My eyes hurt wah :( Hope you enjoy this chapter
Hippies is Punks - Wavves
Boone's eyes opened to purple skies, clouds fading in and out of shapes and patterns that had seemingly come from nowhere. The air was pleasantly warm though sticky, sifting in through the open doors of the boat shed like batted lashes on cheeks. His body was raving with goose bumps, prickling his skin against the rough fabric of his newly found pants. His entire body ached, joints clicking and muscles groaning in complaint as he shifted himself up on his elbows to sweep his eyes for Annie. He found her stoking a small fire a few metres away, keeping the flames low enough to avoid detection.
"Hey." He grunted loud enough for her to hear. She perked at the sound of his voice, springing to full height to head towards him. "How long was I out?"
"Three hours." She checked her pipboy, the glove a sleek black against her bare skin. She was traipsing around in one of his undershirts tucked into her armour pants, preferring the maturity that came with the ability to sit with one's legs open.
"What's the time..?" He drawled off, attempting to kick-start his tired brain. "Five o'clock?"
"No, it's seven." She blinked at him. "You didn't get brain damage, did you?" He gave her a salty look, making her grin brightly. "Nope, still a grumpy old man… Don't you remember waking up before? We had an entire conversation, and then when I went to cook you a late lunch you fell asleep again."
"Not at all." He rubbed his head, sitting upright to stretch his back warily. The sky was darkening around them, fading into a soft navy dotted with whites. Her face fell mildly surprised, nodding her head as she leant to his height. She cocked her pipboy to his face, leaning on his shoulder to keep steady.
"Well in that case, you've been out for… oh, maybe twenty-six hours give or take." She tapped the screen with dirty nails. "You obviously needed it, because you've slept like a log this entire time. I actually had to check if you were dead a few times…" She trailed off, a weird look accidentally fleeting through.
He reeled at his idle time, running his palm over his head in disbelief. Annie's pipboy was always synced to the right time - there was no way (and no reason) she would trick him like that. That poison had sucked him dry, literally taking him a day to regenerate what little energy he had at that point in time. She had stayed up twenty five hours straight looking after him, and he still felt like he needed another twenty more.
"Have you slept?" He asked, turning his cheek to face Annie. She grinned in his face.
"Not much, but now that you're awake I'd love a nap." Stretching to five seven once again, she threw her arms up and stretched, kicking her boots off suddenly with two heavy bangs. She stopped, mid-thought. "That's if you're going to stay awake."
"I'll stay awake." He told her, rubbing his eyes before struggling up. There was no pain in his leg whatsoever, Annie's desert magic working its medicine precisely. Boone leant on a wooden bench, surveying the dark workshop with unsteady eyes. Although it was deep blue outside, the natural night-light still shone brightly through the holes in the roof almost like a white sun – the Mojave full moon.
He headed to his pack, retrieving his sunglasses and beret, fixing them onto his face in muscle memory. The girl turned in her place, picking the exact spot where he had slept moments before to make her bed. His abandoned body warmth in the concrete was like a heated mattress, bent in a perfect place.
"There's food over by the fire. You can let it go out if you want, it really isn't necessary." She waved her hand at him, curling onto her side to shine moon-plated eyes at him. "How are you feeling, by the way?"
"Better. Thank you." He found his way to the fire, taking a spot in front of the cooking plate. "You never told me you knew much about medicine."
"I told you this three hours ago." She mocked, giving him a soft smile before folding her arm under her head, curling her fingers under her neck. "Back at Bitter Springs, there was this old Khan named Nanna. She was a real tough bitch but she knew all about desert medicine. You barely ever see any old people out in the wastes but when you do you know they're the real shit." Her eyes were shiny with sleep. "But yeah, lucky break on my behalf. God knows what would've happened if I didn't remember."
"Death." He sighed at her, oddly complacent about his brush with fate.
"No…" She stared over his shoulder at the rotting canoes. "Probably would have lost your leg first… And then there ain't much use in the wastes if you only got one leg, Boone, probably would have ended up putting you down anyway."
He stared silently at Annie, the flames casting rushing warm light over her tired face. The courier's cheeks had declared a certain tan from being in the sun all day, turning her into a sleepy foreign queen that had claimed his makeshift bed.
"Thank you." He repeated, catching the girl's sad attention.
"All my fault." She drawled awkwardly. "But it's alright because I fixed it…" Her voice strained softly as she stretched onto her back, arching her spine to creakily get comfortable. "I'm just glad you're alright, Boone - couldn't stand to lose you, buddy."
"Anna…" Boone started, not keen to start the general conversation of her talking about how much she liked him. It was one of those awkward situations where he would end up feeling terrible because he could never say anything back, taking her bountiful compliments like a greedy old man that bathed in her attention. It wasn't like that at all, though – he just couldn't think of anything to say. He had the ideas in his mind, sure, but they were often stuck behind his teeth.
She sat up quietly and reached for the pack of smokes by the fire, helped by his weary hands.
"How long has it been since you've slept?" He asked, counting the time in his mind.
"I fell asleep by the fire for a couple of hours back there. It's okay." She breathed the tobacco to life, shutting the lighter and stuffing it in her pocket. "I want to stay up and talk to you. I've been lonely – all I've been doing is thinking. For hours."
"You should have woken me up." He changed the subject, snatching the packet of cigarettes to pull out his own. Shaking the match out a moment later, he looked up to see she was laying back down again, eyes to the ceiling as she blew tufts of smoke from her thing lips.
