who changed their names for each other because they were so deeply in love with their friendship and one dumb bastard just hitching along for the ride. Candy and I changed our names a looong time ago. Two years? Maybe more? She was never quite the same after Vault 3... Son of a bitch.
I slide the Stimpak into my arm like it's a hard drug, like it can heal the burn and itch of painful emotions, but it doesn't. It just makes a dull ache in my legs fade.
Fuck me. I break one of the Stimpaks when I slam it onto the ground. Fuck me. The last one I wish I could swallow, like a little green Buffout pill. Fuck me. I break that one too. Fuck.
When I go back to the door of the clinic, a guard, the sofa-guard, leans out and looks at me. Just looks. I show him the fragments of what I've done, the little pieces of metal and glass that are left of the Stimpaks, and he leans back inside. I hear him say something to Doctor Usa. Before long, the door opens again and I enter.
Jed smells like he always smells. Like sweat and sex and jet and gunfire. He's older than Candy and I, maybe by about ten years. He's still cute as fuck, though. His hair is dyed purple in a little ridge from the front of his head to the back, in this stripe right down the middle. Tattoos all over his arms. Maaaaaan. He raped me once when he was jacked on psycho, but I was gone on Buffout and barely remember it happening, so we don't talk about it. To be honest, neither of us give a fuck.
There's some bitch naked from the waist down, curled up in the corner of the dirty motel room. She's so still I can't tell if she's dead or alive.
Jed is laying on the bed and staring at the ceiling. He's got it bad. He's probably the worst I've ever seen, and I've seen Violet not more than twenty feet from me when I wandered into her fort by accident in the middle of the night. She was barking like a dog and cutting flesh away from naked corpses and laughing the whole while. Jed's just... He's in bad shape.
"Candy got done in," I say, and my voice echoes through the room. I'm standing by the door with one hand on the knob, ready to bolt. It smells like ass and cat piss in here.
Jed raises his head like it's made of lead, too heavy to lift, and just rolls off the mattress. His body thuds onto the floor.
"NCR," I continue.
He sits up on the floor, cross-legged, and scoots over to me on his ass. His dirty fingers reach out when he gets close enough and his hand makes it's way up my calf. He looks up at me with squinted eyes and smiles.
"Where'd my girl die?" he asks, slow and breathy. One hand kneads my calf and the other kneads the bulge in his pants. That's the Jed I know and love.
I lean down to kiss his face; his cheeks, his forehead, his lips, because in that short moment, I realize that he's the only one I've got left. When I try to back away though, he makes this noise in the back of his throat and grabs me by the collar, pulling me down on top of him. My elbows bang against the wooden floor.
"She still warm?" I hear him whisper into my ear. Asshole.
It's a struggle to get away from him, but, when I get up, he jumps to his feet and punches the door so hard the whole room seems to shake. The bitch in the corner shifts, and Jed throws a cracked vase from the table by the door at her. Some shards stick into her skin, blood running down her pale legs, but all she does is moan like she just got kissed on the neck.
"What the fuck are you sayin'?!" Jed screams at me now, cornering me against the wall by the door, trapping me with his arms. "Dandy."
"NCR got her, dumbass," I repeat myself. Jed can be so annoying sometimes.
He rips off my helmet with one hand and fixes my angel spikes with the other. Then he puts my helmet on his head.
"You lyin'?"
I duck out from under his arm and set his Stimpak down on the table, where the vase was. Beside it, I place two jet inhalers and a psycho.
"NCR fucked her," I say again, turning towards the door. Bastard can keep my helmet if he wants to.
He grabs my arm when I try to pass, grabs it hard and stares into my eyes. "Fuck 'em up," he says, in this serious tone like he's never meant anything more seriously in his life. "You need some help? I'll fuck 'em. I'll fucking... ruin them. You know I will."
I know he will. When it was rumored that this one NCR guy killed a girl he used to fuck, Jed tracked the guy down, cut his dick off, and stuffed it into his mouth while he raped him. Didn't even use the blood as lubricant, I heard. Afterward, he slit the guy's throat and watched him bleed to death while asking him if he liked the sight of his own blood. Shoved his severed dick into the gaping wound on his neck and left him, naked, by the bridge of Camp McFuckbag, right where his buddies would find him. Left his dogtags on and everything, so they'd know.
