"Courier work? Isn't that a little ..." The older man had sighed, scratching the back of his neck irritably. She could tell this wasn't a conversation that he wanted to have; she could tell the very prospect of little Hev crossing the wastes all by her lonesome was causing a severe big brother itch that was apparently located in some unreachable portion of back between his shoulder blades. His hand dropped and he seemed to give up on the itch, finishing his sentence long seconds after he had begun it, each syllable seeming to be more difficult to release than the last, "Dangerous?"
She didn't respond right away, only shot him an incredulous glance, one that was given greater weight by the fact that she was currently changing a pus soaked bandage on his calf. While the infection wasn't life - or limb - threatening, it did serve as proof that he wasn't following her instructions on daily cleaning of the buckshot wound he had received last week. It also served as a valid excuse that Mr. Big Shot Caravan Guard wasn't about to lecture her on how dangerous it was to tread the wasteland. The moment of silence she took to simply glance at him, however, afforded him a window to form and interject an addendum before she could elaborate on the simple stare.
"I just mean that - I know, I know you can take care of yourself. But this ain't NCR land. Not official yet, anyhow. I only mean that the Mojave is dangerous. All sorts of shit out there that ain't a trouble here. If you need the money I could just-"
"No." She finally, and firmly, spoke, pulling away another dirty piece of bandage and looking up to him from her crouching position, "I'm moving to the Mojave because that's where I'm needed. I'm only doing this delivery thing because the money is good and I'm heading to Vegas anyways." He didn't look satisfied, and as his mouth curled to form a new objection, she could only muse that for someone who was forcing such an effort to form mere syllables a moment before, whole sentences were coming quite easily to him now. She was sure to continue quickly before that theory gained weight."I'll be following Jess' caravan almost the whole way there. Soon as we cross out of NCR territories it will be a straight shot to the city. Besides that, it's safer than caravan work - I won't be drawing attention to myself."
Her brother still had that look in his eyes - that uneasy stare that, when they were younger, would have been a promise that whatever her plan was, he aimed to foil it. If they had been kids still, he would have ratted her out to their Father or followed her out just to ruin her fun. But they weren't kids anymore, and he knew that. He knew there as nothing he could do to stop her.
Hev reached out to a small side table, her hand blindly grasping for sterile gauze to wrap her brother's wound in. She didn't wish to break eye contact with him, but after a moment of fumbling for the cloth without success, she glanced away to assure her hand found purchase. Just as she suspected, however, as soon as she looked away, he voiced a new concern.
"Don't trust them Followers a bit neither. You know Caesar is-"
"-was-"
"- a Follower? Ain't no good gonna come from this, Hev, you mark my word."
Her dark eyes rolled skyward as she heard this argument again - it seemed, in her family, that the Followers may as well all be the larval form of Legionaries. Not that her family had been keeping up with NCR politics - not since her Father's death - but there was a definitive attitude amongst them that the Legion were the bad guys and Caesar was bad guy supreme. From the stories she had heard, Hev had to agree with this notion. It didn't change the fact that the Followers had offered her work and additional medical training in a clinic just outside of Vegas proper. It was the sort of work she knew her parent's would have wanted her doing, and the only disruptive factor in the equation was the little fact that she was very nearly flat broke and would have no money at all by the time she had reached Vegas. And seeing as she had these strange urges to eat things that didn't possess antennae and drink clean water and sleep in a safe place away from all the Wasteland's various nutjobs, well, being flat broke just would not do. Mostly broke, however, she may be able to work with.
"I'll be able to do a lot more good out there than I do here." She leaned back and waved a hand towards the door, "Unless you really think helping a Brahmin give birth is personally rewarding to a physician in any way."
"Brahmin are an important -"
"No, no, no, don't even." She couldn't see it, but her eyes had gained a rather annoyed, if somewhat dangerous, glint just behind her thick framed glasses, and this alone quieted his assurance. There was truly only so many things a young doctor could learn from treating Brahmin, and it was just enough that she could start calling herself a goddamn veterinarian. Not that half the people of the wastes knew what that was anymore, but the point was she had been trained for more than just diagnosing who had Hoof Rot and who was pregnant.
"Look - everything is going to be fine. I'm going where I'm needed, and that's that." She smiled sweetly, tightening the gauze despite the hiss of pain he gave. Served him right; if he had been more thorough with changing the bandages, the damn thing wouldn't have gotten infected. Her small hands moved deftly to pin her work in place, her voice and smile continuing on sunnily - her idiotic optimism giving her brother just one more thing to groan about, "Besides, come on, " She tilted her head up with that stupid, happy grin of hers, "Who could shoot this face?"
