10: No Better
"Look me in the face, you son of a bitch. Look me in the face so I can kill you."
Vulpes does not know the voice but he knows the tone: the inept boorishness of the NCR's most groveling slaves. And they are slaves, make no mistake. The Rome of ancient had called itself a republic once too, before it had dispensed with the illusions of democracy. One day, Vulpes knows, this giant of the western shore will do the same.
Only if the Legion does not push them from their self-righteous pedestal first.
"That seems contrary to my best interests," Vulpes says, partially because he can and partially to buy some time. She has the gun, that great equalizer. He should have taken the gun. He should have just taken it from her.
"Your best interests aren't gonna concern you when there's a bullet in your head," he bites back, snapping like a dog, and then, like a dog, seems to think better in retrospect. "Turn around," he says again. "Not gonna shoot you. Yet. Questions first."
Time, Vulpes reminds himself and he turns with it.
Their pale, dingy jumpsuits make them twins, just as the infamous blue makes siblings of all vault dwellers, but there rest the first and final of their similarities. Here, Vulpes thinks at first glance, is a man little more than meat to soak up bullets, to shield his betters from blades. But then he remembers.
He thought he would. He remembers tracking him through the wasteland while he tracked her. He remembers a red beret and he remembers what that means. Vulpes is very good at remembering details: a talent developed through an old desire to forget the greater picture, memorize every inch of a bloodstained fence and forget the bloody body beside it. While he no longer possesses the luxury of completely narrowing his focus, while his world now revolves around predicting that greater picture, the old habit lingers.
"First Recon," he observes from that same recollection. Vulpes doesn't mean to show off, but the fact remains that the moment the NCR dog decided to start talking, he entered a game where Vulpes is inherently superior. Fact. And the issue of time.
"What about them?" His back leg, the one supporting his lunge and the thrust of his arms, the gun that appears seamlessly integrated into his fingers in the dim red light, shifts with the question.
He fixes his gaze on the brute's weapon, intaking and analyzing everything from its caliber to the approximate measurement of the rounds loaded, but when he attempts to plot out a disarmament, all he can think of his how he should have taken her gun whether she was willing or not.
She saved his life and he doesn't know why.
"Your motto," Vulpes says instead, angling for disarmament of another fashion.
"What about it?" Fingers tighten perceptibly on a trigger Vulpes doesn't want pulled.
"What is it?" He thinks and he remembers, just as he knew he would. He remembers the words and he does not think of the woman in Silus's tent, cradling a bloody scalp and mumbling over and over again. There is simply no point in it. "'The last thing you never see coming'? Not quite, here. You were doing better when I was turned away."
"Maybe that's why I left. So bastards like you can know what killed them. Where the hell do you get off, talking about First Recon?"
"You're the right age," he observes and remembers telling the courier that she was the wrong. He remembers how he danced around her, verbally sparring when he should have pinned her to the filthy floor and taken what he wanted.
She saved his life and she won't tell him why.
"Hearing what I've heard about your kind, telling you up front I ain't interested. Where is she?"
Vulpes takes a step forward, trying his luck now that he knows he has something to try with. Just like an NCR brute, to give up information regarding the item he wants most after little more than a slightly prying observation.
Refuse crunches beneath boots, but he holds his ground against the frumentarius' advance. "What are you so afraid of? Why, a decorated veteran like yourself could hardly be threatened by little old me," Vulpes mockingly adopts the charming colloquialisms of the Mojave, narrows his eyes, and smiles his thinnest smile; not the favorite in his arsenal, but an effective tool. "Or might you be just the littlest bit… intimidated? You are the one holding the weapon, are you not?"
"I saw you with her. Where is she?"
"Or is it," Vulpes feigns consideration, "that the famed First Recon only shows bravery in the face of wounded, women, and children? Our eccentric friends in the western hills tell such extraordinary tales of your… finesse in that particular field."
He doesn't know what reaction he was expecting. What he receives in return for his efforts is less than ideal. The sniper -her sniper -chuckles, low and slow. "You looking to die? More than happy to make your wish come true, promise you that—"
"Only that you won't," he corrects. "Not while I know where she is and you do not. I find myself curious; does she know? Do you crow of your exploits to her? Whatever must she make of them?"
The dog takes the bait. He cannot resist. "That's high and mighty talk for your kind."
"I don't pretend to be anything other than what I am," Vulpes shrugs. "Unlike some."