"You want me to, huh?" Jed murmurs. His hand comes up to cup the metal strainer on my painspike armor that covers my tit. "You want me..." I don't move his hand when it drifts down to my exposed waist. "Tell me you want me."
"I'll fuck them myself," I tell him, grabbing his hand and pushing his arm away from me. Jed's getting grabby. That means it's time to hit the road. "You've got enough to fuck around here." He laughs so hard at that, like I said the funniest thing ever.
I turn around towards the door. The wood is splintered where he punched it, and I'd bet there's pieces of wood stuck in his fist. "Use the Stimpak on the table sometime."
"Hahahah- fuck you!" he screams suddenly, throwing a punch at me which misses by a mile. He bangs his hand on the wall by the door instead. "Fucking die, whore!"
The last thing I see before I pull the door shut is him turning towards the bitch in the corner with both fists clenched at his sides. Man, I love Jed so much. So much that I'm not even mad he kept my helmet.
It doesn't make any fucking sense.
I take off my Fiend shit and put on the pretty little dress I stripped off of the field hand girl I found out in the middle of Buttfuck Nowhere, slip on the tattered red dress and the white apron, her brown boots and her black gloves, and suddenly, I'm nobody. Suddenly, I can walk by Camp McFuck and, sure, people look twice at my hairstyle, but otherwise, dumbasses glance at me and tell me to move along, or to have a nice day. or to watch it out there, or something about a nuclear winter. I walk along with the brown bag at my side stuffed with chems and a butcher's knife, and nobody really says two fucks to me.
I don't have a plan. I just want to buy more psycho and Stims so that I can... I don't know. Pump myself full of psycho and assault those pricks patrolling outside the camp? Hell yeah. Get the ones who killed her.
Maybe I'll take Jed along, too. I'm not telling him about the plan until I get the shit, though. He would have raced in, balls out, with nothing to dull the pain and nothing to heal the wounds. Psycho and Stims, baby, psycho and Stims.
I cleaned out Doctor Usa already. Or at least she told me that she couldn't afford to give me anymore than three Stims at a time. Lying bitch. So I gathered up some chems from sleeping folks back in the South Vegas ruins, stealing from my own people like some turncoat bitch. I just grabbed some Buffout and some Med-X, nothing that anyone would really need, nothing that can't be forgotten about with a hit of jet, but enough shit to trade for money to spend on psycho and Stimpaks.
And hence why I'm dressed like Daddy's little girl straight off the farm. There's a medical place in Freeside that should have the stuff I need, since Doc Usa is being a little cunt. She's the one who told me about it. I just need to get in, get the stuff, and get back out. Shouldn't be too hard.
My hands are shaking like leaves, though. I took a lot of jet to calm my nerves before I left for Freeside. Too much jet. I took too fucking much jet. They're gonna know I'm a Fiend for sure, or at least a junkie. Dammit! They probably won't even give me shit. Fuck. Fuck!
Too much, too much. Maybe I overdosed and I'll faint and they'll take pity on me. Maybe.
The door to the place is damn near humongous. I don't even remember making it inside Freeside or finding the fort at all. All I know is that I'm standing in front of it, and, when I reach out to push on the huge wooden gate, my hands aren't shaking so much anymore. Guess the jet did it's job.
The inside is huge, too. There are stacked sandbags in front of the entrance in a half circle and people - must be guards - sitting in chairs behind them. There's an ugly ass ghoul girl wandering around wearing a cowboy hat and a duster. There are guards roaming around in front of tents, and there's this tall flag pole in the middle of it all, with a symbol that must be for the Followers.
I can't stand this shit. I just can't take it. I wish I was back out wandering under the sun with other jacked-up idiots. See, I can take that. I can take bashing people's skulls in and shooting their legs off and laughing about it with other fuck-ups like me. But this shit, all this normal, quiet shit, I just can't take it.
