Soda Pop can pinpoint the moment his heart broke.
He's twenty-five, still running under his father's authority, still pushing miles and packs of rabid humans to the point of insanity. He never understood the principles of hopeless love. After all, he was far too young to mentally die, far too young to understand the concept of heartbreak and all the romantic poetry behind it; his own parents' love was an odd one – given that his mother was a bitter tribal who almost killed his father, and his father was a cheap old man still giving his woman a hard time, but they complimented each other – as if they belonged together in this fucked up world, as if they knew that together they could face this godforsaken land.
Soda Pop is a meddling sort, a decent man underneath his Raider physique, grime and paled scars. He has his mother's blue eyes, red hair, and tribal-souvenir tattoos that heavily marred his skin. He has his father's staring hollow-point grin set into place, his unlucky number thirteen engraved upon his trigger finger, and his boisterous personality that could qualify him reckless.
For a Raider in his prime, Soda Pop's charming; silver-tongued and telling, helpful when it came to luring pretty and easy girls into his bed, scoring drink by the pint, always having a story to weave. He's nimble, a quick shot with a smart mouth, taking anything that wasn't nailed down to the floorboards, breaking hearts like a pastime, stringing bodies up for fun. He blows his smoke, biting off on his Lucky Strikes – illusions of niceties hidden lovingly behind a thick veil of velvet smoke, a pocket knife gearing to stab someone in the back.
He could have gone his entire life completely selfish and empty, but fate had a different means to fuck him over – fate gave him a chance at loving, and it was a hurtful one, too.
He met his late wife, Jamie Leigh, by the gates of her father's rundown farm; she had a dirt-smeared grin, arms laden with hay for the brahmin. The cigarette clenched between his teeth almost dropped, he's awestruck by the plainness of this girl; a simple beauty that came naturally, far too gentle to be associating with some killer with a parched heart. Like a blooming flower on a dying cactus. And, when she spoke, it was soft, too innocent and meek – a far cry from the typical women he bedded.
He had to know her.
He had to speak to her.
And she wasn't afraid of him.
"Never seen you around, stranger. I would know. I happen to know everyone who breaks bread on my daddy's property, and you don't look like any tradesmen I know," with meekness, there's confidence, and he's not the most friendly looking type to start conversation with, but she never judged him – he was unique to her dull backwater settings. He was completely out of her league.
But, damn, did Soda Pop smile hard when she looked up at him with those wide gray eyes.
"That so? I'm new in town, ya dig? I've been travelin' for a good bit now. Thought I'd lay down my roots here for a spell," Those were the words he spun to her, playing his heart out to her in his typical drawl. "Considerin' that I'm new, do you mind showin' me around, little lady?"
It wasn't romantic. He ended up fucking her that night in her father's tool shed to the melancholy tune of I can't Help Falling in Love with You softly filter from the radio speakers outside; the sex wasn't mind blowing, it was innocent and soft – inexperience hands clawed across his shoulders and down his back. But she held him, kissed him, ran her velvet tongue up his throat, made him feel like he was worth a damn in these barren wastes. She never shied away from his scars, didn't hesitate to trace old brands of blue-ink tattoos, and even turned over his knuckle to kiss the number thirteen on his hand.
What those Raiders did to his wife was inhuman. He wonders if it would have been better to have left her on her father's farm – safe away from him and the folly that trailed after him. They tortured her. They plucked her from the waterfront and mutilated her frail body for no damn reason. When he found his wife, she was curled up on a heap of garbage and broken concrete; they treated her with the same equivalence. They stole the clothes off her back. He trailed his fingers up her dirty and bloody thighs, lining lacerations with trembling fingertips, weaving words that broke into a startled sob.
He remembers hearing his mother behind him, speaking in her broken tribal dialect, spinning foreign prayers and curses that fell on deaf ears. She knelt close to the earth and ran her fingers over the sands of the desert, still wet and fresh with cooling blood.
