I can't describe how hard this chapter was to write without overused similes. But this has been a tough week.

Also I kind of want to talk about my theme-music. I don't really listen to music when I write because it distracts me to no end, but I have like an entire album I have co-opted because of how well it fits D: and that would be Losing Touch by the Killers. Not even 50s enough, I know, but SO GOOD. Dustland Fairytale in particular, but like so many of the other ones too. Out here the good girls die.

Chapter 50? Holy hell.


Verity's eyes were dry enough to sting when she blinked. Her legs felt boneless, yet somehow kept her upright, drifting over the desert like a tumbleweed in the wind. There was sand in her hair; in her eyes; under her nails. She ate the food that people gave her, barely tasting it. She drank water when someone reminded her. She sat staring into the campfire while the others slept. She barely listened when anyone tried to talk to her, responding with one- or two-word answers. She listened to the sound of her footsteps and the rush of her breath into her lungs.

She was tired. Fuck, she was tired. Colours were too bright and harsh, and noises which she wouldn't even have thought about normally – people talking, the crackle of flames, tearing open cardboard boxes – jangled in her ears like alarms. Each breath seemed a little harder to take.

Still. One foot after another. Watching her shadow shrink and lengthen with the movement of the sun. The occasional break sitting in the shade of the mountain range they were following home.

She didn't notice the group had stopped until she almost walked into the person in front of her. She squinted to see what was going on up ahead. There seemed to be a small settlement in the distance. But maybe she was seeing things. She could see the road under her feet, and the mountains, blue with haze, far in the distance, but everything in between was a blurry, flickering mess.

The group began to walk again, and eventually, so did she.

The settlement wasn't much more than a few houses and what was maybe a store, a wooden building with a thick railing encircling the porch, decaying loops of rope cast over it. She felt a flicker of something as they got closer – excitement. Curiosity. Something, at least, which was almost enough to break through the fog in her head.

She made her way to the front of the group, paused a safe distance away from the town. The others turned to look at her, cautiously.

"Hey," said Veronica carefully. "How you feeling?"

"Alright," said Verity, quickly. "What've we got?"

Raul looked at her for a long time before responding. "Doesn't look like anyone's lived here for a long time, boss. No tracks in or out, no gardens, no fences. Nothing strange-looking. I'd guess anyone who used to live here left a long time ago."

Verity dropped a hand to the pistol at her hip. "Let's check it out." She didn't wait for consensus before heading into the town. The others followed behind.

She could feel her heart pounding as she approached the store, climbing the three wooden steps as quietly as possible. She turned the handle carefully, opening the door just a crack, then nosed it open with the barrel of her pistol.

It was empty. Not even a radroach poking around in the dimness. The shelves were covered in dust but otherwise bare; the cash register sitting on the bar open and empty. There were a table and a couple of chairs in one corner, an empty bottle and a handful of bottle caps scattered over the table's dusty wooden surface.

"Long gone," said Raul, pushing open the door behind her.

Verity scooped up the bottle caps and tucked them into her pocket.

"Old habits die hard, huh boss?" He was smiling at her. She couldn't quite tell if the smile was kind or mocking.

"Never make the mistake of thinking you're set for life," she said, straightening up. "Guess you were right. Nothing here."

She could feel his pale eyes on her in the low light. "You okay, boss?" he asked, suddenly. "Because seems to me that since you got your brain back in your head, you've been a lot crazier."

It actually made her smile – at the bluntness of the statement; the ridiculousness of the situation; and perhaps with relief at the fact that no, not everyone had been gossiping about what was going on in her head. "That's-" she began. "Uh, yeah. That's pretty accurate. I'm-" she struggled to find a word that described what was happening. "Um. It's like–" she broke off, blinking into the dusty darkness. "I don't know. 'Crazier' is probably a good enough word." She was about to step past him back out into the sunlight, but he held up a hand. She stopped.

"For someone who got a lot of secrets out of all of us, you sure don't like to give any away, huh?"

She looked away. "Didn't use to have any," she said, quietly.

"That was this is about?" he asked. "A history? We all have them. Things we're ashamed of and things we lost and things we regret."

She looked back up at him. "Something like that." The words were hard to speak, as if she had to force them out of her throat.

He watched her thoughtfully. "For someone without a past, I guess getting one all at once would be hard."

"I don't have all of it yet." Her words were little more than a whisper.

He sighed. "My point is, boss – you can talk to us. If you need to. Even me. And I won't even make fun of you."

She smiled, again. "I'm sure I told you to stop calling me that."

"Old habits, huh?"

"Thanks," she said, awkwardly, and stepped past him onto the porch.

The others had dropped what they were carrying in the middle of the street, and were beginning to set up the tents just behind the houses across the street. She hopped off the porch and headed over the road to check the other buildings out.

By the third house, she'd holstered her pistol and wasn't even trying to open the doors quietly any more. The houses were empty. No furniture; no books; no plates stacked in the cupboards. Just empty space, as if the whole town had packed up and left one day. She'd never seen a town so thoroughly abandoned.

She slid her pistol back into her holster, disappointed, and looked around. Gabe was curled up in the shadow of a boulder. Veronica and Christine were discussing the map, Veronica shaking a compass in frustration. The ghouls were clustered next to the tents that were being raised; some helping, but there were too many of them for all of them to help out. She began walking towards them, to the only one she recognised.

"Hey," she said. "How're you guys holding up?"

He inclined his head. "Well enough. Some are struggling – we have not walked this far in many years."

"Are we going too fast for you?"

