47, 36, and/or 8 for Courier Six x Boone? ♡
Thank you for asking! These are honestly some of my favorite new pieces. Something about 8 bothers me still, after five days of editing and re-editing, but you always find a way to make me look deeper at my own work when you review it, so I’m interested to see what you might think. At any rate, whether or not anyone else likes it, I am WEAK for 47. They’re my own ship, dammit; one would think I could write them without having to take a break every few minutes to de-fluster myself. Anyway, enjoy. Everything’s below the cut.
8: I found you, moonlight reflected in your eyes, balcony overlooking the sky.
It’s the same thing every night: dinner, conversation, a glass of wine, and then up to the penthouse to stand on the barely-there balcony outside and stare at the Strip. When Arcade found out, he told Kate the wind would sweep her right off one day. With the penthouse’s altitude, it’s hard to tell if he was exaggerating or not.
So tonight, Boone steps out onto the ledge and the desert wind, cold as death and darker than that, lashes at his face. How she stands it is beyond him, but he’d rather bear it for an evening than let her fall off—purposefully or not.
Gently, like whispers of touch and little else, she feels his arms about her waist and his breath stirs her hair as he mumbles, “Feel like coming inside?”
“I… don’t know.” She leans back against him. “I’m so tired of this.”
“Me too,” he says, though he knows she doesn’t mean her new routine. “Come on. You’re cold.”
She sighs. Instead of relenting, she sits down on the edge. “The city’s back to normal. NCR boys are back in the casinos. House says Legion’s back, too. I… I don’t wanna fight them anymore.”
Despite the heaviness in the pit of his stomach, he sits beside her and lets his feet dangle. It’s sickening, but he knows she’ll come inside soon. Probably.
She turns her head to face him and a glimmer of moonlight shines in her eyes. “What if we left?”
“Anywhere. East? Far east. Somewhere the Legion can’t get me. Somewhere the NCR can’t get you.”
He grips her icy fingers when she reaches for his hand. “Anywhere,” he repeats in a low rumble. “Heard there’s a place on the coast. Lots of people. Couple of cities. Lot more rads. More rads means more ghouls.”
“Of course it is.” After several moments of heavy silence, she sighs again and leans into him. “I… don’t know anymore.”
“He only needed me when Benny and Caesar were alive. Now… now I’m not important anymore.”
She rests her head on his shoulder. “…No.”
He shifts his thumb back and forth across her knuckles, letting her tighten her grip and curl up closer. “You wanna go inside now?”
“Not yet.” She keeps her head turned toward the Strip, eyes afire with the reflection of its lights. The wind, laced with sand and nighttime chill, stings her cheeks and she tucks her face into his shirt. “I don’t want you to do… what you do anymore.”
He scowls. “Makes money.”
“I hate what it’s doing to you, Craig. You used to be happy.” Following a pointed stare from him, she hastily adds, “Happier, anyway. Now you always look tired and bitter and you always sound angry and you haven’t kissed me since Tuesday and we haven’t been—”
“People die,” he interrupts. “Doesn’t matter if I do it or not. You told me that.”
She pulls herself away from him and shouts, “Mierda!” Then she lowers her head and exhales sharply, pausing for a moment before speaking again. “I said that so you’d stop punishing yourself for what you couldn’t control. This is your choice. It’s different.”
“Doesn’t seem too different from here.”
“You can’t kill people for caps forever.”
A long silence colder than the air lingers between them until he answers her. “Stop doing this every night. Then I’ll quit. We’ll go somewhere else.”
She picks up her head and looks at him. She has hope in her eyes, and it makes him sick. “You mean that?”
His throat closes. He swallows the dryness in his mouth and says, “Yeah.”
Bracing herself against the wall, she stands up. “Okay. You win. I’ll go inside.”
As she steps back inside, she shrugs. “I guess. We’ll plan first.”
He stands up too, wobbling a bit on the edge before his fingers find purchase on the wall. She offers her hand and he takes it again, then slips back through the window and shuts it behind them.
“What’s to plan?” he asks. “We go east. Far as we want.”
She looks up and smiles, something he hasn’t seen her do in days. He wonders just how much of that is his own fault. “And you’ll really stop taking those jobs?”
She hugs him tighter than armor two sizes too small. “This’ll be good, you’ll see.”
Slowly, he runs his fingers through her hair. He doesn’t say a word, but she’s used to that now. Used to him.
She closes her eyes and dreams of a house on the beach, toes in cool water, and absolutely, positively no murder. And now, it finally seem plausible—even if it takes them the rest of their lives to get it.
36: I found you, your eyes heavy, nightmares robbing you of sleep.
She awakes with a start, chest heaving with each shuddering breath and hands damp with chilly sweat. Her back is pressed to his, and she feels his muscles tense and release a few times. She knows that movement—it means he’s awake.
“You okay?” he asks in response, little more than a rumble from his chest.
She takes a moment to consider it. Is she? She turns over so she’s facing him and presses herself against his back before shaking her head.
“I dreamt about them again,” she whispers eventually. “The Legion.”
He doesn’t speak, but she can tell by his breathing he’s awake enough to listen.
“I was in that tent again, and Caesar—” here, she stops herself and says his name again, the way Boone does. Retraining herself to say See-sar instead of Kye-sar. “He said my name, my full name, said I was one of them, had his men…”
Boone’s voice comes out colder than he’d intended. “You can stop.”
