If I Had a Heart
(Been sitting on this post-FNV Lucy/Ulysses oneshot for a year and a half. It’s about time I posted the damn thing)
Lucy Decker leaned against the rocky wall of the trail, arms crossed, one booted foot propping her in place. Her hazel eyes focused on the man sitting several feet away. His back was to her while he worked and the wind coming off the Divide tugged at his dark braids.
It'd been three years since the battle at Hoover Dam. Three years since she'd bested the might of both the Legion and the NCR, finally taking the Dam, New Vegas, and the Mojave at large for herself. But that hadn't been the end of things, no. Nothing in her life ever ended so easily.
The first time she returned to the Divide had only been two months after the battle. She'd found him up on the cliff's edge overlooking the Divide. He'd tensed as she approached, and she guessed that he hadn't expected her to come back. Still, he hadn't said a word as she sat herself down next to him, just listened as she recounted what went down at the Dam. Lanius, General Oliver. The aftermath.
"Not what you expected," he'd said after a stretch of silence so long she thought it might go on forever. It wasn't a question. He knew.
Still, Lucy hadn't been able to help but reply, "Never is."
Since then she'd found her way back to the Divide countless times. When she could spare a moment. Or when she needed one. Honestly, she needed one a lot. Power was what she'd been gunning for, going in. More power than some poor girl whose only home was the dusty road could've ever dreamed of. Power didn't come so easy, though. Once you had something, you had to fight tooth and nail for it, lest it slip from between your fingers once more. Lucy knew that particular lesson all too well. She'd lived it so many times. And, as they said, uneasy lay the head that wore the crown. So she kept coming back to that canyon, to his cliff-top, again and again and again. Just for a bit of perspective.
Somewhere along the line Ulysses stopped referring to her as "Courier" to her face. She was "Decker" now, the dual syllables often spoken as a curt acknowledgment of her presence. But not Lucy. Never Lucy. Not once in the three years she'd known him as more than the ghost lurking over her shoulder had she heard him say it. Got a good look at him without that mask of his on occasion -- another thing she'd also thought impossible -- but never that. Shame. Would've been something to hear it said in that voice of his.
"I'm still not so sure this is a good idea," she called, the words carrying despite the wind.
Ulysses was preparing for a foray down into "The Courier's Mile," that patch of Hopeville they'd blown to hell with the Ashton missile. An irradiated deathtrap filled with the worst sorts of marked men and deathclaws. Lucy'd thought the name was pretentious from the first time she'd heard him say it. The Courier's Mile? Really? Then again, this was Ulysses they were talking about. Despite his grim nature, the man had a flair for the dramatic to rival her own. Besides, she hadn't been able to think of a better name, so it'd stuck.
"Never asked for your help, Decker," Ulysses replied as he shot her a brief glance over his shoulder. "Could stay behind."
She snorted. "And let you have all the fun without me? Not a chance. Besides, the Mile's just as much my fault as yours. You aren't the only one who should be going down there."
Lucy already knew the "Why of it," as he would put it, for his trips down there. The marked men in the Mile were getting antsy. He couldn't risk letting them make a break for the Mojave. And, frankly, neither could she. There was too much riding on it staying intact.
Pulling her rifle off her back, Lucy double-checked the stabilizer. The last thing she needed while she was down there was an inopportune tremor ruining a shot on a deathclaw. While she worked, she kept talking.
"Brought some stims and Med-X if the sonsabitches decide to get a little too friendly. Rad-X, too. Better pop some before we head in there. Don't want to glow in the dark by the time we get out."
Ulysses made a noncommittal noise in response. He was checking over his anti-materiel rifle now. Good. They'd need something that packed that kind of a punch with those damned deathclaws lurking about. She propped her own rifle against the face of the cliff behind her.
"Found some .50 MGs on the walk over, by the way. I figured you might be running low," she said, tossing a clip in his direction. He caught it and loaded it into his rifle in one fluid motion.
