an - I cannot for the life of me get the formatting to work correctly on this, hence all the horizontal lines. Sorry :(
"Well, don't snipers work in pairs?"
If Craig Boone were the sort of man to let a laugh slip past his lips, he might have chuckled at the girl's quick rejoinder. As he was not that sort of man, he managed a muted huff and an eye twitch.
"Yeah. Yeah, I guess that's true."
So he'd joined up with the young woman that had wandered in from the desert, and as he picked off yet another ghoul while she flailed in what he hoped was some sort of obscure martial arts practice and not the haphazard terrified swinging of limbs it appeared, he took approximately .5 seconds to muse why exactly he'd agreed to this. He didn't come up with an answer before his focus returned to shooting the rampaging ferals, with a quick "Get the hell down!" tossed off in the direction of his companion. She spun and dove for cover, but not before landing a surprisingly graceful kick to the head on her mostly dead opponent. His cheek twitched. She couldn't shoot for shit but he did have to admire her agility.
He'd never asked what she did before or where she came from. It wasn't that he wasn't curious, he just didn't see much point in it. She was quick and smart, if a piss-poor shot from a distance further than five feet. They'd killed some Legion, helped a few folks. It passed the time. That was good enough for him. She asked him questions, though she was polite enough about it and left him alone when he wanted to be left alone, so he didn't mind. Much. There was something about the way she talked, though, like she wasn't being nosy so much as trying to put things in place. She didn't know about things, odd things. Brahmin, the Kahns, Bitter Springs, hell, the first time she'd seen a deathclaw she looked like she'd seen an alien before she had the sense to look terrified. So maybe he was kinder to her, in his way, than he'd have been to most.
She gave him some answers of her own, in bits and pieces. She told him she'd been shot in the head, though not why, and that she'd been a courier, though she didn't seem too keen on picking up where she left off. He supposed he couldn't really blame her - attempted murder probably hadn't been in the mail delivery job description.
A month or so out of Novac, the night after a particularly brutal battle with some Legion assassins, she'd scraped her hair back with a handkerchief to get a better view of her never-ending eyeglass repair. The webbing of fresh scar tissue had shone pale against her skin. He hadn't said a word, but Carla had always told him he could burn through steel with the weight of his stare, and the courier must have felt his glance lingering a little too long. She let out a nervous laugh, not looking up from her work.
"Yeah, I know. Not my most attractive feature."
Boone waited a moment before replying.
"That scar's not bad. You must heal quick."
"That's what the doc said - ah, that I'm a quick healer, not that I must heal quick. You know, because he was there and he would know, I mean, that would be a weird statement coming from - " she glanced up, noting Boone's raised eyebrow. "Um. Anyway. Yeah."
He gestured at her head. "You know what the motive was?"
She looked over at the fire. "Yeah. No. I don't know. I - It's complicated. It's why I need to head up to New Vegas, anyway. Find some answers."
Boone watched flames dancing across her face for a moment and nodded his head. "Well, you know I've got your back."
She smiled at him then, big and genuine. "I know."
She finished screwing something into something else, and put her newly fixed glasses back on. She turned and wiggled her brows at him.
"You know, we make a pretty good pair, don't we?"
Boone quirked a lip in what, in the right light, might have almost passed for a smile.
"Yeah, I guess that's true."