A guard starts walking up to me from my right, probably about to ask if I need any help or something, and I bolt. I charge to the left of the sandbags, across the yard, and into a tent at the very back. My heart is pounding, fuck, fuck that fucking jet I took.
Some guy sitting in a chair by the door stands up when I linger in the middle of the tent, panting and trying to catch my breath.
"If you're looking for medical help, try one of the other doctors. I'm just a researcher. Not even a particularly good one."
He's tall, tall as hell, legs like stairways to heaven, with styled blond hair, green eyes, and dark glasses. I could stare at this son of a bitch for the rest of my life.
"...Excuse me? Do you need help?"
God, he's so pretty. I could marry a guy like this. I wonder if he'll accept a carved out bottle cap as an engagement ring.
"Um. Don't take this as an insult, but do you have hearing problems? Just nod yes if you can read my lips."
His lips.
"...Ma'am?"
He steps closer and touches my arm. Oh...
"Huh?" I gasp out. He's so tall.
"Are you okay?" His eyebrows crease like he's all concerned about me. Yeah, be concerned about me, baby.
"You're an angel," I say, because my mind is racing hard on jet and my skin is on fire underneath his hand and he needs to know how fucking gorgeous he is. I'm close enough; I could grab him by the hair. I could hold my knife to his throat and grab him by his pretty, blond hair. I would, if it was any other guy. I would do that shit in a second. I'm so nervous though. I don't even know, I'm just...
My eyes don't miss a second of his face as he thinks about what I said. He removes his hand and takes a step back. Clears his throat and shifts on his feet like a virgin. Oh man.
"Ahem. Thank you."
I open my mouth to ask for help, but I end up taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly.
"Do you need any help?" his angel voice asks me, still sounding concerned. I would cut out his beating heart just so I could kiss it.
"Yeah... I need, uh, I need chems and stuff," I stumble out. Fucking retard. That's it. It's over. Might as well be wearing a "I'M A JUNKIE" sign around my neck. He won't give me shit now. "I mean, I need medical shit," I blurt out, trying to save this mess. Stupid, stupid bitch.
"Ahhhh," he draws out, all high and mighty, like some kind of fucking genius solving a math problem. "I see." It pisses me off. "Why don't you sit down for a while? I'll go get you someone who can help."
"No. Fuck you," I snap, my hand going down to the bag at my waist. I wouldn't ever cut his pretty face, but I'm sick of stuck-up doctors talking to me like I'm a damn child. "I just need some Stimpaks, okay?"
His eyebrows rise. "Oh, Stimpaks? Okay, wow, I thought it was something a lot worse. You probably should have started with that part, you know."
Asssssss-hooooole. "Do you have Stimpaks or not, doctor gorgeous?"
He looks uncomfortable at my compliment again and it makes me happy. "Well, no, not exactly. I'm not a doctor; I'm more of a sub-par researcher. I could direct you to our lovely leader Julie however. She might be able to help you out. Supplies have been a bit on the scarce side though, as I'm sure she'll tell you."
"Hey," I interrupt his rambling because I'm tired of hearing all the shit he has to say about how amazing this "Julie" slut is. She's probably a bitch anyway. "Why do you do all this stuff?"
"Do what exactly? The sub-par research or the being gorgeous?"
I smile at that. Guy's charismatic, I'll give him that.
"No, just like. I dunno. Like the Follower shit. Helping people and stuff like that."
He's quiet as he thinks about it, and I use his distraction to inch a little closer to him. Perfect. Just perfect.
"I guess... Because it feels good. Because it makes me happy to."
What the fuck. "That's it?" I ask, shocked. I look at him like he's a dumbass. That's what he sounds like right now. "That's all there is?" Because it feels good. Hell, that's why I swallow chems like cand- like sweets.
"Who says there needs to be anything else?" he asks me back, shrugging like I'm being the stupid one. Fuck, man.
He steps out of the tent, leaving me standing there like a brain-dead moron. He helps people because it makes him feel good. What the fuck. Just. What the fuck. How could he say that?
