hello guys! i'm sorry this took so long - my country's been getting a lot of rain and because of that my internet (and phone) were lost for a day and now it's generally being a fuck ass and won't connect to any pages and it's just made me so irritated so i haven't been writing at all.
and then this happened. i'm sorry, it got a little long (by my standards anyway) some day soon i may need a beta because if i keep writing high then you're going to get a lot more chapters like this one.
Piledriver Waltz - Alex Turner
Veronica was weeping silently at a black jack table in the foyer of the Lucky 38.
"I'm sorry." Annie said, her hands so cold against the green felt. The scribe didn't respond, her hands cupping and harvesting whatever tears fell to collect them in her palms. The courier's shoulders sagged. "I'm really sorry… I didn't want to do it, I just can't… I just can't-"
The room was warm like the sands outside, but everything Annie managed to grab was cold as ice. The room was dark except for her one table, the overhead light buzzing with electricity without a plastic guard. The energy hummed openly above their heads, shadowing Veronica's sad face with ugly patches of black.
"Sometimes people have to stand up and take responsibility." Boone had his hand on Annie's shoulder, his body close behind her. Veronica's sobs were harsher than she imagined they would be. "I just had my rifle with me. Just me… against all of them." His breath was warm on her ear, sending bumps up her bare arms.
The Brotherhood Scribe stopped crying and turned from them, standing up before shifting to leave. Annie grabbed for her but fell short, a hand on her wrist drawing it back to her chest. "Veronica, wait!"
"All of this was only ever going to play out one way…." Boone let her go and turned her around to face him, soft hips holding her in place against the polished wood of the table lining. "So… I took the shot." The way his eyes reflected hers was sad – she could actually feel the pain that was radiating from him. He reached up and tucked the hair from her forehead, giving him a prime view of the welt he was suddenly so interested in.
"You're talking crazy." She told him, turning her face away but keeping his between her hands. His cheeks were as hot as the Mojave sun under her hands; the fingers shuddering individually with the chilling cold that ran through her limbs. Her digits drew themselves to his beret, tracing over the soft skull patch before returning to her gaze to his. His eyes were brown, and furious.
"You said you wouldn't fucking tell anyone!" Manny grabbed her wrists and held them to her stomach, thrusting at her with thick thighs to keep her from struggling. Boone's face had darkened and shaped into the round face of his partner. "You fucking promised me..!"
His eyes were suddenly soft and scared, his thick scraggly black hair sticking to his sweat-caked face that had cracked angrily under the desert sun. "He doesn't know anything- He doesn't, Manny, I swear-" Her voice died in her throat and she choked at the impact of his fist to her nose. The crunching of the cartilage ran her blood cold. The shock threw her head back to loll on her shoulders, her entire face grimacing in pain as she tried to find her bearings.
He flipped her over and she sputtered over the green velvet, blood specking the painted white lines every time she exhaled through her stinging nose. The spatters sunk into the fabric, staining it with ugly copper welts that stuck to the board like sickly fridge magnets. He could feel his hands – not Manny's (too big) – run up and down her sides to dip off at her ass over the bundles of fabric from her dress.
He pressed her against the hard wood, an erection building through his dirty old jeans as his hands snaked up to her throat and took it in his huge hands. Straightening her posture with the butt of the other on her lower back, Annie's head was placed on his shoulder as his mouth drained miserably down her neck.
"Anna" A new voice muttered into the soft skin of her neck, hiking the folds of her dress up her back. The hand on her throat drifted down her torso, tucking itself happily into the front of her underwear. A thick finger slipped between her legs and ran itself over her clit, earning a groan from the befuddled girl.
He seized her suddenly and flipped her back around, forcing her ass onto the table as he tugged her panties off with one hand. She finally caught the face of her assailant, hidden by layers of beautiful, long blond hair that had fallen from the tied bunch at his neck.
"Chance… Oh." She reached to grab his face and he fell between her legs, adjusting himself with a thick palm before entering her harshly. Annie's head spun as her nose drooled blood into her mouth, his hands finding a clump of her hair to pull her head back.