Evidently satisfied, he slung the rifle across his back. Grabbing the battered old flagpole he used as a weapon from its place on the rocks beside him, he used it to push himself to his feet.
"You good?" Lucy asked once he was standing, quirking an eyebrow.
He nodded. "Time to go."
"Right. One second."
Holding a tie in her teeth, Lucy gathered her chin-length blonde curls as best she could before pulling them back into a short, ragged ponytail. With that finished, she snapped her goggles into place, pulled a mask much like his own over her mouth, and picked up her rifle. Then she gave him a thumbs-up.
Together, they headed down through the silo bunker toward the canyon floor, passing the bodies of old marked men and destroyed heaps of bot parts. Reaching the end, they stepped out into the ruins of Hopeville. The wind was stronger there than it was from the cliffs. It howled in Lucy's ears and whipped dust around her face as they headed to the right, circling the edge of the destroyed buildings. Their path curved up around the rocks and onto a destroyed stretch of road. Upturned, rusted vehicles littered the cracked pavement. They picked their way around them and stopped at the top of the hill overlooking to the Mile.
It appeared just as it had the several other times she'd ventured down into it since the missile hit. Massive chunks of broken metal and cement were strewn about, shaping the ragged landscape. The air had a faint misty quality to it, hovering as a sick cloud over the destruction. Reaching into her bag, Lucy pulled out her bottle of Rad-X. She cracked the lid and poured the pills inside out onto her gloved palm. Moving her mask aside, she popped a couple into her mouth. Then she nudged Ulysses and held out the remaining couple to him. He took them from her in silence.
They both stood on the hilltop for a few moments, waiting for the effects of the pills to kick in. Peering through her binoculars, Lucy examined the ruins for any sign of their quarry. There was no movement as far as she could see.
In an undertone, she told Ulysses, "No sign of them yet."
"Further in," he replied. She lowered her binoculars again with a nod.
They began to pick their way through the Mile. When he gestured to one of the crumbling towers, halfway sunken into the ground, she silently followed him toward it. The two of them climbed up over the broken bits of concrete scattered around it to reach the upper floors, careful not to shift any of the rubble as they did. Even the slightest noise could alert the residents of the Mile to their presence and ruin the element of surprise they were relying on.
Reaching the top, they both crouched down on either side of one of the empty windows. Ulysses pulled his AMR off his back and got into position. For a long time, he silently watched the ruins through the scope.
"Fifteen marked men," he finally muttered. "Legionnaire leading. No deathclaws."
"What's he using?" Lucy asked.
"Gatling."
She sucked a breath in through her teeth. A marked man wielding a Gatling laser was the last thing they needed at the moment. He was going to be their primary target, then. Lucy readied her rifle and waited. She watched as Ulysses clicked the safety off on his own and took aim. The still silence was broken by a sharp crack as he fired. Peering around the edge of the window, Lucy saw what was left of the marked man in question crumple, his head little more than red paste. One down, thank god. Then the others all turned in their direction. Lucy picked off another of them, then another, but the rest were coming up on them too fast.
"Time to move," she said.
They scrambled back down the ruined tower to put some distance between them and the swarm of marked men. Bullets whizzed overhead or struck the concrete around the two of them. Sooner or later they'd hit what they were aiming for. Cover was scarce at the moment, so the ghouls needed to be stopped. Fast. Fishing a grenade out of her jacket, Lucy pulled the pin and looked at her companion.
"Ulysses!"
He turned at her shout and she tossed the grenade in his direction. With a solid swing, he hit it with Old Glory, knocking it straight into center of the group of marked men. It exploded, splattering bloody chunks of the flayed soldiers all over the nearby crumbling walls and kicking up a massive cloud of dust.
Lucy grinned at him from behind her mask. "Nice hit!"
Ulysses said nothing, but she thought she saw one scarred eyebrow quirk a little.
