There used to be a time when she thought she was really beautiful. She had never been vain, not really, but she was proud of her origins and her ethnicity. Being Chinese in the Mojave was a rare thing. Hell, being Chinese anywhere in the New California Republic was.

It didn't matter anymore, she guessed. That time had come and gone.

She stared at the sullied water beneath the dinosaur statue, flinching every now and then as the tattered remains of her resolve stared back at her resolutely through her image.

She had the surefire physical characteristics of being Chinese. Straight, jet black hair that was darkest on her head, a flatter face and small, thin nose. Her cheekbones were wideset under her eyes, full, overreaching her mouth just slightly into two plumper cheeks. This was a "westerner" quality her village had once commended her for. Maybe it was why she'd been deemed so beautiful. She didn't know. Her mouth was wide, concealing a huge smile that sheltered an array of strong, white teeth. Her skin was dark, and her eyes, curved in just slightly nearest her nose, tilted upwards just slightly at the end.

Yes, there was once a time in which she thought she would have been called beautiful. Her mother had told her this; though, to her mother's credit, this was the job of most mothers. Good mothers, anyway. She would likely have said it to her children, if she had any.

This made her feel pinched all over again, but she just stared, tight-lipped, tight-chested into her reflection, eyeing her features with anthropological disdain for the first time in what felt like a very long time. It was strange how a person's perception of themselves could change.

Being beautiful didn't really seem important anymore. There were other things that mattered more now.

And her mother and father had taught her almost all of them.

The ability to run very long distances was a plus. This was a skill she had. Her father had taken her out from a very early age to go on very long runs to build up her endurance. The ability to drop everything and abandon it in an attempt to flee, also a plus. Their village, if you could even call it that, was forever in motion. Sometimes, getting up and leaving in the middle of the night was absolutely necessary. This was also a skill she possessed. The ability to listen quietly when others spoke, she had. That, her mother had drilled into her. Listening was an important facet of the old ways. The ability to watch her surroundings – also in her arsenal. Her mother, also, had taught her this.

But there were certain things her family would never have been able to teach her.

The ability to shoot a man in the head from a mile away, her most valuable asset. She'd learned she'd had that capacity only after everyone she'd known had died. She'd learned how to treat blunt force trauma, how to utilize and apply a tourniquet, what and when and how to press into wounds to ensure that the wounded wouldn't die – that she'd also learned outside of her home.

Not that she really had a home anymore. She'd come to know that the only people who really had these kinds of qualities didn't really have homes. They were more or less homeless.

That was where all her so-called beauty and skills got her.

Homeless.

She was now so homeless, utterly homeless, more homeless than she had ever been, that she wasn't quite sure what to do or where to go or how to think. And it was in times like these, hiding out from the rain in some backwater Mojave settlement called Novac, hiding under the ass-end of a T-Rex statue, that this realization was felt with particular acuteness.

She heard footsteps coming closer to her, and she stood tall, placing frigid palms against long-since aged plastic to ground her to reality. A man came around the corner, obviously seeking to get out of the rain, and she receded as far into the dinosaur as she could, not wanting to be seen.

He wore a red, tattered beret, but that obviously didn't keep him any drier than anybody else because his white shirt, a little tight and stained from sweat and the wear and tear of living in the Mojave appeared to be soaked through. This showed off his stellar physique, but she couldn't be less interested. He was tall, had some kind of weapon slung around behind him, and he wore sunglasses – even though it was still early enough in the morning to be too dark to see.

This seemed ridiculous to her, but then again, what was ridiculous in this day and age?

"Yo, Boone! Where'd you head off to?" a voice from above called.

The man with the white shirt ducked closer to the dinosaur.

Boone, she presumed.

"Yo, you dip out early, man? What's with that?"

Still, the man with the dirty white shirt ducked closer to the statue, eyes up towards the direction of the voice, as if poised to be discovered at any moment. She, too, chose not to move, not wanting to be seen. It would happen eventually, the man had to be either totally sloshed or high off his rocker not to notice her, but that didn't mean it had to happen right away.

