After playing Dead Money (which I thoroughly enjoyed), I thought to myself, "Wow, the Sierra Madre could really fuck someone up." So I wrote about that.

Sometimes she woke up in the middle of the night. Nightmares pitched her whole body forward and she was powerless to stop the flow of tears and the gripping of her knees that followed, her whole body shaking and the beeping still echoing in the recesses of her mind. It passed in an hour with the help of a drink or so, and only then could she sleep soundly.

She can't listen to radios anymore. It saddens her sometimes, because she used to love the sound of Mr. New Vegas talking about her on the news. She used to love Bing Crosby. Now, whenever she hears static, she can't help it. She pulls out her pistol and destroys the source. She's gotten banned from a lot of saloons.

She hallucinated a lot. She'd see Elijah's eyes behind the eyes of every villain she'd run across; every ghoul became Dean. She'd begun communicating regularly with Marcus, trying to understand the brain chemistry of the Nightkin. She couldn't talk to Veronica for long stretches of time for fear that she'd begin crying. She'd left for a week and returned changed, and her friends had noticed.

"So, tell me when it started."

She hadn't planned on telling anyone. She had gone to the bunker alone, and had returned alone. The only one who had tried to delve deeper was Boone, for obvious reasons, when he'd seen the collar marks around her neck. She'd returned to the Lucky 38 months ago, battered and bruised, with Christine's final message from the tomb still ringing in her ears.

"Mellie."

Mellie's eyes looked up to meet the steely gray ones that rested behind spectacles similar to her own. Arcade pushed the cup of tea across the table to her, his fingers lingering on the handle of the mug for only the briefest second. A lot had happened in a few months. She'd pushed the NCR out of Vegas. She'd wiped out Caesar and suppressed the Legion. She'd helped a lot of people out of a lot of tight spots. The Mojave had become her blood. But she still felt she'd failed.

"What happened in there?"

There were three of them at the table that night: Mellie, Boone, and Arcade. Boone had his feet resting on the table, a beer leaking condensation onto his hand and the shirt beneath it. He'd been awake when Mellie had gone for her midnight 'sleep aid'; normally he didn't ask about it. He of all people understood the need to keep secrets. Arcade, on the other hand, was a firm believer in talking it out. Too much time in the Old Mormon Fort with therapists.

"I don't want to talk about it."

"I know you don't want to talk about it," Arcade replied with a small smile. "But you need to. It's healthy."

"If she doesn't want to talk about it, she shouldn't have to," said Boone, speaking for the first time that night.

"I don't want to talk about it," Mellie whispered, staring at her dark reflection in the tea.

"Mellie," said Arcade pleadingly, reaching out to touch her hands.

Mellie jerked away, looking at Arcade with eyes that stared for miles. "You know what, Arcade? Maybe if you keep saying my name, I'll respond. Maybe if you keep asking the same thing over and over, I can tell you why I don't listen to the radio anymore. Maybe I'll tell you about the collars, or the prospect of being trapped in a vault for eternity." Tears began pricking the edges of her eyes. "Maybe I'll tell you about the friends I'd made who, for all I know, could be dead. Maybe I'll tell you about the ghosts. Oh, Arcade…there were so many ghosts. The whole place reeked of the dead." She stared down at her hands, beginning to cry silently, tears running down her face and onto the table. "Arcade, I sloshed tea on my hand and it really hurts."

"Gimme that," said Arcade, snapping in the direction of Boone's beer. Boone handed it over and Arcade took Mellie's hand, putting the still-cold beer on the reddened skin, rolling it over to cool the whole area. Boone stood and got a second beer, cracking it open with that satisfying ksh-pah sound.

"Start from the beginning," said Arcade quietly. "What happened first?"

Mellie sniffed. "I followed the radio transmission. I wasn't expecting anything…I just got curious." She let out a barking laugh that sounded more like a sob. "I didn't want to rob the place, I had money enough from Happy Trails. It led to an abandoned Brotherhood of Steel bunker. There was a radio there…with the same transmission playing over it. Vera."

"Vera?"

"Vera Keyes. The singer from the old world. Dean Domino wrote that song for her, you know the one." Mellie squeezed her eyes shut. She could still hear it, that damn hologram calling out for Sinclair. Sinclair! Couldn't she hear the sin in his name? "I got gassed. When I woke up, I was in the Sierra Madre with a collar around my neck."

