Work Text:
The woman who lets Christine out of the Auto-Doc looks horrified.
“This isn’t what it looks like,” she insists. Her voice is rough, like she’s swallowed nails. She flinches, too, and rubs at her breastbone through her thin undershirt. She’s staring at Christine like she’s about to drop dead from thirst, and Christine is a pitcher of cold water.
They talk a little more, the woman looking back over her shoulder at the open door in a way that makes Christine nervous too. She catches Christine watching, and waves her hands.
“It’s the holograms. Shouldn’t be any on this floor but--they make me nervous. Laser robots I can handle. Intangible laser guards I...can’t,” she finishes lamely, fingers curling around the lead pipe slung through the belt loop of her jumpsuit. She shrugs and grimaces, rubs at her throat and her chest again. She wheezes when she breathes, Christine can hear it from several feet away. “If you want, you can come with me.” She waits for a slow nod before she says anything else. “Need to find an inhaler here. Getting too hard to breathe.”
That explains the wheezing, then. Asthmatic in the Sierra Madre Cloud--as if this place wasn’t hellish enough on its own. It makes her chest hurt to think about. She nods, agrees. This place is a medical clinic, there has to be something here that’s survived. The other woman smiles and pulls a knife off another belt loop.
“Cosmic knife,” she rasps. “Watch the edge, it’ll take a harvester’s arm off without much trouble if you angle it right. Doubt it’ll be much nicer to a real human being.” She grins again, and this time it’s wide enough it’s crooked, and that’s when Christine sees the way her whole right side droops; not badly, not enough to be noticeable most of the time, but enough that something must have happened--brain injury, maybe, though anything severe enough to cause drooping should’ve killed her without medical care, and she’s too young for a stroke. She’s too thin to have regularly been near medical care, too. “Come on, should be something upstairs,” she says, and when she turns, Christine sees the scars.
There’s a bullet exit wound under her left jawbone, ugly and mottled and with heavy scar tissue, and two entrance wounds--lumpy, discolored, but mostly unscarred besides--at the base of her skull.
That explains the drooping then. The shaved head too, though the scars are healed enough she could have grown her hair out if she wanted to.
Though she seems to be doing awfully well for taking two bullets to the back of the skull.
Christine doesn’t mention it, just follows behind as the woman climbs the stairs.
They dodge into a room right at the top, and Christine closes the door behind them. The woman goes to work on the terminal on the desk, and Christine, without being prompted, starts digging through the filing cabinets looking for an inhaler. If nothing else, she doesn’t need one, and maybe this woman can get her closer to Elijah. She has a pip-boy on her wrist, still open to a radio window. it’s flatlined, though. Christine can see the frequency of her bomb collar there, still marked as the last station she was tuned to. She’s not sure how she feels about that.
The woman mutters to herself, counts on her fingers as she hacks into the terminal. The whole screen is a jumble of symbols Christine can’t parse anymore. She turns away and starts tossing Sierra Madre chips onto the desk.
The woman is humming to herself, and there are a few quiet beeps. They put Christine on edge--they’re not collar-beeps, they’re terminal-beeps, but they’re noise, and in a place as deathly silent as the Villa tends to be, it makes her nervous. The holograms are dumb, but she doesn’t want to take anymore chances than she has to. The woman sits back, chewing on her fingernail, still wheezing. It’s not as bad as it was when she first let Christine out, but still too loud for comfort.
There’s a few dozen chips and a half dozen pencils left in the filing cabinets is all, everything else has moldered away in the last 200 years. She finds one inhaler, but it’s empty. Who keeps an empty inhaler?
The woman takes it, shakes it around some, and shakes her head.
“Jet inhaler,” she says. Her words sound thick. “Someone brought their drug habit all the way out here.” She lofts it into one of the trashcans, where it clatters against the sides before it clanks against the bottom. “Doubt fumes’ll make me feel any better.” She tries to laugh, and it turns into a wracking, mucusy cough, until she’s doubled over and gagging. Christine waits, not quite sure what to do. She’s a soldier, not a doctor. Even during her time as a scribe, she had worked with weapons technology, not emergency medical procedures.
When the coughing stops, she comes to stand next to the woman, who has her eyes closed. She’s still wheezing.
