Apologies that this took so long! I've been super tired and blah blah blah excuses.
Leave me some feedback in the reviews section because it seriously is the best thing to wake up to! It's totally late here, so surprise me when I have to wake up to get my boyfriend out of bed tomorrow morning -_-
Talking Like I'm Falling Downstairs - Sparkadia
"It's peaceful here, isn't it?" Annie was packing her bags slowly the morning after, folding bits and pieces only to cram them in uncomfortably into her backpack. The shed was glowing with a warm orange, light filtering in through the broken windows. "It's like the casino, but outside." There was a certain feeling attached to waking up early for an adventure, a stomach bitten with fatigue and a head swelling to adjust to the extra hours in the day.
"How?" Boone asked, awkwardly pressing down his growing hair with his flat palms. They had taken longer than expected on their trip, giving the man a more rugged look than he usually purveyed. Usually Boone was the spitting image of a clean-shaven new aged man, but without the comfort of a razor he had managed to regrow his lonely man's beard (barely there but rough to the fingers).
"It's quiet. And it's just you and me all the time." She zipped the pack roughly, digging through a side pocket to drag out her smokes. Her eyes brightened at the thought, looking over at him from across the shed. "Do you want to run away and just live here forever?"
"Sounds great." He deadpanned at her, earning him a soft look from the courier.
"Wouldn't you want to just leave everything behind and start afresh? I already tried it once and it's not going too well already…" Tightening the laces on her boots, she staggered to full height before readying herself for their departure. "But I suppose we can't live in a boatshed forever…" The sun was rising behind them, sending soft rays of light over the glistening lake.
Annie would have loved the idea of spending the rest of her days camped at the beach. There was always water to purify and food to catch, a place to sleep and the absolute silence of nature. It was nothing like the place on the Strip they called home, in a way that when they closed their eyes at night they felt safer than they would have inside.
The water lapped against the shore as the remote in the courier's hands started to beep. Boone was waiting behind her, watching as a set of lakelurks scuffled on the beach just to keep the situation in hand. They hadn't bothered the pair over the couple of days after Boone wiped out half their family, more concerned with chasing birds and fighting for male dominance. Simple creatures, really.
Annie pressed the button with an outstretched finger, waiting breathlessly for the aircraft to emerge. When it did, it arrived with a burst of spray, startling the wildlife and earning a squeal of excitement from the courier. Boone watched on, impressed with the sheer size of the thing. He wasn't a fan of being underwater (too many blind spots in the murky haze) so checking out the plane was not one of his priorities.
"Isn't that cool! That thing used to fly, Boone. It's huge!" She held the straps of her bags excitedly. "When they get it running they have to take me for a ride!" She looked up at her companion who was giving her a small smile, relaying the contrasts between Annie's morning skin and the shine of the warm sun on the wet metal.
The lakelurks burst the vessel with bright blue circles, wailing in terror with their ugly cries. This gave Annie and Boone the supreme chance to sneak away undetected, kicking sand over their fire before marching their tightly laced boots out of there.
They passed the turn off to Bitter Springs on the way back to Nellis, Boone's face pulled into a tight line the entire way. If it weren't for the constant need of recon he would have kept his eye to the road in front of him. He could only shred his insides mentally as the young girl looked wistfully up at the campgrounds, sighing almost unhappily when her childhood drifted out of view once again.
Amongst the pain and hatred that boiled in his stomach grew a tiny tumour of grief. It was like he was inhibiting her from finding out who she was, like a selfish old man who sucked the life out of young girls like Annie. It felt wrong, like he was holding her from her fate because he was too ashamed to return to the place of the turn of his life.
Just because he was semi-dead on the inside didn't mean that the lively girl should suffer the same fate.
The ideas drowned in his head like a sad song, checking the horizon before stopping mid-step. He stood his ground as the courier turned around to figure out what was wrong. Boone was generally the pace maker in the march back home. Annie was mid-sentence, thrown off of her conversation by her partner sudden turning stationary.
"What's wrong?"
"You can go to Bitter Springs if you want." He told her, shifting his feet awkwardly on the metaphorical eggshells.