Anger hisses through the sniper's teeth like smoke from a gun. He takes three jerky steps toward the frumentarius, losing one more piece of his advantage with each, words storming forward with his advance, eyes white-hot. "You're a lying, killing, slaving son of a bitch. If you're trying to tell me you're the good guy here—"
Good boy. Just a little bit more. But he knows that, just as with any hound, he must dangle an incentive.
"I'm not saying I'm good," he says smoothly, executing his penultimate play in this altercation. "I'm saying you're no better."
Centuries-old dust makes a carpet beneath her pacing feet. She curls one fingernail around the seashell of her ear and flicks the recovered filth to the floor. No time for personal hygiene, even as she pleads with the voice in her Pip-Boy, "I need more time. Give me more time."
Father Elijah is a demanding taskmaster: as insistent as House, as unyielding as Caesar, as patronizing as Crocker. But it's okay. She's as ready to please as Yes Man.
"Earn more time," he tells her, cold and clipped. "You forget I can see you. I can see the board in its entirety and I can see each play you make. You and this first interloper may have history, but that does not mean I must humor it. Do as you are told and you may just survive this."
"I need more time," she says again, unyieldingly stubborn and unyieldingly stupid with it. She can't say no but that doesn't mean she can't bargain before she says yes. She knows her value.
"Speed is of the essence for this endeavor. Discussion of matters beyond this city is not. If I give you too much time to stare into each others' navels, you will hang yourselves with it."
"And where will that leave you?"
Stella has asked this before. She has asked it with ankles coated in river mud and dust from a march up Fortification Hill. She has asked it with her nose stinging from too-clean air and her head rolling from the view atop the Lucky 38. She has asked it in a room top full of re-purposed memorabilia and re-purposed Old World values. "If I say no, where will that leave you?"
Once again, she is deliberately misunderstood.
"Where it always leaves me," is the Old Man's answer. "Where I have always been. The more pertinent question is where this tiresome, coy obstinacy leaves you."
He doesn't guilt. He doesn't threaten. He merely states his advantage as facts and figures, like another voice that echoes from another machine's speaker, and they're both right. Whichever way the table spins, she loses.
"If I were you," the tinny little voice in her Pip-Boy tells her, "I would be less concerned with making threats you cannot possibly uphold and be more concerned with more immediate circumstances." He pauses. "It will be interesting to see if you survive," he remarks before the soft click of disconnection.
Stella doesn't have a person to stare at so she stares at her Pip-Boy. "It will be interesting..."
Her pistol is in her hand before she registers reaching for it; she's belly-down beneath the bed before she remembers choosing a hiding place. Dropped down so she doesn't drop dead, she's listening now. Listening for screeching of furniture. Listening for shuffling of steps. Listening for breathing that doesn't belong to her.
Nothing. Nothing and no one. Alone. What she's best at. "Just go home."
It's the weight around her throat that reminds her: she's never alone in this damned city for better or for worse. Definitely for worse when she realizes that the Pip-Boy had been the right thing to be staring at all along. What she sees there, blipping up on her screen like twin telltale heartbeats, sends her scrambling out from beneath the mattress, chasing after the bogeyman himself and the devil she doesn't know yet.
There may be no scope, no crosshairs, on the shaky little pistol he's got held tight between two fists but Boone's vision is still full of angles. Never been great at numbers, but he knows where to aim a shot. Upper chest for shock value, get the bastard to look down and realize he's done for so slow and so fast. Throat's messy; knees are torture tactics. Right between the eyes if he's feeling merciful; he's not feeling so merciful. But really, he could hit any major artery from hip to collarbone and have the satisfaction of watching the son of a bitch bleed out slow.
Boone isn't feeling merciful. Doesn't make him a monster now. Whatever came before.
"I'm saying you're no better."
He is better. And he doesn't need to prove it but letting this monster walk.
"Where," he says again between teeth as tight as the hands around his gun, "is she?"
"Boone."
His head snaps around to stare. He's damn lucky that the Legion bastard doesn't take advantage, that he's looking as shellshocked, stock still and staring as the courier with the broken memory slips out of the fog like a ghost, cat eyes a muddy brown in the red air, hair knotted like a tangle of crackling wires. Something electric about her. Always has been.
But he can't make himself say a name. Wrong one might come out again.
"Boone," she says again like a warning, like a prayer. Eyes slide down the bulk of his arm, slip up and steady on the gun, then travel along a phantom bullet's trajectory to its target, still breathing and still scheming. Feels himself mouth two syllables to try and get her attention back on him, but no sound comes out and he's not sure which letters they would've been on paper anyway. Should've said something. Should've said anything. Because she does the unthinkable next. The unforgivable in his law-book.
She steps between them.
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