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It was an undeniable fact that the Mojave Wasteland was a harsh mistress. People died all the time, and finding corpses and skeletons and other human remains wasn’t anything new, but it still put a sick feeling in Gin’s stomach all the same.
Gin glanced back at Arcade, whose mind seemed to be wandering again. “Come on,” she encouraged him, hauling herself up over a boulder. “It looks like a cave. There might be some good stuff down in there.”
“I’m not made for this kind of thing,” Arcade pointed out. “Gin, I’m a doctor, not a mountain climber.” But she was already over the rock and out of sight. Arcade sighed and managed to pull himself up to the boulder that Gin had just disappeared to the other side of. “Well?” he called down into the darkness. “Did you find anything?”
“Bodies,” she called back solemnly. “Human. Night stalkers, if I had to guess.”
Arcade sighed, not bothering to ask what made her guess night stalkers. He didn’t really want her to describe the scene to him. “Come on, I’ll pull you up.”
“Wait, I found something,” her voice echoed out from the darkness, and the urgency in her tone worried Arcade.
“What is it?”
“It’s a… baby.”
“Oh, Gin,” Arcade murmured. Gin hated the idea of harm befalling children; she didn’t even like finding prewar toys. “I’m sorry.”
“No, Arcade,” she appeared at the bottom of the hole, looking up at the bespectacled doctor and holding a bundle in her arms. “It’s alive.”
Sure enough, though weak and malnourished, they found the baby just in time to save its life. They were lucky to meet some traders along the way back to camp, from which they purchased a few ingredients that Arcade could use to make baby formula. The Followers cared for enough abandoned chem-babies that they’d long since figured out how to synthesize a close approximation to human breast milk.
An hour later, Gin and Arcade (and li’l baby no-name) finally found their way back to camp, where their companions were waiting.
Cass was the first to notice their approach. “What is that?” she demanded tactlessly.
“A baby,” Gin answered coolly.
Cass scoffed, “Yeah, I can see that. Where did it come from?”
“Well, Arcade and I just decided to make it official and start a family.”
“Oh, ha-ha,” Cass mocked, throwing back the last of her moonshine.
Veronica stood and approached, peering at the infant curiously. “Seriously, though,” she said, “where did it come from?”
Gin stroked the sleeping baby’s dark cheek. “I found him in a cave. Parents had been half-eaten by night stalkers, but I guess they didn’t notice this little guy—or else they just figured he wasn’t worth their time.”
“Might be the luckiest person in Vegas,” Veronica grinned. “So what’s his name?” Gin shrugged and looked to Arcade, who put his hands up in surrender.
“Don’t look at me,” he said. “I didn’t find him.”
“You found him in a cave, right? So call him Cave,” suggested Cass unhelpfully.
Veronica shook her head, “That’s just cruel. Might as well call him Dead Parents.” To Gin, she said, “You seriously haven’t picked out any names for future children?”
“Well…” Gin bit her lip, “I do have one. Reid.”
The Brotherhood scribe shrugged, “Works for me. He actually looks a little like a Reid.”
***
The Lucky 38 Presidential Suite was filled with the wail of a very unhappy infant. As if Gin could sleep through the noise, Veronica jabbed her in the side.
“Make it stahp!” she whined tiredly.
Gin groaned and sat up on her side of the bet, blinking the sleep from her eyes. She only half registered the form that approached the crib in the dark and scooped the baby up, until it turned to her and whispered, “Go back to sleep, I’ll take care of him.”
The strawberry-blonde nodded mutely and was all too content to curl back under the covers beside Veronica who was already snoring lightly. In the morning, she would have a long think on the fact that Boone was taking to Reid better than any of them, but at that moment, she was too tired to do anything besides obey the sniper’s command to sleep.
***
They didn’t move in as large a pack anymore. There was always at least one person who stayed behind with Reid, though it was never Raul. The old ghoul insisted that it had been too long since he’d last held a baby and he’d probably end up hurting it, additionally he was sure his face would scare the niño. Conversely, Lily loved having a baby around, and she was surprisingly gentle with him. It was a sight to see Reid’s tiny body cupped carefully in Lily’s gigantic blue hands while she cooed at him in what was probably her gentlest voice.
Cass tolerated the baby, but when she’d had a few (dozen) drinks and Reid got cranky, she tended to get cranky right back. Loudly. After a few instances of this, the group silently decided that it was probably best the Cass had never seen fit to become a mother. Cal had a similar reaction to Reid, though admittedly with fewer borderline-violent drunken outbursts.
Arcade also kept his distance from Reid, but his reason for this seemed to live somewhere between Cass’ detestation of children and Raul’s weariness of them, though Gin wasn’t able to pin down exactly where Arcade fell on that spectrum. He kept an eye on Reid’s color and weight, made sure he was in good health, but otherwise left his care to the others. All he would say on the subject was that if he were a nurturer, he wouldn’t have been assigned as a researcher.
