Author's Note: WHAT THE HECK, WINDOWS! So, I lost internet. For like...weeks, man. More than weeks. Longer than a month! I had the option to (and by that I mean) I was forced to undergo an (apparently mandatory) update to Windows 10, which resulted in like...all the problems. All duh problems, people. Erego, I had few opportunities to upload, and I don't really do the whole "just write it on another computer" thing. I think it's a superstitious, I'm a whiny writer thing. Anyway, hope you enjoy.

Juli was angry nowadays, and it riled Boone up. People pissed her off, and he wanted to slit these people's throats. He just couldn't really tell who those people were or why they made Ju angry. She wasn't talking these days about much, but she huffed around like a bitch on her period. Honestly, he was beginning to think that he was one of those people who made her mad, which he hated to admit rubbed at him just a little bit. He'd taken on this strange partnership with her in such a way that it felt like the two of them against the world. When she excluded him from this, hissing and snapping all the while, he felt even more lost than he ought to have felt.

So much so that the two of them had their first real argument.

Now, this was significant for a variety of reasons. Firstly, in order to engage in an argument, one must first be deeply invested enough in both the matters of the opposite individual and the issue at hand for it to be consider one. Unfortunately for Boone, and in the form of abrupt realization, Boone realized that he was on both counts. When Ren was upset, he was upset. It was stupid and silly and simple, but it was true. Boone tried to play it off like an instinct, an animal behavior of mimicry that was more primal than the behaviors of an emotionally elevated human being, but he wasn't sure if he was fooling anyone. He also realized that he cared about why she was upset.

He thought, probably, that was easier and more convenient to explain.

He owed the girl. She was good to him. Too good. She should have ditched him in Novac, but she didn't. He really appreciated shit like that. Nobody did anything like that for anybody anymore, and nobody gave a shit about him. Not anybody. Probably not even Manny. Probably especially not Manny. But now, she did. He mattered to her, for unfathomable reasons, sure, but the fact remained.

He owed her because she gave a fuck.

Still, that didn't make him better, and it didn't always light a fire under him to give the same amount of fucks, nor fucks of quite the same quality. Therefore, her bad mood was rubbing off on him. Badly.

She was uncomfortable going to Helios One by herself. They were heading north, and it was one of the few conversations they'd had. She'd all but volunteered him to go with her to talk to the soldiers on her behalf. He was barely good at talking to her, and she was a comfortable presence at that point, so the thought of blithely escorting her into territory that he wasn't ready to be in made him feel wildly out of place and resentful of her presumption that he'd just agree on the spot. When he tried to tell her this, she became angry, and shots were fired. He rose to the challenge, of course. He was him. And it went back to the place it had been going back to for the last few days between them.

"Well, why don't you just go fuck off then?" Boone found himself shouting at her, color rising in his face, his breathing hitched with rage that always seemed to get the better of him whenever emotions came into play.

"Do not swear at me, NCR!" she shrieked back over the fire, leaning forward with teeth bared like an animal, her hair flying everywhere.

She'd gotten into the habit of calling him that when she was angry. Which had been since Novac. The bitch.

"Why do you even give a fuck, anyway?" he shouted, gesturing wildly with his arms. "I didn't ask to go with you! If you're really this butt hurt that I won't help you, then leave! Go! Nobody ordered you to drag me along!"

"Oh, but I was really twisting your arm, wasn't I?" she screeched. "Poor, Boone! He got asked to have a friend by a girl! Poor, Boone!"

Her fragmented English came into play here slightly, and something nasty and vile rose up in his stomach, a monster that was tempted to mock her for it, before, to the relief of himself, it settled back down, not to be brought up in petty conversation.

He still didn't like to be made fun of though.

"Shut the fuck up, Warden!" he shouted back at her, turning his back on her.

He knew she hated that, and he loved the way she breathed when she squirmed with rage.

Finally, he felt two small hands on his back push forward with a surprising amount of weight, and he stumbled forward, nearly falling to his palms and knees.