...
It was a shapeless thing, she was staring at, whatever it was.
It lay crumpled with the bulk of it's mass spread out on it's back, connected to something frail and like colored running down and out of her vision. Spindly arches reached up crooked and weak looking, like a roaches legs reaching gnarled to the sky while it lays dying. Four thinner and one thicker and shorter bent at regular intervals and pointed upwards for the most part, though the way they were angled made her wonder if they had somehow gotten lost on the perilous endeavor of pointing. A thin metal band rested on the third one down, a simpering and weak looking digit if she had ever seen one, and the silver of it seemed to physically nudge her in the direction of awareness. She felt this nudge poke it's way through her consciousness, and it followed through her shoulder and down her arm and she watched the shapeless digits twitch powerlessly once in unison.
She was looking at her hand. And she had drooled on her pillow.
Her eyes moved past her hand, which, with the mystery about it abolished, didn't seem quite so fascinating anymore. She imagined it was best to move on quickly and quietly - lest the hand become aware of it's previous stardom and set it's aims to retake the spotlight. Instead her sight moved quickly, flicking across alien surroundings which were recognized with far greater ease to her than even her own hand had been. Not that she had been in this room before, no, but there were only so many ways to decorate a wasteland clinic without a friendly sign that read 'I Will Try Very Hard Not To Kill You'. The Wasteland Doctor's oath. And she imagined a smiley face at the end.
She could see an aged oxygen tank, a short table with wheels and medical equipment atop it, a gurney with scalpels and forceps and other things that didn't like to stay as clean and sterile as they were supposed to, and a bucket overflowing with bloody bandages and a ruined set of clothes. the blue of overalls peeked out over the edge of the basket, faded and beaten by the sand and sun of the wastes. An orange checkered shirt with the sleeves cut off, that, though she couldn't see them, knew had her initials stitched into the collar from her Mother's hand. Her clothes lay in that heap, bloody, filthy and ruined, and there were several minutes where she couldn't recall why some part of her mind found that so profoundly disturbing.
Oh, pain. She had certainly not missed that. But just as everything else was falling together with an alarming pace, pain had decided to make it's triumphant return and split lengthwise across her skull. She hissed in a breath, that shapeless hand slowly recollecting how to move and then doing so - sliding up to grasp at her forehead. She kicked over, rolling onto her back and closing her eyes. The dim room suddenly seemed brighter, and as a dark memory slithered unwelcome into her mind, it seemed a bit more frightening as well, bright or no.
Shot. In the face. Fingers scraping against a new divot in her forehead confirmed the memory with chilling certainty. The left side of her head, just to the right of her temple and just below her hairline. Puckered and ugly and whispering soft to her a nightmare she wanted desperately to believe was nothing but. There was some comfort in this clarity, however - by her logic, being shot in the head meant that she was certainly dead. She was not too modest to admit she was a gifted doctor - at least to brahmin, but that was beside the point - and, being the gifted doctor that she was, she was almost positive that she was alive. Maybe, given more time, she could perform a few tests to ascertain which of these statements were false, because one of them had to be untrue, though judging by the amount of pain she was in, she was fairly certain it was the latter.
Who was to say the dead couldn't feel pain? She hadn't ever been dead before, how could she know?
Well one thing was certain - she needed to get to the bottom of this am I dead thing right quick. She propped herself up on her elbows, testing how steady her head was before she dared to push herself up and forward. Her bare feet brushed at errant grains of sand on the stained concrete below the bed, the sensation sending a shiver up her spine and a twist into her stomach. Even taking things slow did little to help the dizzy spell that struck just as she lifted herself from the bed, her vision teetering between clarity and blur for a befuddling few seconds before it settled into definition and she realized she was not alone.
Though her vision couldn't be blamed entirely for that; it was dark and the man had only chosen then to speak. Which, after a moment's consideration, seemed to her a little creepy. He could have introduced himself while she was dumbly examining her hand, but instead waited until she was just getting her bearings together, like surprising her after the trauma she had already endured would usher along her recovery. Though, seeing as how she was still on the fence about whether or not she was alive, she decided she could forgive him for this transgression.
