A/N: Welcome to part five. This part will be very limited in action, as I have planned. It is in this one that Eris has returned to Vegas, and it is in this one that she and Mr. House will develop a closer friendship, which is to be expected when either of them have missed the only friend they have.

Note that Eris has been humbled significantly, but I'm not sure if she will retain every lesson she's learned, though I suppose we'll see, won't we? Of course, going from a place like Vegas, to a place like the Fort will doubtlessly have had huge effects on how she approaches the world. Unfortunate that she had to be taught vital lessons through something so traumatizing. But, she's got a mind of her own when she's being written. She makes horrible demands of me.

Onto part five.

The man in the street, dragging his feet

Don't wanna hear the bad news,

Imagine your face, there in his place,

Standing inside his brown shoes.

You do his nine to five, drag yourself home half alive

And there on the screen, a man with a dream

I heard it was you, talking about a world where all is free

It just couldn't be, and only a fool would say that.

- "Only a Fool Would Say That", by Steely Dan

There's something to be said about the simple pleasure of that which is familiar. Often times, and especially in their youth, men and women alike are known to ride a high horse, with their eyes far from the ground, and fixed entirely on the sky above. Naturally, they're prone to forgetting that it is the ground that supports their feet. Most, with few exceptions, will find that when the heart of novelty is finally laid bare, all that remains is the skeleton holding it together, and it encompasses all that is easy, prosaic, and simple.

That's certainly true, and for so long, Eris would just shrug and say something along the lines of the heart wanting what it wants. For her, it's always been easy to forget that the heart also relies on a brain to tell it what to do, or arteries to carry blood away from it and keep things nice and clean. It's hubris, plain and simple, though she's always been keen to ignore that in favor of riveting distractions.

Before her is the Strip, bright and sparkling underneath the falling sun. It's beautiful, she decides, truly the pinnacle of success out here in the wasteland. Even the heavily intoxicated hookers dancing in front of the sleaziest joint that ever was – even they are a welcome sight. An NCR soldier, drunk already, shoves past her, and she can't find it in herself to berate or call him names as per her standard protocol.

What a sight she must be to the people here! She wants to say that she looks like a fallen angel, but it probably looks more like debutante turned street waif. Her clothes are mismatched, and she no longer feels like she is one with the other people here. A similar emotion had struck her as soon as she'd entered through Freeside – like she didn't really belong among these people anymore. It wasn't like she was above them, or anything overtly arrogant like that. However, it does feel like she's seen enough now to really earn her keep. More so, she feels like a real wastelander now, as if she'd been playing at it before.

Maybe this dissolving of sameness with them is due to having experienced true struggle, and therefore she can now see the futility of what they do here. Before, she'd often criticize House when he spoke of the tourists like they were numbers in a catalog, not because she had any real empathy toward them, but because it was so… bizarre. She can now see why he saw them in such a way. After the Fort, she can't imagine squandering luxury.

Eris breaths a deep, incredulous sigh at seeing the Strip with her own eyes again, having forgotten how mesmerizing it really was – like nothing else in the world, a vision of prewar splendor and superfluity, what mankind could be if it tried hard enough.

Realizing that she's standing there like someone who's never seen a city before doesn't phase her, because she's gone months now without seeing city lights, and she deserves to just look at them for a few more seconds. She's making a point of not looking at the 38, but sooner or later, she'll have to face the music.

The walk up the stairs does not feel the same as it did before. The prospect of talking to him is something she's fantasized about ever since that first night in Cottonwood Cove, but now that it's before her, it's.. unnervingly intimidating. He knows she's here, or else he wouldn't have given her access to the Strip without a passport or credit check, but still the nerves in her belly are all riled up. Her hands hover over the large, metal door handles, and she tries to summon that same energy that got her across the river the night before. That's a force that can't be summoned at will, though, and so she opens it slowly, and closes it behind her as soon as the deed is done, making sure no one followed her in.

Yikes. It seems the constant checking for loiterers in the latrine has stuck with her, unsurprising given that bathroom visits were the only thing she did with any measure of gusto.

Inside, it looks just the same as it had before. The same securitron (or so she thinks) mans the lonely bar, and she finds that it is just as quiet and unsolicited as it always was. While silence should be a deterrent, it is a luxury she's not soon to spoil. Silence like this is an honest sort of loneliness, far from a crowd of individuals where everyone is lonely. It still smells of stale liquor, and the cigarettes she used to smoke in the morning, or after coming home from an evening out at one of the casinos.

