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They sit around a dying campfire, and it’s late and he should be asleep but there’s fire in his veins tonight, and a mournful tune on her lips. He catches her eye and she smiles like she knows.
Into the blackness he swears that when they go, it’ll be together.
Three months later Six is laughing, tearing her way through a line of legionnaires with a handful of NCR at her back, ablaze in all her foul-mouthed glory. Boone watches her through his scope from his sniper’s perch.
He sees the frumentarius before she does.
“Slunk away,” she had said one night, when Boone had asked what became of Caesar’s pet. “Melted into the horizon, tail ‘twixt his legs. Last we’ll see of him, I think.”
The scope realigns, brings the tattered dog’s head into focus. She doesn’t see.
The blade comes free of it’s sheath, glinting like gold in the sunlight. She doesn’t see.
His heart is in his throat but Boone’s hands are steady. He squeezes the trigger --
Click
-- and hears the sound of goodbye.
Six doesn’t see the blade fall, but Boone does.
She’s dead before he gets to her. The battle is over almost as soon as it began and the last remnants of the Legion are fleeing into the hills, lead north by a fox.
Now he stands before her body, and he grieves.
He falls to his knees beside her in the burning sand. He ghosts his hand over her face, closes her empty eyes.
“Where’d you get them glasses, city boy? Always wanted a pair. Sun hurts my eyes.”
He lets his hand travel the planes of her face with such reverence, and curses himself for never being half so bold when it mattered.
When a recruit comes up behind him, asks him if he’s hurt, Boone takes off his beret and lays it in the blood-soaked sand beside Six.
“Go help someone else.”
The recruit tries to push it further, tries to say “sir, your hands are bloody — “
But the look Boone gives him makes him go quiet.
When he’s left and all that remains is Six, bloody and gone gone gone, Boone pulls his pistol from its holster and presses the barrel to his temple.