And suddenly she was back. She could feel the collar around her neck, and Father Elijah, that sonofabitch, barking orders at her like she was his dog. No, she wasn't his dog…Dog was his dog….

"A collar?" Boone interrupted her dream with his hard voice. "A slave collar?"

"No," Mellie said, rubbing her neck. It was still a little tender; she'd rubbed it raw in the days following her escape, reveling in the skin there, the ability to go by a speaker without that terrifying beeping. "A bomb collar. I had one, God had one, Dean had one, and Christine had one."

"Christine?" asked a soft voice from the door. The three heads whipped around to see Veronica standing in the doorway in her pajamas, Ed-E floating by her head. "I mean, I know there are a lot of Christines out there, but do you…was it?"

Mellie sighed, nudging a chair out with her foot for Veronica to sit in. She padded over and sat, her eyes still pleading questions. "I think so. She never mentioned you by name, but she said Father Elijah had done terrible things, and that he had separated her from someone she cared for very much. I guess that was you."

A tear slipped down Veronica's face. "She's alive?"

"I guess so. I mean, I don't know anymore. She left me a final broadcast, but I haven't heard from her since."

Veronica smiled through the tears streaming down her face and took the courier's hand. "She's alive. That's all I needed to hear. What happened next?"

"I met God."

Boone groaned. "Don't tell me those religious nuts in Zion got to you—"

"No, no," said Mellie quickly. "His name was God. Well, Dog and God. He was a nightkin with a split personality. God was an asshole—"

"How fitting," Boone snorted. Arcade shot him a dirty look and motioned for Mellie to continue.

"God was an asshole, but I liked him better than Dog. Mostly because God could hold up his end in a conversation, and all Dog ever talked about was his hunger."

"It's a constant feeling, Courier," said a smooth voice behind her. Mellie removed her glasses and rubbed her eyes: she didn't need to look to know it was another hallucination of the friends she'd left behind in the Sierra Madre. God placed a hand on her shoulder, gentler than he ever would have been in real life. "But I appreciate you never locking me in the cage."

"They called the basement of their mind the cage," Mellie said, looking Arcade in the eyes as Veronica stroked her hand. "One of them would be down there at all times, either Dog or God. And the one who wasn't was the one I spoke to."

"You earned my trust," said God. Mellie leaned back into the imaginary comfort of that massive hand. "It's a shame I'll never be able to pay you back. Or even remember you."

"I saved him from himself. The two merged together, into someone I never knew. I don't know what he goes by now. If he goes by anything at all. If he's even alive."

"Do you believe I'm alive?" Mellie tried her best to hold back more tears, instead settling on taking a swig of Boone's beer. "Then I'm alive."

The hand on her back dissolved back into air, and Mellie had to fight the urge to call out for him. Instead, she smiled and said, "Then I met Dean Domino."

"Oh, darling, what kind of an introduction is that!" demanded the quasi-British voice behind her. Mellie fought the urge to grin; even though Dean had proved himself to be something of a bastard in the end, she still saw the potential for good in him. If she ever saw him again, she'd mention it.

"Wait—the Dean Domino?" demanded the gravelly, Mexican voice from the door to the kitchen. Raul entered and sat beside Boone, grabbing himself a glass and a bottle of whiskey on the way. "The guy from the posters? I thought he was dead."

"He essentially is," said Mellie with a smirk. "He's a ghoul. Over 200 years old, by my count."

"You make me sound ancient," Dean scoffed.

"Trapped in a world that's outgrown him," murmured Raul.

"I don't like him," said Dean after a short, sour pause. "Make him leave."

"He threatened to blow me to bits when we first met," said Mellie, remembering sitting in those chairs and looking over the cloud with him, like they were two old friends and not strangers tied by fate. "He'd rigged a chair with explosives. Said he'd make the moon turn 'cherry-pie red'. But he helped me get through the cloud okay, even if he was terrified of the ghosts."

"The cloud? Ghosts?" Arcade asked. "Drink your tea, it's getting cold."

Mellie complied, taking a sip of the barely hot tea. The thin tendril of steam that still trickled off it turned blood red and wound its way around their feet, lapping at their ankles. "The cloud was…I'm not sure what it was. A red, toxic cloud that covered the Sierra Madre. Poisonous if inhaled."

"Maybe for you, partner," smirked Dean, kicking at the fog.

"When Dean was with me, he could keep me from being poisoned, at least for a little bit. But it eats away at you. Especially if you don't have any stimpaks."