A book is lying on one of the chaise lounges, the first of many volumes of Proust's In Search of Lost Time, a title she'd gotten not even a quarter of the way through before finding something more interesting to covet. An interesting decision – to leave it there, and she can't help but wonder why. Normally, all of her miscellaneous clutter would've been cleaned and moved as soon as she was out of sight, and she'd know, because she's in the habit of leaving things lying around. Even the bookmark was left in it – a folded lottery ticket that she'd found in one of her suite's closets.

It really was like looking at a preserved museum of her life, and looking at it felt like she was not even a participator anymore, but an observer. Disorienting was how she'd describe it, but she's not sure that it could be defined by word alone. Surreal usually covers anything she's fascinated by yet doesn't understand, but that doesn't cover it either.

On instinct, her feet led her over to the elevator, which opened to her with the press of a button. Her fingers lightly pushed the button to the penthouse floor, and the ride up there felt nauseating. Months had gone by without being in an elevator, that she'd forgotten how staggering it was to be lifted up hundreds of feet within the span of a few seconds. No doubt, her cheeks had paled significantly, and she held onto the bars for stability when the elevator doors opened.

How truly magnificent it would be to hurl on his floor the second she gets up here. How rare a creature she would truly be!

So she walks out slowly instead of bouncing down the walkway on the balls of her heels, which is inwardly what she'd like to do. Her head spins, but holding onto the railing in the penthouse seems to help that little bit. Besides, she's had worse now, much worse.

She's still dizzy when she walks past the potted plants and into the room with his monitor. Evidently, he's already waiting for her. She should feel reassured by that, but she's never felt easy accepting anything until she gets a better view of what's going on.

The image of a familiar, handsome prewar aristocrat greets her, cast in greens and blacks, like the interface of any RobCo tech. She ignores the bots for once, doesn't even mind that they're here, because even they are a welcome sight for her sore eyes. The leather chair is still there, but she doesn't make any move to sit in it, only stopping when there's a foot or two between herself and the furniture.

Her arms cross in a routine gesture that she doubted she'd ever be able to shake. In lieu of saying something profoundly stupid or even tooth-rottingly saccharine, she says something much more easily said. Eris realized that her admiration of him was most likely one-sided, but that doesn't take away from the pleasure of being here again.

"Hey." That does fall close to the 'profoundly stupid' tier of greetings, but she shakes it off in favor of being idiotic over reverential.

Maybe she expected him to take sometime to answer, or tell her off for being 'tardy' to work, but she knew he wasn't that supremely rigid and unreasonable. The last thing she expected was for him to answer her immediately, very nearly convincing her that he was just as in dire need of a friend as she was.

"Well. It's been quite awhile, hasn't it?" He opened, sounding as unbothered as usual, though there was a hint of curiosity, and a sprinkle of something vivifying. Of course, he was well into his years and too experienced to look at anything with childlike wonder and vitality. "By my order, you did away with the Brotherhood of Steel's presence in the Hidden Valley, and according to my sources, you were captured immediately afterward, and taken into Legion custody." He spat the word like said civilization was far too beneath him to even consider, "You were gone eighty-five days, approximately seventy of them were spent in Fortification Hill, and now you're here.. in Vegas."

Disbelief was thick in the way he spoke, a quality she's never heard him use before. For someone so quietly confident, it was a sound that made her do a double take, alongside the comfort she found in hearing the bourgeois cadence of his voice.

"You'll forgive me if I find it hard to believe that anyone, even you, is equipped to sever their status with the Legion. When I was approached by Swank telling me that you had been taken into their custody, I ran all the calculations available to me, and from none of them could I divulge a chance that you could escape."

She supposed that was sensible enough. Those chances would've been slim indeed, and she was tempted to chide him about how unpredictable a variable humans are, incapable of being calculated in the way that the earth, or machines might be. Her chances to escape had been as slim as finding that fork, as slim as Lupa not barking, or as slim as the shoreline of the river being unguarded because the wisdom of Caesar did not extend to the depths of desperation one might have to get away from him.

"I thought much the same about my prospects of freedom, only I didn't have any technology that could tell me of how low my chances were of getting that collar off. All I had were my own two eyes, and ears, to hear how no one gets out of the Fort alive." She sighed then, feeling the weight of fatigue on her shoulders, now that she was here and safe. "But I'm here now. Funny business, that tech of yours. Maybe you should get it looked at." She said, with a humor she didn't exactly feel.

