The Courier hauled herself up to a sitting position with great effort and palmed her bleeding lip with a dirty hand, pushing dirt and dust and grime and whatever unmentionable things she had put her hands into straight into her mouth. She grit her teeth against the taste, sand and dust cracking between her molars. The muscle in her cheek jumped spastically, betraying the emotion running just underneath her skin. The girl shook herself off and then launched her fist right back into Craig Boone's stupid face.
0
The first time the Courier had met the sniper was the same time the edge of his bowie knife had met the delicate skin of her neck. She dragged herself up the stairs inside of Dinky the Dinosaur, limping heavily, hoping to find a quiet place to sit and lick her wounds in peace. She had followed Mr. Noonan's wild words to the McBride Ranch, and the caps hung heavy in their satchel, but at what cost? She had tangled with a Super Mutant over god forsaken cows. Her blood dripped onto the dingy linoleum from her gashed leg and desert-sand rashed arm, and she was eager to apply a stimpak or five from the pack that she dragged behind her. The door required her entire being to open and no sooner than she had clicked it shut, another body was rushing hers, slamming her back into the unforgiving surface. She cried out she connected with the hard door, only then remembering being told about the night time sniper employed by the little settlement. She must've been bleeding, there were little red flecks on his hard cheek. Her lips were wet.
"Mother fucking cocksucker!" she swore as she flung her head back in pain. The man's grip on her arm faltered, and his knife stopped pressing so intimately against her pulse. He probably had thought she was a Fiend, covered in blood and dirty.
"God damn it! Don't sneak up on me like that, what do you want?"
"Expecting visitors?" she ground out. The larger man released her and she sunk back into the wall, relieved. She wouldn't have been able to handle a fight, not right now, and she wasn't even sure she could have taken the man down not feeling like she had just been trampled by a wild bighorner. His eyes were dark and hard behind his shaded glasses and his lips were set in a solid line. Instead of sheathing his knife, he let it tip lazily toward her belly. His face said soldier, but his clothes were dusty and civilian.
"Yeah, I guess maybe I am," he said gruffly, then looked her up and down. "But not like you. Hmph. Maybe it should have been you I was expecting all along. Who are you?"
The Courier tried not to grimace at the query. Such a difficult question, since she didn't rightly know who she was. There was a huge, yawning chasm where a life should have been in her head, and no matter how hard she tried, she didn't remember a thing past three weeks prior. At night, sometimes she thought she caught whiffs of some unfamiliar yet familiar smells, riding on the wind of the Mojave and she felt like she should know them but couldn't bring up the memory attached. Like a word at the tip of your tongue. She decided to go with the easy answer. "I'm a Courier, for the Mojave Express."
"Why are you here?"
The Courier shifted uncomfortably against the wall with a vaguely cornered feeling. "If you're looking for someone in particular, I could tip you off if I see them?"
"Yeah, well, you see anybody in Legion crimson or lots of sports equipment, you just let me know," the man responded. It was the Courier's turn to thin her mouth, but it was against a shiver of fear that raced up her spine as she recalled the smell of burning bodies, stacked on stinking mounds of melting tires, the sound of flags flapping in the breeze, men dying on crosses up and down the street. The crunch of her boots like gunshots in her ears. Vulpes Inculta dragging a dirty finger down her face as he spoke close to her ear, breath stinking hot against her cheek. The sniper's voice was sharp when he spoke again. "You still haven't answered my question."
"I, well, uh—" she gestured to her bloody leg. "The office is closed, I can't—"
Boone grabbed the lone chair and tugged it over to the girl with a horrible noise across the concrete. "Here, do what you need to do. Then I think you'd better leave."
The Courier flung herself into the chair eagerly and dumped two stims onto the floor next to her. She wrapped her leg in gauze, not ready to drop trou in front of the intimidating figure to check out the damage. It could wait until she had some privacy. The stimpaks burnt as she injected them, and she grit her teeth against the pain and searched for a distraction. She chose the man next to her. "You always so friendly?"