And then she was back in the cloud, the toxic vapor filling her lungs. At one point, she nearly collapsed because she'd been forced to fight ghost people while in the cloud: they were blocking the stairs. She'd nearly passed out, but Dean had caught her, taking her into the closest out-of-cloud bedroom and sitting on the edge of the bed while he waited for her to wake. He was looking at her when she did, the last bits of his humanity showing behind those sunglasses.

"I couldn't let you die," Dean said quietly, rubbing his dehydrated hands together. "For one, our lives were tied. You died, I died. For another…you remind me of her. Head in the clouds, but that police pistol firmly on Earth." Mellie smiled slightly and Dean chuckled. "I know you can't answer me, or your friends will think you're crazy. But know this, Mel; I'd have been positively distraught in the seconds after you died before I died." He placed his dry, cracked lips on her cheek, and she swore she could smell the cigarette smoke and that certain smell that old world charm has before he was gone.

"Last…I met Christine."

Veronica inhaled sharply beside her. "What did she look like?"

"Not good. Dean and I got her out of an Auto-Doc…turns out he's the one who put her in there. She was bald, and covered in scars. Unable to talk, that thing had cut her vocal cords."

Christine appeared behind Boone, silent. She smiled at the courier, encouraging her to continue the story. Rex and Cass, drawn by the noise, padded in. Rex and laid his head on Mellie's lap with a whine. "She kept radio signals from setting off my collar for a little bit. Without her…well, I'd be fucked sideways, let's just say that." Christine grinned, letting out a silent laugh followed by a wince.

"Radios set your collar off?" Arcade asked.

"An unfortunate side-effect of old-world technology," said Mellie in her best impression of Father Elijah's voice (which was not very good). "You'd get close and it would start beeping, and then you had to get back before the beeping became faster and faster—"

"I dunno what that table ever did to you, boss," said Raul, eyeing Mellie's hands, which were white-knuckle gripped on the edge of the table, "but you're throttling it within an inch of its life."

"Sorry," Mellie murmured, releasing the table and instead running her hands over the soft fur around Rex's brain case. She made eye contact with Christine, who was gripping Boone's chair with the same intensity.

"What—what happened to her?" Veronica asked, peering up at Mellie behind that curtain of hair. With a start, Christine seemed to see her for the first time. Mellie watched her breath catch in her throat, her eyes blink. She wandered over to Veronica, finally coming to a stop behind her chair. She hesitated, but then rested the back of her hand on Veronica's cheek, smiling tearfully.

"We all got to separate positions and triggered the gala event," said Mellie, squeezing Veronica's hand. "It was spectacular. Fireworks, music…amazing. With the unfortunate side effect of attracting a lot of ghosts. And I was alone to fight them." Christine put a hand on Mellie's shoulder and squeezed it comfortingly. Mellie reached up and placed her own hand over it: to her friends, it just looked like she was rubbing her shoulder.

"You keep mentioning ghosts," said Cass, sounding puzzled. "Do you mean actual ghosts? I mean, I know you have a thing about skeletons, but—"

"No." Cass sat back, shocked at how hard his friend's voice had suddenly become. Christine, sensing that her time was coming to an end, planted a firm kiss on Veronica's forehead, remaining there as she dissolved. As she did, a pair of green eyes lit up in the darkened corner. "Ghosts…ghost people. They were people…they were real people once." A second pair of globes lighted in another corner. "The workers of the Sierra Madre. Trapped in their radiation suits when the bombs dropped." A third, a fourth. "They—they were people once. But they weren't. They couldn't get out of their suits, and…oh God, they moved like spiders, like bugs. Leaping and spinning and punching you with bear traps." The table was surrounded now, a pair of ghastly eyes wherever she looked, so she dug the heels of her hands into her eyes. "Harvesters, seekers, trappers—when they died, they weren't dead!" Mellie knew she was crying again, knew she was screaming, but she couldn't help it. She heard Arcade move his chair around by hers and felt him wrap an arm around her shoulders, but it didn't help the shaking. "They were people, but they weren't people. I had to dismember them when they died, or they'd just get back up. And the noise, that awful hissing and clicking—!"

"Ssh, stop, stop," Arcade murmured, allowing her to simply dissolve into shaking, terrified sobs. He handed Mellie her tea and she gulped it gratefully, letting the now cold liquid drip down her throat. "You had to fight mutants, okay. Then what?"