When he comes back, there are about four Stimpaks in his hands and he sets them down on the white table inside the tent. He says he talked Julie down into giving me them for only 50 caps each, instead of the ridiculous prices she usually charges. He looks at me and asks me if I'm okay again. Fuck no, I'm not okay.
"That's why... What the fuck, man."
"Um..."
"That's exactly why we do the shit we do... Every one of us. Jed... Candy liked to cut hair off of the girls she killed, if they had long hair. Weird as hell, but it just made her happy to. Fuck. Just this thing she did... Every single Fiend just does shit that makes them happy, you know? You're just like us..."
He's really quiet, and for a while I think he's thinking about what I just said, but his eyes grow wide and he glances out of the tent quickly, leaning like he's about to run. "...You're a Fiend?"
I don't know how I move as fast as I do. I grab the Stimpaks from the table and open my bag and drop it, spilling the Med-X and the Buffout and the butcher's knife as payment for the Stims, and then I'm hiking up my dress and running towards the huge wooden door, yelling out "I'm gonna come back and marry you sometime, you pretty asshole! I'm gonna fuckin' marry you!"
I race back to my side of the tracks, hoping he remembers every word I said.
Jed's completely wired beside me, a shotgun dangling in one of his hands and a psycho clenched in his other. This will be his second hit, and I'm not letting him have any more than that. We'll be lucky if he remembers to use the Stimpaks I jammed in his back pocket during the fight.
He got a couple of his buddies to help us out; three other dudes with jittery eyes just like him, all hot with psycho, all ready to bleed the NCR dry. We're standing by Candy's rotting corpse, on the edge of the line, ready to haul ass. Candy's cleaned helmet is on my head, my own helmet still on Jed's, and I feel like we're a little more okay again.
There's a Ripper in my right hand, heavy and bloody. Jed tried to give me a laser rifle, but we both know I'm better in close quarters. I want to see the looks on their faces as I saw their fucking limbs off. Because I'll be right in the middle of it, I take my third hit of psycho, and off we go.
The party begins.
And it's so much fun.
We pass El Ray Motel. I remember ambushing a fucker standing off by himself. Carving his head from his torso. One shot in my leg. Jed offs the two bitches patrolling by the close wall. One shot in my leg. One of Jed's buddies moves closer to the door and shouts something. One shot. They file out like ants, without even weapons drawn, and I'm waiting there, cutting the hands from their arms as they open the door, Jed's buddy putting rifle shots right into their heads. So much fun!
One shot in my leg, one more in my shoulder. Nothing, nothing.
There must be a couple more patrolling on the other sides of the wall, but the walls are so long, it's such a distance, that they can't get here in time. Jed props open the door, and I cook a grenade beside him, chucking it in right where almost a dozen fuckheads are standing around by the door and yelling orders at each other. It goes off before it can even hit the ground and alert them. Blood and body parts fly, pieces of weaponry broken apart like the hands that are holding them. Yes. This is what I live for. This is what makes me happy.
One of Jed's dudes writes out "Fuck NCR" on the wall, right beside the door, with some dead idiot's blood, but it looks more like red crayon to me. A bullet pops his head before he can finish the "R".
My leg is really wet for some reason. Someone picks me up and throws me over their shoulder, and all of a sudden, I realize how loud it is: guns firing and boots thundering against pavement and Jed's voice screaming right into my ear. Everyone's screaming, it feels like. I start screaming, too.
"Fucked 'em good, baby! Wooooo!" Jed slaps my ass, but I barely feel it. I jiggle on his shoulder while he runs and screams out all kinds of great things that make me laugh: how he's gonna rape their wives and piss on their daughter's faces and make their baby boys watch it. Cut off your grandma's legs and shove them up her cunt, he yells. I'm laughing so hard that I'm crying, and then I'm crying so hard that I'm laughing. I almost fall off his shoulder a couple times. My leg stings.
We both go down before we make it past the motel. He crumples on top of me and my head bounces off of the pavement. It makes my brain hurt and so I close my eyes. My arm bends in a funny way under us, but then goes limp until I can't feel it anymore. Jed doesn't move, so I don't move, can't move. I can barely breathe under him.