He made a deprecating sound deep in his throat. "I don't have any friends here."
"I'm not from here," the Courier mumbled in response as she slumped low in the chair. She hurt all over.
"Huh, no," said the man, suddenly contemplative. "No, you're not. Maybe you shouldn't go, not just yet."
"Why?" the Courier asked with a fidget, uneasy.
"I need someone I can trust. You're a stranger here. That's a start."
The Courier straightened in her chair, suddenly alert and ready to help. Maybe this one wouldn't include a Super Mutant. "What do you need me to do?"
"I want you to find something out for me. I don't even know if there is anything to find, but I need someone to try. My wife was taken from our home one night by Legion slavers one night while I was on watch," the man said, arms crossed and posture defensive. "They knew when to come, and what route to take, and they only took her. Someone set it up. I don't know who."
"You want help finding your wife?"
"My wife is dead. I want the dirty son of a bitch who sold her," the sniper snapped.
The Courier swallowed thickly. "What—what do you want me to do when I find him?"
"Bring him out front of the nest here when I'm on duty. I work nights. I'll give you my NCR beret," he slid the very red beret off his head and offered it to the Courier. "It'll be our signal, so I know you're standing with him. Then I'll take care of the rest. This is something I need to do."
The Courier nodded, understanding of the laws of the Mojave she was currently party to, and pocketed the beret. The man had short, dark hair that matched his rugged stubble. "I'll see what I can do to help you, my good man."
"Good. I'll make it worth your while. And one more thing, we shouldn't speak again. Not until this is over. No one it town knows that I know what happened to my wife. Best they never know, or the Legion will be after me next."
The Courier gave another nod, silent. The sky was beginning to take on a pink hue, and she knew exactly which wasteland settler to speak to. He gave surprisingly good advice, for a crazy person.
0
"Stay back! Stay back, you, or I'll stick you with my stickin' stick!" No-bark Noonan cried as he brandished a rusty fork, it's tines sticking out every which way rather threateningly. The Courier held her hands up in front of her, trying to calm the incensed man. She had knocked on his door early in the morning, and when no one answered, opened it to call out for old No-Bark, a custom she found to be common in the Mojave. The old man hadn't taken too kindly to the intrusion.
Which led to him chasing the girl out to the middle of the street, shouting and raving, waving his weapon around every which way. He swung it in a wide arc in front of himself and the girl jumped back to avoid being gouged. "Mr. Noonan! Mr. Noonan, please! I just wanted to ask you a question!"
"How do you know my NAME?" No-bark howled as he grabbed his head with both hands, and the Courier was worried that he would stab himself before anyone else.
"Mr. Noonan, we spoke yesterday about the brahmin! I killed that chupacabra you saw!" Chupacabra, Super Mutant, was there much difference? No-bark was no longer howling like an injured animal, but he was looking at the Courier with suspicion.
"Wha'chu want?" He growled, still gripping the handle of the fork. The Courier must've had a stabby air around her that week.
"Have you seen anything strange around town lately?"
"I don't trust a man that don't have something strange goin' on about him, cause that means he's hiding it from ya. If a man's wearing his pants on his head or if he say his words backwards from time to time, you know it all laid out there for you. But if he friendly to strangers and keeps his home spick and span, more of'en than not he's done somethin' even his own ma couldn't forgive," No-bark replied.
"Ah," said the Courier. "Well, I wanna know about the wife of the night sniper—uhm," she faltered, searching for the man's name. Fuck. Nothing was forthcoming. No one had given her a name. To be fair, she rarely offered up what she thought was hers. "Uh, so, I'm looking into her disappearance."
No-bark lunged forward and grasped the Courier's aching arm. "I seen em, I do! One night, shadow men, with glass eyes, went into their house then come out a bit after. Held congress in the lobby for a spell, that night, too," he raved, giving his fork a point to the Dino Dee-lite Motel. The Courier grinned at the grizzled man and reached into her back pocket for her deck of Caravan cards. When No-bark saw them, he returned the smile and released her arm. "Now, no more magic tricks today, little lady. You play a man outta his hard earned money the good and honest way."