Mellie took a few deep breaths, causing the eyes to slowly fade. "I made it into the casino. The others were all there. I had to stop Dog from blowing the place to high hell, and I had to find Dean and figure out…everything he did."

"What'd he do?" Boone asked.

"Don't tell them," said Dean, reappearing at the head of the table, where Arcade had been. "Don't tell Veronica. She doesn't have to know."

"He was planning on robbing the place," said Mellie coldly, staring Dean dead in the eyes. He sighed, letting his guilt show through. "The whole place was built as a monument to Vera, by Frederick Sinclair. He loved her."

"I get it, all right?" Dean snapped. "I screwed up! I ruined one woman's chance at love, all because I wanted to live like a king. Can you blame me? The riches in the vault, yours for the taking—you took one measly gold bar and used it to buy a sniper rifle!"

"He'd ripped out Christine's vocal cords and replaced them with Vera's."

"Why?" Veronica whispered.

"To get down to the vault—the only way to get down there was through Vera's voice. And she was dead. So Dean…came up with an alternative." Dean ran a hand over his head, and then, in a swirl of red fabric, it wasn't Dean anymore. It was Vera.

"Terrible thing to do to that poor girl," she said, touching her own throat. She was even more lovely in Mellie's imagination than she had been in the pictures she'd seen. "But Dean was always willing to do whatever it took to get what he wanted."

"I found Christine again when it was almost done," Mellie said, turning away from the hallucinated starlet to her more real friend. "She was okay, she could speak, but she had Vera's voice. That's when she mentioned you…I think. She spoke the passcode. Told me to kill Elijah." Mellie exhaled slowly. "And I was in."

"Begin again. Let go," Vera said, clutching her hands to her chest. It echoed around Mellie, the words she wished she could adhere to but was incapable of. Vera smiled and began to morph, twisting into the shape of a man in blue robes, with a beard on his chin and a fire in his eyes. Mellie couldn't look at him.

"I had to get past holograms that would shoot you with beams of light—"

"Ingenious, the one-man armies," Elijah hissed, resting his hands on the table. "You can't hit them and they can't miss."

"—and the cloud, of course there was more of that—"

"It preserved the Sierra Madre! This treasure trove, a sealed land of miracles that were mine."

"—and speakers. Tons of them. Sheilded ones that couldn't just be destroyed."

"Damn pre-war tech. An inconvenience."

"I got to the vault and it sealed behind me. There was a computer terminal, and I was able to read the last message from Sinclair to Vera." A pair of ghosts appeared behind Elijah. Sinclair and Vera reached out to each other, unable to quite reach each other, before dissolving back into nothingness. The courier's eyes hardened. "And then he appeared onscreen."

"Who?" Arcade asked gently.

"Elijah," Mellie spat. Veronica inhaled sharply.

"No need to sound so distasteful when you say my name," huffed Elijah.

"We talked…I convinced him to come down." Mellie stared at Elijah as a small, clean hole appeared in his forehead. "He turned on some turrets, and Christine turned several of them off." Blood began to drip out of the hole. "Dean turned some music on, his own way of helping." Elijah's eyes rolled back in his head and he slumped over the table, hitting his chin and landing, hard, on the ground. "I put a bullet in Elijah's brain." However, her victory was short-lived. The triumphant smile Mellie hadn't realized she'd been wearing slid off her face. "And then the world started to fall apart."

"You had to run," God said, behind her.

"I had to run."

"He'd begun destroying the vault," Dean said.

"He'd begun destroying the vault."

"Your collar was going to go off," Christine said, with Vera's voice.

"My collar was going to go off." Everyone at the table held their breath as Mellie clenched her fists. "I ran. I ran faster than I thought I was able to. I jumped over catwalks, barreled through the fog, ignored the security—I ran and I ran and the beeping kept getting faster and faster and it was about to go off and I finally got to the elevator—and then I was back at the fountain. And my friends weren't in sight." A dry, tired sob. "I thought I was going to die. I was so certain I was going to die."

"You didn't," Boone grunted.

A laugh escaped Mellie's throat. "No. I didn't. Sometimes…it feels like I did, though."

There was silence around the table, then. The hallucinations had disappeared, and Mellie was just left with a quiet, high hum that permeated the air around her. Her companions all sat silent around her, unsure of what to say.

"You defeated the Legion," said Cass finally. She grinned at Mellie in that disarming manner. "You got rid of the NCR. You freed Vegas. You gave us all a new lease on life. You didn't die in there."

