A very special thanks goes out to ScrimshawPen for helping edit and revise this chapter! They helped transform what I felt was a medicore chapter into something that I'm quite happy with.
They write some great Fallout fiction here on FF.N, so y'all should go check them out.
Boone puttered around, trying not to appear as dejected as he felt. Clarke had moved well out of earshot, chatting up the young woman. She had breezed up onto the overpass not fifteen minutes after they had sat on broken concrete traffic barriers to share trail mix and gecko jerky. Clarke had just been complaining, loudly, about wasting a hundred caps around a mouthful of seeds and cereal when a girl in a brown robe came walking past the two, her entire body draped in the same drab brown fabric as her pack that hung empty off her back. The shock that left Clarke's face frozen was worth letting her think that he was gullible for those fifteen minutes.
Boone had left her side earlier to meander around, taking in the trading post that he had traveled past many times but had never actually visited. On a whim, he wondered if perhaps the fortune-teller would be there to eat up the time it took for Clarke to finish ooh-ing and ahh-ing over weaponry. He nodded at the child on the mat, assuming that he was one of the many orphaned beggar children of the Mojave. "Is that fortune teller still 'round these parts, kiddo?" he asked, only to have the boy laugh at him. Buying his predictions was expensive, but the psyker at the 188 Trading Post was rumored to have untold knowledge that was well worth his price.
The boy had explained that he was the famed Forecaster, selling thoughts and predictions to those who traveled through the trading post. Boone didn't want to hear about himself, or the trading post, or the Mojave; he had turned and nodded towards the Courier, bent over an open crate of munitions. "I wanna hear your thoughts about her," he had said with absolute certainty.
When the boy took off his 'medicine', the transformation from boy to psychic was immediate and startling. "Her face…Her face does the thinking – two to the skull, yet one gets up. Odds are against her… but they're just numbers to her after the two-to-one. She's playing the hand she's been dealt, but she won't let it rest… she shuffles and stacks and gambles…Gambles that might pay off? …but how? Forecast; rapidly changing conditions."
'Thinking' about Clarke left the boy in enough pain that he was moaning softly as he struggled with his gear; Boone knelt down and nudged the child's hands straighter until the weird cap slid easily over his head. In truth, the sniper was a little disappointed. It didn't seem that the Forecaster had told Boone anything that he didn't already know. He already knew that Clarke was gambling; hell, he knew that she was gambling with their lives. Here she was, stacking their deck. Sure, it was impressive knowledge for a little boy to have, but the man had been hoping for something more. Just, more. The Forecaster surprised him when he spoke again.
"It doesn't take any thinking to see that that wasn't what you wanted to hear, though," he mumbled perceptively, leaning back and closing his eyes.
Boone had nodded in agreement. "There's just so much I don't know," he admitted with no small measure of dejection. This kid spoke in confusing riddles and parables; the sniper's secrets were safe with him. Besides, no one would be interested in hearing about some washed up NCR veteran's crush on a Courier with amnesia.
"There's the divide in her… The Divide. It's buried deep in two graves, but she carries it with her always," the boy had said, head resting back against the dirty concrete as he waved one weak hand in Clarke's general direction. She was still haggling with the Gun Runner some twenty yards away. "Thanks for helping."
Boone had felt the air get sucked out of his lungs as his lips slammed shut, eyes bugging out behind his glasses in shock. Suddenly it made sense: why no one in the entire Mojave seemed to know who she was, why no one was missing the Courier of the Mojave Express who had been shot in the head in Goodsprings. She hadn't been born of the Mojave, as Boone had whimsically daydreamed, she didn't rise up out of the desert sands like some god – she was probably just a native of the Divide.
The NCR didn't talk about the Divide, just as they didn't talk about Bitter Springs; it was just another dirty NCR secret where civilians were caught in a blunder of the Republic. No one really knew what happened there, they just knew that those prosperous settlements popping up all over to the west of the Mojave were suddenly and violently destroyed just weeks after the Legion and the NCR had clashed over the trade routes. Entire platoons went MIA, lost to the Divide, never to be seen again. Handfuls of survivors and refugees had trickled into the Mojave after the earth swallowed up their entire lives, and almost all had succumbed to radiation poisoning before a straight story could be pieced together – or at least, that's what Boone had heard. Was she one of the survivors?
The sniper had felt sick – he knew that, armed with the knowledge, Clarke would want to ignore the dangers of the Divide to return there, to try and uncover the secret of who she really was. That was when he had turned on his heel to grab the Courier's attention, the weight of the Forecaster's words too much to handle on his own. But instead of asking about herself, as Boone had assumed that she would, and of all things, she had wanted to know about the Trading Post.