"Woah, easy-" His voice was soft and grandfather-like, gentle and steady, and she could tell he was doing his best to reassure her, "Don't try to get up so fast, now. You need to rest. Hell of a thing you been through," She felt a hand on her shoulder, and she looked, blinking, up to his aged face. Weathered and tan, creased from the hardship of living - definitely a man of the wastes. So that was one point towards still being alive, unless the Great War nuked Heaven too. And that was just too depressing a thought to entertain.
"You remember anything? Your name? Birthday? Where you from?"
"I'm dead, not retarded." She felt her face twitch and she blinked, as the voice she thought she had lost somewhere out in the darkness came back to her with startling clarity. The old man blanched, and then those well worn creases folded back into a grin. Her own mouth worked soundlessly for a few moments as she tried to grasp why she was such an asshole - and even came up with a rather convincing theory of the 'asshole switch' being located in the frontal lobe and chemically activated by the presence of lead - but he saved her from the lengthy explanation that would have been with a soft chuckle.
"Nah, you ain't dead, girl. 'Gainst all odds it seems." He nodded to himself, then leaned back into the chair next to her bed, his eyes moving over her face, appraising his work, "But I had to root around a bit in there, so if you would, can you tell me how your memory is?"
"Monroe." She spoke again, maybe a little too quickly, and again her voice sounded much stronger and steadier than she felt inside, even if her name wasn't something she often cared to share. Her first name had always been a point of vexation for her, and so she opted instead for her surname, "I mean, my name ... It's Dr. Monroe. August tenth, twenty-two fifty-eight. I'm ..." Her word caught on the last syllable, dragging out as her hand returned to the pain in her head. Her eyes screwed shut as she tried to shoo the headache from her skull through sheer force of will, and when that plan fielded no results, she popped one eye open to scan the room for drugs. Preferably strong ones.
"A Doctor, is it then? 'Magine that." He seemed to already be a single step ahead of her plight, as he was reaching forward with a syringe topped with something that was clear and absolutely divine because it only took a few moments to swill around in her veins and march up to that headache and give it a mean talking-to.
"Yes, and it's my medical opinion that I'm dead, sir, so ... thank you for your concern but you can go and leave the needle-"
A soft sound rose up out of his throat that she imagined was a chortle, but couldn't quite tell because immediately following it he began to mutter, "Sure do have a lot of jokes fer a gal just got shot in the head ..."
Hearing it said had a strange effect on her; like it suddenly all became so irrevocably real that her breath caught in her throat. The morphine was working it's will on her still healing wounds, and as the pain faded the pounding of her heart became more noticeable, breaking into the forefront of her mind as his words ran over and over again, quickening the rhythm in her chest and stilling the intake of her breath. Her hand had begun quaking, dropping from it's position at her new scar to land numbly in her lap, eyes fixing and staring unendingly at the ground. Shot in the head. He had said it, he knew it had happened, and that made it real, that meant that that horrible nightmare burned into her waking mind had actually occurred. That there was a man out there with a suit of checkered white and a shining, silver gun that had barked forth a terrible ultimatum.
"Oh, my God ..." Her lips felt just as dried and cracked as they had then, crouching on that desolate little patch of earth waiting to fall into that shallow, unmarked grave, "Oh ... Oh my God ..." Now that she was sounding like a terribly articulate Doctor as well as an asshole, she decided to cave into the urge she felt growing in the twisting emptiness where her stomach was and curl forward, feeling dizzy and sick and so horrifically alive she wished her body wasn't so damned resilient to being dead. Something thick and heavy lurched up into her throat and she struggled to draw in a breath past it, and paired with the lurching of her stomach and the heaviness of her head she couldn't hold back the sick that boiled up and spilled out.
Luckily for what was left of her dignity the good Doctor was quick - sometime in the midst of her panic attack he had pulled forward the waste bin and she was able to puke onto her ruined overalls instead of her bare feet. Reflex summoned tears to her eyes as the burning liquid escaped her throat, splattering muted against the tattered remnants of her life as a Courier.
"Where ..." She gagged, feeling as though she may vomit again, but somehow held it back in the pursuit of understanding, "... What ..." A strangled cough fought it's way through her chest, and the tremble it sent up her neck shook the tears loose from her eyes to drip down into the bin, " ... Who ... Who ..."
"All in good time, darlin'." His palm pressed into her back, rubbing along her spine as if that was a practiced medical procedure to use in response to a trauma victim. "All in good time."
