The traffic at Moriarty's had died down for the afternoon, only a few patrons sat at the bar, talking quietly and listening to the sleep radio. Gob leaned against the counter, taking advantage of the lull in business to clean the glasses and stopping every so often to scratch at the sores on his back.
The stairs creaked as Nova came down from the second floor, yawning and pushing tangled blonde hair out of her eyes. "Mornin' boys," she greeted with a lazy smile.
"It's afternoon, Nova!" one of the barflies called, "Busy night?"
Gob grimaced into the glass he was cleaning and kept his head down. Hearing about Nova's work every day didn't make it any easier.
He glanced up sheepishly at her throaty laugh and watched her pull her robe more tightly around herself. "You'd know, wouldn't you?" she shot back and was answered with a hoot and a flurry of jests. She shrugged them off and walked behind the counter, looking for the food Gob hid away for her late breakfast.
"Hey, Nova," he said warmly, glancing over his shoulder at the groggy woman, "it's on the top shelf."
She nodded and stretched to reach it, the front of her robe pulling taut across her breast as she did so, and looked around to make sure Moriarty wasn't lurking around. When she had her plate of food she put a hand on Gob's back and leaned toward him, lowering her voice to speak in his ear. "I set aside some time later, for the two of us."
Gob couldn't help but smile. "Thanks, Nova, you're the best."
The day passed more slowly after that, it was hours yet until the bar closed and the drinkers would disperse. In the meantime, Moriarty strutted about, smacking Gob back to attention when he caught him scratching too much or when his work slowed because he was busy watching Nova.
She kept to herself and didn't speak to him again. Instead she flirted with the locals across the bar and occasionally disappeared upstairs with someone. Gob turned up the radio and tried not to think about it, it made his blood boil. He was lucky enough to have the distraction of the heat inside the little tin bar and found he was often too busy trying to soothe the itch under his clothing to worry much about Nova, even if it did make Moriarty nastier than usual.
Long after the sun went down on Megaton, the town's citizen's hung around to drink and socialize but finally Moriarty told him to stop serving drinks, told everyone to finish up and get out, and went to bed.
Nova sidled up to him again as he was trying to convince Jericho, the last lingerer, to leave. "I'm going upstairs to get things ready for us;" she crooned, "you come on up when you can."
When he finally got rid of Jericho and went upstairs she was sitting on the bed in his room, mixing turpentine oil into an ointment and humming to herself. He shut the door and she smiled up at him, setting the bowl of ointment down on the side table beside tweezers, a clean rag, and other things.
"Alright, get those clothes off so we can get started," she said and patted the mattress beside her invitingly.
Gob complied, pulling off his shirt quickly before joining her on the bed. The skin underneath was purplish, inflamed and swollen. Where his sores had broken open, the infestation of maggots under his skin was obvious, but raised bumps of irritated flesh showed where they were hidden under the closed skin as well.
It was a ghoul problem. When the maggots attacked the rotting skin on his arms and legs and front, Gob could easily remove them on his own and did so regularly. The flesh on his back was a different story. He could only treat the infestations with help and because Moriarty kept him so busy with the bar it was hard to get down to Doc Church's clinic for help and Gob didn't have many spare caps to pay the doctor anyway. So the sores on his back would fester and hurt while the maggots ate away at him.
Nova was sweet enough to help him when it got to be too much. She had noticed the trouble a few years before and had him show her how to scrape the bugs out for him, insisting it was because he looked out for her when he could. She'd become something of an expert since then.
Now she scraped maggots out of the open sores with a curved piece of metal and shook them off into an empty bowl so they wouldn't get all over the floor. Her soft hand on his shoulder to hold him steady was warm and pleasant contact compared to what he was used to since leaving Underworld.
"Moriarty was a real beast today," she commented sourly, digging the metal a little deeper into his back to get everything out.
Gob winced and covered her hand on his shoulder with his own. The difference between her worn but lovely skin and the greened and peeling fingers on his hand was striking. Still, it warmed and softened him after a hard day. "It's because business has been stale."
She gave a short laugh and picked up the bowl she'd been mixing turpentine into. "Not on my end," she quipped and scooped up a glob of the mixture with her fingers and began rubbing it into the puffy red skin that covered much of his back.
It burned, especially when it found its way into sores and broken skin, and Gob hissed and tensed up. "I noticed," he said with his voice strained, partially from the pain and partly from jealousy.
Nova squeezed his shoulder lightly, a reassuring gesture. It wasn't her fault and he knew it.
The maggots under his flesh began to panic and push their way to the surface as the turpentine blocked their air supply. Gob could feel them wriggling under his skin and it still made him shudder. He glanced over his shoulder to see how she was doing, found her grimacing in disgust as she carefully pulled each one out with a pair of tweezers.
"I think I could go my whole life without having these little worms in me and be just fine," she commented.
"Yeah, you're not missing anything by being a smoothskin. It does give us a reason to spend time together without Moriarty breathing down our necks, though."
She stopped to wipe her tweezers clean and smiled at him. These sessions gave them both a break from life as Moriarty's lackeys and had given them a chance to grow close. While Nova treated him, they filled the usual silence between them by complaining about the patrons they had to deal with and talking about their lives before ending up in Megaton, sometimes going so far as to fantasize aloud about being able to leave someday and following that with a pair of heavy sighs.
When she finished, Nova helped him wipe the turpentine off his back with a damp rag and covered some of the sores with bandages to catch the blood. Her hands were covered in the thick resin, pus, and Gob's blood but she wasn't particularly put off by that fact. He got up and stretched when she said she was done, breathing deep with relief now that the worst irritants were gone, and thanked her.
"Sure thing, sweetie. The two of us have to look out for each other," she said and tried to clean her hands off on the rag with questionable success. He helped her clean up the tools she'd used and she handed him the bowl of squirming maggots for him to dispose of. "Now, I'm going to wash up," she announced and leaned over to kiss him on the cheek before leaving the room with her dirty hands held gingerly at her sides.