"No," said Mellie half-heartedly. "I guess I didn't."

"I told you," said a faint, irritated-sounding voice from the hallway accompanied by the ping of the elevator, "I'm Dean Domino. I'm a very important man! I have posters with my name on them!"

"I'm sure you are!" said the Yes Man's chipper voice as Mellie slowly rose to her feet, not daring to believe it wasn't a hallucination. "Everyone's important! But not everyone's as important as Mellie Duarte. I can ask her if you know her, but if you don't, I'm afraid I'll have to kill you!"

Mellie practically sprinted out of the door, skidding to a stop in front of the elevators, only then realizing that she was still in her pajamas and probably looked a mess. Inside the elevator, his arm clamped in the Yes Man's hand, was Dean, a little worse for the wear, but alive. He caught her eye and smirked. "You neglected to tell me you were as famous as I was, partner."

"Dean," Mellie breathed, pulling him out of the elevator and into a hug. Dean remained stiff for a moment, then gratefully returned it.

"She knows him," said Arcade.

"I do, I know him," Mellie sobbed, leaning back to look into Dean's eyes (or rather, his sunglasses), and then burying her face in his lapel again.

"All right-y then!" chirped the Yes Man (he'd transferred himself into a securitron to escort Dean to the Presidential Suite). "Yell if you need me!"

"All right, all right, you're going to stain the tux," Dean finally chuckled, prying Mellie off of him. Mellie laughed as well, wiping the tears from her eyes.

"I was so certain you'd died," Mellie said, taking Dean's hands, unwilling to let him slip away like her hallucinations always did.

"I didn't," said Dean, tucking Mellie's hand into his elbow and leading her into the kitchen where her friends still sat. "Although without the treasure I felt like I might as well have. 200 years of planning, undone by one little courier."

"I'll set you up here," Mellie said instantly, pulling a chair up beside her for Dean. "We're planning on reopening the Lucky 38. We'll need entertainment—"

"—And what better entertainment than Dean Domino!" Dean finished with a flourish. "I'll confess, I have missed the stage. And the Lucky 38 was a prize even in my day." He smiled around the table. "Let me guess." He pointed at each person as he did. "Raul, your other ghoul friend. Either Arcade or Boone…" When Boone snorted derisively, he amended, "Boone. Cass, the pretty thing; Arcade—" he finally reached Veronica. His voice softened. "And Veronica."

"Is she—is she—?" Veronica tried to get out.

Dean kissed her hand. "She's the curator of the Sierra Madre now," he said gently. "She seems happy. Quiet, but happy."

"Why'd you do that to her?"

Dean sighed, his face going slack. "Greed makes a man do funny things." He shook his head, snapping himself out of it. "But enough about me. Tell me about yourselves!"

He shared her bed that night.

Mellie was unwilling to let him leave her grasp, for fear that he'd disappear into smoke again. She milked all of the information she could out of him, about what had happened to Christine and Dog/God. When he asked her where he could stay while she slept, she pulled him into her room. "I had no idea you were so forward, partner," said Dean, grinning devilishly.

Mellie remained serious, placing her hands under the lapels of his jacket. "I'm not," she said, staring up at his glasses. "But Dean…I thought you were dead. I thought the casino might have killed you all. I've been hallucinating you!"

"I'm flattered."

"Stop." Mellie grinned and put her arms around him again. "I had no idea how…profoundly you'd affected me until I lost you. And then I couldn't stop thinking about you."

"Funny," said Dean as he shrugged out of his jacket. "As I recall you had some fairly scathing remarks when you left."

"Dean…"

"Something about being a greedy bastard—"

"Dean—"

"How I deserved everything coming to me—"

"Dean!" Dean raised an eyebrow as Mellie got into bed. "I know what I said. And I know what you did. And in the morning, we can yell at each other until we're blue in the face and you're unable to sing for a week. But tonight, I just want you near me."

Dean sighed fondly as he removed his sunglasses, revealing the bluest eyes Mellie had ever seen on a ghoul. "All right, Mel. No fights tonight." He undid his tie and slid out of his button-down shirt, leaving his gnarled body in his dirty black pants and still fairly clean white undershirt. He kicked off his shoes and crawled in next to the courier, his courier, the both of them curling around the other on instinct. And when nightmares awoke her that night, and the night after that, and the night after that, he would be there to chase away the ghost people.