"The poor child," Soda Pop recollects his mother mumbling in her language, "She should have stayed with her kind."
It was just him and Aries now. It will always be just him and Aries.
Soda Pop often tells himself that children only grow up to break your heart; his daughter has her mother's eyes and innocent voice, but she's wayward and outlandish, always gearing to make trouble unlike her mother who often kept to herself; she has her simple beauty and gentle touch, she fabricated innocence – and that often led her into trouble with the boys in the settlement – if she paid them any mind.
His daughter loved listening to holotapes, daydreaming about swing dancing, the women with the pinned up hair and painted faces, and the men who dashed out on the floor with spectator shoes and pinstriped clothing. She often sung along to the strumming of his banjo during dry spells and heat waves, or when her grandmother would sing bygone gospel as she helped her out in the fields – pinning wet clothes on fishing line to dry. She had champagne taste with beer-pocket money.
And, now, he's an empty old man who hasn't heard from his daughter in a long time.
Soda Pop sits on his porch, kicking the dust off his boots against the edge of the stairs; the ghoul's mutt lifts her head, inquisitive to the sound and the slow motion of her master tirelessly adjusting the old cowboy hat on his head. The sun made its dreadful crawl over the sky, the heavens blended in the mass of the wastes, smothered and intoxicated by the shift in time and the old scars of war.
"Helluva heat wave, eh Miss Daisy? Just touchin' on mornin', too," The mutt wagged her tail, yawning in response to her master's tone, and then laying her head back down on her dusty paws. "Think she'll write us today? It's been awhile -." And, what a sad fate, a lonely ex-raider finding companionship in his dog, waiting on the morning courier to make his rounds, hoping to receive a letter from his only daughter.
His daughter is a wild one, chasing neon lights and old stars, parading through a gunfight, stirring the mighty hand of a mad leader. Some days he's proud of her: the wasteland is not always kind to the women folk, especially with the rise of Legion forces and their lust after young breeders to fuel their armies, but she prevailed and did the Legion one better by taking siege over New Vegas.
New Vegas. His baby girl, at a ripe age of twenty, was pushing the envelope in people's pay, reaping benefits and taking lives. Trashcan fires and neon signs bathe the city in a hellish glow; his daughter was in love with the damn capital of sin. The little shack she grew up in dared not compare.
They lived an hour from New Reno, and during Soda Pop's service with Happy Trails Caravan she would constantly beg him if she could help him; he knew he lost her to the city lights. He knew that one day she'll break his heart – constantly mulling over the inevitable.
Some days he's desperately terrified, she makes enemies as fast as she can make friends. The day that she wrote him about meeting Caesar and Malpais Legate, well, he about keeled over. He was up in arms about it. Took him thirty-four days to tread across the Mojave with Daisy to reach his daughter. And, of course, she mocked him for being so worried over her. But she hugged him, told him that she missed him and their little shack; his daughter looked different, the city changed her.
"Hey, ol' man!" A young man hollers at him from the broken concrete of the interstate, waving down Soda Pop's attention; he's holding a cheap grin, pushing back wind-mangled dark hair with his other hand. Daisy lifted her head, moving her sore joints to stand; she stumbled down the stairs, sprinting in the direction of the boy to greet him. "Any word from Aries? I've been listenin' to the radio, hopin' to hear good news."
"Not a peep, Kemper-boy," Soda Pop found Kemper a decent sort; he's been showing up on his property since he was just a boy; his mother was usually too drunk to watch after him, or feed him.
He's a few years older than Aries, made a small living helping the ex-raider and his family around the farm, tending after the family's rundown greenhouse, or herding skinny cattle. He knew his daughter had that sparking crush for the boy, unrequired to a searing point that often left her in tears as a little girl. Now, considering his daughter holds importance in the Mojave, Kemper's been asking a lot after Aries. And, honestly, that amused the old ghoul.