"In due time, I may. Praise is not something to be given lightly, on the whim of a moment. Rarely, do I judge it prudent to deliver." An interesting segue from him, and because it's so abnormal, and she's simply content to listen to him speak, she waits. "I'm proud of you, Eris. Not only for returning here, but for escaping a scenario I deemed mathematically impossible. It appears I made the right decision to choose you as a protege, and being proven wrong in lieu of an inconvenient future is a loss I can take."

Nothing was said for a few moments, even though there was plenty she'd like to say to fill that silence between them. It wasn't awkward, but it was… palpable. The air was so thick with unsaid things that it could be cut with a butter knife, much to her good humor. The simple joy of being here again wasn't enough to distract her from the fact that her skin was literally crawling with filth, and that her eyes were threatening to close with each passing moment, nor the heavy ache in her limbs, burning with exertion from the thoroughly human condition of surviving.

Survival is overrated, she thinks. It's for people who have less to lose, and for those who don't have others relying on them. Unlike her. His agreeableness right now leads her to believe that he's been waiting, and how sad but relieving that is to hear. Maybe he had no one else, either, despite being in a position of immense power, where he could likely pay others to spend time with him. That was like the archetype CEO's self-fulfilling prophecy, come to think of it.

"I saw a lot of things I wish I hadn't seen. I experienced things I thought could never happen to me, things I thought only happened to other people." They'd never discussed anything very intimate before, and she'd never found her way to someone with the express purpose of confiding. That'd never been her, and would likely never be her. In that way, she's just as secretive as House, though unlike him, she had a need to fill her life with insignificant acquaintances, managing to convince herself that she had people, when she didn't. "I get it, if you'd like to… what's the term? Eliminate our partnership, given what happened."

Okay, that kind of silence could only mean one thing – that he was trying to piece together a sentence. She remembers thinking that he was blunt to a fault when they'd first met, but that wasn't the case at all. He put an insurmountable effort into how he presented his thoughts, leading her to believe that he was straightforward about things he cared little for, and was poetically inclined with things he placed high value on. For him, concision came second to excellence, nearly every time.

She'd very nearly forgotten how fun it was to psychoanalyze him, to try and assign complexity to every word that was uttered, and then work to unravel the complexities and figure out how they could be connected.

"Rumors have, on occasion, reached me even here, about the brutality with which the Legion approaches its.. prisoners of war, so to speak. They tend to be exceptionally detailed – and accurate, as far as rumors go. You and I both know there is always a hint of truth in the whispers passed between the common stock. While it inconveniences me to say so, there would be no misunderstandings, if you chose to cut ties with me. One can easily imagine what occurred to a.. woman, in their custody, and for that, I cannot in good conscience reprimand you for retiring, from this line of work." She should've expected him to completely misunderstand her point. Either she's grown verbally inept in her captivity, or he's never had to pity-fire someone before. Eris decides that it's probably a bit, or a lot, of both.

A scoff, or a laugh, bubbles up from her throat, a clearer sound than it had been before, when she used to chainsmoke at least twice an hour, every single day. She paced forward, leaning on the back of the chair, which was positioned only three or four feet away from his monitor.

"You didn't miss the point, you missed the entire line." Finally, she was able to conjure up that ability to say something smooth for once. "Maybe you're used to people giving up, or maybe you're used to people much wiser than me. Either way it tends to go, I'm not intending to give up on the vision you have for this place. I'll say it now, so I never have to say it again. I've basically figured out that I don't want to be tricked into romanticizing another side, ever again. Even if Freud said that my penis envy will lead me to indecision regarding patriarchal figures, I will stop. And, I will also stop getting off track.." She trailed off, searching for how to word what she wanted to say, without sounding like a schoolgirl. "What I'm trying, and failing to say, is that I would like to do whatever it takes to make your dreams come true."

She released a deep breath then, and blinked a few times in a daze at what had just left her mouth.

"To whom it may concern," she begins, mustering the last brain cell she had left, "you are kind of, maybe, perhaps, the only real friend I've ever had, and I know how insufferably flippant I can be. It is probably biased and naive to say, but I don't really want to live in a world that you didn't envision. That's a roundabout way of telling you that I'd like to stay, and that you're basically.. all I've got." She can't leave it there, heart-to-heart conversations make her just as uncomfortable as him, so she holds up her hands in surrender and babbles, something she does only when she's unsure of what to say. "I know, different terms and conditions may be subject to change in the near or distant future, and-"

"Stop babbling, Eris." He cut in, quieting her immediately. What awe-inspiring power he had, to silence her without first threatening her physical person. "Go and rest. We'll speak further after you've seen to your needs. Take the time needed to clean that filth off of you, I can assure you that you'll feel better afterwards. After you've slept, we'll continue this conversation, yes?"

