14: Dishonest Hearts
Stella feels sticky.
There's the humidity clinging to her jumpsuit and seeping into her skin, but it's not that. There's the thick fog that makes a wide street claustrophobic, but it's not that. There's her own sweat, rolling cold and clammy down her back, but it's not that. She feels sticky like anything that anybody throws at her will latch onto her body and hold tight. Grenades hiding behind her knees. Words pinched along her ears. Bullets sprouting from her temple. There's been so much thrown at her. Knives and baseballs and teeth sunk in deep. Promises and obligations and debts to be repaid. His whispering dead-weight on top of her. All clinging to her skin and refusing to let go.
Only a matter of time before she collapses under the weight of it all.
Escort mission. Get the mutant to the station. Keep its hide in one piece, even if its mind is a lost cause. The field, so far as Boone's limited scope can see, stands two monsters and two…
Numbers were never his strong suit. Words, categories, labels neither. Something tells him that's why he joined up with the Bear, so figures caught between his crosshairs could light up good or bad. No bear's claws backing him here. So he sticks to Us and Them and figures his fists and a rusted-up pistol are gonna have to do for making the distinctions.
Puesta del Sol, she says when he's asking where they're going with two monsters in tow. They aren't talking much. Same as usual. But this she says. Spanish, he thinks. Something Spanish. He hears the words in a warm baritone, sees them unfurl out like smoke from beneath Manny's mustache. Tries to mouth along, like he always does. Hears the bastard laugh, like he always does. But that bastard had been smiling ear to ear when she disappeared and ain't nothing to laugh about that.
Not disappeared. Boone knows where she went while he was out on watch, where they took her. Only he doesn't know where she ended up, where he put her. But she was a good girl, so if anyone was gonna go up, gonna be her. But now she's just another good, lost girl, and there are damn plenty of those. Must be hauling ass upstairs, trying to make floorspace for all of them. Lending out white dresses. Running out of wings. Borrowing halos.
Puesta del Sol, and he thinks it's got something to do with the sun, thinks he's heard the word bubble out of Manny's mouth as a lame excuse for a fucked shot. No sun here and since Stella's clearly smart enough to know what the sun looks like, he doesn't think she came up with the name. Makes him wonder who did. Makes him wonder if that ghoul in the shades knows.
Should probably speak up about that.
Puesta del Sol, says the sign on the gate or so Stella says, blonde head cocked sideways like a hair trigger, green eyes slanted like a shutter-scope. Takes her a while. Slow to read and slower to write, but she's a hell and a half better than Boone at both so he's not complaining. He tilts his head up and squints as if trying to read the sky instead. Still no sun. Sky looks like the ceiling of one of those red rock caverns where Manny grew his first mustache. Makes him wonder if they've been trapped in one of them the whole time, that the red rock is gonna crack and come tumbling down on their heads any second now, settling a score that the Khans can't. He wonders and she passes through into a nonexistent sundown, since the sun never came up in the first place. One monster shadows her, and the other—
Gravel crunches. Bone's neck snaps back to attention. Blue eyes watch him, watch the gun held two fingers too slack in his grip. Boone tightens up.
"You are going to arm me eventually," says the Legion boy.
The absolute certainty in his voice makes Boone's fingers tense on the trigger but he feels his mouth curl up at the same time like a cazadore going in for the sting.
"Not today," he tells the lying, spying, slaving sack of shit and the satisfaction he feels is enough to make him stop wondering. Enough to make him forgot all about the ghoul in the shades and the good, lost girl, at least for now, and keep his eye and his attention on the good girl he's still got between his crosshairs instead.
Vulpes is beginning to enjoy this.
The abomination has stepped ahead. The hound has fallen behind. The NCR dog would likely claim to be seeking the superior vantage point, but his inner tension is palpable. Vulpes is beginning to enjoy that as well. It gives him openings, tiny mouse-holes, little cracks where a cold draft can slip in unhindered. And he intends to take full advantage.
"Follow the wires," he suggests delicately when the messenger girl's face is twisted up along with the convoluted city around them and the reflected labyrinth map flickering on her wrist. "It is a switching station. That suggests electrical pursuits."
"You think you're that good," she says.
He tries not to smile. "I am," he says simply because while he rejects the Old World and its littered remnants, logic is as much a pillar of his society as any.
But she isn't looking at him. And she still has not gifted him with a gun.
"You think I'm angry," he observes. "I'm not. You think I feel betrayed. I don't. You may have saved my life only to preserve your own, but that is logical. That, I understand."
"That's about all that people like you understand," she mutters.
"People like us," he corrects softly and then pauses. Feigns a revision. "Ah," says the fox in him, canine teeth glimmering in a grin. "Your heart of gold. I forgot."
"Better than your heart of lead," she mutters. She does that often, this muttering. He wants to teach her otherwise, wants to instruct her in the fine art of taking those cruel impulses and filing them razor-sharp.
"It weighs heavy still," he rejoins smoothly. "Gold is soft." He pauses, reprises his smile. "Malleable."
Her brow knits. If she does that often, it will leave a mark upon that fair skin. Good. Youth is all very fine and useful, but in this wasteland marks such as those, fine lines between the eyes, half-moons at the corners of the mouth, are trophies to be admired. Badges of survival. And yet the offense she has taken amuses him. He did not outright name her for what she is, and yet she hears it. Knows what she is. Impressionable to handprints. Malleable to suit another's greater purpose since she, like so many others, believes she has none of her own. Her purpose died with that buffoon in the garish suit. Which reminds him.
"The Chairman," he says and that is all that is required.
"You said that was a test." Her boot scuffs up against an unfinished cobblestone.
Vulpes shrugs. "It was."
He catches her stealing glances back at the sniper, waiting for her dog to intervene, to snap his jaws and growl. He does not. Lost to whatever private hell he inhabits, the NCR mutt is not of this world. "Did I pass?" she snaps at Vulpes instead.
"Did you?" he inquires, a smiling reflection.
Green eyes look clouded yellow with uncertainty. He's beginning to enjoy that too. A pure, beautiful contradiction to the ugly, lying words that tumble from her pretty mouth. "I didn't want to shoot him. You made me."
"Did I?" Eyebrows raise.
"Didn't you?" she demands and the fog in her eyes begins to clear. Anger does that for her; not blind rage, but the sort of pure violence he has perfected. Even if she names it whatever righteousness she wishes to now, she will learn it for what it is soon. "You were gonna string him up there. I didn't want to see that, no matter what he did to me. Who the hell wants to see that?"
He steps closer and when he speaks, he imagines his breath and the words it carries fogging up those green eyes again so he can wipe them clean once more. "I think you did" he breathes into her. "I think you wanted to. I think you wanted to see him strung up there, legs flailing, shoulders breaking, tears streaming, skin blistering in the sun, for what he did to you. What he took from you. I think you wanted to make him feel exactly what you did, what you do, but you couldn't, you can't, so what we would do to him would have been second-best. And you wanted it. And I think that frightened you more than anything else you saw at Fortification Hill."