Soda Pop knew Kemper didn't have a snowball's chance at winning his daughter's affection now, not while she's surrounded by important people.
His voice distorts on that note, and he has a hard time deciphering between emotions, or if it's his vocal chords eroding away from the radiation.
"A damn shame," Kemper walked in the direction of the old shack, burying his hands in his dusty trousers, Daisy pranced by his side, barking with excitement. "A courier already passed by the town, I was figurin' he passed by here, too."
"No, sir," Soda Pop mumbled, "But I know my girl, she'll turn up."
-x-
Change comes in like a revelation, but she persevered the hardship, the subtle turmoil to watching the end unravel.
She's tired. So damn tired.
Courier Six is vigilant; she stands at attendances in front of her temporary tent, watching the labor of captives pull at the restraints around their wrists, numbly tugging at the ropes that bit into their flesh. She stands with little emotion to match the occasion; wary tribal children cling to their mother's sides, unaware to change, scanning the layout for their father's to appear. One-by-one, the Legionaries marched the women and children in formation, valuing their worth and then separating them from each other, each checked off as a number in a leather bound ledger.
And, oh, it was cruel.
Two months after leaving Camp Nelson and they're still nestled on the boarder of Arizona. With approach from the Legate, he's slowly chipping away at the Hidebarks' defenses; they're a hostile group unmoved and opposed to Caesar's theatrics at uniting a single nation under his bloody flag.
Six is sick, with good reason behind her lack of empathy; she hurts for these people, it's enough to keep her awake at night – praying, wishing that she could sway the tide of war in her favor, but she's just as stuck as them. And, honestly, she's in no condition for heroics, shy six months pregnant and still biting back on the burn of morning sickness.
The weather today is unforgiving, but she lingers around her assigned destination, mindlessly drifting her hand over the small swell of her abdomen – calculating revenge to the finest detail, keeping her unadulterated hatred to herself; a woman scorned makes her no less weak than a woman who faired rational. She goes on with life wishing she could loop her finger through a trigger and take aim at the core source to her demise; she's too prideful to die by her own hand, too sane to fly off the handle and proclaim the worse. But she watches. Always watching, waiting for the flaw in the Legate's system.
The gales through the valley almost knocks her back a peg, but she stands steadfast, sweating out her exhaustion, witnessing visual heartache in the mix; the soldiers begin prying children away from their mothers in a jerking motion, snatching the children up and pushing them in the hurried grasp of attending Priestesses. They cry and sob and scream for one another in this bizarre fiasco of human evil.
The Legion flag at the center of the encampment whipped violently; a noise that bled with the cries of mothers and children, and the buzz of Legionaries who started calling numbers for a makeshift slave auction, claiming wives and leaving the undesirables for the pyre along with the men who were automatically executed, or for fieldwork. The male children will be brainwashed, groomed and fed through the military rank as fodder for the frontlines. The female children will be pushed into later breeding, Priestess duties, officer's wives, or used as labor.
Amidst the damnation, she sees the Legate; twilight hatred burns in her chest, and when he glances in her direction she frowns, and she is not ashamed to match his impersonal expression. She's furious, and he is not blinded by that fact, merely accepting the inenviable.
The Legate's hands are stained with expensive blood, barely dried and ruby red under the unforgiving sun; the color is revolting, almost blinding and quickly drying. But Courier Six refuses to look away, asserting her dominance between their stare down – Legionaries and slaves blocking their way, but the Legate parts the sea of people with his slow and impending stride. His clothing is stale with blood, fabric lingering with the smell of burning wood and freshly fired ammunition.
Six can only frown harder when he's upon her, towering over her small frame. With blinded vexation, she didn't realize that he's holding something outstretched towards her. An offering, a meaning of peace relations that will go unfulfilled.