Time passed, but the rain didn't, and the man finally relaxed against the yellowing yellowed dinosaur statue as the voice who'd sought after him lost interest. After a few moments, obviously under the assumption that he was alone, the man glanced over his shoulder to his right around a corner she couldn't see and withdrew a long needle from a thigh-pocket.

A blue liquid was inside, clear and pure. There were tiny letters on the plastic: Med-X. Highly potent, very effective. A painkiller of some kind - she knew what was in pure medicine, but that was hard to come by these days. Who knew what was really in that syringe?

She surveyed him for injuries and saw that he had none. She waited for him to draw the injuries from his person, waited for him to perhaps lift a sleeve or drop trou to reveal some kind of scar in which he could apply the medicine directly. He didn't. In fact, based on the way he was continually glancing over his shoulder, based on the unsteady, somewhat ungraceful lurching of his hands, it looked as if he didn't physically need the painkiller at all.

He flexed his left arm and she saw that the area of interest in which his vein ran most easily was uninjured. No tell tale signs of being a junky. No bruising, no scarring, no swelling. The area looked clear.

So the man was in some kind of pain.

This wasn't the way, she thought, and the medic in her couldn't remain quiet anymore.

"Unless you're hurt, that's just not a good idea," she said calmly, as non-judgmentally as she could.

The man jumped, slamming his head into the dinosaur, swearing prolifically, albeit in hushed, angry whispers, as he rubbed his head where contact had been made. The syringe dropped to the ground, and the precariously held liquid inside seeped out with the tiniest tinkling of shattered glass.

Syringes these days, she thought, a little guiltily, glancing up into the man's sunglasses.

He just glared at her with more hatred than she would have anticipated.

"What the fuck would you know about it, chink?" he snapped, scowling, driving the toe of his right boot into the now-destroyed analgesic.

The racial slur was nothing new – in fact, it was quite predictable. It wasn't cool or shocking. Just made him sound and look as desperate as his behavior obviously was.

She felt sorry for him.

Leaning forward, she bridged the space between them slightly. He stiffened, as if she was physically repulsive.

This, too, wasn't new.

Old news, pal, she thought to herself.

"I was a doctor once," she offered him as kindly as she could. "Served with a unit."

"Then what are you doing skulking around here?" he asked. "Not like any fucking soldier I've ever known."

She nodded, smiling unaffectedly, as if his rudeness was commonplace.

"Yes, I suppose you're right," she finally offered. "Though I'm no soldier."

"I thought you just said –"

"You assumed," she continued inscrutably. "But I can understand your confusion. I was obviously unclear. Sorry."

There was a silence between them. She could sense from his demeanor that he was in an incredible amount of social agony. That was unkind of her, she realized, and she nodded her head lightly, just the way her mother taught her to do. It was not the full bow from the shoulders she'd afforded elders or other important people from her village, but that couldn't be helped. All in all, he was a foreigner to her culture, and tradition could only carry so far when dealing with foreigners.

"Don't fucking bow at me," the man called Boone snapped at her viciously.

"Very well then," she said to him, standing taller. "I apologize if I have caused you some discomfort. Though, your racist attitude does you no credit."

"Where the fuck did you even come from?" he asked her, eyes narrowing behind his tinted glasses. "And what are you doing under here so late?"

She smiled at the use of his terminology.

"It is very early in the morning," she commented, glancing up at the gray sky. "As for the matter of my being here, I didn't see the need to involve anybody, but I needed to rest, and I wanted to stay dry. I found this spot, and I thought it would do nicely. It seemed safe, dry, and solitary."

"Yeah, well, squatters aren't allowed in Novac," he spat aggressively. "You could be Legion. How are we supposed to know?"

She stiffened, and for the first time, she couldn't hide it.

This was the first time being outside of the Legion that anybody had mentioned it to her directly. She should have expected it, but somehow she hadn't. It felt like a different time. A different life. Like she'd died and been reborn. That was how it had felt when her village had been raided too, how it felt as she watched her father and mother get picked off by the very heathens who would then take her in.

