Title: Merry Christmas, New Vegas
Pairing: F!Courier/Raul, implied F!Courier/Dean Domino
Summary: The Courier gives New Vegas Dean Domino for Christmas. Raul finds himself jealous.
A/N: Just a quick little thing. It is what it is.
"Come to the Sierra Madre," the radio croons and Marilyn goes.
Raul's old enough to know better—it's a carrot on a stick, it's a pit waiting to swallow. Every bone in his body screams trap, trap because when he left Mexico, even the cockroaches fled. There's no pre-war resort there, no shining beacon to the past.
But Marilyn smiles, all sharp teeth and charm when he worries. "A city built around a casino, Raul," she says. "If it's working, I want to know how."
She's a queen, now. She swears she'll drag New Vegas up from the ashes of its past. Already, crews work night and day—handsomely paid—rebuilding the city, reclaiming those buildings still standing.
"I'll be fine," she tells him, tapping the side of her head. "I'm bulletproof."
What can he do, but watch her go?
Three weeks later, nearly Christmas, she returns.
She drags a bag behind her down the street, bearing gifts. For Cass, she brings a bottle of bourbon, the first Raul's seen in two hundred years, maybe the last in the wastes. She brings Arcade a Gauss rifle, brings Boone a pair of diamond-studded sunglasses to see him laugh. She brings Veronica a woman with a face like a roadmap and smiles when they melt into each other like coming home.
For Raul, she brings back a pair of .357 revolvers like the ones he had as a kid.
For New Vegas, she brings Dean Domino.
All smiles and snide asides, the bastard trails through the Lucky 38 beside her, a casual hand on her back, fingers brushing her arms, moving with her like he knows her, like three weeks in a busted up old casino and he earned this.
Raul remembers him. Remembers tabloid headlines—a fist fight with Dean Martin in some long forgotten club. He says as much, watches with quiet, vicious pleasure as Domino's teeth clench hard enough to creak.
Marilyn laughs. "You have a legacy," she says, and Domino slips back into charming like putting on a suit.
Still, when she hugs Raul hello, he sees Domino's eyes narrow behind his glasses, cold and mean.
He grew up in Hidalgo; Raul knows how to spot a snake. Domino thinks he's dangerous, following Marilyn, planning and plotting. Wants to use her, probably. Smells the power on her and thinks he can charm it his way.
But three weeks in a busted up old casino—he doesn't know the first thing about the New Vegas queen. He'll only ever be as dangerous as she wants him to be.
So Raul smiles over her shoulder, watches Domino snarl—
Watches the cameras shifting in the ceiling, Yes Man following everything.
Merry Christmas, he thinks. You won't last past the new year.
Domino does not return to the Lucky 38. Marilyn sets him up in the Tops, gets him the stage. She rewrites the radio—changes Mr. New Vegas to Ms.—plays music salvaged from wreckages wasteland-wide.
Between her and Tommy Torini, fifteen new singers hit the Top's grand stage. Marilyn puts them on her radio, too.
"New Vegas is waking up," she tells them. "It should sound like it. Too many jangling spurs and men in Roman skirts lately. I'm done wallowing in the past."
Raul catches himself wondering what Domino thinks of that—him, history's poster boy. He doesn't wonder long. Marilyn smiles at him over the radio, asks him to dance, and the thought crumbles.
"With these knees?" he asks. "Won't hear the music over my creaking."
Still, he dances. Hand pressed flat against her back, fingers twined in hers, they dance. He feels her heat like a wall, her laugh like a promise, fluttering against the hollow of his throat.
He hopes a little, wrapped up in her.
But later, Arcade tells him, she dances with Dean Domino, too.