0
After soundly whooping No-bark in a hand of caravan, she made her way to the motel with slumped, exhausted shoulders. Jeannie May Crawford was friendly and polished, a cold sort of polite that had put the Courier on edge from the moment they had met, but she seemed genuinely pleased with the dirty girl leaning on her pristine counter as she left dark smudges on the old linoleum. When the Courier offered her caps for a room, she was turned down and given a key with a warm smile and a gracious thanks for the good deed she had stumbled through the night prior. She almost felt bad that she was going to go ferret through the woman's belongings. Almost.
The door had barely closed before the Courier fell into the bed, asleep before she could even take of her muddy boots.
0
The Courier woke with a start, the black room ominous and unfamiliar, and scrambled to her pack, swearing. She hadn't even locked the god damn door. But her pack and everything precious she owned laid untouched where she had dropped it. Her Pip-Boy told her that it was far past midnight, and prime snooping time. She made absolutely sure that the door was locked that time, and pocketed the key.
Down at the lobby, the door was locked, but it didn't prove to be an issue for the Wasteland savvy girl. Inside the lobby was neat and clean, and the Courier went straight for the floor safe that she had spotted earlier, resisting the temptation of the cash register. She laid herself down on the floor and went to work on the safe, breaking bobby pin after bobby pin before it clicked and opened with a hydraulic hiss.
The contents of the safe were sparse, but a little browned piece of paper caught her eye on the bottom of the black metal box, stuck underneath a chipped baseball bat. The Courier noticed the holes in the paper, like it had been refolded again and again. At the top was scrawled 'Bill of Sale'.
The Courier flattened her lips into a hard line, and swiped the caps from the safe. The ones in the register were forfeit now, too.
0
The Courier's eyes were wide and white against the crimson blood splattered across her face and soaking her hair, but her hand was steady as she handed the sniper the crumpled paper. He seemed to take an eternity to read the words as his face steadily grew darker and the girl wasn't surprised when he crushed the paper between his fists.
The Courier reached out to place a hand on his shoulder, but he ripped himself away into the concave side of the dinosaur's mouth. The sniper stumbled to the jagged plaster teeth and the Courier reached forward again, about to pull him back from the edge when he began to heave. Once, twice, three times he retched, using the teeth to steady himself as he heaved again, finally vomiting, choking on his own sick violently before he sank to the floor on his knees to rest his head against the knee-high wall. He started to wipe at his mouth shakily and the Courier palmed the beret off her head, hair in a state of disarray.
"I guess I shouldn't be surprised. It would be like them to keep paperwork," he spat. The sniper got to his feet as he threw a heavy sack of caps at hers. "Here, this is all I can give. I think our dealings are done here."
"What will you do after this," questioned the Courier as she toed the bag with her boot, unsure if she actually wanted the man's caps after all.
"I don't know. I'm not staying here, I know that. I don't see much a point of anything right now, except for hunting Legionnaires," the sniper sighed as he accepted the beret from her hands. "Maybe I'll wander, like you."
"Come with me. We can go after the Legion together."
The man shook his head with a strange jump in his cheek. "You—you don't want to do that."
"I thought snipers worked in teams?" the Courier asked. She didn't know how she knew that, just like she didn't know how she knew how to read, or how to shoot a gun.
"Hrn," the sniper grunted. "Yeah. Working on your own, you're a lot less effective. I've been there and paid for it." He was looking thoughtful now, and reached out to touch the Courier's sleeve before he seemingly thought better of it and dropped his hand. "But this isn't going to end well."