She wipes her mouth on the back of her hand, fumbles for the bottle of water she has shoved into the waistband of her jumpsuit.
“Sorry,” she apologizes as she takes a sip of water. She sloshes it in her mouth before she spits it into the corner. “Wasn’t a problem back in the desert. Forgot how bad it gets.” She wrinkles her nose; the wheezing is worse again. “Let’s keep moving. Think I saw the emitter just down the hall, should be able to yank some wires to shut it off. Then we can look without worrying.” SHe shoves herself to her feet, narrow shoulders hunching. Christine watches as she opens the door to the hallway, then immediately rolls back into the room as a laser flies past her head. “Hologram,” the woman says, as if it isn’t obvious. Christine nods and rolls her eyes, which gets her a wrinkle-nosed glare from the woman on the floor. Christine flaps her hands at the door, urging the other woman to get a move on.
The woman gets to her feet, but she watches her pip-boy for half a minute before she steps out into the hallway again. She makes a mad dash down the hall and yanks wires before the hologram can turn around. Then, she comes back to lean in the doorway to the room, grinning triumphantly, the most blatant “look how smart I am aren’t I just the fucking best” look on her face that Christine has ever seen. It might be cute, if the Sierra Madre wasn’t actively trying to kill them.
+++
They find three rescue inhalers at the end of the hall, in a first aid kit. There are actually five of them, but two are broken and empty. The woman mutters about how there’s no reason to break an inhaler unless you want to be a dick, since there’s really only one thing you can use a rescue inhaler for. The woman stashes all three in a pouch on the vest she’s wearing under her jumpsuit. She seems to have an awful lot of places to stash things. Christine wonders if she’s in league with Elijah, if that’s why she has enough weapons to share and a bottle of clean water she can waste on rinsing her mouth.
They hole up in one of the Villa gift shops for the night. The woman blocks the front door with a shelf, and the upstairs door with a bedframe, and drags a mattress out into the middle of the upstairs room. She doesn’t bother to strip to sleep, just collapses onto the mattress with a pleased groan. The red X across her back is surrounded by rusty Cloud stains. Christine wonders if she looted the jumpsuit off some poor schmuck, or if Elijah gave it to her. There are a lot of questions she has about this woman. First and foremost is why she’s here. If she’s after the fabled treasure, she’s got another thing coming.
“If you want to sleep, I sleep small,” the woman says. “Or if you want me to show I trust you not to kill me, I’m gonna sleep and you’re free to stay up and watch for ghost people.” The woman rolls over onto her back, coughs once. It’s healthier than her coughing earlier, but she’s taken two hits off one of the rescue inhalers since then too. She opens her eyes and raises one eyebrow, and Christine nods. She holds her cosmic knife at the ready, and goes to lean against the bedframe, so she can watch the stairwell. The woman snorts, smiles, rolls onto her side so she’s facing Christine. “If you want a reason to trust me--my name’s Cecilia. I usually go by Cici, if I’m not just ‘courier.’ I work as a courier for the Mojave Express. I picked up a package in Primm, south of New Vegas, and got shot in the head for my trouble. I was trying to track down the bastards that did it, but I heard this radio signal and I got curious. Shoulda known better than to poke my head around that bunker. Had enough younger siblings, I know what curiosity gets you.”
Christien points to the fannypack of Sierra Madre chips, and raises her eyebrow.
“I have hoarder tendencies,” she replies. “Like magpies. I like shiny things.” Then she laughs. “No, I just recognize currency when I see it. Figure a pre-War place like this doesn’t take bottlecaps as currency. Not that I had any when I showed up here.” She pats her hips as if she’s feeling pockets, then wraps her arms around herself. “People keep telling me there’s some sort of treasure here, and I’m not buying it. It’s not worth it, even if there is. I just want to go home. Back to the Mojave, I mean.” She laughs, but it’s the sort of laugh Christine remembers from when she was a kid. The laugh kids do when they’re expecting someone else to say something mean or to point out something can’t be true. Like she’s expecting Christine to say she doesn’t have a home. “Hard to put down roots somewhere when you’re running north and south and east and west all the time. I’ve been all over out here, but I’ve never gone past the Rocky mountains. Hopefully will someday. I guess this is the wrong direction for that, huh?”
