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She is not strong or fast, she never has been.
But she crests the hill with the body in her arms like a man possessed. If she was any more aware of her body, she’d feel the trembling in her biceps, the numbness of her fingers, but she does not. Each step is like a roll of thunder across the Mojave, abrupt and powerful, and to no point.
Because it doesn’t rain in the Mojave.
She doesn’t know where she’s going, but the limp, clammy corpse she’s pulling along is not getting left behind. Not again. She already failed him once.
Her fingers, calloused and red, tighten reflexive against the body’s skin, squeezing an arm, a side, whichever part of him it is she’s grasping now. All she can feel when she breathes is the stark dryness in the back of her throat, the way her eyes sting from the sand on the wind.
She’d cried at first, when he’d been shot right in front of her, but there was no time for that now, no reason. He’s dead. It’s too late.
She couldn’t leave him back there, couldn’t leave him in legion territory with his gun and his regrets, nor could she stand the thought of dragging him off to some end of the desert and burying him.
He deserves to go home.
There’s honor in that, at least. He’d died defending her and himself, he’d died fighting the legion, like he always wanted. She finds some twisted humor in that, at least, twisted like gnarled roots of Joshua trees and like her own insides, all distorted and warped.
He’d always wanted to die and now he has. She laughs, but there is no sound, just a strong exhale from her lungs when her foot meets sand again, and for a moment she thinks about how welcomingly soft it would be to lie down in the sand and let it consume her, let it bury him itself.
But she keeps walking.
She walks until there are glittering lights on the horizon and the sun has set. She falls, twice, her knees buckle and her shoulders sag, she drops to the solid ground beneath her. And then she stands, she grapples with carefully repositioning the corpse of her companion in her arms, and then she moves onward.
The lights grow into defined shapes and the night grows darker and more clear. The strip is lit up like it is most every night, noise emanates from the gates, but she walks right by. Staying out of sight. She isn’t sure if anyone else is concerned about her whereabouts, and she’s certainly sure she doesn’t care if they are.
There was no one more important than him.
She doesn’t think again until she reaches black mountain. And by then, the sun is peeking just a hair above the horizon line. She’s thinking, now, that she is dead as well. No person could drag themselves this far from the mountains, carrying a body, for this long. She thinks about what that entails.
But she isn’t dead because her legs feel as though someone’s been grinding her against sandpaper and her eyes are sticking to her lids. Her canteen ran dry hours ago, but now, at least, it’s cold and there is no breeze to dry her out. She trips again, at Black Mountain, and for a moment, she lies there, considers dying and death, considers never standing up again, like she has every time she’s fallen or stumbled. Not just today, but her whole life.
She has always considered giving up, but she never has. Just like him.
She can’t help the wavering, manic smile that splits her face as she lies nose-against the ground. His body lies next to her and she meets his face with her eyes. It’s still him. There is blood around his nose and mouth and he is stiff and rigid and there is no life left in his features, no subtle twitch of lip or brow, but he is still him.
He was like that too, considered death every day since his wife died. Probably before that, too. He never seemed a happy man. But he had been happy before, sometimes. When he would roll his eyes at her or clam up at a joke she told. He was surprisingly witty, when it was just them.
His comebacks and oneliners were simple and effective, and she thinks, for the life of her, no one man should be that simple and that complex all in the same measured beat. And he was, simple, for her, anyways.
He didn’t make things hard for her, only his own conscience. Over time he’d divulged the truths of his past to her and she’d met him half way with an open mind and arms. There was still so much she never told him about herself.
“Meant to tell you,” she drawls, limp against sand and rocks and dirt, staring a dead man in the face, “Somethin’ about myself… I never could read.”
He doesn’t respond and she starts to shake. Gooseflesh ripples across her skin, the rocks under her form are digging into her skin and chill seeps into her bones. The Mojave isn’t a forgiving place.
“Pa never taught me, wasn’t important.”
She’d failed her pa, too. The legion had gotten him, too. And maybe she should just stop associating with men, stop loving people altogether because this always happens.
She had never learned to read, but she woke up in Doc Mitchell’s cot and turned her head and read the spine of “ Cranial Surgery: Volume 11” like it was no big thing. Then she’d grabbed the book herself and when she read it, she understood. She still hasn’t had a chance to try cranial surgery yet.
Boone knew all of that, though. How she’d woken up smarter than she’d died. How she’d woken up with blank spaces in her brain instead of mush and began to soak them in with any knowledge she could find. How she could walk into Helios one and fix their solar panels without knowing how or why she knew exactly what the issue was. He just didn’t know how slow she’d been to begin with. He'd probably just assumed she was some sort of prodigy.
It would’ve been hard to keep her newfound intellect hidden from him if she’d even wanted to. Too difficult to hide that sort of thing from someone who you spend every day and night of your life with, who travels with you, protects you, befriends you despite their steely, unfeeling demeanor.
Since she’s become the Mojave’s #1 handyman-scientist-doctor-physicist, she thinks, mostly, she's just a performer.
Doing things to get people to look or to listen. And to what end? So she could let Benny escape because, by the time she got there, she had no malice left? So she could tell House to fuck off, rend Ceasers head off with a sword of flames?
It all amounted to nothing anyways.
She picks herself up again and drags him past black mountain and the super mutants are either feeling quite respectful, or just don’t notice her, because she makes her way by peacefully and quietly. She finds herself easily able to shake the rock in her gut and the hook in her heart because it doesn’t matter if nothing matters, it’s too late.
That’s always been her escape from reality, from responsibility and regret, it’s too late .
If you’ve already gone and ruined it, what’s the sense in worrying?
And Boone is dead, and House is gone, and Caesar is dead, and Benny is leading the strip, and she doesn’t care where anyone else is because she’s given up on all of that, there is no sense in worrying.
She makes it to Novac and the sun is up. She slumps against the chainlink fence and settles him down again so she can rest before she looks for a shovel or a spade or something to dig with that will hurt less than her hands.
She looks at his face again.
He’s still dead.
Novac is quiet at this time of morning and she only has a little trouble looking for a shovel, digging through Broscoe’s storage shed outside the dinosaur. Her hands feel like slabs of charred skin, and a tremor runs through her with each step, her knees buckle on each movement. She holds herself up with the shovel in the earth, crutching it as she slinks back towards the flat patch of earth she intends to disembowel so she can bury the best friend she ever made.
It makes her angry and it makes her sad. But her brows are lax and her eyes are dry and her mouth is a content line. She can’t feel any of it, as much as it is registering that her life is a chain of deaths of loved ones over and over, as much as she knows she is a curse. She can’t cry, or even frown. It feels like being frozen solid.
She knows, with everything she knows, that it is a survival tactic, to keep herself from breaking, to keep the dam from flooding over and destroying any chance left of keeping on, of moving forward.
Does she deserve to keep going?
Absolutely not.
But, she digs the hole and she kisses his bloody, cool forehead and she thinks of a phrase she had told him when he was feeling suicidal, and she remembers being 11 and learning it from her father.
“Fall down seven times, stand up eight.”