"Are you feeling any better," the Legate consoles her in his own unique way, voice rough and strained, muttering under his breath to gander her one-track mind. His blue eyes peer down at her, intent and sharp, stark in contrast compared to the blood on his flesh and his clothing. He coaxes her enough to take the fresh apple from his vile hands, and she turns it over in her possession, mildly surprised – testing the weight in her grasp; any sort of fruit plucked from traveling caravans was a rarity, a damn treat. She's been craving them like crazy, and he must have been listening to one of her frequent rambles.
"You know, they say the Devil's water ain't so sweet, Malpais Legate, these people -," Six turned the apple in her grasp, unsure what to make of the awful situation around her. "Who are they?" They're tribal, of course, she only wanted clarification on their origins, their lost culture under the bindings of Legion expansion.
There's something taunting in his blank expression, unnerving and insidious. The Legate slowly nodded his head, backing her towards the entrance of the tent, and then guiding her inside by the lift of the flap. Six turned her gaze from his, holding her staring displeasure, but following through with his given and silent direction to enter the tent. She held the apple with both of her hands, held close and precious; a silly token that oddly made the world a better place, a sign to numb the pain that life has pageant out for her.
And, when they found shelter in the quiet of the tent, the Legate answered her in his causal tone, too causal for the gravity of the situation – owning and taming human life, holding the same significance as one would own a mutt. Lethal dread struck a raw chord in her, but she swallowed down her sorrow, finding courage in the straightening of her spine and the squaring of her shoulders; tall and broad, harnessing courage in her bleak existence while the odds will always be against her. Niceties didn't deserve forgiveness – certainly not in the trials the Legate made her endure and observe – exposing her to the chaos in colonization, the execution of culture among tribes: the raping, pillaging and blunt murder.
"They're a part of the Hidebarks' tribe, a branch just north to their major encampment. We are so close to conquering them, Aries. With luck, we'll be able to lure out their champion," the Legate notes as lighthearted as he could sound, he's pleased by the reluctance in her fight, the slow motion in her movement to sit at the edge of the cot with the apple in her lap; she balanced the fruit between her hands, fingers slowly dragging over the ripe red flesh.
The Champion, the Legate speaks of, goes by the endearing title: the Monster of the East. She's only seen this notorious man once when she was by the Legate's side, watching the fall of a party of young Legionary soldiers meet tragedy by this beast alone. Honestly, Six could not believe the sheer monstrosity, the almighty height of this human being who lurked the grounds, the abstract strength and will to be able to slowly rip a head clean from the shoulders.
The Monster of the East gave Courier Six a moment's pause, a rare feeling of unbecoming fear flooded her rationality. She remembers listening to the gurgled cry of soldiers down below in the valley beg for their lives. She remembers the amused shrug in this man's shoulders, the slow raise of his hand, and the ungraceful defeat of the soldiers who begged for blissful mercy. She remembers the Legate rounding the rest of his troops after the carnage and marching them down in the valley, hoping to corner the Monster of the East – finding that he was nowhere to be found.
"Does it ever both you," Six begun, spinning her tongue on hollow words for a man who never took them to heart, who never stepped back and analyzed the grand picture in his imperfect strategy. "Separatin' children from their mothers?"
He took a seat next to her on the cot, giving her question some thought. Normally, he would have dismissed her inquiry, but he's been rather giving in his information and his suppressed feelings. When he spoke, she never interrupted, she took everything with a grain of salt.
"The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it," the Legate answered, still mulling over Six's question. "Did you know those who fall under Legion siege typically do not fight back? Those in the wastes already believe that they have no say in the world. They want change, but they are not willing to die freely for it. It makes for easy targets. There are, however, the rare breeds who fight back, who seek after change. The mothers in this raid did not fight back – they stood there like startled cattle – even while we butchered their husbands and older sons in front of them."
"That's not what I'm askin', Malpais Legate," Six retaliated, sharply. "Does it, or does it not bother you?"