He whirled around furiously, but not before his cheek was struck. Hard. A resounding thwack burst through the night air as the two of them breathed, and he felt himself rush her more than he was even aware of on a conscious level. He grabbed both of her arms in his and felt them squeezing from the wrists, gripping her hard. Ren recoiled in his hands aggressively, even squealing for a moment, and Boone pretended like this didn't fill the recesses of his stomach with disgust with himself at the pleasure of getting a reaction out of her mixed with the horrible guilt that he was clearly overstepping his boundaries.

Pushing limits. That was what they did with each other.

And Boone was tired of limits.

"Don't you hit me again, Ren," he growled. "Don't do it. I mean it. Unless you're alright with me hitting you."

"Oh yeah? Go ahead!" she replied, bravely making eye contact, blinking away tears of fear in a glorious effort to appear strong.

Her eyes, then. It was her eyes that communicated it to him. A density that normally prevented him from interpreting them dissipated for just a second, and he saw something inside of her squirming with nearly imperceptible pain. The edges of her eyes, tilted and strange as they were to him, were pinched just slightly at the corners, but unmoving. Her jaw was clenched, and he saw her cheeks palpitating under the duress of her discomfort.

She wanted him to hit her.

Feeling deflated, and foolish, and sad, and frustrated, he let go of her, determined to not see what he'd just seen. Determined for Juli to be a simple, plain, boring girl who didn't feel complicated pain the way he did. There was simply no way somebody as happy as Juli could be that happy and have endured the things her eyes told them she had in that last, harsh, brief moment over the heat of the fire.

But then why did she look at him like that? he wondered.

"Fine!" she said, sounding disappointed in a way that haunted him immediately.

He couldn't resist a shudder.

She wanted him to hurt her.

He clenched his jaw and wanted to ask about it.

Which was fucked up.

Because he didn't want to ask about it.

But he didn't want her to feel like that. Not ever. Not his charge. She had to be better than that. In a way that was distinctly hypocritical, he felt disappointed that she wasn't. Nobody who was as pure and righteous and good as he had thought her to be could possibly harbor those kinds of terrible feelings inside of them and hide them as well as she did. If he didn't know any better, he'd say that her eyes were a mask to his pain.

She just seemed so normal. So well adjusted. Jumpy, skittish. But so...straight and narrow. Not bent or stunted.

Not like him.

"I will go by myself!" she snapped at him, ripping his mind from their ruminations.

Without bothering to pick up her ruck, she stormed off into the distance, the little visage of the factory visible far off in the cool image of the rising sun comically far away.

"Hey! You forgot your stuff!" he called after a long while.

"No!" she called back without turning. "You will watch it for me until I am returned!"

He watched her go silently then, something strangely civil and respectful coiling and uncoiling in his belly. When he couldn't resist anymore, he called after her.

"Wait!"

He jogged after her. She'd stopped, but didn't turn to face him, and he realized she was moving faster than he thought as the trip to her took longer than he expected.

"Take a gun, at least," he told her, handing her his sidearm by way of the barrel.

"Thanks a lot," she dismissed, taking it without looking at him and then continuing on her walk.

Somehow, that peace offering having been unceremoniously rejected, he felt angry all over again. Indignantly, he turned on his heel and stormed back to the camp, standing there in the silent morning air as the bugs were just beginning to hint at buzzing. He stood there for what felt like forever. His mind was with her, walking away so simply, her goal just to talk.

They'd think she was crazy. No supplies. A sidearm.

Ridiculous.

They'd laugh at her.

Serves her right, Boone thought. She could have been a little nicer.

But she wasn't. Not anymore.

Angrily, he took his sleep pack and flipped it, the motion largely physical but satisfying. After it was done, he noticed that he'd flipped his canteen of alcohol and cursed bitterly, moving immediately to clean up the mess he'd made in the brief, momentary tantrum.

She got under his skin, that was for sure.

And, God, he fucking hated that.

Once that was done, he kept the fire going, and he just sat, drinking his secondary reserve of alcohol until the buzz turned into something slightly heavier. He shouldn't be drinking that much. Not alone. He should put the fire out. He should have done a lot of things. But none of them made sense. All he could think about was how awful he felt, how alone he felt, how bad it was when she went away and he realized he looked around and wanted to die.

He thought of Carla and took out the picture Juli had given him of his dead wife. Carla looked beautiful in this picture, sure, but they both looked younger. An older Boone stared at the picture critically, an older man's analysis tainted by the weathering aches of years of hardship.