The man let his eyes wander over to where the two women were sitting across from each other and chatting amicably. He hadn't wanted to shoulder the responsibility of telling the Courier what she needed to know – he already had to brace himself for the next time she asked him about his past, and now he had to contend with this. This was not his area of expertise; it wasn't even in the same realm of reality. He shoved it all away when they shook hands and Clarke pushed herself up, followed by the other girl – Veronica? – before the Courier turned and motioned him over to the table with a wave. The other girl was slightly bulkier than his companion and at least a head taller, and Boone eyed the gauntlet strapped to her right hand. Power fists were nothing to sniff at, and if this girl decided that she had less than noble intentions, he'd be near useless at close range. Piston-assisted punches could break bones, shatter skulls, rupture organs, but it took a specific sort of person to be willing to get up close and personal enough to punch their enemies to death – just the sort of person that might get along nicely with a certain mail-courier with a penchant for machetes, small guns, and, occasionally, chairs.
Clarke threw one arm around his shoulders and gestured towards the burlap draped woman, tossing him a grin; Boone rolled his eyes and sidestepped out from under her grip as she spoke, intensely aware of the tall woman's eyes scrutinizing them, but the Courier didn't seem to mind. "Boone, this is Veronica! We're gunna do some prospecting together!"
So was this her plan? Build herself an army out of misfits that she gathered up from around the Mojave, like himself? That was… an incredibly dumb plan, even for her. Maybe she was counting on their own combat prowess to keep them safe if things went pear shaped. Maybe her brain had leaked out of her head last night, too. "Okay," he said plainly. If the Courier wanted to get them punched to death for all of her caps, that was her decision.
Veronica gave him a warm smile that he didn't want to trust, but she didn't try to shake his hand, which he appreciated. "Hiya," she greeted with a small wave.
Clarke started clicking away at a dial on her Pip-Boy, then poked at the screen as she scrolled around her map. "So I wanted to take a look at that dry lake bed over by the El Dorado service station – ya' know, the one that those raider-types were holed up in. It's directly south of us and on our way to Novac. We don't have anything to lose by taking a detour, right?"
0
Their haul out of the Vault was a slow and stumbling one that left Boone feeling like he was swimming through the air; he felt as if he was watching himself from slightly left of the back of his own head. A glance back at Clarke and Veronica showed the same haunted sort of look that he suspected was plastered across his own face. None of them looked back at the huge steel door slid shut behind them with metallic grinding, but he was sure they would all remember Vault 11 for years to come.
Blood was leaking lazily out of a gash just above the sniper's knee and the raw pain of laser burns stretched across his shoulders, where his shirt flapped uselessly against his back. The rest of his small group didn't look much better. One side of Clarke's face was already bloated, the skin stretched into a shiny pink mask with her eye swollen shut and blood still wet across her lips and down her neck, and Veronica was holding her left arm gingerly while she limped next to the Courier. Both women were bogged down by their heavy packs but were unwilling to part with any of their prospected goods, leaving the sniper to take point out of the damp cavern and into the bright midafternoon sun.
Their short trek through the dry lake was relatively uneventful, Boone picking off a small pack of wild dogs before they climbed back up onto the highway, heading south to Novac. Most of his doubts about Veronica's intentions had evaporated somewhere around the third sentry bot, so the sniper was comfortable enough to creep well ahead of the pair, peering through the scope of his rifle before giving Clarke the okay with a wave over his head. The stretch of highway between them and Novac lay empty and barren, the El Dorado service station still abandoned after their first trip up to Vegas, all those weeks back. Old Lady Gibson's junkyard came into view not long after that, with Dinky rising up from between the soft hills. As glad as he'd been to leave it behind, Boone almost felt relieved to see Novac, if only as a place to rest their heads.
The sun had yet to set by the time they wandered through the rusty gates of the town square and Clarke immediately took off up into Dinky with Veronica in tow, shouting a hoarse, "We'll be right back!" in his direction before closing the door behind them. Off to trade with Cliff, no doubt, Boone thought while rolling his eyes, but he allowed himself a small smile – at least she didn't drag him along this time. It gave him time to take care of his own business in town without the inevitable questions or offers to assist from the nosy Courier. The key to his bungalow was still in his pocket, and the little one-room cabin was dusty and dank from being closed up for all those long weeks since he'd last stepped over the threshold. It smelled like a tomb, which he guessed was pretty fitting. Everything the little cabin stood for, Carla, their marriage, their unborn baby, all of it was dead and had been for years. He was holding onto ghosts.
