Kinda late, but a monster of an update. I have a funny feeling most of the Companions' quests will end up like this...

Not much in the way of funny, since it's Boone. And his backstory sucks.

Bitter Springs

"Bitter Springs still needs a lot of help." the courier said after a while, looking down from Coyote Tail Ridge with a thoughtful expression in the morning light. Cass and ED-E were nearby, with the former caravan driver picking over the terrain with a practiced eye. ED-E was just floating around, on watch for the entire valley.

"This whole place is a deathtrap." Cass remarked, pointing at the narrow gap in the hills where everything squeezed together like a bottleneck. "No secure escape routes, not a damn thing to drink other than the lake water—which has lakelurks—too many refugees, and at least two slopes wide open to Legion attacks."

"I think they know that." Li said quietly, still surveying the landscape.

"Where'd Boone disappear to, anyway?" Cass wondered aloud, whacking the dust from her pants.

"He said he wanted to be alone for a while." Li said, frowning slightly. Then she shrugged and clapped her hands together. "Come on, the others will want to know if we got that sniper."

"Still can't believe there was a Great Khan just hanging around here." Cass muttered as they slid down the rear edge of the hill, toward the graves of the Great Khan noncombatants that had been butchered in the Massacre.

"I can." Li said. "It's a place that has a lot of bad memories. Sometimes you can't get away, even when you're not there."

Cass blinked, glancing back at the courier, who was still being oddly quiet and thoughtful. "Kinda philosophical for you, Li."

"Explains Boone pretty well for being philosophy." Li replied. "Come on, I bet they still need help."

"With Gannon taking up space in the medical tent, Veronica beating lakelurks to death, and Boone doing God-only-knows-what?" Cass sighed. "All right, let's go."

It was the first time all of them had been together on a single assignment. It wasn't really an assignment, actually, since Li barely ever asked them to do anything other than fight, but everyone working together to make sure an NCR refugee camp didn't destroy itself? That was new.

Lily was asleep, but only because she'd been one of the four guards for the camp. And she had been the only one to stay awake the whole night through, with ED-E bobbing up and down beside her head as a metallic sentry, and the biggest super sledge anyone could find in her right hand. A few of the children in the camp had decided that she was the most incredible person in the world, and even now were snoozing fitfully all around her cot.

Well, really, she was just taking up space in their tent. And after Li had convinced them that pretty much nothing was going to wake her up anyway, the kids had swarmed.

It was pretty scary, actually.

Arcade spent all of his time working with the camp's only medic, who was probably at least ten years younger and less than half as experienced. The poor man had probably never gotten the kind of training the Followers offered to all of their members, which left him somewhat lost when it came to the refugee kids. Not to mention the fucked-up-in-the-head veterans. Arcade helped, and once sent Li off in search of a book on child psychology when his expertise failed him. They were getting better.

Unlike with Camp Guardian, where lakelurks had been popping up from hidden cave systems and killing everyone (among a few dozen other problems), most of Bitter Springs' threats were clearly defined. The Legion was in one direction, the lakeshore in another, the mountains…except for the cazador, Legionary, and lakelurk problem, it was a nice enough place. Veronica was sorting most of those problems out, anyway. With grenades.

Cass snorted to herself. Who was she kidding? Without their help, this entire chunk of NCR territory was fucked.

Raul wasn't as good with long guns as she and Boone were, and the refugees didn't like ghouls much. Sad, but true. But Tejada was getting used to people again after being stuck with that crazy nightkin for way too long, so maybe being around jumpy people wasn't that bad of an idea. And the old ghoul still found it hilarious whenever someone (usually Cass) brought up how he'd been greeted by Ambassador Crocker's bodyguard—not because the guy was a racist jackass, of course, but because of the colorful threats the little courier had gleefully invented for Tejada's defense. Tejada might not have really liked any of them, but at least Li was good for laughs and snide comments.