A doomed marriage from the start, Boone bitterly thought, his thoughts - bizarrely - hopping back and forth between Juli and Carla. Carla always had it her way.

And Boone always caved. Every time. He didn't want to stay in Vegas as long as they had, but for her - oh, for her - he would obey. He'd been her silly little slave, and the horrible truth that part of what Manny was saying might have been right. Right before she died, the two of them weren't happy because he'd finally stuck up for himself and she'd done nothing but make him feel guilty about that. They were certainly not happy. He'd even prevented her from leaving him once. Her bags had been packed, and Boone had supplicated the shit out of that love confession, feeling a fear of abandonment that he just couldn't quite shake.

That was probably why he compared the two of them, Boone thought. Or hoped. He couldn't tell which verb was more appropriate there.

Juli and Carla both were on the cusp of abandoning him. Or rather, that was how it felt all of the time, and it sucked to feel so vulnerable and frightened. Boone considered what he would do if Juli just left. She was more than resourceful enough. He recalled with strange clarity the first moment he'd looked at her. Her loose, stray hairs whipped in the cool desert wind of that early morning, or late night, depending on how one looked at it, and he was struck with the fact that she just looked so old and imperceptible. She was beyond his comprehension. A leviathan in her psyche, all communicated to him with his eyes. She was an angel, one of death, one of judgment, one of mercy, maybe even one of salvation.

He wouldn't be able to understand how capable she was if she left him behind. He wouldn't be able to protect her, to make sure nobody else hurt her.

Carla had managed to do it, to leave him behind. Sure, she'd stayed, but she didn't try for their marriage anymore. She'd given up. Stopped trying. Then, it was all too late, and Boone was lost for it.

He was sure as hell going to rip open the threads of time and space to get to Juli if that was what it took to make sure that Juli could never, ever fall victim to the same fate.

With a small burp, Boone realized that he was drunk. The next moment, he began to fall asleep, feeling exercised and emotionally exhausted, as if his awareness of himself had increased with the marathon of self-realizations he'd just made.

Hoping he'd forget it all in the morning, Boone finally put his head back onto his pack, a rifle casually cast across the tattered jeans surrounding his tired legs, and he was beginning to nod off to sleep.

When he heard a shot, a single firing of a gun, a rifle maybe, and Boone's eyes shot open.

He jerked upwards, stock still, and looked around for the source of the echoes.

It sounded like it came from Helios One.

They were camped outside of Helios One close enough to see the camp from the old solar factory, if somebody looked hard enough with even rudimentary binoculars, but Juli knew she didn't need direction. She was inherently good with that sort of thing, and her mind was on other things anyway. Plus, she didn't feel great. She was freezing cold, which made her eager to get back to the campfire, and her arm was sore still from where she'd fallen in Novac. If anything, it was worse than it had been.

She huffed and puffed over tumbleweed, unceremoniously stumbling into a camp that revealed a pacing Boone.

He cursed, rushed over to her, and he put both of his hands on her shoulders. The contact was hurried and she winced away from him, but something in his eyes stowed her anger for just a moment.

"You're alive!" he nearly shouted.

He squeezed her shoulders, and she just looked at him quizzically.

"Why am I not alive before?"

"I heard a gunshot!" he breathed, clearly exhausted with relief. "I heard a gunshot, and I thought it was you."

She felt a pinching inside of her.

"Next time, if you do not want me to die, you can come with me."

He backed off now, and she saw that he was irritated all over again. Why did she always make him mad? She didn't like that very much, and, given the precarious emotional state she'd been existing in for so long, it frayed at her already tattered nerves.

"Looks like I didn't need to. You're back. Has to mean something."

"Like hell it does!" she spat, and Boone's head jerked up to meet hers at her cursing.

"What do you mean?" he asked, his eyes narrowing from behind her sunglasses.

"They won't help me because I am Chinese," she spat at his inquisitive stare when she returned to their camp.

She huffed down beside the fire, which glowed brightly for her in her absence, and Boone could tell it was the kind of fire that she liked by the way her arms relaxed a little around her torso. Despite this, Boone narrowed his eyes at her.

"What do you mean?" he asked her.

