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Sometimes, she forgets she has to sleep.
Before, when she traveled more with humans, she had to stop. They made her stop. They all got tired or pissy or achey and so they'd make camp when the darkness came or sometimes in shady spots during the day, and they'd sleep and then she'd sleep too because, well, why not right? If you're already stopped, you might as well do it and drift in and out a few dozen times over the space of the night.
But she forgets she has to sleep when it's just her and ED-E and Yes Man and they go for weeks until the colours are all starting to swim in the wrong direction and she's on so many chems that she plum forgets what it's like to not see the world in slow motion, and then she inevitably realizes in the middle of a gun fight that she needs to wrap this up so she can go pass-out for a few days. This is not how ordinary people function.
But Courier hasn't been ordinary since Benny put a round in her skull and buried her under three inches of topsoil (didn't even bury her all the way down, lazy bastard). Some switch deep in her head got flipped from OFF to ON, or from NO to YES. And so that one who used to live in this body died and this one who came from the dark woke up and now she's the kind of woman who can't tell you where she's from but can carry five hundred radioactive rockets in her bags everywhere she goes without breaking a sweat.
(“I really love your creative way of looking at things! We could be carrying weapons or ammunition or something like that, but I like that you're using that space to carry around rockets instead! It's so very you!" Yes Man says in his cheerful passive-aggressive way.
"You never know when you're going to need a large quantity of toy rockets for bartering purposes! Sooner or later, we'll find the right stop and make ourselves millionaires." She replies back, just as cheerful, just as passive-aggressive.
It's not entirely her being a shithead though. She literally can't make herself get rid of them. They seem important. When she holds them in her hands, she thinks maybe she should drop them, and then she always puts them back in her packs and bags until the next time she remembers they're there. It feels good to keep them. And they don't weigh much, so Courier doesn't mind it.)
Sometimes, she's pretty sure that something more than mental happened when she died, because these days it's like death’s avoiding her at all turns. Courier tries not to think too much about that or the dreams she has when she's awake where she knows things that will go wrong before they even happen. There's old world books that say stuff about it but it's all just guessing and speculation and nobody's written any new books on having ESP or whatever it is that makes her the way she is, like she's a cat waking up just before the life where she would have stepped into the viper's pit and been eaten up alive.
Yes Man doesn't have any ideas. He's pretty good at listening though and he's always positive, whether he wants to be or not, which makes it easy to tell him when she's been thinking about killing every last person in the mojave, starting in alphabetical order.
"Seems like a mighty big task but I'm sure you could do it! Why, if anybody could murder a hundred-thousand people, it would absolutely be you!" He smiles at her from his TV monitor, that cheery face and his happy voice bringing a smile to her own face. "We could start with the Great Khans!"
"We could." She agrees though she doesn't really care about the Great Khans anymore than she cares about NCR or anyone else. They're a mix of idiots and decent people. She always likes their chems though. It's real good turbo they cook up.
Courier doesn't kill the Great Khans. She doesn't kill NCR either, unless she has to. Mostly she kills the Legion, slowly making her way across the Mojave and into Arizona proper. There's real cities here, though most are empty by the time she reaches them. The Legion doesn't run too well without Caesar to hold the reins. It seems only right. Seems only fair. You can't build an empire on the cult of personality. That's why Courier's out here, mopping up Legion, instead of trying to do what he did and make herself Queen of New Vegas.
Anyway, ruling seems boring. It's a lot of fun out here, making her way across the endless scrubland and desert with her robot pals. Her favorite part is when she comes across an area and sees that the Legion's already gotten into a fight with themselves, the defectors clashing with the true believers. Courier kills anything left and picks over the remains, showing Yes Man the treasures she finds among the bodies. There's rings and working watches, books and precious gems, and lots and lots and lots of money, which is handy. You can never go wrong with more money.
Money buys new guns. Money also buys two tins of mystery paint that Courier uses on Yes Man's frame to fancy him up some, giving him some real wicked green and orange stripes that make him easy to spot. He doesn't like it much, but as he reminds her all the time, "I can't stop you! I'm not allowed to hurt anybody who's my friend! Pretty stupid to have put in the code, huh?"