"No, you really needed it." Her ash fell in patterns next to her. "Trust me on this one, Boone, you were seriously fucked."
He swiped a burning cherry from his pant leg, stretching them out in front of him in a moment of ache. "Did you dress me?" The sniper asked, rubbing the fallen ash into a black spot.
"Of course I did." She turned her neck to look up at him. "And don't get all weird about it either, I've seen it before."
His brows knitted together momentarily, his mind still slowly booting up. It was expected of Annie to throw things at him when he wasn't competent enough to have a comeback. It may have been how tired she was, but the speech filter in the back of her throat had deteriorated, turning her hour-long thoughts into weird little words.
Instead of dignifying her sentence with a reply, he gave her a tired look, receiving no satisfaction from the one she sent back. He was in no mood to deal with the bombastic Annie, settling his blue gaze into the fire to let them thaw under its hot tongue.
"Talk to me." She whined, rolling over to face him once again, resting her palm under her ear to take a drag from her cigarette. "I told you not to get weird about it."
"I'm not getting 'weird'." He snapped at her, feeling ridiculous under her smarmy gaze. "I just… I don't know what to say."
She felt ashamed the moment the words came from her mouth – often forgetting that Boone wasn't one for a light chat. He'd been asleep for a day, and she had missed him, and seeing him alive and 'Boone happy' sucked away whatever fatigue she had gathered over the day. She wanted to make up or all the precious time they had lost together, planning all the things she could say to make him smile at her in the slightest approval – and all of her goals fell short when she realised that he was Boone.
He was just Boone – that man who never really knew what to say so didn't say anything at all.
Annie remembered the times when she would tell him naughty things to watch him squirm in a way only he could (the brief widening of the eyes, the almost comical flare of the nostrils and his awe-inspiring ability to zip back fifty feet). She revelled in the fact that she could make him so disposed when she showed him a bare shoulder, the full kit driving him to a bottle of scotch and a very satisfying fellatio. There was a time when she had him under her thumb, under the impression that she was under his – and in their current moment it was nothing like that.
If she were to try something he wouldn't back down – possibly sling it right back at her in a way reserved for stony-faced comedians in a packed theatre. Boone was sly with his words, which is why there were few. Annie had no sense of domination over him anymore, the man clicking to the fact that Annie liked to be told off – to be grated for her misdoings and felt far too satisfied when hurting herself or others. The thrill of being naughty was Annie's game and Boone had finally figured it out, credit to Old Ben. It only took one night with her knees on rotting floorboards for her entire game to crash and burn.
"I forget about that sometimes." She told him quietly, flicking her cig into the fire. The tobacco burnt with a faint fizzle, punctuating her sentence like a little laugh track. "Sorry."
"Don't apologise." He said tiredly, abashed by her sympathy. "Don't."
Boone had really grown to like Annie, although he wouldn't admit it to himself. It was nice to have another body in the bed when he woke in the morning, and the smell of a woman floating around their place brought back happier moments more times than the bad. All she did was fill the silence with him, and in turn that blocked out the screaming in the back of his head. It would have been a strange thought back in Novac – that he would have found someone that made him happy after Carla had passed – but there it was, sitting in the neglected part of Boone's brain like an embarrassing memory.
He didn't really want to give in to the girl that attempted to psychologically torture him for a month, because the moment he said something that put them too deep would be the moment she would win. He knew the girl like the back of his hand, but even he did not know how to handle her when she psyched herself up on that fucked up sadomasochism thing she had going on – she was a ball of energy that surprised him time and again, and it not happening as often just concentrated the unstable formula.
Nine times out of ten, Annie felt that her kind feelings towards Boone were stronger than the raw need to fuck him and then destroy him. She had no idea how it had happened, only tweaked by that one night that he had been the one rough with her – but that couldn't explain the empty ache in her chest when she thought of him not being around anymore. Although her sexual needs had been put on a leash, there was literally no reason she had to ache over the sniper. But he was just Boone and that's what was so frustrating about him.
He was just so good-looking; the way he sat by the fire with his forearms on his knees while the burnt orange licked his tinted glasses softly, further pressing the idea of the handsome stranger. He was so fine in his faded shirt – when it rode up while he slept to show the soft skin of his hips that screamed to be touched… Annie had thought all day long about what it must have felt like to have her ankles linked around his shoulders – what the soft skin of his neck tasted like under her tongue and teeth, or what noise he would make when she dragged her nails down his back.
But once he was awake all she wanted to do was talk.
"I'm gonna get some sleep, okay? Wake me at five and we'll head back to Nellis." She waved him goodnight with the flick of her fingers, dismissing herself back to her lonely thoughts. At least there Boone would comply to her every command. "Night buddy." He watched her roll onto her stomach, burying her arms under her makeshift pillow before letting her wide eyes close quietly. She let out a huff of comfort like an old dog on its bed.
He had to make note that she was still the beautiful creature he had laid eyes on in the mouth of the dinosaur. She was nowhere near Carla but he guessed that's why he liked her so much – she wasn't Carla. He couldn't tarnish his beautiful ex-wife's memory by replacing her with a carbon copy, but he could remember her as being the only light of his life. Annie wasn't a light; she was the strangling vine that had wrapped herself around him and had just stopped strangling after a while. He liked that.
He pressed his cigarette out on the cooling concrete, reaching for the warm teapot she had left him full of food. "Night, Annie."