"That sounds incredibly.. sound. I think I'll go do that, so without further ado, thanks for not firing and turning your back on little ol' me."

"Yes, yes. Go and do what I suggested, and come see me then. You'll be better off for it." He said sternly, though not entirely void of understanding. She knew better than to think he was exasperated with her. In reality, she's certain he's just trying to process 'merciful' things to say, and the effort it took to be amicable was probably leeching away from his cleverly crafted, stern facade.

The cigarette was hanging out of her lips, just waiting to be lit and savored. Eris wanted it so badly, had literally dreamed of this moment for months now, the feeling of something entering her lungs and coming out of her, which she can fully call her own. To feel it again was the ultimate temptation, to savor it was like Eve plucking the fruit from the tree. But to actually do it, would make her better suited to the moniker of 'Pandora' rather than who she is now.

Indubitably, Pandora was probably more fitting anyhow. She'd opened a box that could never be closed, and never before could she put a stopper to the urge to just look, though looking always became living, soon enough.

How long she slept, she has no idea, and no matter how many hours it was, it's not likely to be enough. Frequent awakenings, just like at the Fort, haunted her even now, though she'd been too out of it to remember any of the sordid details of why she'd woke.

A bath was probably more important, on the list of human necessities. She was still in the clothes that the doctor had given her at Hoover Dam, and when she thought back to that moment, it felt like it had happened a lifetime ago, though it was only yesterday morning, at around 7 AM if she recalled correctly. She could be recalling incorrectly – her memory wasn't always pristine, after all.

The will to leave bed was predictably out of her reach, unlike the pack of cigarettes she'd left on the nightstand next to her bed. Something about sullying the clean sheets, it bothered her, and she wasn't usually the kind of person to apply mystical significance to meaningless actions like lying in a bed. She shut her eyes, feeling the breeze from an air conditioner brush her skin, rushing through the looser parts of her shirt and up her sleeves.

Smoking could wait, couldn't it? Her cigarettes had waited three months, surely they could wait another hour. She never would have believed her procrastination could extend to one of her favorite creature delights, but apparently it did. If someone had told her that before, she'd have laughed in their face. Apparently, she did a lot of that.

Unlike where she'd been, it wasn't utterly dark here, the lights of the foyer were on, the artificial lights reminding her of advanced civilization, which reminded her of freedom, and that reminded her that she was home. Background ambience wasn't the sharpening of blades, or the wailing of yet another slave, or better yet, the incessant barking of dogs. That had unnerved her more than she'd like to admit, especially if she considered that the dogs were more three-dimensional than their owners.

The ambience was instead comprised of low sounds like humming, and others that could be explained by a powered facility. Such an environment was safe, and oh so sterile, compared to where she's been. Here, there was a degree of privacy, not counting the tiny cameras and speakers that were in every single room save the toilet. Well, that wasn't necessarily true. There wasn't a camera in her own room in the presidential suite, but there was a microphone and speaker, only she's so poor at noticing environmental details that she's never been able to spot them.

Her stomach growls, and the sound is heartbreaking. Never before had she anthropomorphized her stomach like that, but it was fitting. Through her rush to get to Vegas, she'd forgone eating, and drinking, apparently. Her inner body felt hollow like a reed, and just as light as one, and it's the thirst that gets her to roll out of her bed. And that wasn't a figure of speech – she really does land face first, saved only by her shaking hands. Standing up leads to yet another vertigo attack, that or she's so hungry and dehydrated that she's light-headed. Where the vertigo ends and the low blood pressure begins, she's not sure, and she's not in the mood to provide an educated, peer-reviewed guess.

If at all possible, her body hurts even more than the day before.

"Scratch that, it is possible." She's made a habit of mumbling to herself, for lack of a better conversational partner.

The bathroom is better than ever, and she yearns to ask the porcelain tub for forgiveness for once making fun of the embellished claws on the bottom. Her hand strokes the smooth, polished porcelain in a gesture that probably looked worshipful, but she was certain it was just to reality check. She pushed the handles on the faucet all the way to hot, and started running the bath that her neglected soul needed so badly.