"You never let me look at you when I fuck you." His voice was a soft growl. He thrust into her, tugging her closer with his fixed grip as her gasps escaped her aching throat. He fucked her for a moment, churning hatred between them. It was nearly painful, the way he held her tightly to his own body, her groans slinking up her gorge and bursting through the sickly gobs of blood that coated her lips. Her fingers felt like they were going to snap off on his hips, almost burning with the chill that had begun to soak up her arms.
"You don't sound too happy to be here, dolly." He spoke again, Benny's smooth voice sending sickening vibes down her ear canal. His chequered coat was folded nicely over the back of the chair beside them, his tie loosened around his neck. "Baby – you're disappointing me." He held her to him like a rag doll, his clean-shaven jaw digging into her shoulder like a bone wedge. The smell of his cigarettes made her gag, her hands scrabbling for the knife she kept strapped to her thigh.
His strong grip stopped her as he bounced between her thighs, each pound bruising the soft flesh of her ass. Her entire body was revolted at the feeling of him twitching inside of her, attempting to dig her fingernails into his shoulders as some sort of self-defence. He was far too strong for her to push away, the man like a heavy statue that needed to be dug out of the ground further.
Something clanked behind him, like metal footsteps slowly crunching towards them. Catching a glance over his shoulder, Annie winced at the sight of FISTO, who was powering towards them on stubby little legs. The fear that ran through the courier turned her blood ice-cold. She never did like that robot.
"Assume the position." House's voice reverberated through the abandoned foyer. Annie clung to Benny as tightly as she could, the man groaning into her neck as the robot clanked beside them. It's usually empty face burnt with the image of House, his handsome pre-war face glowing a soft light over them in the dark room. "No excuses."
Veronica's powerfist emerged from the darkness and crushed the bot's head, the shriek of steel against steel tearing through Annie's eardrums as the young scribe began to lay into the Father of New Vegas. Veronica's sobs were louder than the grinding metals, Annie's eyes wide as Benny's breath in her ear began to quicken.
Her head turned back to push him away, praying he wouldn't come inside of her. "No, please don—" She started, finding herself caught in Boone's startling blue eyes once more. He wrapped his arms around her and held her close as he came with a grunt in her ear. They were still for a moment, his warm shoulders under her fingers that burnt with blossoms of heat every time her grip tightened.
Hands swept up to wipe the blood from her face, his thumb on her lip when he kissed her sore nose.
He lay her softly on the table as he pulled out, running his rough fingers down her frame to tug her dress back down to a respectable length. She leant up on her elbows to gawk at him, watching him reach up to push the hair from her forehead. She stared up at him with big eyes.
"Don't you want us anymore, is that it?" A blond woman had replaced Veronica, her bare fists bloody on the jagged pieces of robot. Annie snapped her neck towards the voice, out of breath as she fought to put a name to the face. The woman's cheeks were streaked with red sand, eyes wild with hurt and wrists wrapped with red cloth. "Aren't we good enough for you?"
Boone woke to Annie shoving things hurriedly into her bag. They were scheduled to wake in two hours, but her heavy footsteps on the hollow rot wood floors had roused him prematurely.
"Anna?" He asked as he sat up, squinting into the darkness. He focused in on the light from her pipboy. Catching her quick glance from afar, he watched her freeze.
"You're usually such a heavy sleeper…" She huffed, finally standing up to flick on the light. The bright shocked his eyes and he squinted more, blinking to ease the pain. "I'm just getting ready for the walk today."
"The walk." He said flatly, caving in and simply shutting his eyes. He didn't see her grin at him.
"We're taking a side detour for me, but that's okay because you don't have to come if you don't want to."
"Where to?" He brushed his face with his wrist, eyes opening cautiously. "And why two hours before?"
"Had a really fucking weird dream." She rubbed the back of her head, frizzing the black mess. Annie could almost feel his lips on her nose, her hand reaching up to touch it for the fiftieth time that morning. "And Red Rock."