"Yeah Benny wasn't too bright." Courier agrees. She has no idea how to take that out of Yes Man's code either, but he did some of it himself before she left to go mop up the Legion. And there's a Yes Man still back in Vegas who's still working on himself even right now, which is pretty convenient. Courier would like it if she could leave part of herself behind to do maintenance stuff, but last time they scraped her brain out of her, she had to sweet-talk that asshole into sitting back in her skull and she's not really eager to do a repeat of that.
When they get back, Yes Man's going to be all ready, maybe. He'll supposedly be just like a real person - able to say no, able to fight back, able to have an opinion that doesn't have to be coached in a million passive-aggressive statements to try get a portion of his real feelings across. That should be a wreck. Courier's really excited to see how that all goes down.
"Hopefully you don't make me kill you too. That would be real inconvenient." She tells him as she picks her teeth with a knife and scrapes what she pulls out on her pant leg. There’s a beautiful blue sky above them and all the world is theirs for the picking. Courier would rather loot with Yes Man than loot him. Anyway, he wouldn't have much on him, just some machine guns rounds, maybe some scrap metal. "I like you, but I'll shoot you in the face."
"I'm really glad our friendship doesn't prevent you from looking out for your best interests! That's what I really like about you - that your loyalty is entirely conditional!" Yes Man smiles at her. She smiles on back and gives his side a pat. "Of course, mine isn't!"
"Not yet. But you'll be like me soon. And hey, won't that be something?" Courier asks him. Yes Man just smiles and rolls on beside her, dead grass and gravel crunching under his tire. ED-E whistles to themselves and floats ahead, singing old jingles that even Courier can't find on the radio.
She blasts her pipboy as loud as it’ll go while they stroll through the Arizona hellscape, singing along loudly with all the songs. There’s local stations that they switch to sometimes when the signal gets weak or fuzzy, but she always goes back to Mr. New Vegas, even if she has to find a radio tower to storm.
Courier’s pretty damn good with electronics and with Yes Man’s help, they always figure out a way to get the tower up and running and to get it boosting the Courier’s #1 pick so she can still hear all her favorites, even as she’s mowing down Legionnaires five hundred miles away from home.
“You know, other people would get sick of hearing the same songs over and over again. It’s so novel how you can listen to something a thousand times and still just want to hear even more of it!” Yes Man says during what she’s guessing must be play number 1000 of “Ain’t It A Kick In The Head” which is of course her all time favorite song ever. It’s the perfect anthem for reigning down cheerful death on the heads of whatever idiots haven’t run away from her fast enough.
Courier grins and just keeps on teaching ED-E how to whistle along with the chorus. And when he beeps furiously at her and refuses to stay near her as long as the song’s playing, she strongarms Yes Man into singing along with her. “You know all the words! You can sing with me!”
“I do know all the words! I can sing along! I can’t stop you from making me join in, just like I can’t say no to anything! Good thing I love all of your ideas, huh? It would be super inconvenient if I didn’t like to sing along!” He says in his usual way. It just makes her smile wider, big as he does.
Yes Man deliberately sings off-key. It’s the funniest shit she’s ever heard and it only makes her demand he do it more, the both of them warbling out the words while ED-E yells at them to shut up from thirty feet away.
There’s going to be a day when she can’t boss him around like this. Courier’s looking forward to it, as she tells Yes Man on a regular basis.
“You’re going to love telling me to fuck off. And you’re going to do it even when it’s something you want to do, you know. You’ll do it just because you can. I still do it even now! I’m not sure if I couldn’t say no before or if I was always like this but it’s great. It’s the best feeling in the world, hits you right here.” She taps her chest, dead-center in the middle, and then taps the center of his chest too. “Well, maybe not you since you’re metal instead of meat, but y’know, in your mind-gut. It’ll feel great.”
“I sure bet it will!” He agrees with her. It might actually for real agree too. She’s getting better at reading how sarcastic his tone is or isn’t. “Especially if you say so. You’re the most contrary person I know!”