“No. Arcade said I need to tell you about this stuff. Get it out of my head.”
And into mine, he thinks grimly. “Okay.”
“They tried to kill me this time, instead of the other stuff. But I woke up again, in Cottonwood Cove. And then I saw you, up on the ridge, and… you really did kill me. For good.”
His muscles tense again, and they don’t relax this time. He shuts his eyes and prays she doesn’t know he’d thought hard about it when he first saw her, bloodied and bruised and still fighting back in the heart of the Fort.
“If the others weren’t there, would you have?”
Shit. He opens his eyes again, and with a slow, measured exhale, he relaxes. “Yeah.”
She twines her arms around his chest. “I… I think I hoped you would, when I was there. But I’m happy you didn’t.”
He tries to say I’m sorry but it catches in his throat and comes out as a weakened grunt instead. He shrugs her away and sits up, rubbing a hand across his face, feeling the scrape of his wedding ring across his cheek. And then he turns and pulls his arms around her, lying down beside her again with her head tucked under his chin.
It’s more of a breath than anything. Still, he doesn’t answer it. Only tenses again—around her now, not against her—and closes his eyes.
Sometimes, she wishes he had shot her. But then she sees his face, sees the pity in it, and realizes he sometimes wishes he had, too. Tonight, they can agree they’re glad he didn’t. She just doesn’t know how long that’ll last.
47: I found you where I should have been looking in the first place.
Veronica catches him by the north gate and flags him down with a smile and a wild wave. “Kate went out,” she says after a hug so quick and tight it draws the breath from his lungs. “Gave us some caps and said the Strip was ours. We weren’t expecting you back for a while.”
“Job fell through,” he mutters. “She say where she was going?”
Veronica shrugs. “Not to me. She did tell me to lock up the suite if she wasn’t back by two, though.”
Boone checks his watch. 4:29.
With a clap on the shoulder and a chipper “Good luck!” Veronica walks toward the Lucky 38 and disappears inside.
So Boone looks in the Tops, and Kate isn’t there. He looks in the Ultra-Luxe, and Kate isn’t there. He looks in Gomorrah, and a nearly-nude man tells him with a purr that a girl “about that tall, brown hair, drunk as fuck and probably high” had staggered through that night.
He punches a wall on his way out. Just another bruise he’ll find in the morning. His other hand reaches for the bullet casing dangling next to his NCR tags—9 millimeter, one half of the scars on Kate’s forehead—and he curses quietly before shaking out his stinging fist.
A trio of drunken soldiers stumble down the sidewalk, laughing and slinging slurred insults at each other. One falls—the others leave her. He’s seen it too often. He’s been the one left behind, too… only he was sober enough to walk back to the monorail station. So boring, said the others. Go find someone else’s party to crash. It makes him think of the night he met Carla, and thinking of Carla makes him think of Kate, and he scowls at nobody but himself as he sighs and walks toward the Tops again.
Swank’s shift starts at midnight, so if Kate was there, he’d have seen her. So, as Boone stands at the desk of the Tops, he demands, “Has Katerina been here tonight?”
Swank says no. The Chairman beside him says yes, but she left. The cashier upstairs says no. The bartender says yes, and she was drunk when she came in, and she mentioned “the cannibal casino.”
So, as Boone stands at the desk of the Ultra-Luxe, he demands, “Has Katerina been here?”
Marjorie says yes. “She was with two men and another woman. They had a wonderful time at the blackjack table.”
Marjorie says no. When Boone asks the newly-appointed room manager, she says no, too.
So he goes back to the Tops. “Are you sure Katerina left?”
Everyone he asks says the same thing. “Yes.”
Once again finding himself in the heart of the Strip, thinking of Carla and thinking of Kate and thinking of why he isn’t enough to save either—one from the world, the other from herself—he looks at his watch again and finds it reading 5:11.
He shuts his eyes. He stands still and breathes, just for a moment, before turning toward the Lucky 38 and dragging his feet up the steps.
He remembers a Vegas proverb one of the other soldiers told him once. A hotel elevator goes slower if your bed is empty. And the Lucky 38’s elevator seems to barely move. When it finally reaches the presidential suite with a ding and a whirr, he finds a pair of shoes and a wine-stained sweater tossed on the floor.
He opens the door and sees Kate, curled up in a knot of blankets and too much skirt, clutching a stuffed dinosaur and mumbling something in her sleep. She frowns, her face wrinkles up, and she reaches out for someone who isn’t there.
He hasn’t even taken off both of his socks before he’s in bed behind her, arms tightly wound about her waist, face tucked against her neck. She barely stirs—just smiles into her pillow and hums with drowsy delight.
She smells like warmth and the bed and herself, not casinos or makeup or another man’s cologne. She snores, and he catches the alcohol on her breath, but her skin isn’t clammy and her mouth isn’t dry and the tracks on her arm are from years ago. She’s been here longer than he’s been searching for her, and her only vice tonight was wine.
He presses a kiss to her skin and brushes the pad of his thumb across her cheek. “I’m sorry,” he whispers, muffled against her shoulder. And softer still, barely a breath: I love you, Katerina.
“Mierda” is the Spanish equivalent of “bullshit.” To clarify, all these take place after the events of Fallout: New Vegas’s main storyline, siding with Mr. House.