I can't stop fucking crying. Can't even catch my breath under Jed's weight. He's limp like he's too tired to get up or something. God... My breath catches in my lungs and stays there. I feel dizzy, and so I close my eyes as tight as I can.
I'm on a thin ass mattress on the ground. In a shitty tent. There are other people laying beside me. Every inch of my body aches. The Stimpaks in Jed's pocket...
I start bawling my damn eyes out and curling up into a little ball, even though my taped up limbs scream at me as I do so. I don't really remember what happened, but I remember enough. Oh my fucking god.
Other people in the tent make loud noises, tell me to shut up, start calling for a doctor, start cussing me out. When I yell right back at them to shut up themselves, they yell back louder, and it hits me. A glance confirms it. They're Fiends.
They're two of Jed's buddies. The two that didn't get popped like a ripe fruit by the door of the camp or shot in the back while screaming about fucking bitches.
One of them calls me a whore and I throw a pebble at his bandaged face, but some dumb doctor comes in to break it up soon enough. It's some girl with a sick hairstyle, a mohawk, who bends down to whisper something in the asshole's ear before sticking a needle into his arm. That shuts him up real quick.
The other one slurs to her in a tired voice "she needs to go, doc", but when the chick looks at me, her eyes widen and brighten in some weird way like she's looking at her long-lost sister or something.
"Ah, you're awake!" she chirps like a bird. "You're the girl Arcade told me about. How are you feeling?"
The only thing I can answer her with is a ragged "...what?"
"How much of what happened do you remember?" she asks, crouching down beside my dirty mattress and clasping her hands in front of her. "Arcade told me you were the one who came in a few days ago to donate some medical supplies." She leans in closer still and places her hand on my shoulder - the one that's not wrapped in medical tape. What a weirdo. "I'm not sure if you remember, but you got caught up in a firefight between not far from Camp McCarran. You were one of the only survivors that our scouts found when they went out looking for any wounded to bring back here and treat."
It's almost too much to take in, and I don't know how I could respond, so I don't. She gets the message that my brain's in critical overload because she tells me that she's glad I'm feeling better and that she'll be right back before she ducks out of the open tent flap and leaves.
A few days ago..? I came by and dropped the ball in front of Doctor Cutie on the same day Jed and I took on the NCR. A few days...
I've been out for days.
The only thing I can think of then is Jed's body, out there under the sun and rotting for the days that I was out of it. It pisses me off so much that I push myself to the one leg that's not bound and aching and attempt to hobble out of the tent. I hear Jed's bud, the one that's not out, tell me to sit my sorry ass back down. Shut the fuck up, bitch. You probably never cared about Jed one bit.
"Where is he?" I ask the first person I see, which happens to be a guard. He glances at me like he doesn't give a shit before gesturing to a tent at the very back of the fort.
"No, not Doctor Gorgeous, godammit," I growl at him, but he's already ignoring me and walking away to continue his rounds.
"Where the fuck is Jed?!" I yell to whoever is listening in this dumb fort. Lots of people glance over, but nobody answers. I lose my balance and fall on my ass. My leg hurts like a bitch.
Mohawk Chick suddenly materializes beside me, clucking like a mother hen and reassuring me that the men I was found with are recovering and will be fit as fiddles in due time. Like I give a flying fuc-
"Whoever he was, his body was taken care of."
Well, I'll be damned. My future husband himself here to be the bearer of good news.
"Some who volunteer here at the fort helped clean up all the bodies they could. Or what was left of the bodies, at least."
Blondie's standing tall as ever and looking down at me with an expression of both weariness and worry. We both know that he kept my secret of being a Fiend from Mohawk Chick, even painted me as a kind donator, but hell if I know why he did it. Now that Blondie's here, Mohawk pats my shoulder and turns away to get something. Probably something to knock me out and shut me up. My head is starting to hurt.
"He's not out in the sun still, is he?" I ask from down on the ground. I sound foolish even to myself, but I have to know. I have to. "He hated being in the sun too long."