As for Li herself…they'd been in the area for a week. Li had actually been in Bitter Springs for all of two hours before taking off again. At night.

She'd taken Cass with her, and Rex, and they'd run errands that every ranger outpost seemed too damn incompetent to do. Li knew explosives—she could teach the idiots at Camp Golf how not to get killed. Cass, likewise, knew guns and how to make sure your friends didn't have to pick bits of lead out of their limbs after one practice session. Rex was only there because ED-E couldn't be spared from sentry duty at Bitter Springs and they needed someone to be their lookout while on the road. Rex may not have been an all-seeing eyebot, but he was a good cyberdog.

They gathered ammo from some camps, dogtags for others, and ran around the Mojave when it seemed like the ranger stations were all getting false information and it was leading to more deaths to figure out what the fuck was going on. The rumor of intelligent deathclaws was particularly interesting.

Cass had been a bit surprised to find that Chief Hanlon was responsible for all of it, but not as surprised as she was that Li had left the guy mostly alone. She'd thought—hell, Hanlon had thought—that Li was a loyal NCR citizen, with the same tolerance for traitors. But the courier had only looked sad for a moment before telling the man that she had no intention of exposing him. And they'd left after extracting a promise that the man wouldn't ever lie in such a way again.

Cass realized later that Li was trying to balance two parts of her nature—the loyal NCR citizen, who had family to look after and protect in case their baby sister ever crossed the army, and the decent-if-weird woman who was trying to keep more innocent people from dying, regardless of affiliation. She looked after Freeside in her goofball way, and had freed Primm and Goodsprings from their tormentors. But she didn't necessarily want the NCR to just roll on in. Not the way it was.

Cass also later decided that she needed a drink.

Bitter Springs would get its second chance. When Li decided to make something happen, it would work eventually. It was that future they were waiting on.

The evening breeze was frigid, coming off the lake and blasting right up the natural ramp that led into the camp. High deserts weren't hospitable at the best of times, what with the air sucking the moisture right out of a man's mouth and the sun beating down on everyone like they were living in a gigantic oven. But nights were cooler, and dangerous, mostly because humans couldn't see in the dark while a whole lot of other things didn't have that problem.

Neither did ED-E, who watched over the camp from the ridge above Gilles's tent in case something went wrong. Something always did.

Even after spending a week in Bitter Springs, a few months on the road with him, and helping him find out who had betrayed his wife to the Legion, Boone still hadn't expected Li to actually agree to camp on Coyote Tail Ridge. But Li had apparently seen that it was important to him, and that was the end of that.

Spending time with Li meant talking about old pain, though, and that was hard.

"All this time, and you never asked." Boone said, shaking his head in disbelief.

Li shrugged, sitting on the bare rock of the ridge without any sign of minding the cold. "It was your business. But I'm asking now. What happened to your wife after the Legion took her?"

Boone sat down next to her, his rifle across his knees. He digs his heels into the stone, making sure he won't go rolling down the ridge to his death or something else just as stupid. He put his rifle to the side, because otherwise he'd worry about what he'd do with it. He had to dig up an ugly memory.

He sighed and folded his arms. "She…I tracked her down. Southeast, near the river. They were selling her. Saw it through my scope."

Li looked like she wanted to interrupt, but thought better of it.

"Whole place was swarming with Legion. Hundreds of them." Li winced, but Boone wasn't going to stop. Not now. "Bidding on things no man has a right to.

"I only had my rifle with me. Just me, against all of them, so…" His throat was trying to close, but he'd come this far, right? "I took the shot."

"Oh, Boone…" Li whispered, but she didn't try to pat him on the shoulder or anything. Thank God. The naked pity was almost more than he could stand. She took a deep breath. "It was better for her to die there than live as a Legion slave."

"Yeah." Boone agreed distantly. "What they do to women…it's worse than death. There's no choice in what I did." But…still. There was always that feeling that he could have—no, should have done more. "It was more like…being forced to watch something you can't stop."