"Red Rock?" He asked. "You said you didn't want to go."
"No, I have to go." She headed towards the bed to plonk down next to him. "Call me morbid, call me tribal, but that dream told me I should go." Her eyes seemed bigger, if that was possible, staring up at him with that same fire that seemed far past smothered. The way that her eyes scrutinised every part of his face, logging every little detail into her brain, made him uncomfortable. She looked as wild as when he first found her.
"This feels like a bad idea." He warned and she nodded and shrugged but took his knee in her hands.
"But you can't stop me." She told him, fingers lurching up his thighs. He grabbed her wrists and held them in her lap. It didn't stop her from leaning over to him, nose to nose, with that stupid grin on her face.
"Anna." He said.
"Hmm." She looked away and leant back, shaking him free only to spring up to relieve the energy. "No, I have to go." He watched her as she paced across the room for a moment, stopping to sit back down beside him. "But you don't. I understand if you don't."
"You're talking crazy." He mumbled at her, watching her flounder for a response. The girl froze for a moment, her body dumped into the familiar feeling of déjà vu.
"Don't take the wind out of my sails, Boone." She pushed away from him for the third straight time. He sent her a look, although it was not as menacing when he was wrapped up in sheets. "Whatever that means."
"You haven't slept by the looks of you."
"I have! I had that ridiculous dream and I just couldn't go back to sleep while that was still in my mind." She was already half in her armour, one sock away from a full set of shoes. He could read the pitches in her voice as she spoke about her experiences, subconsciously flicking on his 'loving husband' switch.
"Do you want to talk about it?" He grunted and her incredulous look fell on him like a tonne of bricks. She slipped off her shoe with primed toes, and she crawled over to him.
"Are you sure you want to hear it?" She asked, resting on her knees and legs curiously. Boone never really asked the personal things – it was always Annie prying into his life.
"I suppose." He lay back down to get comfortable – a go-ahead marker for Annie to show he was relaxing with the awkward subject. Boone didn't play best girl friend for Annie; it was supposed to be the other way around. But the courier seemed flustered.
Her weight slipped between her legs and she sat comfortably on the bed, swinging her feet around to cross them around each other. "I destroyed Veronica's life and she killed House for me, all while I was having sex on one of those gambling tables." Boone blinked lazily at her.
"Alright..?"
Her face eased into a frown, finding it hard to force out the words than she had originally anticipated. She had been practising for moments where she could drag all the blood to his cheeks, but for some reason a little thing called 'shame' was clogging her throat.
"Okay… so at first it was just you and me at the table- not like that, calm yourself... You were saying weird things-"
"Weird how?"
"You were talking about your wife, but it didn't sound right." She caught his curious look. "But it was just you, me and Veronica…" She explained the rest of her dream in detail (as much detail as she could afford to spend) and pondered each origin of the facial expressions he would pull. He openly grimaced at the mention of Manny, and grew stony around Benny, but her voice died in her throat before she could finish with him finishing.
Would it be weird for him to know that she dreamt about him in such a personal way? Annie didn't find it uncomfortable at all – in fact it just fuelled the aching fires in her heart to take him as her own and use him until the end of their days. But Boone was different to her, and that's what made it too hard. She couldn't risk him having a minor freak out and his boot steps through the door would probably cause her to tear her ears off.
"And then when it, uh, finished, I saw a woman in Khans' leather beating the shit out of the House-FISTO hybrid. She looked at me and said 'Aren't we good enough for you?'"
If Boone had taken all of his dreams as literally as Annie did he probably would have killed himself a long time ago.
"There's some spooky shit in that dream and I think it wants me to go back to Red Rock."
There grew a minor panic in the back of Boone's brain. At first it was a shocked whisper, but as Annie began to talk deeper the idea began to warp like a siren, barreling heavy thoughts into the spotlight. If they were to go to Red Rock, there would be a substantial settlement of very resentful Khans. Khans whose family he almost definitely murdered.
