NOTE (Feb. 2, 2018): Wow. Didn't expect quite the reception to this. Alas, I've been writing more again.
Ruby had been staring at the Courier again.
Rather, she had been staring at his decorated lever-action brush carbine slung over his shoulder while he fanned the small sparks in the fire pit into a sizable flame. By the time the campfire had gotten large enough to cook raw meat, he could feel her drooling over his back.
"For the tenth time, Hyper: no," Six said tiredly.
"But I didn't say anything," Ruby deflected.
"I don't have any of that Aura crap but I can feel you gawking."
"She has a crush on you~" Yang teased and earning herself a glare from her sister.
"She has a crush on your gun," Blake droned.
"Ruby, please stop bothering him so he can cook our dinner," Weiss harped only to hear Yang playfully snicker something about her being jealous to which Snowball went on a tirade about some lady standards that Six could care less about.
Meanwhile, Hyper dropped back to her place beside her teammates with a pout. Team JNPR later joined them around the campfire with pickings of barrel cacti, banana yucca, and prickly pear fruits that they had foraged nearby. Well, most of them; it took a while for Jaune to limp over.
"The hell happened to you?" Six asked. Upon closer inspection, he sighed. "Really?"
Blondie burst out laughing, pointing at the many cactus thorns that Pyrrha and Ren were cautiously pulling out of Knight-boy. Still, he refused to sit down on the ground along with the rest of them. At that, the Courier gestured at him to turn around.
"You missed a spot," Yang choked out before laughing again.
"Not funny, Yang!"
And you want to be a fucking knight, Knight-boy? "Pull it out of your ass. I ain't doing it for you," Six ordered sharply.
"I can't reach."
"Yes, you can," chorused everyone to which Jaune hesitantly and very clumsily (and much to Yang's entertainment) extracted the rather large cactus spine out of his rear.
"Hey, Ruby, 'ya want some?" Nora offered, munching on a chunk of banana yucca.
"No thanks."
She tilted her head. "You alright? You look a little down."
"She's just upset because Six didn't want her to touch his big gun." Yang stopped midway through her bite when she caught up to what exactly she had just said. "You know what I meant! I meant his rifle! His rifle! She wanted to mess with his rifle!"
Goddamn it, woman. "Wow, Blondie. Thanks for calling me a pedophile," Six groused, letting the fire crackle at the awkward silence.
"Does it have a name? Did you give it a name? You should give it a name."
Answer the damn question and maybe she'll finally shut up.
"Seriously? Why'd you call it 'Medicine Stick'? Ooh, wait! Does it shoot medicine darts? Like those poison darts but instead of poison, it heals you up? That's so cool! Why'd did you put feathers on it, though? It looks weird. And won't they come off when you swing it like I do Crescent Rose?"
Damn it. That backfired. Screw it. Just ignore her and keep walking.
"Si~ix, these bottle caps are making my hips itchy! Why can't we just use the NCR's paper money?"
One more mile. Just one more mile.
"My feet hurt. Six! I can't go o~on... Could you carry me, please? Pretty please? My feet hu~urt..."
Almost there. Right up this hill.
"Si~ix, can we stop for a bit? I want to pee! I need to pee!"
The Courier yanked her arm and pointed to the perch peeking past the old cargo truck hanging over the edge of the parking lot. A low wall of sandbags surrounded the makeshift alcove cobbled together from a few poles and metal sheets—a convenient sniper's nest that had an unobstructed view of Cottonwood Cove and much of this section of the Colorado River.
"Stay there and watch for any threats," he ordered her.
Ruby whined, hopping with her hands between her legs. "Si~ix, I really need to pee! I've been holding it in!"
Goddamn it, woman. "Fine. Go find a spot but I want you back there providing overwatch—"
Swoom!
Six deflated in the wake of her Semblance, grumbling at the rose petals floating to the ground. Tired, my ass. Feet hurt, my ass. And you bolt faster than a missile when I let you loose for five minutes to do your shit. Goddamn Hyper.
They had one job. One goddamn job.
A simple job that didn't even need this many people to begin with. Hell, he thought they were competent enough for it!
All they had to do was to make sure nothing and absolutely nothing would compromise their rear flank—say geckos and lakelurks repopulating Cottonwood Cove—while he crossed the Colorado River alone. Now Six was at the end of his rope when he hurried back from scouting the promontories across the river after seeing thick smoke all the way from his position on the Arizona side of the Colorado!