0
Boone was surprised at the force with which the Courier flung her petite body, feet leaving the ground as her fist connected with his cheek, her entire being behind the punch. His head snapped back and he stumbled, but he didn't fall. Pain exploded in his face where her flesh kissed his, sandy fingers scraping away skin. The sniper ducked away from the next swing and brought his knee up to deliver a devastating blow to her abdomen. Her body hit the ground with a thud, and her head connected not a second later with an even more sickening sound, but she was up again within the space of a breath, shaking her head to clear it, dark hair shining chestnut in the sun.
Not to be bested, the Courier lunged again, this time cracking Boone in the skull with the butt of her rifle. They were gathering a crowd now.
0
The Courier had dragged Boone to hell and back on whims and her near-suicidal savior complex. First, she had sheepishly revealed her agreement with one Manny Vargas – deal with the ghouls in the facility to the west of the town in exchange for information about the Great Khans that had been through the settlement and the man in the checkered suit. When Boone asked why she was tracking down the rough looking men he recalled stumbling into town a few days prior, she lifted one shoulder in a half-hearted shrug before she opened her mouth to respond. The girl was interrupted by a rotting ghoul charging at them from the carcass of a dead mole rat, and Boone swore she looked mighty relieved when more feral ghouls charged them.
"By the way," she said later as she was ferreting through abandoned supplies a few hundred meters away from the facility, "I don't think I ever caught your name."
Boone grunted as he picked through an ammunition box full of energy weapon ammo, all useless to him except for the caps, recalling that no, he had never given her his name. "Boone. Craig Boone."
It wasn't until much later that he realized that she had never offered up a name in return.
0
Boone was a man of few words. He usually let his trigger finger speak for him, which usually worked just fine in the Mojave. The Courier, on the other hand, had many, many words – so many, Boone came to learn, that when she bargained and bartered with her many words, she somehow placed them all in just the right order to come out on top at the end. He stood dumbly by as she spoke easily, leaning on the butt of her battered varmint rifle, to ghouls and Super Mutants alike.
She upheld her bargain with Vargas with little more than the breath in her lungs and a handful of bullets, and if the olive-skinned man was surprised to see the other sniper in step with the girl, he didn't show it. Boone felt like he held his breath until they were out of town.
But instead of heading north to Boulder City after Novac, the Courier led the man south and east. When questioned, she waved her hand dismissively. "I've been following those Khans and their trail of stupidity across the desert for a week now, and something tells me I'm not going to be losing their scent any time soon. We have a more pressing matter to attend to," she explained, and went on to tell the tale of the town of Nipton being razed quite nearly to the ground by Vulpes Inculta and his Legion trained troops, and the men they took prisoner. "I scouted the camp earlier, and there were too many for me to take on alone. I knew I needed backup," she gestured happily towards Boone, "and now, backup!"
Boone was surprised that she was planning on making good on her word so quickly – and he was quickly coming to learn that she was quite good on her word, but the situation rung too close to his heart. Legion slavers. He stopped abruptly, suddenly aware of how little he actually knew about the girl he was traveling with.
Quite obviously younger than himself, she couldn't have been more than twenty or so, and a bit on the skinny side, her battered clothing hanging off of her frame awkwardly, making her silhouette look gangly. She had a pretty face, though, with light eyes and ruddy, sun-kissed cheeks from long days in the Mojave. Her dark, messy hair hung in tangled curls and obscured most of her face; it hung long, much longer than Boone had ever seen in the wasteland, but she made an effort to stuff most of it underneath a stiff-billed canvas hat, all sun-bleached and splattered with dark stains.
Boone repeated his question from early that morning. "Why are you after those men?"
The girl stopped mid-step and stumbled a bit before turning to face her traveling companion. Her expression was resigned, and she gave the same half-shrug she had given him previously, before she pushed back her hat, taking hair along with it, and tilted her face towards the sniper. Above her thick eyebrows was a network of angry pink lines and pock marks that extended up past her hairline to her left, where her hair was shorn short in patches. He could tell that it was growing back, and he could also tell that the girl was sporting two healing bullet wounds to the face.