Any further celebration was cut short by a loud clanking from behind them. Through the settling dust came another marked man, carrying the Gatling laser. He must've picked it up off his dead comrade. The barrel was aimed right for them. Lucy saw the thing whir to life and felt her blood run cold. She took a couple steps backward. Almost unconsciously, she reached out for Ulysses. Her fingers barely brushed against the edge of his duster before the gun went off.
All Lucy could hear was the scream and the rat-a-tat as the lasers fired. She wasn't sure where the strength came from -- adrenaline, the remnants of those implants from the Big Empty, or some combination of both -- but she grasped Ulysses' coat and yanked him down to the dirt with her, out of the path of the beams. When she hit the ground, it was hard enough to knock the wind out of her. Her head swam. Her right leg was practically screaming. Gasping, she rolled over to assess the damage.
She hadn't been fast enough. One of the beams had hit her thigh, tearing through the leg of her jeans and taking a solid chunk out of her flesh. Worse still was the big hole she saw singed into the front of Ulysses' threadbare shirt. Past that, burned flesh and a gaping wound. She heard a muffled grunt of pain from behind his mask.
"Shit," Lucy gasped, wiping at her dusty goggles to get a better look. "Shit."
There wasn't much blood; the laser'd cauterized it almost instantly. Beyond that it was hard to get a read on how much damage it'd done. How far had the shot made it in? All the way through? Was that bone? She'd seen guns like that take out full-grown deathclaws. The fact that he was still breathing at all was a fucking miracle.
The Gatling laser shrieked to life again and she had to duck to avoid the renewed shots. A quick look back over her shoulder told Lucy the marked man was still coming up on them. Slow, to keep firing the Gatling, but steady nonetheless. Her first instinct was to bolt. Jam a stim into herself and hope her leg didn't slow her down as bad as she thought it might. If she was lucky, she'd get to cover before the ghoul reached her, then pick her way through the ruins and out of the Mile. There was enough of a head-start to make it if she didn't outright collapse on the way. A sharp intake of breath turned her attention back to the man beneath her. Behind the breathing mask his face looked ashen. Ulysses might be dying, and he would definitely die if she left him now. The thought set a raw, gnawing ache tearing at her insides.
Damn him.
She looked back over her shoulder again. The marked man was too close now for her rifle. She pulled Maria from the holster at her hip and fired twice at the ghoul. A spray of red blossomed from the back of his head as her shots impacted and he crumpled to the dirt. With the immediate danger out of the way, she pulled a stimpak out of an inner pocket of her jacket and jabbed it into Ulysses' arm. She heard the familiar hiss as it injected.
From somewhere in the ruins around them came a series of low, garbled growls. More marked men, by the sound of it.
"Not now," she muttered. Slinging her companion's arm across her shoulders, she looked around for a bit of shelter from the impending attack. "Like I said before, I've got some Med-X if you want it, but we've got to get to cover first. I -- Ulysses?"
Something was wrong. His grip on her was much too weak and, despite what appeared to be his best efforts, he was losing the fight to stay conscious. His head thumped against her shoulder, and his skin felt cold against hers. Her breath caught in her throat. The stim hadn't worked. They were still deep in the Mile, and the nearest auto-doc was in the Hopeville Missile Base. There was no way she'd be able to get him out of there and fight off the marked men that'd be on them at any second. Not with him barely conscious and her busted leg. At the rate he was fading, Ulysses would be gone in minutes, and there wasn't a single goddamn thing she could do about it. Unless...
Frantically rummaging around in her bag with her free hand, Lucy pulled out the Transportalponder. She stared uneasily at the device in her hands, blue and crackling with energy. Trying to use it this far from the Big Empty, and with this much interference from the radiation? It was a long shot at best. All she could do was hope for a miracle.
She adjusted her grip on Ulysses, wrapping arm around his back and clenching a fistful of his duster to pull him tight against her side. Aiming the device at the sky, she fired.