Annie was going to find out about Bitter Springs earlier than he had planned to. She said she could wait but apparently she couldn't, teasing all the effort he had put into keeping the memory hidden behind times he had read as slightly happier ones. He felt so selfish imagining a world where she never had to know about it.
The situation was no longer an 'I don't want to talk about it', turning hurriedly into a 'I want to but I can't talk about it' the more he realised that he liked having her around. He deserved the fiery depths of hell and still he could not stop himself from liking the fact that she existed. It was a terrible, terrible thought but if he weren't so sickeningly greedy it wouldn't have felt so good.
The more he thought about it, laid back on their bed with his eyes closed, the dirtier he felt. Why should he even bother caring about another person if all that was left for him was the dark descent into whatever crippling afterlife he found? The most he could hope for was his triumphant death on top of a mountain of red – a goal of which had been abandoned for a long time. Why? Because he tried to fight fate? There was no fighting fate, not for him anyway.
The courier was looking down at his stormy face with soft eyes, feeling that he had drifted off into some sort of internal nightmare. She never liked when he turned himself off – it made his eyes steely and cold like they used to be - a man on a mission. Boone had successfully taken the wind out of Annie's sails without even trying – the girls mild hysterics dampened by Boone's dead-brain blanket. There was no room for her to misbehave when her only guardian was fighting an intramural war.
Boone knew that if they were to return to Bitter Springs, the best thing for him to do would be find Gillies and her death, and then find his own. That would be the only real way for him to go, after what he had done – all the lives he had destroyed, including those of his wife and unborn child. This whole thing spawned from his mistakes, and he obviously had no self-control to stop him from doing it again. The thought churned his stomach sick.
"Hey," Annie cooed at him, reaching out to rub his shin "you look like you're going to die. Stop it."
He opened his eyes to catch her stare, remembering how soft she looked in the dank lights of the Wrangler's rooms. He hated that he thought that.
"Go to Red Rock alone." He told her curtly, probably sounding angrier than he really was. "I have something else to do."
"Oh." Annie never expected him to reject her. All he did was follow her around like a lost but irritated puppy. "Alright. Okay, when are you going?"
"Wednesday morning."
Boone was going to travel to Cottonwood Cove first, and he was going to take down as many Legionaries as possible. He owed that to Carla, and he owed it to his child, and even if he got himself killed he knew he would be going out the right way. Those sons of bitches wouldn't even see him.
"I suppose I can stay for another day…" Annie squeaked, looking miserably at their half packed bags. It was foolish of her to assume he would jump through whatever hoops she held – no matter how small. "Rest up and what not… I am a little tired."
"Alright." He replied tiredly, knowing he wouldn't get anymore sleep that night. He kept his eyes closed anyway. She slinked off the bed towards the wall, melting against the switch to turn it off. Crawling back, she curled up beside him and took his forearm in her hands.
"Stop thinking yourself stupid." She gave him one last pat and rolled onto her back, staring up at the stained ceiling as they both strayed from sleep.
They spent the next day drinking up a tab at the Wrangler. Neither was near drunk but the buzz they found from a shared bottle of liquor made them happier about their decisions to part ways.
James Garret always found it a game to find out everything he could about the two wanderers. It was more exciting than pressing Beatrix to work, and definitely more entertaining than the ugly old ghoul that called himself a comedian (the man brought in the caps but some nights it was just not worth it). Annie and Boone were his favourite tenants because every so often James Garret would get the news before anyone else.
And because the courier had a mouth like a deep abyss, he would not allow anyone to hurt them. Three times he had stopped (only with a fierce look, no real bravery included) a disgruntled resident from sticking a knife into the sniper's back, and four times he stopped strange men from putting little tablets into the girl's drink. Even when someone lurked outside their bedroom door for too long was he up there, sending them back down to the bar with the proposal of a beer – for only 1 cap, a special offer just for them.
Annie and Boone were not exactly the best people, but in saying that they certainly were not the worst. The courier refused to work too closely to the NCR, noted Garret, but what was even weirder was how attached she was to the man she kept. She hated the Legion though, and that was something that wasn't kept quiet in the Freeside casino.