Veronica took to the “auntie” role as if she’d been born for it. She cared for Reid and played with him and loved him, but what separated her from the “mommy” role was the extent of how much she would let Reid’s needs come before her own. Aunties didn’t get up with babies in the middle of the night, mommies did—or that’s how Veronica had put it, anyway. Which was how Gin had ended up sitting alone in the Presidential Suite with Reid, while everyone else was off doing their own thing with the few days of downtime they had before most of them had to pack up and head out the meet with the Great Khans.
Well, almost alone. She glanced over at Boone, who was methodically taking his rifle apart and cleaning it and putting it back together, despite the fact that it had become redundant after the third time he’d repeated the exercise. It seemed if he wasn’t watching intently for danger, shooting at said danger, or sleeping, he didn’t know what to do with himself.
Though it made her uncomfortable to think about, she couldn’t help but dwell on the fact that Boone, despite his reticence and rough edges and general harshness, had been all too eager to step up to the plate and stand by her side in what would otherwise be a vacant parental role. Is shouldn’t have been so surprising, she knew; he’d been more than ready to take on the burden of fatherhood up until his family had been so cruelly ripped away from him. Boone only discussed Carla sparingly, when he felt pressured to provide Gin with an explanation for his behavior, but he’d never spoken a word about the child Carla had been carrying. If Gin hadn’t found that bill of sale, she might have never known.
She laid Reid on his back on the floor, and the baby babbled and laughed as she tickled his feet to keep herself occupied. The last time Boone had caught her giving him pitying glances, he’d rebuked her bitterly and stomped off to “scout the area.” She sighed and rolled Reid onto his tummy.
“Doesn’t look like he likes that,” Boone commented, startling Gin.
She shot a brief smile at Boone before turning her attention back to Reid, who was starting to fuss. “Whether he likes it or not, he has to be on his belly to help him build up his muscles so he can crawl,” she explained. She placed a toy car in front of Reid to distract him from his mounting tantrum.
Boone almost sounded amused when he asked, “How do you know that?”
“I read it in a book once,” she answered. She found herself being carried away by wistfulness for a moment, “A long time ago, when I thought I might be starting a family soon.” She was grateful when Boone didn’t ask her to elaborate, though it served as a reminder to her how he must have felt every time she pushed the issue of Carla. He didn’t want to think about his past any more than she wanted to think about hers. And yet, she was always there, prodding and probing and trying to figure out what made him tick.
It may have seemed malicious from his point of view, but Gin wanted only to help him like she did every other person that she came across. She’d helped Arcade and Raul let go of their pasts, helped Veronica leave the Brotherhood behind her, helped Cass avenge her ruined caravan, helped Dr. Henry with the Nightkins’ schizophrenia, given Rex a new brain and seen to ED-E’s upgrades, to say nothing of what she’d done outside the scope of her ragtag family.
Despite all this, though, she simply couldn’t help Boone. None of them could. Arcade couldn’t bandage his shattered soul, Raul and Veronica couldn’t get out their tools and build him a new one, and Cass and Cal’s only solutions were temporary at best (getting “shit-faced,” as the cowgirl put it) and suicidal at worst (running headfirst into Legion camps with little to no regard for their own welfares). Given this information, though, it wasn’t surprising that Cal had managed to make the most headway with Boone on a personal level, and Gin was envious of her brother for it.
The only relationship she could ever say she had with Boone was camaraderie in its loosest definition. That wasn’t to say that they had any negative feelings for one another, he simply had an absence of feeling towards her. The closest they came to anything more (anything even close to what a tiny part of Gin wished for, that is) was when they sat watch together every now and then, and the darkness and the closeness seeped into Boone’s cracks and he let himself forget for brief periods of time. In those fleeting moments, he shifted a little closer and his hand brushed hers, and she knew she was just a surrogate for a woman whose ghost still haunted him.
The silence had managed to span into awkward territory while she’d been busy with her thoughts, she realized too late. “Um, you could go out and have some fun if you wanted,” she offered.
Boone shook as his head as he stood from the couch and relocated to the floor beside her. He pulled the toy car from Reid’s mouth and picked him up when the theft upset him. “I’m fine here,” he told her, though his eyes never left the baby.
“Oh, okay,” she murmured. Watching Boone and Reid together made her feel like she was intruding on something private, like she was some unnatural thing trying to be a mother to a child that already had an adequate father and no need of her. Watching Boone’s serene face as he held this substitute for his child, it dawned on Gin that Reid was succeeding where the rest of them had failed: he was healing Boone’s battered heart with every smile and gurgle.
And, suddenly, being a stand-in didn’t seem so bad.