Souls were interesting. The only authors she ever read who talked about them were people who probably shouldn't be talking about souls, like Freud. She liked to think that the concept of the soul could be reiterated to mean the psyche, or the collected parts of it, like the conscious and the unconscious, and all the little bits cast between.

Once the water is on her skin and those clothes have been taken off (hopefully they can be burned, or at least disappear in the laundry chute), the process is much like that of one of House's securitrons. It's automatic, leaving no room for savoring. The discoloring of the water is ignored too, in favor of doing.. whatever it is that she's doing.

When her hair is mostly clean, it takes a lot more muscle clenching than it should to force herself to clean her legs, and splash some of the scalding water onto her face.

Now that she's back, it's easier to think about everything that happened. When it was happening, it felt like it was never ending – just one, horrible day that could never be paused. Now? A flash of images becomes the description more. A flash of images, with dates and times unavailable, because she'd had no calendar, and no way of knowing how time had been passing.

The Weathers boy, his eyes ripped from his skull and thrown in the dirt – she'd labored under the impression that people like the centurion just didn't exist, despite having met Clanden a couple months beforehand. How could a situation go so wrong, and just where had it gone wrong? If she were more self-centered, she'd be laboring under the delusion that this stuff only happens to her, but unfortunately, it happened to that boy too, only he didn't have eyes, or a life for that matter, to be witness to the horror.

And then the taste. The explosive collar had been the height of unnecessary, for removing any semblance of humanity from her person after that. There was the detail of her inevitable escape, of course, but the collar had only ever been just that, too – a detail, compared to what happened in that shack in Cottonwood Cove.

He'd been right about demoralization, though he'd been far from clever about it, since it only made him the first object of hatred she's ever known in her life since waking up after being put out of commission by Benny.

Hell hath no fury like a loser's first moral dilemma.

At least she had the good sense to drain the water, and then refill the tub afterward, so she wouldn't be bathing in river silt for the rest of her time in here. Her blonde hair, once so full of volume and life, lay wet and flat on her back and against her cheeks, and she'd never felt more vulnerable than she did in this moment. Perhaps, this is what was coming as soon as she got here, because vulnerability was intolerable by the Legion. In tents, it was inevitable, but saving face was too important, so important, that she'd seen legionaries in training get lashed for crying.

Tears trail down her cheeks, and she hugged her knees close to her chest, trying desperately to look the part of lonely child that she felt. Everything was made exponentially worse by the fact that nothing that happened to her was unfair, nor unwarranted. For many, the life that had been taken from her was the reality of thousands out here. She briefly wondered how they moved past it, how they could cope with losing their innocence so swiftly?

For once, she is curious about a common sort of wisdom, because rationally, she was aware that these were the kinds of lessons that weren't written down, they were passed by word of mouth, from generation to generation. But there was no one she knew from her past life – not a mother nor a father, and that bothers her now more than it ever has. The ugly truth was that she remembered nothing about how a mother or father should be, and since she knew a little about so many things that she doesn't recollect ever reading since waking up, she could only assume that what she always knew to be true, irrevocably was – that she had nothing and no one.

It can't be healthy, she decides, that her living memory is comprised of only that which occurred in the past year. Her understanding of life doesn't take into account any normal, human things, because the first participatory memory she has is Benny.

And it isn't that his handsome body, tucked in a checkered suit, isn't flattering, but it certainly wasn't the first thing anyone should have as a memory. She imagines that her mind was like that of a babe's, and Benny was the medical doctor that pulled her out of the womb, the first human she has any memory of. Only, Benny had been pointing a gun at her head, and it was no wonder she was predisposed to disregarding human life, including her own. How telling!

She heaved in a breath, tears falling into the water and getting lost immediately upon contact. Her hands clenched and unclenched, and while properly steamed, she had no one to direct it to. It certainly wasn't Mr. House she could blame, nor Benny, nor Caesar. Even she wasn't a good object for her anger, as that would be way too easy. And the universe just did as it liked, as it always had apart from her existence.

Eris leaned her head back onto the edge of the tub, and reclined her legs, suddenly too tired to keep crying now that her eyes were swollen and puffy. Besides, she had little to no experience with crying, so her etiquette fell short.

Instead of shuffle back to the bedroom and smoke cigarettes in a smoke-filled, angsty haze, she fell asleep.