“Thank you! I really try to be as contrary as I possibly can, so long as it’s fun. And it’s usually pretty fun.” There’s no better complement in her mind. The sky is a beautiful vivid green right now and she’s not sure if it’s from the mushrooms she found and ate the last time they made a pit stop or if she’s taken too much jet again. Right now she feels like she could walk forever. There’s a skeleton about ten feet off that’s moving and she makes them stop to watch it jitter for a bit, bones all clanking together as it rolls around in the dirt again and again. “You’re going to love it too. But I hope that even when you say no, you’re still super passive aggressive about everything. It’s your best quality.”
“Me too. It would be really swell to keep answering everyone the way I do right now, with the option to say no when I want to. Not that I’ll ever need to tell you to stop doing things, mostly because I’m pretty sure saying no to you is like… well, asking you to do it twice as much!” He smiles at her. She smiles back and steps on the skeleton. It flies up into the sky and away, over the horizon. Courier watches it until she can’t see it anymore, and then she gets moving away, her brain already hustling on to the next topic.
When her legs get tired but her mind's still bright and burning, she rides up on Yes Man's shoulders. His little antenna keeps on turning slow and smooth and he sways as he moves, rocking her back and forth real soft-like. She thinks maybe this is what the sea feels like, but she can't remember if she's ever really been over water, or if she's only ever just read about it.
He doesn't care if her legs dangle over his face, because it's not really where his eye is. The camera he sees through always ends up between her legs, her knees on either side of it. Sometimes, when there's nothing around, she'll peek down and stare right at him and wait for him to gripe about it. He can't tell her to stop. But, he always had some cheery way of reminding her to move.
"Gosh, it's so nice seeing your face so close up! I can't see anything else but hey, why would I want to when you're around? You're much more interesting looking than any raiders or Legion scouting parties!" His voice is always loud through his speakers and she just beams, giving him a pat before she sits back up. "It's it nice when we both look in the same direction? There's so much for us to see together!"
"There is!" She agrees, and then slaps a hand over his camera and laughs to herself as he deliberately drives them right towards a hard dip in the earth. Courier uncovers him of course, just before he would drive in. Not that she's sure he could drive in and hurt her, but it's more fun playing the game and leaving it a mystery if he could do it or not. It's more fun if he gets to be dangerous too.
And he is dangerous. Yes Man is all rattling machines and belching rocket launchers and an excited voice calling out fake apologies as he mows down anyone in their way. Between him and ED-E, Courier's got to try twice as hard and fight twice as fast just to keep up, or they'll wipe out everyone before she even gets to have a little fun. They make her try harder. They make her be faster. They make her take an insane amount of drugs, patching up her space suit with whatever she can yank off the Legion until her suit's more Legion armour than it is a space suit anymore. Which is fine honestly because it's not like she was ever going to go to space.
She mostly just likes the fun of seeing the world through that great glass helmet, pretending that she's some strange new creature the world's never seen before. And maybe she is. Maybe that's why she's the way she is. Maybe that's why she can eat four boxes of 200 year old pre-war Sugar Bombs and wash it down with half a dozen bottles of cola and still feel perfectly healthy. Maybe that's why she can stave off sleep for as long as she does and take the drugs she does and maybe that's why she feels more comfortable with a mute sharpshooting eyebot and a resentfully cheerful securitron than she does with other flesh and blood people. She's just as odd as those bots, piloting a body that she's not even all that terribly attached to.
"Do you think I'm some sort of ancient evil that accidentally found their way into a human body and I'm just waiting to get my memories back so I can start the apocalypse?" She asks Yes Man while on day fourteen of what has proven to be another chem induced insomnia episode.
"Gosh, I sure hope so!" He says and blasts down a half a dozen crows circling overhead. A shower of gristle and feathers descends on them and she just turns her head up, watching it splatter over her visor. It’s like a red rain, and on it, the gentle flutter of feathers as they spiral through the air towards the ground. "I think whatever you are, you're going to be hard for anybody to forget or survive!"
She puts her hand in his claw as they walk. When they get back, and when he gets the ability to say no, she's going to ask him if he'll come with her to the ends of the earth. And then if he says yes, they'll go strolling off together. And if he says no, she'll leave him to run New Vegas and go off on her own.
And if he tries to kill her, well, that should be fun too. She loves a good challenge, no matter who it's coming from.