***
When he wasn’t expected to follow one or both of the Calhoun siblings across the Mojave, Arcade reported for duty with the Followers in the Old Mormon Fort. When asked why, he’d summed up his work ethic with a Latin phrase that none of his companions had bothered to remember, and set off for Freeside. That evening, he’d come back to the Lucky 38 an hour earlier than usual and found Gin in the rec room/playroom (“Are you going to fill every room with baby shit?” Cass complained, almost tripping over a pile of toys).
“I think I might have found someone willing to adopt Reid,” he said, foregoing even a greeting.
The word adopt sat like a stone in Gin’s stomach. Who had said she wanted to find someone to adopt him? If there had been a conversation on the topic, she most certainly hadn’t been present! How could he just go behind her back like that?
“Virginia,” he called her name sternly, reading the betrayal on her face. “The woman I found just lost her daughter, but she’s still able to nurse. He’d be healthier with real breast milk, and she says she’d be happy to take him in.”
“So you want me to just hand him over to,” she searched her mind for a fitting description, “to some Freeside junkie who can’t even take care of her own baby?”
Arcade frowned at her childishness, “She’s not a junkie. She helps out with the Followers from time to time, and the only reason her baby died was because it was born prematurely.”
Gin could already feel the tears welling up, “Is this why you would never get close to him?”
“You knew we couldn’t keep him,” he reasoned. “There’s a war going on, and we might all die horribly in it. If you want Reid to be happy and grow up in a stable home, she’s his best chance. And in the long term, we take back New Vegas, and his and every other person in Freeside’s life gets better.”
“But,” she sobbed, “I love him.”
Arcade sighed and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “I know you do,” he assuaged, “and she will too.”
“Will I at least get to visit him?”
“I’m sure she wouldn’t refuse if you asked her.”
***
Unsurprisingly, after Gin had been convinced, Boone was the most reluctant to let Reid go. Even the arguments that had made Gin agree to give him up did little to change Boone’s mind. What was surprising was what finally did change his mind. When he was told about the woman, Isabelle, and her baby who had been born the week before and died only a few short days later, he seemed to connect to the grief of this person he’d never met before. With a final look at Reid, as if he intended to burn the little one’s features into his mind, he nodded silently, and slunk off into the bedroom.
Veronica planted a kiss on Reid’s cheek and promised to visit him often and teach him how to use a pneumatic gauntlet when he got big enough. Lily stroked the downy hair on his head with one massive finger and encouraged him to be good or “Santa” would leave him a “lump of coal” (apparently she thought it was something called Christmas that week). It was Raul’s turn to say good-bye next, but the ghoul hung back.
“You don’t want to scare him with this face, do you, chica?”
Gin snorted, “If Lily doesn’t scare him, you won’t.”
Raul hesitated, but stepped forward and held a knobby finger toward Reid, who grasped it without pause. The old ghoul’s face shifted into something akin to a grin and he muttered something in Spanish to Reid before stepping away. “Until next time, niño,” he said and slipped away into the rec room.
“See ya, you little shit,” Cal murmured affectionately, pinching Reid’s cheek and causing Gin to scold him. The ex-soldier laughed as he followed Raul’s lead and vacated the entry hall, leaving only Cass to say her farewells if she so chose to.
The Whiskey Rose sighed, looking down into Reid’s big, curious brown eyes. “We never really got the chance to get to know each other that well, huh?” she asked him rhetorically. “Mom tried to teach me how to be gentle-like, but I guess I’m just not cut out for that sort of thing. Anyway, maybe when you’re a little older, I’ll know how to handle you.” Her mouth curled into a wry smile, “Not that I’ll probably be seeing you much in the future. Trust me, you’ll be better off for it.” She tilted her head at Arcade and Gin and also decided to make herself scarce.
With all of Reid’s things packed and sendoffs out of the way, Gin and Arcade took the elevator down to the desolate casino before leaving the Lucky 38 altogether in the early evening before the nighttime rush overtook the Strip. The walk through Freeside was silent; Arcade had nothing of value to say and Gin was lost in her muddy thoughts. This was for the best, she told herself. She wasn’t prepared for parenthood and even if she was, the Legion and the NCR and House all had to be dealt with before she had time for such things. Maybe once it was all over, she’d settle down and have a few kids of her own. Maybe by then a certain sniper would be ready for that too. Or maybe she’d meet some fast-talking man with roguish good looks who could love her without a dead wife heavy on his conscience.
Isabelle was waiting outside Old Mormon Fort when Gin and Arcade approached, and Gin felt the lingering unease fade away when the woman with a mother’s smile took the baby into her arms.
Gin waved at the woman’s retreating back until she and Reid disappeared around the corner of a building, and her heart clenched with conflicting emotions. She was happy that Reid and Isabelle had each other, and she truly believed each was exactly what the other needed, but at the same time, she had the overwhelming pain of loss clamped tight in her throat.
Arcade put a hand on her shoulder. “You did the right thing,” he assured her.
“It still hurts,” she told him.
“Doing the right thing usually does.”