Fallout: New Vegas - Female Courier/Joshua Graham
What’s it gonna take to make her walk away from Zion?
This work is explicit. Full chapter on AO3.
Joshua walked out of the cave with her pack. It was light, easy to strap on over her flannel shirt and set on her back. He had nothing but his holstered gun and a dark stare. He wanted to walk with her, he said, as long as he could.
She wouldn't stop him, though it might have been wiser.
They hiked with the map, though he seemed to know the way well enough. It was a low, rocky trek south around the biggest boulders. The canyon bottomed out and widened ever further, so the mountains were green hills, and the Virgin was shallow and quiet.
They were quiet, too. He would set a warm hand upon her back, dust his fingers across her neck when they stopped for water. Oh, how she wanted to hold him. Drop to the ground right there at the river basin and make a new home wherever they fell. Down among the mossy rocks. Down among the summer flowers.
They kept walking. She half-dreamed he wouldn't stop, and wherever she went he'd be beside her, around to the Long 15. Beside her clipping into Legion Arizona. Beside her cutting through the Nevada desert.
But they reached a point where the path ahead was obvious—flat and brown and wide and westward. All the green was behind them, in the canyon valley. All the life and things she'd come to know.
She turned to him. He blinked at her. Like a cat.
She said what she'd never said aloud to him. "You could come with me. Start over new."
The cat eyes grew tense. Worried. "I've started over twice already. I cannot come. For so many reasons."