Blondie swallows hard, I see it in the way his throat moves, and looks away from me. "No... He's not out in the sun anymore."
Well, that's a relief. I'm pathetic and hurt, friendless and homeless and hopeless and sad, but man, what a relief. Poor Jed. My poor dear Jed and my poor darling Candy.
I must have zoned out thinking about my two favorite dead people because, when I realize where I am again, I'm standing up straight with the support of a crutch and Mohawk Chick is telling me that exercise is good, but not to wander too far. What..?
"If you feel any pain, go back to your tent. I'll tell the guards to keep an eye on you, okay?"
Oh. I'm allowed out of my pen, then.
She's so motherly. It makes me sick. It reminds me of what my mother never was.
I manage a nod, but hell if I'm gonna give her a fake smile or tell her thanks. Even so, the nod seems enough because she touches my shoulder again, so fucking touchy-feely, and returns to the tent she got my crutch from.
I don't bother standing there in the middle of the fort and looking around at things I've already seen before. I hobble to where I want to be most and find myself in Blondie's tent.
He's sitting in his chair, with a clipboard and pencil in his hands, looking over smart things that doctors and researchers must look over. The sight of him makes me want to cry.
Not because of his beauty, no, that's already been established as a godsend, but just seeing a person these days, a human being, with a clipboard and a pencil in their hands, probably looking at data and numbers and information that hold hope for the future, I don't know. It makes me want to cry.
"Try not to cause too much trouble and mess up all the lies I had to tell about you, okay?" he says without looking up from his clipboard. I'm going to cry.
"I'm sorry about your friends, too, by the way. I'm sure they were... good people. For the kinds of people they were. You know what I mean." He looks up at me finally. Green eyes and blond hair. I'm not going to cry.
"...Arcade?" I mumble out. His name sounds fucking stupid, but my voice sounds like a little girl's right now, so we're even. "Why did you even lie? I don't care if anyone knows I'm a Fiend or anything."
He doesn't seem to notice that his name sounds nerdy as fuck or that my voice sounds small and insignificant. He shrugs, easy, with one shoulder, and looks back down at the clipboard. "I knew you would get better medical attention if Julie thought you were only an innocent bystander. I don't know. You could call it having a conscience. Just wanting to help. Because it makes me happy, remember?"
It still doesn't make complete sense to me.
Even after a week of recovering in the fort, getting weaned off chems by Mohawk Julie, chatting with some guards, and watching Jed's buds get their asses whooped at Caravan, a harder-than-balls game some other patients teach us; after sitting in Arcade's tent late at night and listening to him go on and on about his useless research and his life and the Followers of Apocalypse, I still don't understand.
We talk about our past lovers one night because I slyly bring it up, and all his past fucks have the pronoun "he". His first love has the pronoun "he". His last fling has the pronoun "he". I still come to his damn tent almost every night, and I don't understand why.
One night, when he takes my hand in his and tells me I'm a good person despite my past, it makes my face hot, and I don't fucking understand. He calls me by my first name when he says it, which is almost as fucking stupid as his first name is. Almost. I ask him who's name is more retarded, and he says both our names are pretty amazing because who else out there in the world has them. I tell him that's a bullshit answer, and he chuckles until his eyes get squinty.
I know nice things can't last. I know I'll eventually end up wandering back out towards the rundown edge of Freeside, Westside, or Shitside, hand in hand with Jed's buddies, shivering from withdrawals and sitting on the national line and feeling like a piece of shit. Probably get done in by the NCR like a piece of shit, too. Like everyone I've ever known and cared about has.
Hell, maybe I'll join the ultra-junkies back in the Vault and lose my mind to chems or even become a damn guard for this sad, little medical fort. Who could know?
I just know that whatever happens now, it's not gonna be nice. In this world, it just can't be.
I look at pretty-boy Arcade, happy and young and alive, trying in vain to make the world a better place, and I try to think otherwise, but I know without a doubt, that when push comes to shove, no matter what we do, we're all a bunch of fucking losers in the end.