"I had a package, and it was worth a life to some people," the Courier mumbled, not looking directly at Boone. "It was a poker chip, made out of platinum. I'm going to hunt down that bastard in the checkered suit and find out what's so damn important about that stupid chip."
"What's your name?" Boone asked, even though he already knew the answer. She didn't know.
"I don't rightly know," she sighed as she smoothed her hair back down over her forehead and firmly placed her cap back on her head, kicking up a bit of dust from the desert sand. "I don't have a memory older than three weeks, when I woke up in Good Springs." The Courier dropped her heavy canvas pack and flipped open the top flap to reveal a splash of embroidered color, bright against the faded fabric. 'O. Clarke,' it said, surrounded by little thread flowers and birds, such misplaced femininity in the rough and tumble wasteland. "I've got this, and a delivery order signed the same way, and as far as I can gather, it's my name." She tapped her temple with two fingers. "I got two in the skull, then had the good doctor of Good Springs dig around my head after them, I'm lucky my memories are the only thing I lost. At least I'm still housebroken."
Boone barked out a laugh that surprised even him, and the Courier's eyebrows jumped up behind her hair. Boone cleared his throat, heat creeping up his neck. "I—I'm sorry for that. You're damn lucky to be alive."
The Courier laughed humorlessly. "Yeah, something like that."
0
Boone heard the camp before he saw it. The heavy flapping of tent fabric in the wind, the delicate metallic clink of a flagpole or two. The Courier lowered herself down to sneak towards a dark outcropping of rocks and Boone followed suit, shrugging his rifle off of his shoulder. The girl reached the natural barrier first and motioned for Boone to stop. "I draw them out, you pick them off? Good plan? Good plan."
Before Boone could tell her that that was a stupid fucking plan, she was off and running into the camp, quicker than he had expected for the petite female. The man swore and hurried into position to ready his rifle. There were already shouts and gunshots from the camp below, and he wasn't sure exactly what he was seeing through his scope. The broad machete that had hung from the girl's hip – an item Boone thought was more to intimidate than anything else – was in her hands as she swung it in a wide arc to bring it crashing down through a Legionnaire's skull and outwards again in the same motion to slice through another's belly. Her expression was fierce and wild, hair flying untamed behind her. Gone was clever diplomat familiar to Boone, in her place was a ferocious destructive force, fueled by righteous vengeance, cutting through Legionnaires and causing an uncomfortable feeling to worm it's way into the pit of Boone's stomach.
Boone squeezed his trigger and dispatched three crimson draped men in the time it took the Courier to hack another two to death. She swung her machete high above her head to bring it down onto another Legionnaire, but he managed to snatch up a pike to save himself seconds before she connected with his head. The Legionnaire – no more than a boy, Boone noted – wrangled himself away and hurled his arm our in a circle, knocking the blunt metal pole into the Courier's side with a thud. She doubled over and he kicked out his leg into the Courier's chest, sending her flying to the dirt as he threw his pike to the side.
"Profligate bitch," he snarled as he stalked up to her as she clutched one arm to her chest and scrambled backwards desperately, pawing for her spare blade. Boone swore again and took aim, but dust flew into the air instead of blood or brain, and two more Legion soldiers were running up between the tents. Things were spiraling out of control quickly.
"Fuck, fuck," Boone spat, and one running Legionnaire's head exploded into a fine mist; his fellow soldier dove behind cover and Boone ducked away from the spit of a machine gun. The young soldier grabbed handfuls of chestnut hair and lifted the girl up to form a ten-fingered noose around her neck. He started to squeeze.
"Clarke!" Boone shouted, hoarse and desperate, and two heads swung around to search for the source, a fatal mistake. The machine-gun wielding soldier was dead before he hit the dirt, and the Courier's little knife was so deep in the other's neck, Boone couldn't see her fingers. Blood rushed down her arm as she was dropped, and it gushed straight down her front in a wave when she wretched her knife free with a squelching sound.
