The fucking burn.
It's the one part she never got used to, regardless of how often it happened.
She stared up at the orange tinged sky, trying her best to wiggle her fingers around the trigger of her sequoia.
She used her other hand to finger at the wound. Extremity, right arm, one bullet, roughly 5.56 caliber, entry wound, no exit. It was still inside.
'Well,' she thought. 'At least it'll make a nice souvenir.'
She took a deep breath, gripped her iron, and angled the top of her compass in an attempt to use it as a mirror, to peek at the snipers position. Another bullet pinged off the top of her cover. A rusted out pre war truck was all that stood between her and the sniper.
She returned fire at the legion assassin staring at her down his scope, and was careful to count her shots. One, two, three. Click
'Fuck'. Jammed.
If Veronica ever found out the condition she allowed her weapon to degrade to, she'd probably hit her with it, but finding the parts to fix a revolver chambered in 45-70 while avoiding legion assassins wasn't exactly easy. Regardless, she had to make do. She dug around in her backpack while looking at her gun, analyzing what was wrong. Months of training with Boone rushed back, and the issue reared its ugly head. The cylinder spring had failed to rotate properly, meaning it either slipped, or was broken, one of which was significantly easier to fix than the other.
She took a deep breath, and tripped her Implant GRX. She'd need time to fix her gear, time she didn't have. So every second had to count. Screwdriver in hand, she took her weapon apart, and glanced at the spring.
Snapped in half.
'Fuck!'
Her environment slowly began to return to normal, and she fought hard to crush the panic welling in her chest. She dug through her backpack again, looking for something, anything with a spring. Even if it wasn't the right type, anything that would let her get just one more round.
Other guns? Too complex to take apart in the short amount of time she had. Microfusion cells? No springs there. Hot plate? Maybe, but once again, too complex to disassemble at the moment.
A mechanical pen?
A mechanical pen!
She unscrewed it, ripped out the spring, and quickly slapped the sequoia back together just before the GRX wore off.
She stood, leveled her weapon in the direction of the sniper, and pulled the trigger.
Her bullet found its mark. Right though the assassins feathered head.
An explosion of brain matter and blood blossomed on concrete behind where he was perched, and she let out a sigh of relief as she lowered her gun.
She'd been on the move for months, but despite her best efforts, they found her everywhere she turned.
Ever since the Battle of the Dam.
She grit her teeth, and slammed a stimpack into her thigh. The wound began to stitch itself up, pushing the bullet out. She picked up the bloody copper piece, inspecting it before slipping it in a small pouch at her hip she used for noteworthy small metal bits.
Her head turned toward the sky, at the rapidly setting sun.
'Need to keep moving…'
She was glad for the distraction, in a way. At the absolute least, it broke up the hours spent staring at cracked asphalt and burned out cars. Usually, the legion assassins also carried weapons or supplies with them she used to trade with anyone friendly she happened to run into on the road. Such was the case with this would-be killer of the Courier. He was carrying a silenced marksman rifle, but little else. It was unlikely that Lanius thought they'd actually be able to kill her. No, this was a formality, like those sent after Joshua Graham. A message to let her know they were watching, waiting for her to slip up.
She shook the thought off, and, after gathering the assassins' things, put one boot in front of the other, walking ever onward.
A few hours later, she stumbled across an empty gas station, and decided to make camp for the night.
She rolled out her sleeping bag, and set up a hot plate to boil some stillwater she'd found sitting in a bucket outside. After straining it through her shirt to get the silt out, she let it get up to heat, and went outside to stab a small gecko she'd seen lazing on the side of the building.
She brought it back into the station, and proceeded to skin the animal with practiced ease, and sheared off the muscle and fat from the bone into a pot of now-boiling water
After a short while, her stew was done.
Her stomach groaned as she took her first sip, this… meat-gruel, was all she'd eaten for the past month, after her rations had been stolen by mole rats in the night. Still, it sated the hunger threatening her focus.
Once finished, she took a map out from her backpack and looked it over.
'One week left if I'm lucky' she thought, staring at the road to her destination.
It'd been 6 months since she left New Vegas, longer still since the Battle of The Dam. Her body still ached more from that day than it did from the journey, and she had done her best not to pay any attention to the welling sense of failure in her stomach. For half a year, she'd focused on nothing but the next step, to fix her mistake. To make amends. To honor the dead.
For half a year, she'd thought of nothing but getting to The Capital Wasteland, and getting the East Coast chapter of The Brotherhood of Steel to help her take back New Vegas from The Legion.