"I mean that they will not help me because I am Chinese!" she repeated roughly. "She says I am a spy, probably for the Legion."

This was the ultimate insult, and Boone seemed to get his hackles up at the implication of his Chinese ward. Finally, he sneered.

"Typical NCR bureaucracy," he said, sitting across from her.

"Nobody will ever help me because I am Chinese!" she spat viciously. "I am not an alien or an enemy! I do not even look Legion!"

"Legion don't even use minorities," Boone spat in agreement.

"Yes, and I hate that she says this. 'You are a minority. You don't belong here, Chinese.' Everybody calls me Chinese like it is my name, and it is not my name! I am not a minority because I am not small. My skin just look different and my eyes looks different too. Not my fault."

"You're right," he agreed, unusually docile and accepting, "it isn't your fault."

"So they tell me to go home to my village!"

Now, her eyes began to burn, and for the first time, really, the hurt of this overtook her.

"Go back to my village!" she repeated for emphasis, blinking hard as tears began to spill out of her eyes.

She felt her mouth contort as her vision blurred in front of her, and she felt Boone stiffen.

"Why does that upset you?" he finally whispered, a dangerous curiosity in his voice that something strange inside of her wanted to feed.

She'd never had a person to vent to, to explode at. Boone was suddenly right here, begging for her to release her tension. So she would, even if her head felt a little sore and her forehead a little warm.

"My village is dead!" she shouted, squeezing and relaxing her fists. "My family is dead! My mama and baba are both gone! Why does everyone say, 'You go now! You go home now!' Like I have something to go home to! To be safe!"

Her chest heaved and she realized sobs were building, but she didn't want to run away. Juli wanted Boone to see, and he didn't seem keen on moving either.

"I am not safe! Nobody is safe!"

Then, all at once, her head began to swim and she heard him make an "oh!" kind of noise that somebody might use right before their partner puked. Suddenly, she was in his arms and being supported by a strong chest, a heaving chest.

"Juli..." he whispered down to her, into her hair.

She found she couldn't sit up, no matter how hard she tried. Weakly, her limbs all shook, and she felt starved for water.

"Oh, shit..." he whispered under his breath somewhere above her.

He brought her stiffly over to his bedroll, which she noticed because it smelled strongly of the soap that he used - a dull vanilla smell.

"You're really hot, Juli," he stated above her.

"Thank you..." she replied without thinking.

Her reaction upset him.

"Are you ill?" he ground out.

She found she couldn't quite keep her eyes open.

"Maybe...just a little tired."

"Bullshit, Ren, don't lie to me."

She exhaled, no energy left to fight.

"Fine...since Novac...not great."

"Where?"

"My arm..." she mentioned, lifting it. "It hurts where I fell. Think...infection maybe."

She felt him stiffen again, and Juli shivered uncontrollably now, having been offered the peace of a bedroll.

"Can I...stay here?" she asked weakly, feeling tears fall from the edges of her eyes.

"Yeah, yeah, fine," he muttered, further off.

She heard rifling noises.

"Uh..." he mumbled. "Um...I don't know which one to use here, but...I've got a few."

"No antibiotics," Juli mumbled back. "Get a piece of tumbleweed grass and...cactus water. I'll suck on that."

He began to move away, but she flailed her good arm out, which collided with his chest.

"Don't leave me behind."

He didn't reply, and he left.

Juli began to feel cold in earnest, and the resting of the bedroll was as intoxicating as it was torturous. She just couldn't sleep when she was this cold, and she recognized that it was the artificial cold of fever. When Boone did return, she felt weak from shivering, and she felt him move over her gently, like she were a glass doll.

"Okay, uh...I've got the stuff."

Ren reached out and took the grass.

"This should help," she promised him.

"You sure?" he asked, clearly unsure.

"Yeah..." she whispered.

But the shivering. The damn shivering.

"Here," he finally muttered. "I'm going to get you warm, okay?"

She stiffened.

"How?" she asked him suspiciously.

"It's okay, it's alright," he reassured her as he moved his arm surprisingly around her shoulders. "Just don't make it weird. You're cold."

Don't make it weird.

She could do that.

And, in fact, the warmth of another body definitely help.

Anxiously, hazily, she fell into a stupor.