Li nodded, looking out over Coyote Tail Ridge and below.

"All this was ever going to play out one way. It still is. I don't have any say. All I can do is wait for it to be done with me." Boone muttered, likewise looking away.

But Li broke into his thoughts with a sharp, "Wait. You make it sound like your wife's death was inevitable." From her tone, she disagreed. A lot.

"It was gonna be something," he insisted, though without much heat. "If I'd never met Carla, it would've been something else. I should've never gotten close to her." Admitting it always felt like a knife to the gut. But he knew it was true. It wouldn't hurt so much otherwise. "I've got bad things coming to me. You'd better keep your distance, too."

"I won't." Li replied quietly. She turned to face him, and he could see the raised, still-healing gashes in her face and neck from her run-in with the Boomers. She'd already had her warning. Even if it had been with Gannon and Nellis rather than with him and the Legion. "Why do you say you've got bad things coming, anyway?"

"Because fair is fair." Boone replied. He's fucked, he knew that, but he's not going to drag anyone else down with him if he can avoid it.

"I don't understand," she said, but there was an undertone in her voice that implied what she actually wanted to say was more along the lines of, "Start talking, you jerk."

No. "Better that you don't," he said flatly.

But she let it go anyway, rubbing absentmindedly at her scars with the back of her right hand. "Can you tell me about her?"

Carla. Still hurt, but not as much as the other memory. "I met Carla while I was at the Strip on leave. She said I looked lost." He looked down at Bitter Springs, to where Rex was leading an exhausted Gannon toward one of the tents. "She talked a lot. Suited me fine—I never know what to say."

Li gave him a look that said she agreed.

"And listening to her, it could…make you forget." He moved on so he didn't have to dwell on what he'd tried to forget. Except they were at Bitter Springs, and there was no getting away from it. He mentally kicked himself for asking Li to camp out on Coyote Tail Ridge. If anything was going to trigger the memories, it was that. "She stuck out, pretty much everywhere we went. Like she was from a different time. A better time. I never met anyone like her."

Li seemed to struggle for words for a moment, picking at her stitches because she couldn't come up with anything that made sense to say. Then, "That's why you didn't want to talk at Nelson, right?"

Nelson—wait, how did she…ah, fuck. Doesn't matter now. "Yeah."

"Then I'm glad we got to stop history from repeating." Li remarked. "And the next time someone asks you to do that, I'm breaking his fucking nose."

"Won't change if it needs to be done." Boone pointed out. It was one of the jobs First Recon always had. Sometimes there wasn't anything to do. Even if it hurt.

Li shrugged. "Still won't change what I'm gonna do."

"Even if it's stupid?"

"Even if it's stupid."

Silence reigned for a time.

"Okay, your turn." Li said.

"What?"

"…Never mind."

Silence reigned for a while longer, since she'd apparently run out of things to say and he wasn't good at filling awkward silences anyway. Never wanted to.

"I talked to Manny."

What? Boone tensed. She hadn't brought up that name even once in his presence before, so why now? "When and why?"

Li replied, "I showed up in Novac while he was on duty. So after I talked to everyone who was awake—you weren't—I went up to bug him. And he didn't tell me anything about the Khans I was chasing until I did a couple of favors for him."

"And?" Boone wondered what the point of it was, since she'd never talked about the things she did in Novac before, either.

"And he had me go out to REPCONN to figure out why there was a ghoul problem." Li explained. "I managed to get everything sorted out."

Boone remembered having to shoot more ghouls than usual, at least in the weeks up until the courier showed up. And then they suddenly stopped coming. He'd never asked why.

"But…" He'd known there was one coming. Li seemed to think over what to say for a while. "But Manny told me that he'd faked sick to get out of heading to confront the Khans in Bitter Springs, while you two were both enlisted. He knew too many people on both sides. I got pretty much the same story from Bitter-Root at McCarran when I asked how he enlisted—but all he said was that the Khans deserved it. But…what happened?"