Boone scrambled over the rocks and down the short decline, face dark and stormy, clutching his rifle in his fist with an iron grip. The Courier had a dreamy look on hers as she wiped her knife down her shirt uselessly, and it didn't change when Boone grabbed her arm and whirled her around to face him.
"You – fuck you! I didn't god damn sign up to watch you kill yourself, that wasn't part of the deal," Boone snarled and jabbed the barrel of his rifle between her breasts, but she just turned her bloody face up to him looking distant. "Are you okay? Is some of this blood yours?"
She waved her hand dismissively. "Yeah. Yeah to both. I thought you said my name. It sounded like my name."
"What? Clarke?" This time her eyes sharpened and her gaze shot right through him, and he let go of her arm uncomfortably, not liking the way his heart was still racing, hands shaking. He wasn't entirely sure it was all from adrenaline.
"It sounds like my name. It's the first time I've heard it out loud," she said, searching around for her fallen cap and machete before heading over to the three captured criminals. She pointedly avoided Boone's eyes.
He didn't mind. The pounding in his chest and warmth in his belly were engrossing enough without her turning those eyes back on him.
0
She didn't speak for a long time after that, not until the sun had fallen behind the horizon and her face was cast into dark shadows by the bright embers of their dying fire. She sat on her heels and poked at the coals with a crooked stick, and as annoying as Boone had found her rambling, he found that he actually missed the sing-song sound of her voice as she prattled out information regurgitated from where ever she had learned it. She sighed heavily before speaking.
"I've learned that I am… impulsive, at times. I just, I get these niggling little thoughts or feelings and then I'm neck deep in all sorts of trouble, like bleeding up in Dinky that first night," she said, gazing into the fire. Boone gave a grunt, and Clarke laughed. Was this thing weighing so heavily in the pit of his stomach camaraderie? It felt so unfamiliar. "Anyway. I wasn't trying to get myself killed, but I would understand if you'd rather not travel with me."
Boone's spine straightened and his lips thinned into their familiar line. "We wiped a Legion camp off the map with no casualties," he ground out. Of course he wanted to travel with her. And of course, he would never say the words, but the Courier was sharp as a tack. Her face brightened and it split into a wide, toothy smile. One of her canines was chipped into a jagged edge. "But next time, don't go running into glory without me."
Clarke put her face in her hands and gave her signature shrug, still grinning. "Yeah, okay. Why?"
Boone snorted. "Cause I don't wanna watch you die."
0
Veronica and Arcade were getting in between them now, Veronica lifting the kicking and swearing Courier off of the bleeding sniper as Arcade lifted Boone up under one shoulder to guide him to sit on the steps of the Lucky 38. The Courier was spitting and hissing like a feral cat, furious that the target of her rage was no longer within striking distance.
"Fucking lemme go! Fuck – Fuck you, Craig Boone! You fucking cocksucker!" she hollered around Veronica, still struggling in the larger woman's bear hug, feet kicking uselessly in the air. She tried to yell obscenities again, but she started to choke on her words, her rapid breathing not subsiding. Tears were gathering in the corners of her eyes.
Boone hung his head between his knees in shame as he pressed a dirty cloth to his nose to staunch the bleeding. His left eye was already swelling shut, but Clarke wasn't looking much better. "Veronica, let her go. I deserve whatever she does to me."
Arcade recoiled away from the sniper, suddenly very unsure of his friend, as Veronica loosened her grip just enough for the Courier to shrug herself violently from her grasp. Tears were leaking freely down her face now, cutting white lines into the dirt on her cheeks. They had never seen their fearless leader in such a state. "Fu-fuck you, fuck you Boone," she yelled, breath hitching emotionally. "Couldn't get what you wanted out there, so you think I'll finish the job for you here?"
She scrubbed furiously at her eyes and shook her head. "Well, fuck you, man. You can find someone else to go and watch you die."
The Courier snatched up her pack and stalked up the stairs to the casino. The doors closed with an ominous echo, and Boone felt a huge pit open up in his stomach.