"It did at first," the Legate laments, his voice grated on the smoke from past pyres he's lit. However, he held no anger towards her quirk. "Thirty years can numb anyone's soul, I'm afraid. But I was the one who made the calls."
-x-
She gleefully wounds him, not in a physical sense, but mentally.
She plays her routine kindness, touching the side of his jawline, dragging gentle fingertips across his stubble, whimsically scolding him for not keeping up with his shaving and he uses the excuse of being too tired. Still, she smiles up at him; her fingers drift, lulling his senses – pressing her brow against his, respiring on a harmonious note.
He's enraptured by the hum in her throat and the soft laugh she made when she coaxed him enough to lean forward and press his mouth against hers. She catches his eye, holding attention with the worse intentions, sweetly talking to him between breaths – whispering private matters that are only meant for him, and him alone. He pays her with the same respects; rough hands gripped at her waist, running up and down to gander warmth and a sigh, talking with praise in his tone.
She's warm and falsely welcoming, and he knows she's pulling him into a ploy.
He doesn't care.
He doesn't care when her fingers hooked into the fastenings of his bulletproof vest, nor when she slipped it off his shoulders with a heavy thud. He doesn't care when she reached up to tug at the collar of his button up, bringing him closer to her. And, certainly, he didn't mind when one of her hands slipped down between them and roughly palmed at him through his trousers, spinning vulgar words that dripped from her mouth, something he's sure she's picked up from New Vegas.
This reminded him of the time that he had received a letter from one of his couriers, addressed to him, written by her; there's humor in this recollection, pulling out a lipstick-stained napkin from an envelope that only read "Fuck you," in pretty handwriting above the crimson kiss.
She's desperate, and he's still searching for deception in her gray eyes, hoping to catch something amiss before he lets her take this too far. He adored the steady cadence of her voice, in tune and haunting. He always tried for some semblance of gentility when it came to their newer exploits and rough handlings. But she catches him with an unfair advantage and he's willing to believe that he'd walk through Hell with her – even at the expense of knowing that his playful Courier is the Devil in disguise.
She holds his gaze when she sinks to her knees in front of him, and he awkwardly takes a step back to give her room – standing in partial awe. Her fingers brush the leather of his belt, pulling back on his brass buckle till she slid the strap through the loop to free him. Her hands make quick work at popping the button, pulling down the zipper, and hooking her fingers into his waistband – sliding them just enough to peel back the layers. He feigns patience by her soft touch and warm breath against his flesh; how she hovered near – curling her fingers into the loose fabric of his trousers, expecting him to stand idle in a compromising position.
The first swipe of her tongue earns her a startled groan; soft and timid. A rouge hand finds the side of her face, tipping her closer to repeat the motion; his thumb brushes over her cheekbone, asserting pleasantries early in their game. With his free hand, he wraps his fingers around his own shaft, giving himself a few pumps before he guided her over him.
The next swipe of her tongue comes naturally; she can hear the clip of his boots, finding common ground to stand still. And he swears he found small death in her motion. Warm and wet, her soft lips part over his tip.
She strokes his ego with heated words, complimenting him, reverberating vulgar words against his heated flesh.
The Malpais Legate never seemed the desperate sort, certainly not in his seat of power, holding an impersonal expression, with the heavy mentality to simply take. But she taunted him, grinning against him, slowly engulfing him.
His fingers tangle in her hair, coaxing to take him deeper, or as much as she was able; her tongue slides across the underside, eyes closing in concentration, humming with pleasure over the fact that she's topped him again – even while he strived to demonize her existence.
She's killing him with kindness, and when the time comes, he holds her still, keeping her in place by the pull of her hair; he stokes himself over her face, forcing his ungraceful release. Her mouth remains open, enduring his brutish behavior. Warmth gushes against her, feeling the drip of his come sloppily mark her. She can taste him on her tongue, aware of the excess that mapped down her throat and under the lining of her shirt. And, when she's able to breathe, she heaves forward.