"The NCR won." Boone said flatly.

Li scowled at him. "Boone, I'm NCR too. I know that. But civilians don't get told why every Great Khan from here to Red Rock Canyon calls you a quote-unquote 'fucking murderer.'"

"There was a…miscommunication." Boone said after a while, struggling to find the right words.

"…Must've been one hell of a miscommunication." Li replied.

Boone glanced away. "Yeah, well. That's how they wrote it up in the report. We did what we were there to do. Lot of people got killed. That's war." He paused. "Maybe looking back you'd do things different, but that's not how it works. In the field, you hesitate, you or someone you care about will die. They teach you that from day one."

Li nodded. So she understood, partly. Good. Then she said, "Sounds like you have some regrets."

"You don't come out of a tour of duty without regrets. It's best just not to think about it." Boone said.

"Do you think about this place a lot?" Li asked, her tone carefully neutral.

Goddamn it. "Yeah. Always. Even when I sleep." The nightmares proved as much. She'd probably noticed.

"…I noticed that you didn't really seem like you wanted to come here." Li said after a pause. This conversation was just full of hesitant stops and starts. "Is it because of this place—what happened here—that makes you think you've got bad things coming?"

Boone sighed. "Life has a way of punishing you for the mistakes you make. Big enough mistake, punishment can take a while. Mine's not over."

"…Maybe you can make up for your mistakes." Li suggested.

"A murderer who does good deeds in the dark is still a murderer." Boone replied bluntly. "And he'll still get his judgment. I left the NCR when my tour was up. Had enough of war. Decided I was gonna start over.

"None of it made a difference in the end."

Li said nothing for a moment. Then, "How do you know your punishment isn't over?"

Isn't it obvious? "Because I'm still alive."

Li went silent. Then she stood up, after a minute or two, and climbed down the ridge. Boone sat and watched as she walked down to the camp, past Gilles's tent entirely. Instead, Li strode over to where Lily had been sleeping all day and rouse the nightkin.

Within ten minutes, Lily was patrolling the area with Rex at her side. Then Li emerged from the tent, carrying her pack and blankets and something long and made of metal. She climbed back up the slope and dropped everything in a heap except for the rifle, her face set in a neutral expression that was probably forced, and shoved the gun into his hands.

"…What's this?" Boone asked as she began to spread the bedding out on the ridge. Boone couldn't see the gun very well in the half-moon light, but he could tell that it was designed for .50 caliber rounds. He looked it over again. "An anti-materiel rifle. What for?" Bribery?

Li ignored that, instead sitting down on one of the blankets and taking out her binoculars and a bottle of Catseye. She seemed to be waiting for something—probably her watch shift—but she looked at him and asked instead, "What's so special about this ridge?"

…She was really good at needling things out of people. Gannon must hate her. "Canyon 37. That's what the NCR calls the pass down there."

Li looked.

"It was the Khan's only escape, so we set up here to guard it while the main force attacked from the front." Boone continued. "Standing orders were to shoot on sight."

"What happened?" she asked.

"Main force got spotted too soon. We heard shooting. Then Khans started coming through Canyon 37 in bunches." Boone looked down on the deathtrap below. "It was all wrong, though. Women, kids, elderly. Wounded started coming through, too.

"We radioed to confirm our orders, but command didn't get what we were seeing. They told us to shoot till we were out of ammo. So that's what we did."

He could see her struggling. She was an idealist, like Gannon, but it wasn't black and white. Li would've found a way around it—she liked the Khans, once the whole thing with Benny was sorted out—but she hadn't been there. She would've disobeyed orders. She probably would've gone up to Gilles before her demotion and started a fight and gotten shot over it. "…You did what you had to do as a soldier," she said at last, with difficulty.

"Yeah, well." Boone muttered, "I'm not a soldier anymore. Those rules don't seem like much of an excuse now." He resisted the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose to stave off the impending headache. "Anyway…I don't know why we're here. Thought maybe it'd help make me see things better." He paused. "I'd like to stay here for the night. Think some things over."