It was quick work to gather what he wanted – Carla's dresses that had stopped smelling like her a long time ago, her sparse collection of jewelry and pretty tchotchkes, and the three photographs from their meager time together – it all fit neatly back into the suitcase they had come here in. The battered luggage was leathery underneath his fingers, calling to mind memories that were starting to hurt less every day. He sat for what felt like an eternity on their dusty bed with that luggage on his knees, holding the letter that he had written his wife one night while he was on watch, penned in his messy writing and begging her forgiveness for Bitter Springs. Closing his eyes and folding the letter back up, he pressed a kiss to the paper and stood, tucking the letter into a pocket for safekeeping.
Discarding the evidence of his shame and grief seemed to take so much longer, though. He picked up each syringe gingerly, hands shaking as he threw them into the wastebasket that he carried under his arm. The needles were strewn across his floor, where he had tossed them, high and delirious, once he was done with them, peppered with inhalers and burnt spoons. It hadn't mattered – buffout, jet, psycho – anything he could find, he would snort or shoot up; he would use anything he could to take away the hot pain that radiated from his back to claw at his chest. Chems were the bosom he buried himself in instead of facing down his own selfish cowardice. He preferred killing himself slowly with the drugs over dreaming of Carla's face every morning he laid his head down on their cold bed in their silent bungalow.
Truth be told, he was glad to lock the door behind himself for the last time, tugging on the knob to shut it tight as he squinted through the early evening shadows. Grief was pushing like waves against the back of his throat, but it wasn't crashing over him like a flood this time. When had it gone from a deluge to a trickle?
Out in the common, Clarke was up on the balcony, the jingle of her keys ringing out in the quiet of the courtyard as she unlocked the door to her room, Veronica leaning heavily against the railing with both bags slung over her shoulder. The sniper raised his hand in a wave to the girl, who smiled and nodded back, turning over her shoulder to say something the Clarke, but Boone wasn't quite ready to join his companions. He turned his back and hurried away before the Courier could swing her piercing eyes towards him.
Cliff was still inside Dinky when Boone approached the counter, setting his key ring down on the peeling Formica softly, and it didn't take much haggling over the deed to come away from the deal a few caps richer. The house would sell quickly, Cliff assured him, and Boone felt glad for it. Soon it would be as if Craig Boone had never even lived in this town at all, and it would be all for the better. He could fade away into the Mojave on the heels of the Courier and never come back unless he wanted to, and it felt liberating.
Suitcase in hand, he made his way to Clarke's motel room. When he entered the cool room, Veronica was bent over the Courier with healing salve in her hand – another gift from Sunny Smiles, most likely – smearing the grey paste across the smaller woman's battered face. The self proclaimed bunker-raised girl had shed her sack robes, leaving her in a short sweater with no sleeves; even bandaged, the cut of her muscles was intimidating. It was obvious, now, how she had managed to beat a sentry bot into spare parts and walk away from it to see another day, and Boone struggled to keep distrust from bubbling back up into his mind. If the girl had wanted either of them dead or hurt, it would have been as easy as letting the both of them get gunned down by robots, or she could have snapped the Courier's neck and run off with thousands of caps while Boone was otherwise occupied. Instead, she was tending to Clarke's injuries, grey smudged fingers gentle, not deadly.
Clarke opened her one good eye when Boone closed the door, nodding her chin in his direction as a greeting. "Once Veronica here is done, I'll take a stim or two to those burns on your back. We don't need any more infections on our hands, and I'm sure Ada has more in stock that we can convince her to part with before we head out tomorrow."
The sniper grunted in agreement and tossed his heavy sack of caps onto the bed before kneeling to tuck Carla's suitcase underneath the faded boxspring. There it could stay, as safe as any other place in the Mojave; Clarke would respect his privacy, and the residents on Novac would respect hers. Boone's possessions would be safe.
The couch creaked underneath him when he finally sat, letting out a tight groan under his breath as he buried his head in his hands. The soft cushions taunted Boone, but he didn't dare sit back to relax properly. Pain lanced across his shoulders with every movement, making him hyper-aware of the oozing skin and exposed nerves. In all honesty, Boone was excited to be able to collapse down onto the couch and sleep uninhibited for the night; for all its failings, Novac was relatively safe, leaving no need for any of them to take watch, and if Veronica decided to kill them in their sleep, well, at least it would be a good sleep.
Sleep must have taken him in spite of everything, because the next thing Boone knew, a hand was pressing into his shoulder to rock him gently awake. The ability to doze in almost any situation was one he had gained in his years with the NCR; it was important to catch any shut eye where one could find it, sitting in the mess hall, leaning against any vertical surface he could, or, as in this case, with his fists in his eyes and elbows balanced precariously on his knees. Clarke was still nudging him with her knuckles, and Boone spared her damaged face a cursory glance – the skin was a bit swollen, but Veronica seemed to have done a fine enough job tending to the wounds on the Courier's face. When she was sure he was awake, she spared his shoulder a light squeeze before standing and turning to her pack. Veronica was nowhere to be seen.