She talks a little more before she dozes off, about pointless things--about where she found the knife Christine is holding, about the other two people she needs to find, about what a bastard “the man on the radio” is. She admits she listened to Christine’s radio frequency, but that she could only manage a few seconds before she started to feel sick. That makes Christine feel a little better.
The courier finally falls asleep, and she snores. Christine spends a lot of time alone with her thoughts--has spent a lot of time alone with her thoughts, especially in the last few years--so being alone here isn’t really a problem.
Around midnight, she shakes the courier awake. The courier makes disappointed noises, btu sits up and moves to where Christine was sitting, against the bedframe.
“I’ll keep watch,” she says, as if that wasn’t clear enough. Christine nods and curls up on the mattress, knife in easy reach. She jumps when the courier turns on music, though--and then jumps again when a Very Official voice comes on and warns about protocols in case of a nuclear emergency, as if they didn’t all live through one already. The courier hums along with the songs it plays, like she knows them all by heart. “Sorry,” she apologizes when she sees Christine jump. “The radio on my pip-boy doesn’t seem to set the collars off and--and the silence starts to get to me after a while. I can turn it off, if you want me to.”
Christine thinks for a moment, then shakes her head as another quiet radio sirens starts up, accompanied by a man calling himself “Johnny Cash,” and if that’s not the name of a kid playing at being a badass she doesn’t know what is.
“Okay. Just tap my shoulder and tell me to turn it off if you want it off. It’s no problem. I should get used to silence out here anyway.”
Christine shakes her head again.
“Okay,” the courier whispers. She turns down the volume anyway, until she can just barely hear it. Christine can feel the eyes on the back of her neck, but she doesn’t make any indication of the fact. The courier had explained to her about how if one of them dies, then all of them die--and she suspects the courier wants to live. The inhalers were proof of that, if nothing else is.
The courier wakes her at what passes for dawn here, and they open the upstairs door. The courier takes the head off a seeker on the balcony straight away, lead pipe swinging. The ghost people come apart too easily, and Christine tries not to think about it. Tries not to think about the fact it was the cloud that did this to them, somehow. She also tries not to breathe when they go through the cloud, for various related reasons.
Two harvesters and a trapper go down quickly too, as they walk through the streets. The courier grabs a spear off the seeker, and uses it to bludgeon the rest of them. Christine is pretty sure you’re supposed to stab with a spear, not bludgeon, but it seems to work well enough. She slices off limbs with the knives duct taped to the end often enough, it seems to keep them down.
She really needs to work on her technique, though.
+++
The courier rolls her eyes at Elijah. She mimes his talking, rolls her eyes, then does as he orders after taking the most diplomatic option. She’s not stupid, then. She knows this is a game and she has to succeed to get out of it alive. She laughs silently when she sees Christine approve of her mockery, laughs so that Elijah can’t hear her. He only has ears, he doesn’t have eyes or hands here. Not anymore.
It’s reassuring, even if she does worry that one of them will slip up, and all their collars will detonate.
+++
They’ve been together three days when she notices the courier’s tremors.
She noticed the drooping the first day, and noticed her unwillingness to use guns unless she had to shoot a speaker over the subsequent three, but she doesn’t notice the hand tremors until they’re huddled next to each other by a hotplate. There are two cans of Cram on it, their lids peeled off and discarded. The courier has her hands over the cans, warming them after complaining about how cold and stiff her fingers were. It’s colder up here than it is in the desert, Christine has to agree. She taps the back of one of the courier’s shaky hands, and the courier pulls them to her chest, embarrassed.
“Got shot in the head. Mostly I do alright, but it’s hard to do delicate things sometimes. Especially with guns where there’s nothing to lean on. Knives are alright. Sledgehammers are better. No good with sniper rifles. Too shaky, not that I was real good with ‘em before.” She holds one hand up and out, unsupported, and she shakes like she’s on withdrawal from Mentats and Turbo both at once. Christine’s seen the addicts--not very often, and not in large numbers, but enough for the shakes to look familiar, even if they’re for an entirely different reason. Once the courier tucks her hand back against her body--or, closer, at least--the shakes get less pronounced. The courier stares at the cans of Cram like they’re the most interesting things in the world. She doesn’t look at Christine. Christine isn’t sure whether it’s shame or something else. She’s not going to ask. No need to drag it out any longer.