Currents of electricity hissed and snapped around her, and she held tight to the man next to her. For a second everything was static. When her vision finally cleared, they were both sprawled on the balcony of the Sink. Staggering halfway up to her feet again, and stumbling when she put weight on her injured leg, Lucy headed for the door. It hissed open at her approach and she pulled him through.
"Sir?" the Central Intelligence Unit called over to her as soon as they'd passed the threshold. "Is everything all right, sir?"
Lucy didn't answer. There wasn't time. Her feet slid on the smooth floor, slipping out from underneath her, and she sat down hard. Wincing, she crawled back over to where Ulysses had fallen. With a start, she saw that his eyes were closed now.
"No, no, no, no, no." She fumbled with his breathing mask, trying to get it off. Her left hand was shaking so bad it was all she could do to try and get a grip on the thing. "Shit. Come on!"
Lucy finally got the straps undone and she cast the mask aside, sending it skittering across the floor. The other personalities that made up the Sink babbled at her in the background. Voices of confusion and concern. She ignored them. Ulysses wasn't breathing.
"You son of a bitch, we're five feet away!" she shouted at him. Grabbing the back of his duster again and gritting her teeth, she continued to drag him across the room. "Doc, incoming!"
"Get him in here," the auto-doc told her as its door opened.
When she finally reached the other side of the room she practically ripped off his duster and what was left of his shirt before shoving him into the machine. Once he was inside, the door slid shut again, blocking him from view. A second later she heard the muffled but distinct sounds of the tools whirring to life.
Silence. It was all Lucy could do to just sit there, gulping in deep breaths while blood pounded in her ears. Her leg gave a horrific twinge. Gritting her teeth, she took another stim from her jacket and stabbed the needle into her thigh. That'd have to do until Doc could look her over, too.
She then yanked off her goggles and her own breathing mask, casting them aside. Her eyes stung. When she touched her face, her fingers came away wet. Fuck, she was crying. Why was she crying?
"Ma'am?"
She looked up at the machine. "Talk to me, Doc."
"Well, I got him breathing again and most of the damage can be patched up, but there's a problem." It paused before explaining, "The wound -- laser-made, by the looks of it -- it goes right through the sternum. Punched a hole in his heart that I can't fix. And with the Think Tank gone I've got no more replacements. I can keep him going for a little longer, but..."
It didn't need to finish. Lucy already knew.
She lurched to her feet again and started pacing, even when her leg screamed in protest. Back and forth, back and forth, with short, unsteady steps. Her hands tangled up in her curls almost by themselves. She wanted to break something. Instead, she slammed her fist against the wall before slumping against it and closing her eyes.
Three years since she'd first tracked him down to the end of that canyon, three years of heading back into that death trap again and again just to see him, only for him to die because she'd been a second too slow to pull him out of the line of fire? Pathetic. Absolutely pathetic. And what about Doc? It could rip her own heart out on Dala's command and shove it back in again, but it couldn't fix this?
Her eyes snapped open. That was it.
"Use mine," she whispered.
"What was that?" Doc asked her.
"Use mine." She spun on her heel and ran back over to the auto-doc. Reaching the terminal on the side, she began frantically searching through the options. "The tech implant my heart was replaced with when I first got here. I know you've still got it, so use it!" She'd kept it in the back of her head as a "just in case." Well, now she needed it. Finding the right selection, she punched it in.
"It might not work."
"Try," she begged, and she took a step back from the machine. The voice sighed, but seemed to relent. There were a thousand ways this could go wrong. She knew that. But the alternative was even worse.
For a long time, the only sounds came from the auto-doc. The dull hum of the sensors, the metallic buzz of a saw. Lucy stood there, watching, waiting, her clenched fist pressed against her mouth. She barely dared to breathe. Even the other personalities had gone quiet for once. Finally, the door slid open with a sharp hiss.