"Where's your new friend?" he asked his companion, voice rough with sleep.
Clarke smiled brightly at him over her shoulder as she pulled a few syringes from her pack. "I sent her off to the McBride's with a generous handful of caps to rustle us up a nice dinner. Figure it's another good way to see if she's trustworthy, you know?"
Boone snorted, but the Courier's grin didn't falter. "What? If she comes back at all, you mean," he stated, completely amazed that she would give the other woman an invitation to rob her. He briefly wondered exactly how many caps was a 'generous handful' to Clarke, but quickly banished the thought – any handful, no matter how generous, would be a drop in the bucket for the suddenly wealthy Courier.
Clarke chuckled. "Well, yeah, my good man, that's kinda the point," she said as she sat down next to him with her medical bounty bundled up in a clean rag. Boone shifted away from her, turning to expose his injured back, grateful that he wouldn't have to face her while she was nursing his wounds. He was trying to act unbothered by the prior night, but he couldn't quite push away the feeling of her pulse beneath his fingers as he lay there in the dark. With the presence of another person, those sorts of moments would become scarce, if not disappear completely, and Boone couldn't decide how he felt about that. It would be for the best, but that didn't mean that he had to be happy about it, so he closed his eyes to savor the feeling of the Courier's fingers on his shoulder as she inspected his aching back. Even through the pain, her hands felt nice on his bare skin, sending minute tremors down his spine as he pushed away the enticing thoughts that her touch brought to mind. He welcomed the warm spread of the numbing high from the Med-X that quickly chased away both his pain and the sensation on Clarke's hands on him as she began to work on his injuries.
It would do him good to be around another person besides the Courier to shake this ridiculous crush before it got any deeper under his skin. Being with Carla showed him exactly what happened when he got too close to anyone – he was a man living on borrowed time after his time with the NCR. It was only a matter of time before he would have to pay the ultimate price to atone for all those lives that he took, and he wouldn't let another innocent person get caught up in whatever divine judgement was coming his way, especially not someone like Clarke, someone who just wanted to do good across the Mojave. Someone who could do good across the Mojave. Boone sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose; if keeping his distance was the right thing to do, then why did it make him feel shitty to think about?
"You okay there, Boone?" The Courier asked from over his shoulder and he was vaguely aware of her breath against his ear, making him grit his teeth against a groan.
"Yeah… yeah. Just tired," he replied, only half lying. Med-X assisted exhaustion was tugging at his eyes but Clarke's proximity made him feel high in itself, the combination wreaking havoc on his inhibitions. She was so close, he could just turn his head and lean against her shoulder, bury his face against her to close his eyes and the most tempting part was that she would probably let him. It took every ounce of self control he had to keep himself leaning away from her, especially when he felt the vague pressure of her hand resting against his shoulder, giving it a squeeze.
"I'm almost done here," she assured him, giving his shoulder another squeeze before she tugged on his shirt. "I'm gunna just cut this off, but I picked up a few more off of Cliff for you."
Boone kept his face buried in his hands and grunted his consent; by now, the Courier could discern the meanings behind his variety of noises, and he didn't trust his voice. Drugged as he was, he wasn't sure what would come out of his mouth, and he didn't really want to test it. His body rocked slightly as she cut away the ruined fabric and she made quick work of wrapping white gauze around his chest, much to his relief. It was only a matter of minutes before the woman was tapping his shoulder again to give him the go ahead to lay down, which he immediately did, cushioning his arms in his head with a pleased sigh as he sagged down onto his stomach.
The soft sounds of the Courier rustling through her pack soothed Boone into a medicated lull until he heard the quiet rattle of the doorknob; he cracked open one eye sleepily. It was only Clarke, unburdened except by her ever present machete, opening the door – off to try to find Veronica, no doubt.'Good luck,' he thought to himself before he cleared his throat.
The woman paused in the open doorway and looked back, her thick brows drawn down in concern. "You okay?"
Lifting his head an inch, Boone nodded jerkily, and when he spoke, his words were slurred, "Jus'… Thanks, kid."
The toothy smile that she tossed his way was brilliant as she crinkled up her nose, a smile that Boone was beginning to recognize as the one that she reserved usually for him, and it stoked the warm, lazy fire that was burning in Boone's belly.
"You're welcome, my friend," she said as she stepped backwards over the threshold, but her voice was already fading as Boone closed his eyes, sleep taking him quickly.