Half of Cottonwood had been leveled. It looked as if the Boomers had flown a sortie over the whole area, turning this part of the Mojave Wasteland into an even worse wasteland. All because his eight shitty brats used their Dust or Semblance or Aura—whatever the fuck they called that physics-defying shit—on the poor sons of bitches who thought it was a good idea to sneak up on them while they were all skinny dipping in the water.
Skinny dipping in the fucking water. All of them. With lakelurks, geckos, and schools of mutated man-eating fish nearby. While people watched.
"What in the goddamn..."
"Our actions were completely justified!" Pyrrha argued, her free hand holding a towel over most of her bare body while her other arm pressed her alternating spear-rifle—was it 'Milos' or 'Akouo'?—against the throats of the uniformed, slightly singed, and rightly terrified NCR privates tied to the guardrail.
"Put some clothes on, damn it," Six ordered. "I'll handle this."
"We should castrate them," Weiss hissed from behind a derelict Chryslus. In fact, all the girls bar Pyrrha were crouched behind the only unexploded car parked by the railing, stark naked, covering their bare chests with their arms, and peeking their heads over the car frame to glare at the unfortunate sods.
The Courier glanced around. "Where are the boys?"
"Over here," Ren called, his damp pale arm waving from the window on the door of the concrete dockworker's office that had once been the headquarters of the Legion bastion stationed here.
"Are they done?" Jaune's voice rang out from inside the building. "Can we come out now?"
"NO!" chorused all the girls.
"But I'm sticky, there's giant roaches in the bathroom, and it's freezing in here," he whined. "Can someone at least toss me a towel, my sword, or any of my clothes?"
"Whose idea was it to strip naked and go swimming in the river, anyway?" Six demanded, his hands pressed firmly on his hips while the NCR privates whimpered underneath him.
Fingers pointed to Yang who pointed to Ruby. "Wasn't my idea!"
"Yes, it was," Cat-girl deadpanned.
"You all agreed to it!" Blondie deflected. At that, most of the girls nodded with complimentary 'yeah's and 'it sounded like a good idea at the time.'
Six, meanwhile, pinched the bridge of his nose. I'm getting sick of this shit. "What if it was a goddamn Legion scouting party? What if these goddamn perverts shot back at you? What if the rapids picked up or them scaly man-eaters got one in on you? You kids could have fucking drowned! Did you ever think of that?"
"We grew up on an island," Yang and Ruby sheepishly said. "We can swim against the current."
"At Remnant, there were a lot of swimming tournaments usually in the summer," Nora chirped. "They're really fun!"
"I doubt Jaune could swim, though," Blake remarked much to Pyrrha's amusement.
"I heard that!" Jaune barked.
"He actually almost drowned," Weiss added nonchalantly. "Twice. He was panicking even after Ren pulled him out of the water."
"That was not the case, Weiss!" snapped Knight-boy.
The Courier massaged his temples to kill his growing headache. He was going to have to restock on aspirin after this. And maybe some extra alcohol, too. NCR is definitely going to be asking a lot of questions. What the fuck am I supposed to tell them now? "You kids are bleeding me dry, holy fucking nut-sack..."
"We're sorry, sir!" one of the privates cried. "We won't do it again, sir!"
"Please, we've learned our lesson!" another whinnied while tears and sweat rolled down his cheeks.
"Just don't tell our CO, please!" the third pleaded.
Six rounded on the bound soldiers, bearing down a glower so fierce that they could have shit out whatever spine was left in them.
"You boys have done screwed yourselves," he began. "If I were you, I'd forget about this whole experience and march back up to your posts 'fore you get slapped with goin' AWOL. Better yet, ask for a transfer. These brats of mine won't be forgettin' your faces anytime soon. Sure as hell, I won't."
The privates feverishly nodded.
The Courier turned to the girls staring at him from behind the Chryslus. "What the hell are y'all still doing slinking around there for? Put some goddamn clothes on!"
"Crap! Sorry!"
"Oops!"
"Don't look!"
"Girls, can we come out now?"
"NO!"
Meanwhile, Six withdrew the NCR emergency radio from one of his vest pouches and began extending the range on the antenna so he could call in a ranger squad to retrieve their men at the planned designated drop-off point further up the highway. "Goddamn kids had one goddamn job and they somehow manage to fuck it up..."
ORIGINALLY DRAFTED: February 1, 2018
LAST EDITED: June 18, 2022
INITIALLY UPLOADED: February 2, 2018
NOTE (Feb. 2, 2018): Thank you for the many suggestions. I'll see if my brain can come up with more. Also, thank you, Colossus Bridger, for suggesting the general themes for this fic.