"What?" She asked, reaching up to tighten her pony tail with her slim hands. "Now?" Her cocked head earned her a stern look. "No, Boone." She ended up letting out a soft laugh, starting to walk backwards as she coiled her fingers to urge him to follow.
"But you want to go."
"We have to get back to the Boomers… And besides, we're low on nearly everything." She got him to take a step forward, his neck turning to take one last look at Coyote Tail Ridge before powering on. "Don't worry yourself, okay? Just because you've got a stone face doesn't mean I can't read it like a baby book." She punched his arm lightly when she turned back around, earning her a grunt in return. "I'll go when you're ready."
"Why do you have to wait for me?" He asked her tiredly, slightly irritated at her want to wait. He didn't want the overbearing feeling of guilt that circled his head to carrier another burden, especially one as big as Annie's feelings.
"I… don't want to go alone." She told him, feeling better to be honest about it. The thought of returning to Bitter Springs without Boone behind her gave her an oddly chilling feeling, like the situation just wouldn't feel whole without him. She lit a cigarette in a short-lived surge of angst. "You have demons, I have demons – we'll kill them together."
The claws embedded in his stomach eased at her words, feeling a little better at the thought of not being alone through whatever he was going through. Annie, although irritating at times and definitely not the best partner-in-crime, still managed to brighten his day – even if it only was a ray of sunlight through a hole in thick curtains.
"Alright."
Annie had dragged Boone back to the Wrangler a few hours after they returned home. They had quickly scrubbed the day's worth of dirt and dust from their skin, polishing themselves into their usual Strip personas –the sniper removing his excess hair in the bathroom mirrors while Annie stood in front of him to manicure her brows. Then she had made him repack his bags and walked him quietly up the stairs of the sloppy Freeside bar, locking the door behind them.
She had been quiet ever since she had returned from Houses' suite, her eyes burning with a certain melancholy that he had never seen before.
He was lying beside her with a smoke perched between his fingers, watching as she clutched a half-full bottle scotch between her creamy thighs. All Boone wanted to do was rest, but he knew he could not sleep while she sat and pondered over something he didn't know of. Annie always told him everything that was on her mind, but this time she seemed to be fighting the battle alone.
It was either kill House or blow up the Brotherhood of Steel bunker.
She wanted to say something, but she did not know how he would react. It wasn't a bad thing, no, but it was a decision that she felt she needed to make on her own. Boone never seemed too interested in her advances towards a joint ownership of the Strip, so the decision to kill House was placed solely on her shoulders. She didn't want to own the piece of land that had housed some of her worst nightmares, the idea that she could actually run the community by knifing an old man seemed weird and uncomfortable.
Looking down at her companion, the courier's eyes softened awkwardly.
"We should get to sleep. We need to get to the Hidden Valley tomorrow."
"What's there?" He asked, taking a drag of the smoke only to ash it in an empty bottle of Sarsaparilla.
"Brotherhood of Steel." She told him flatly, placing the bottle on the side table before lying down beside him. She rolled to face him, resting her arm under her head to curl her fingers around her chin.
"Something's bothering you." He stated simply, earning him a sly smile from the girl.
"Oh, is there now?" She asked, curiously leaning on the palm of her hand. He shifted his position to face her, giving her a blank look.
"Yes."
"Is that a 'please tell me what you're thinking Annie'?" She teased, leaning over to softly swat his forearm. The contact seemed only natural now. He sent her a look that made her grin widely, spirits lifted by the man who was almost casually trying to read her mind. "Alright, well, okay, if you insist…"
She sighed deeply, rubbing the bridge of her nose. "House wants me to blow up the Brotherhood's bunker in the Hidden Valley. No exceptions." She started, gauging his reaction quietly. Nothing, as she expected. "But, the thing is, I don't want to. But the only way around it is to kill House, and if I do that then I inherit Fantasy Land… Yes Man is pushing for it but—but I don't want the responsibility."
"Sometimes you have to step up and take responsibility." He told her after a moment of thought, checking her big eyes for any sort of hostility. All he received was a sullen eye roll.