"I'm not Legion," her mouth said automatically.

"And I'm supposed to trust you?" the man snapped. "Hiding around like this? Pretty suspicious. I don't like it."

She pursed her lips, though she was not irritated.

"I suppose you do not need to trust me," she said quietly. "Though I have no caps and no weapons. You can search if you'd like. I've only got a few personal items."

She opened her arms, and the man vaulted backwards, obviously on high alert. But he relaxed after only a second. The baggy coat she'd been wearing spread wider to reveal nothing but a skin-tight shirt that she was relieved she was finally growing into again. Her pants were full of useful pockets, but they were all loose and undone at the buttons, obviously not caches for hidden weapons, and her boots were so tight it would have been a miracle if she could hide a knife in there.

All that was left was her hands and her hair. Her hands, being empty, led the man called Boone to evaluate her face and hair. Her hair, which was tightly wrapped into a braided bun – her mother's favorite hairstyle – couldn't have hidden anything more than maybe a pin or two. All that was left after that was the necklace she had around her neck - her only, best, favorite treasure.

He'd likely reach the same conclusion she did.

Pretty plain, as girls go. Plain and harmless. A chink, he'd probably come to realize, obviously not somebody to pursue.

A little ruefully, she felt sheepish that this was always the way she evaluated her self-worth – by the way she looked. Some lessons were harder to unlearn, she supposed.

"How did you get here?" he asked her, no less suspicious than before.

She shrugged.

"Same way most people do," she said vaguely. "Walked."

"Most people don't walk unless they're moving with a caravan," the man accused.

She held out her palms.

"This is true," she said, "but I don't really feel the need to be with people so much right now."

"And anybody who says that usually has something nasty to hide," he snarled, advancing slightly.

Her physical reaction was instant and dizzying. Knees weak, arms heavy, she felt wobbly as she backed further into the dinosaur. He smelled of alcohol and sweat. Obviously, this was the end of his workday, and his eyes shone from exhaustion and – maybe, just a little – desperation.

Desperation was the tool men used to commit horrifying crimes, and she was riddled with fear.

The man, to his credit, noticed this.

"Get out of here," he finally ordered, waving his hand at her as he turned away. "I don't want to see you again. And believe me, I'll know about it."

"How so?" she asked him curiously.

He motioned to the gun on his shoulder as if this was answer enough. Her eyes flitted to it. A high caliber rifle, probably long-ranged. Her eyes flitted to his beret. NCR, she now realized.

He really was one mean motherfucker, and, rookie sniper or not, he could probably drop her like a Brahman.

That was when she remembered the Med-X, and the smell of alcohol. Her eyes widened as this information all clicked together.

"You're the lookout and you're high?" she asked, unable to hide her disgust now.

"Spare me the lecture, warden," the man snapped. "I get enough of it from everybody else."

"These people are counting on you – they're –"

"—and what the fuck do you know about it?" Boone asked louder than ever. "I wasn't gonna stay down here. I just didn't want to see my replacement, and..."

He seemed to realize he was explaining himself to her.

"I don't recall asking for your opinion, motherfucker. Get out of my face."

The luck of her arrival struck her now, and all at once she felt grateful that she had not died upon approaching. Again, she began to bow with her head, but she stopped herself when she remembered his last reaction to a bow.

"You're right," she said, stiffer now. "You didn't ask for it. I apologize."

"Just get the fuck out of here," the man snapped, waving his hand again to shoo her with a little more insistence this time. "This is my spot. Get away from here."

She watched him with a mixture of pity and frustration before finally sighing.

"I will take my leave then," she whispered.

Without another word, she backed away from the man until she was in the rain again. He watched her as she turned around the corner, eyes unwaveringly even as if he were a cat and she a mouse.

But when she turned to jog away, around the tail and out of the town, she only had to steel a glance back once to realize that the man had not followed her. What was more, nobody else had either.

And, just like that, she was on the move again. Homeless. Funny how some things worked out that way.