Ulysses sat slumped down on the floor of the auto-doc. His head lolled to the side, temple pressed against the inner wall of the metal tube, eyes closed. A long red gash ran vertically down the middle of his chest, marred by the round, puckered mark from the laser. Lucy could see they were both already partially healed from stim injections. It'd leave one hell of a scar. She would know.
Crouching down in front of him and holding her breath, she checked his neck for a pulse. There it was, beating steady under her fingertips. She let out the breath as one long, shaky sigh. For now, at least, the transplant worked.
His eyes half-opened then and he looked up at her. His voice wasn't much more than a hoarse rasp as he said, "Decker..."
"You're not checking out on me just yet," she murmured. On instinct, she pressed her lips against his forehead. When she looked down at him again his eyes were closed, but his breathing was steady.
Leaning back, she shouted, "Muggy!"
The miniature securitron rolled in from the other room. Despite his display not changing from its usual image of a cheerful cartoon coffee mug, he started in a snide voice, "I don't know what you expect me to do--"
"You're the only one in here besides me who can move, so you're the only one who can actually help," she said, slinging one of Ulysses' arms over her shoulders. "So help."
Lucy wasn't sure how long it'd been since she last slept. She dug the heels of her palms into her eyes, further smudging whatever remnants were left of her makeup. Not that that really mattered at the moment.
Together, she and Muggy had managed to get Ulysses from the AutoDoc into the Sink's bedroom and lay him down. She was currently sitting on the metal crate by the wall, chin resting in her hands, keeping an eye on him. He had yet to wake up, but at least he was still alive. That thought in and of itself unsettled her. The amount she'd come to rely on him over the past couple of years... frankly, it was terrifying. Sooner or later, that man would be the death of her. She was sure of it.
With a sigh, Lucy got to her feet. Her leg wobbled a little, but she figured she was steady enough to walk a couple feet to the balcony and get some air. It wasn't like she planned to go fight a deathclaw or anything.
Stretching, she said, "Muggy, watch him, would you?"
"Sure," the robot grumbled from the other side of the room. "Not like this is keeping me from my real job or anything."
"You can go back to that once there isn't a man half-dead in here. Let me know if anything changes."
He continued to mutter half-hearted threats as she walked through the Sink's main room and out onto the balcony. Most of the Big Empty was dark and indiscernible on the other side of the shimmering blue forcefield. The only other point of light was the Forbidden Zone, its distant red glow shining like a beacon in the crater's gloom. Lucy leaned against a nearby metal post holding up the balcony roof and checked the time on her Pip-boy.
4:15 am
She tipped her head back and squeezed her eyes shut. It was a godforsaken hour, and her head was just about swimming, but she finally had the time to breathe. To think. Probably too much time, knowing her.
House rotted in his crypt, the Legion was headless and bleeding out somewhere east, and the NCR was too busy licking its wounds to do much for the time being. New Vegas was hers. The Mojave was hers, but it wasn't enough. It was never enough. She always felt like she was still reaching for something. For a shadow, maybe. For a ghost. For a man, half-dead and comatose in her bed of all places. Alive because a heart that'd once been hers now beat in his chest.
Lucy's eyes snapped open as the door to the Sink let out several loud clanks. Looking over, she saw Ulysses standing in the doorway. Though he'd pulled his duster back on, his shirt was still gone. It'd been so burned up by the Gatling laser that she couldn't exactly blame him. The incision scar on his chest looked better than it had when Doc had finished with him, but not by much. Behind him, she could see Muggy trying to squeeze past his legs.
"You said to come tell you if anything changed," the robot called to her. "This enough for you?"
"Muggy, go back inside," Lucy said. Her eyes never left Ulysses.
"I told him to stop, but no. Nobody ever listens to poor Muggy. Why would they?"
"Muggy."
The little securitron stopped ranting. He shot a quick look between the two of them before turning and rolling back into the Sink, mumbling, "Yeah, okay. Back inside I go."
The door clanked shut again behind him, leaving Lucy and Ulysses standing alone on the balcony. For a while there was only silence as they watched each other.