"Why me, though? Why me? I don't want this. I want my own life."
"If you believe in fate, then you would know that sometimes decisions get made for you." He snapped his eyes from hers, staring up at the whitewashed ceilings with a dead look on his face.
Annie leant over to take a look at the man she had attached herself to, taking in his cleanly shaven face with one of disappointment.
"Why did you shave?"
"What?" He asked, turning his head to catch her hand on his cheek. The warmth from her palm was worth a thousand suns, collecting in his blood stream to send jets of it through his body. It had been a while since she had touched him so personally, only reserving those moments for when they were leaving each other for a while.
"I liked the little shadow thing you had going on. Really gritty, like one of those men from a scarlet novel." Her eyes were glassy with a soft sort of something that only used to appear when she teased him.
"Not what I'm aiming for." He took her hand from his cheek and placed it down in front of her. "Are you changing the subject?"
"Maybe, but only because I don't want to make a decision right now." She grinned at him, eyes trailing over the soft skin of his underarms. He was wearing his bedclothes; a musty old shirt and an old pair of pants that he had to retire due to lack of space left to patch. "I'd still like to believe that I have some sort of control over my own life."
Annie had stolen a nightgown from their room at the Lucky 38 – not an entirely sexy piece at all. It was one of those ugly old floral things that reminded Boone of something his mother would like, bunched at the shoulders and dropping on her body like a potato sack. The courier squirmed too much to fulfil the duties of a matronly old woman, curving the garment over her hips to give her a rosy silhouette that he hadn't really noticed. If she rolled onto her stomach it would give him an equal view of the grey cotton underwear that he had his hands tangled into a similar pair only days before.
He also had to stop thinking about the girl in such a light – remembering back to when he had almost lost his mind thinking about what he could do to her. It happened in that very room too, eyes darting to the spot on the floorboards where her knees had bruised merrily that night. It was not healthy to have such thoughts after all those months of feeling normal (as close to normal as he could get, anyway) again.
"Is it-…" She started talking again, twisting the sheets between her fingers. "Is it stupid of me to not want to know who I was before?"
"Why do you think that?" He asked, clicking their gazes together to reinstate the odd bond that they had found.
"Because, I was a bad person." Her fingers ran up and down tiredly. "That much I can gather… Like, what if I got shot because it was the universe's way of telling me how much I sucked?"
"It must not hate you too much if you survived it." He responded, attempting to lighten her mood. It wasn't much fun when Annie was just as depressing as he was. "Not many people survive things like that." Her hand absent mindedly reached up to touch the ugly welt, the skin sickeningly soft under her fingers.
In a moment of weakness, the sniper also reached out and brushed her hand out of the way to take his first feel of the destruction the bullet left on her brain. It was a weird sensation, his fingers running from clean bone to the scar tissue that layered the hole that drove straight through her brain. He wondered what part of her went missing when it tore through.
His thumb swiped the sore one last time before returning his hand to his torso, watching as the courier let one last savouring shudder run through her body. No one had touched her that personally in a while, the wound a sensitive subject to her. The man who had gifted the bullet was dead and all she was left with was a sickly reminder of what he had done to her. Boone didn't like the way she looked at him when she opened her eyes again.
She seemed morally drained, brown eyes falling back to the bed sheets before giving him one last fleeting look.
"Your turn to turn the light off." She mumbled, covering her head wound with her palm subconsciously. He gave her a light scoff before pulling himself up, slapping the light switch off with his flat palm. By the time he returned to the bed she had her eyes closed, arms wrapped around her pillow to curl towards the middle.
The pillow wall they usually built between them lay abandoned that night, the two collecting each other's body warmth with nothing to separate them. Annie was grateful to be able to return to a double bed with Boone, having ached for it for an entire week earlier. She wanted to wrap herself around his sleeping body and lay there for moments on end. He wanted to be able to turn his mind off and touch her again, this time softer and longer – savour the goose bumps that would rise from her arms as his fingers would roam. But neither did anything.
They slept soundly that night – the best night's sleep they had gotten in days.