The sniper had something wrong with him – that was without a doubt. He seemed to carry a little bit more hatred than the girl could muster, but that being said he was an ex-soldier. James could bet he was at Bitter Springs whenever what happened there went down.
"So where are you two off to tomorrow?" He asked curiously, leaning on the bar between them. The two looked at each other tiredly and the girl sighed.
"Separate ways." She told the barman. "For now."
"Now I wouldn't have thought you two would split up."
"Eesh, Garret. I said it was only for now." Annie stared up at him from behind her hair. "Don't make me feel bad."
"Now don't feel bad." He placed her glass back in front of her, emptying whatever was left in the bottle. "You know what they say, absence makes the heart grow fonder."
"Explains why I love to come back to this shit hole, huh?"
"Finest shit hole this side of Freeside, woman." The man pointed his finger at her and she grinned at him from over her glass. "They also say that absinthe makes the heart grow stronger – care to try?"
"You just want my caps, you filthy old man." Boone watched the courier in giggle fits of whiskey. "It's far too early for your devil water, James, what do you want?" She asked, leaning on her elbows to look up at him. The sniper adjusted his feet in the rungs of the stool.
"Oh, I don't want anything." He returned to cleaning the glasses. "It's just a thrill knowing things before the radio does. Can't help it if you're the Mojave flavour of the month."
"Us?" Annie asked.
"No, you." The man sighed exasperatedly. "Don't you listen to the old box?"
"Not what you're listening to." She looked over at Boone, who stared blankly back. Annie kept her pipboy radio on during the day as they walked but it was always that twangy channel that played the same ten songs over and over. "And why not Boone? He does all the damn work around here."
"You've got a sweeter face," James grinned at her "no offense buddy… but you know how the world gets over a pretty girl." He swung Boone a free drink. The sniper took it and shrugged, agreeing with the other man.
"It's true."
"What, so the whole damn desert thinks I'm a hero?"
"You're no hero, woman, but you're getting there." The Garret leant under the bar to turn the radio up, sending smooth jazzy words over the entire room. "I don't believe you've never listened to Radio New Vegas."
"Oh… Well yes, of course I have. But the man on the station talked too much and it gave me a headache after, you know, the hole in the head." She mumbled, flicking through her pipboy unhappily. "Tuned to Mojave Music and never turned back. Now, what are they saying about me?"
"Well I can tell you all about that 'lake monster' you've recently pulled out of Lake Mead."
"Really?" Annie asked, irritated. "How?"
"People talk."
"City people." Annie tsk'd. "You know what's good about being a tribal?"
"Do tell." James cleaned his glass curiously.
"If someone's talking stick about you, especially on such a wide scale, you can literally beat the shit out of them for it. The cuts and bruises may fade but humiliation lasts forever. That I remember." She kicked herself off of the stool. "None of this casino etiquette shit I keep hearing about."
She wasn't too comfortable with her situation. How could she have been so naïve about the residents she talked to? They devoted radio airtime to her exploits – House must know by now what exactly she was doing. There was nowhere she was safe.
If House knew what she was doing, the Legion must have known too. The NCR as well! The whole Mojave- the whole Mojave.
This is what she meant when she said she didn't want any part of Vegas business. There was something so lovely about being in the open air, where no one could hear you scream. In that shit hole of a desert city laid the most embarrassing, heart-breaking and irritating life that one could live and she was utterly destined to stay there forever.
What were they saying? That she was the saviour of the wastes? She could barely keep on her feet for more than a month at a time without being stabbed or something just as devastating. Thanks to the radio people expected her to do things. It was no longer a situation solely based around who will rule New Vegas, but who will rule the Mojave. Annie didn't want the damn Mojave – Annie just wanted to do her own thing.
Returning her face to her pillow, accompanied with a watered-down bottle of vodka, she marked all the small towns on her pipboy – the ones she never wanted to see before she had gotten trapped in Vegas. If they wanted her to make a difference, then she was going to do it her way.