"You shouldn't be out here," Lucy eventually told him, if for no other reason than to break the quiet. "You've still got a ways to go before your chest heals over."
"Got questions."
"I bet you do, but they can wait until you're--"
"Saved my life," Ulysses said, cutting her off. "Why?"
She looked away and licked her chapped, dry lips, which only made them sting. The lipstick coating them was almost gone. Worn away like so much else back in that canyon. What could she even tell him?
"'Cause I can still see the edge, I guess," she whispered, as she stared out across the darkness of the Big Empty. Ulysses stayed silent, but she hadn't expected him to say anything. That's just the way it was with him. All or nothing, thunder or dead quiet. Shaking her head, she said in a louder voice, "Since you pretty much saved my life, I figured I'd return the favor."
He didn't respond for a long time, long enough that Lucy almost thought he wouldn't at all. Then, "Never asked for your help."
She rolled her eyes and let out a small snort of laughter. "You've said that already. Look, if you want me to just zap you back to the Mojave right now, fine. You're still pretty busted up, but it's your choice. I can't stop you and, frankly, I don't really care at this point."
"You're lying."
Lucy was taken aback by his abrupt reply. She stared at him, dumbfounded. "Excuse me?"
"You care, Decker," he told her, his voice full of far too much conviction for a man who'd just been at death's door. "Could've run. Would've, it was anyone else. Know that much about you by now. But you stayed, risked death in the Courier's Mile even when you had an escape. Something more than debt kept you."
Lucy felt something in her chest give a tight squeeze and quickly turned her eyes away again. There were footsteps across the metal floor of the balcony as he walked over to her. She didn't look at him. Hell, she wasn't sure if she even could. It wasn't until he spoke again that she realized just how close he'd come.
"And in that machine... you kissed me. Can't help but wonder what that means."
Shit. She'd hoped he'd been too out on Med-X to remember that.
"It didn't mean anything," she retorted with a harsh laugh. "I've kissed a lot of men, Ulysses, and plenty of women, too. You weren't the first, and you sure as hell won't be the last."
She could still feel his eyes on her, boring a hole into the side of her head, but she kept her own resolutely fixed on the black sky in the distance. No, it hadn't meant anything. It never did. So why did those words sound hollow, even to her?
"It was different. You know it, too."
Lucy closed her eyes. Different, he said. He'd always been different. Benny -- who should've had a fucking army ready when she came for him -- barely thought twice about being within arm's reach of her once she'd batted her lashes at him. Elijah'd thought he could toy with her like she was some puppet whose strings he could pull. Dean had, too, in his own way. He should've realized something was wrong when he waltzed into Vegas and she was already there, waiting for him. The Think Tank let her have free run of the Big Empty to do their dirty work, never once thinking she might find a loophole and come back for them. Every one of them underestimated her, and every one of them paid for that mistake in their own fashion.
But not Ulysses. He'd known exactly what she was capable of from the start, had been ready for it. He saw right through her. Lucy was sure he was seeing through her then, too.
When she woke up in Goodsprings, alive and angry, she'd been standing near some sort of metaphorical cliff. By the time she followed Ulysses' transmission into the canyon, she hadn't just been walking toward it. No, she'd been running, ready to throw herself off the edge and take anyone else she could manage down with her. She'd wanted revenge on the man who shot her. She'd wanted power when it got offered up. Not once was she able to see past all the blood in her eyes. Then she saw the Divide. Everything she'd loved had been destroyed in that blast. Being there again woke her up, showed her exactly what would happen if she kept going down that road. Now Ulysses kept her off it. Had been keeping her off it for the past three years. She needed him.
But that wasn't it, though, was it? The reason. The why of it all. Not if she was being honest with herself, which was getting so much harder to do. This wasn't about need so much as want.