He shook his head. "We slow you down enough as it is." He turned to look at the ghouls. Most were sitting, white jumpsuits streaked with dust, shielding their heads from the sun. Verity bit her lip. She still didn't know what she was going to do with them. What the hell had she been thinking, just dragging a bunch of people away from where they had lived for the past two hundred years? Surely they couldn't just start over. Not after everything that had happened to them. She wondered what they would think when they saw New Vegas for the first time.

"What did it use to look like?" she asked.

"Forgive me," said Shun Tze. "I do not know what it is that you are speaking about."

"Sorry. Uh, this," she said. "Like, um, before the war. What did everything use to look like?"

She saw the muscles in his cheeks move as he smiled. "Like this," he said. "The Mojave has always been a desert."

"Oh," she said, disappointed. "There wasn't anything else here?"

He looked out at the dry golden earth; the low scrubby brush; the occasional Joshua tree. "Perhaps more snakes?" he offered. "Smaller scorpions? Even these towns-" he gestured around him. "No one lived here, even then. They were abandoned before I was born."

"Why?" Her forehead wrinkled. "What for? Why would they need to leave?"

"This was a mining town," he explained. He pointed up the hill. "You can see the marks up there, where they used to have rail tracks. And the mine entrance."

She followed his pointing finger. "What were they mining?"

"Gold," he said. "When the vein ran dry, they left. This was very long ago."

"Where did they go?" she asked.

He shrugged. "Wherever they could find. Perhaps to new mining towns. Perhaps to the city."

"Just left their homes behind," she said, half to herself. Kept moving, when their luck – and the gold – ran out. She could think of worse lives.

"Yeah. Thanks," she said, still looking up at the mine. "You tell me if you need anything, alright? Any of you."

"We are in your debt," he said.


"How long you think you can keep this up?"

Verity looked up. She was the last one left sitting around the campfire they'd started in the middle of the town's one street. The others had long ago said goodnight and returned to their tents. Boone was looking down at her.

"Keep what up?" she said half-heartedly, poking at the fire with a stick.

Boone ignored her attempt at deflection. "It's after midnight."

"Really."

He narrowed his eyes. "Yeah, really. You been drinking?"

There was half a bottle of scotch dug a little way into the dirt beside her. She looked up at him. "Yep."

He sat down next to her, not quite close enough to touch. "You don't want to sleep – because of the dreams?"

She looked at him warily for a long moment. "I don't want to talk about this," she said.

"Because," he continued. "You'll remember what-"

"I don't know," she snapped. "I just know don't want to. Okay?"

His eyes studied her face. She felt like turning away, afraid what he'd see with his patient, watchful eyes. "You going to stay awake forever?" he asked.

Her shoulders slumped. Stay awake forever? She was having enough trouble trying to stay awake for more than a night or two. Without sleeping there were too many hours in a day to fill in, too much time spent walking, watching the horizon, listening to the thoughts drifting foggily through her head. Too much time by herself. Too much time to speculate on the very thing she was trying to avoid.

"I don't fucking know," she said dully. "I don't know what I'm going to do about it. That's okay, though, because I don't know what I'm going to do about fucking anything."

He stared into the fire. It was burning low, little more than glowing red coals. "I would have thought," he said, after a few minutes. "After – everything I've told you-" he turned to look at her, eyes unreadable. "That you'd trust me a little more. That you wouldn't need to hide things from me."

"I'm not," she said unhappily. "I'm not hiding things from you, I'm hiding them from me as well, I just – I don't want this to keep going."

"You can't get away from the things you've done in the past," he said. "Doesn't work like that. Trust me on this one."

She lifted the bottle to her lips.

"That doesn't help much either," he said.

"Like hell it doesn't," she muttered.

"Trust me on this one," he said. "Tried that too. It just – delays things."

"I am one hundred percent okay with delaying things," she said, lifting the bottle again.

He sighed, so quiet she only just heard it. "Forever?"

"You think out here is a good place to go through this shit? There's no fucking anything."

"Like doctors?"

"I – I don't know. Not really the best place for a mental breakdown," she said, curling her lip. "You know."

He moved a little closer.

She wrapped her arms around herself. "I'm – I just want it to stop."

"It's not going to."

His voice was sympathetic, but it felt like a challenge. She narrowed her eyes. "Bullet to the head wiped it the first time, right?" She gave him a smile that was more of a sneer. "Maybe when I get back I can ask Benny-"

He leaned forward suddenly and gripped her arm. "Don't even joke about that," he said, through clenched teeth.

She couldn't hold his gaze. "I – I'm – sorry," she said, her voice so low it was almost a whisper. "I'm just – I don't know. Scared. I don't want any of this any more."

He let her go. "I know," he said. "But it's okay. We'll sort it out."

Verity had her doubts, but let him lead her back to the tent.

She sat in the darkness, exhausted but wide-eyed. Sleep was so tempting, but she knew she couldn't give in. She couldn't hear a sound except for Boone's breathing, quiet and even. No animals rustling out on the plains, no one walking past, or talking, or calling out. She shivered. It was – eerie. She couldn't help comparing it to Vegas, with the ever-present hum of people and whirl of lights. For a moment she was horribly; terribly homesick, and then – she couldn't take it any more. She reached for her bag in the darkness, feeling for the zip with her fingers. She tore it open, and reached deep down into one of the internal pockets. Yes. There. A slender syringe of Med-X. She lifted it with shaking fingers, peeled back one sleeve, and pressed one finger to her elbow in the darkness to make an educated guess where her veins were most prominent.

The sweet sting of the needle, the rush of the drug – and then she was falling. She was gone before she hit the ground.


I feel like I've gone back to a slightly earlier style of writing - mostly dialogue regarding discussions raised by issues in the game. But, uh - maybe this isn't a good idea? I can't tell.