"Yeah, I figured." Li said mildly. She shrugged. "No problem."

"All right." Boone replied, not at all surprised that she'd agreed. "We won't stay for long."

It turned out that he was right, but not in the way he expected. He woke in the middle of the night, to the sound of both ED-E's sharp computerized beeps and Rex's furious barking. Li rolled over, drowsy still, by the time Boone had picked up the rifle she'd given him and was looking through the scope.

Oh, hell. "Something's wrong. Got a group coming our way," he bit out when Li finally sat up and tapped his shoulder to ask what he was worried about. "Looks like a Legion raiding party. It's big."

Li snapped to attention, her expression going from drowsy to alert and angry in about half a second.

"Might be too big." Boone added reluctantly. "Even for us. If you want out, I won't blame you. But I'm going to stay. See if I can hold them off."

Li's expression told him that she thought he was an idiot even before she said, "You don't sound surprised."

"To tell the truth…I think this is exactly what I've been waiting for." Boone muttered.

Li glared at him again and looked toward the camp. Then she pulled tapped something on her Pip-Boy and suddenly ED-E's electronic squalling got about four times louder. Rex howled. Everyone in the camp started moving. "As far as the Legion goes," Li said coolly, "it just saves us the trouble of finding them. Let's go."

They ran—they were the only two who were far enough out of Bitter Springs that, if they wanted, they could have slipped away unnoticed. But Boone wasn't going to tolerate anything remotely ill-tempered within fifty miles if he could help it, and that went double for the Legionaries that plagued the Mojave. Li just hated them.

Little green globs of energy were already flying across the camp when they arrived—Gannon was awake and in a fairly bad mood, given the dissolved bits of two Legionaries they managed to find. He wasn't hurt, just a little surprised, and didn't need any support when Li asked. There was an NCR trooper who was picking up the slack just fine. And if he didn't, there was the distinct crack of Tejada's mismatched pistols from nearby.

Rex tore across the camp, snarling, and was backed up by ED-E as the eyebot got its zapper online and blasted in the next enemy's direction. He hit a Legion mongrel, fixing his teeth along its lower jaw, and tore. ED-E only arrived in time for the finishing blow, but he managed to vaporize the beast's rear legs. Then they turned as one and charged after the rest of the Legion dogs, blasting and biting and starting their own non-humanoid reign of terror.

Veronica appeared, but only in a brief blur of motion. By then, she'd broken her enemy's spine with her hydraulic fist and leapt in pursuit of the one with a hunting rifle, who was looking in the wrong direction entirely. He was going to get his head punched clean off.

Cass got there first, blowing his head off with a well-timed slug from her caravan-issue shotgun. She and Veronica paired off and dashed as one toward the uppermost part of the camp, where Gilles was shouting for reinforcements.

Then the reason for the Legionary's inattention became clear—Lily appeared out of nowhere as her Stealth Boy failed, wielding a bumper sword and zooming across the battlefield at a speed that would make a cazador jealous. She targeted the next Legionary she saw, and he screamed in terror.

Li ran ahead, ducking between buildings and rubble, and slammed into a Legionary with all the force she could muster. The refugee he'd been chasing ducked behind an ancient trailer, and by then Li had already brutally hacked all the way through the man's neck. After she wiped some of the blood off on the dead man's armor, Boone recognized the machete as the one she'd gotten off Dead Sea back in Nelson.

As for Boone, he had to retreat briefly. The anti-materiel rifle would cut straight through their armor, sure, but it had some of the worst recoil he'd ever had to deal with. Halfway up the hill, he turned around as ED-E and Rex came back from their skirmish with the Legion dogs. Rex kept going, latching onto the Legionary trying to shoot through Gannon's head. ED-E hovered to the left of Boone's shoulder and kept firing his laser.