Did she want him? Oh yes, she did. She wanted the way he made her feel. Longed for it. There was a comfort in his quiet she'd never known from anyone else. And, if she was being really honest, she'd wanted him since that first fleeting glimpse of him back before the Divide went to hell. A glimpse that'd almost made her hesitate. Almost kept her from going to the NCR to bring back the package that doomed the home they'd unknowingly shared.
She hadn't stopped then, but she'd managed to find her way back to him anyhow.
Lucy shook her head once to snap herself out of it. What was she thinking? She couldn't be having this conversation. Not there. Not with him.
"You know what?" she snapped as she put up her hands. "Fine. If you won't go inside, I will."
She started to push past him, heading for the Sink's door. Her head buzzed. Her heart pounded. Going outside had been a mistake after all. Frankly, she'd rather fight a deathclaw -- or, hell, why not seven of them? -- than face whatever this was turning into.
"Lucy."
That made her stop. She lurched to a halt and stood there, frozen. When she tried to swallow, her her throat felt tight. Slowly, she turned back to face him. Ulysses' dark eyes were still on her, unblinking and far too focused. Lucy could only imagine what she looked like at the moment. Dark circles beneath her hazel eyes, lipstick rubbed to practically nothing, blonde curls hanging around her face in tangles. The Divide always knew how to unmake her, strip down her pretty defenses to the raw places that lay underneath. Or maybe that was just him. Either way, whatever he was seeing right then, it wasn't what the rest of the Mojave did.
"Means light," he went on. He seemed to be mulling over the words as he spoke, considering them. "Suits you."
A small frown tugged at her mouth. She took a few slow steps toward him and asked, "Why's that?"
"Lights can blind. Told you, once."
Lucy's frown deepened into a scowl. If he was just going to berate her again -- for Vegas or her methods or whatever else he could think of -- she wasn't exactly in the mood at the moment. But he wasn't finished.
"Lights can also make you see," he told her. "Made me see. Took a long time to realize anger wasn't meant to be the answer -- not yours, not mine. More than that, too. Tried for years to understand, and only now begin to grasp the why of it. Spent too long chasing each other for all this to mean nothing."
It finally dawned on her that this wasn't an accusation. It was a confession.
"You're a hard woman. Hard to kill. Hard to love." He went quiet again. Then he brushed the loose curls away from her forehead. His fingers traced the scar that ran along her hairline and the puckered spot beneath it where Benny'd put a nine-millimeter into her skull. In a solemn voice, he added, "Might try."
"Which one?" Lucy asked, feeling breathless.
"There a difference?"
The soft edge of a laugh escaped her. Ulysses' fingertips hadn't yet left her face, she'd noticed. Instead they traveled down her jaw to curl beneath her chin. She got the feeling that he was holding back, waiting, but when had she ever been one to hesitate?
Lucy grabbed the edges of his duster to pull him toward her and rose up onto tiptoe to kiss him. Even stretched out to her full height, it was barely enough. Their lips barely brushed. That is, until he gripped her thighs and hoisted her up into his arms, silencing her surprised gasp against his mouth. His lips were chapped, but still. Still. He kissed her with enough hunger, enough fire, that it threatened to burn her from the inside out. And she was more than ready to let it. She wrapped her legs around his waist and reached up to hold his face between her hands. Her fingers scraped against the stubble along his jaw.
Was this what she'd been reaching for all this time? The end of the road, the center of the spiral, the point of collision. A light. A ghost. Two sides of the same goddamn coin, too caught up in their own trappings to face reality. A pair of Couriers with too much history to burn or to bury.
"Didn't walk through ash and hell to lose you now," Ulysses murmured. His words held the rough edge of a promise. Lucy knew he was big on those.
So she didn't mean it lightly when she answered back with, "Good luck getting rid of me."
She felt his heartbeat thundering in his chest. A heart that'd once been hers. Figuratively, literally... didn't really matter. He'd stolen it from her, sure as hell, too long ago now to be certain of when it happened. Too quietly for her to notice it even happened at all. That fact alone surprised her.
The bigger surprise was that she didn't care. Not if it was him.