Boone took a deep breath and looked through the scope.

Out of the twenty or so Legionaries who'd started the fight, there were maybe five left. They were all confused except for the dumb fuck with the flag sticking out of the back of his armor—and he was the one that Boone aimed for. He breathed out and the man's head exploded into bloody chunks. Then Lily turned her attention to them and they scattered. Boone picked the rest of them off as they ran.

Except…that didn't seem like it was quite right. It was over too soon.

"We've got more coming in from the canyon!" Li shouted, waving an arm to get his attention.

"Yeah, I see 'em," Cass replied, startlingly close—of course, she and Veronica had just cleared out everything above him on the hillside. She stood a couple of feet away, trying to aim down the sights of her shotgun but knowing it was pointless.

Li whistled and Rex came charging up, jaws red. "Rex, you're with me. Boone, take ED-E to the ridge! Lily, Veronica, down the middle! Cass will back you up."

"Got it!" Cass replied.

"Nice day for a trip to the meatgrinder, isn't it?" Veronica quipped, looking all too eager for a second round.

"Don't worry about a thing, pumpkin." Lily said with a nightkin's typical cheerful bloodthirstiness.

"Yeah, well, Arcade and Raul can handle the camp." Li replied with a dismissive wave. "Let's go."

There were only about five more Legionaries, but also five dogs. They shouted something about retribution and glory in the name of Caesar, but by then Boone already had the first one in his sights.

They lasted maybe thirty seconds after the shooting started.

Boone sat back on a nearby rock after it was over, shaking his head as the rest of the group picked over the bodies for anything useful. The courier was looking for something to repair her machete with, and as such had gathered up all the edged weapons in the area and was looking through them for a suitable source of parts.

Then she sat down next to Boone's rock and nudged him. "Well?"

"We made it through after all. Not sure what to make of that." He looked down at her. "What do you want me to say?"

Li shrugged. "I wasn't about let you die. So thanks, maybe?"

Boone looked away. "I don't mean disrespect or anything. It's a hell of a thing to have someone willing to watch my back like that—helps that you've talked everyone into helping." Really, six human-ish allies, a few troopers, Gilles (who didn't really count), and the robot and the dog versus a Legion patrol that probably hadn't expected any of them. If they'd actually been ambushed, though… "But I've come to believe that there are some things nobody can stop. I thought for sure that's what we'd finally come up against today."

Li blinked, as though she couldn't quite believe what she was hearing.

It's difficult to talk, but the courier was a good listener sometimes. "It would have made sense for things to end here. But now…I'm still waiting."

Li frowned. "No one's judging you here. Sometimes things just…happen."

"If that's the way it is, there's not a lot of comfort in knowing it." Boone replied bluntly. He sighed, lifting his sunglasses to rub his eyes. "I don't know what I'm supposed to do about all this."

"Well…" Li began slowly, "You can't take back what you've done. The past is the past. But your regrets can put you on a better path."

That was…a way of looking at things. Huh. "I guess they brought us here, in a way." Boone said. "One less Legion raiding party running loose now. Never a bad thing, you can take my word for that."

"Exactly." Li said, finally working the handle of the newly recovered machete loose.

Boone looked down at her and said quietly, "Still feels like I'm living on borrowed time. But I don't see any reason not to take a lot more of those sons of bitches with me." Gonna have to admit it sooner or later… "You got a point. There's still some things I can do before all this is over."

"…Not exactly what I meant, but okay." Li said. There was a popping sound as she forced the new handle onto the Liberator. "Well, only thing left to do is clean up after ourselves."

"Oh, yes, no need to be unsanitary houseguests on top of saving their entire camp from being overrun." Gannon said sarcastically. "The breach in etiquette would be appalling."

"Grandma's got this handled, pumpkin!" Lily said brightly, dragging four of the bodies off at once. "Don't worry about a thing."

Li made a face. "Maybe we should just feed them to the lakelurks…"