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Deaton isn’t scared of him. That’s obvious as soon as they walk into the clinic; the guards all stiffen and level weapons, but the doctor himself barely gives Isaac a second glance. That’s good. They have bigger problems at hand – a First Recon sniper with his arm half-torn-off, for one. And Deaton focuses on that, on getting Derek horizontal and sedated and going to work on him right there in the front room. What the hell – the world’s a postapocalyptic nuclear wasteland – it’s not like there’s anywhere better.
Scott’s mother is a Follower of the Apocalypse, so he stays to help in what little way he can, and Stiles drops into a chair by the wall and refuses to move. That doesn’t stop the guards from glaring at Isaac, so he goes outside with Boyd under the guise of watching for possible Legion survivors.
Yeah, right. Fiends don’t leave survivors; neither do Kahns. The raiding party that ambushed them is nothing more than red cloth, metal, and gore spattered across a hundred-yard stretch of Highway 95 an hour’s walk south of the clinic (two hours when you’re trying to keep someone from collapsing and bleeding out during the journey).
The sun is coming up. Boyd parks himself by the door and sacks out; Isaac starts pacing. A raiding party this close to the Strip is unheard of, but he can’t be surprised: Stiles has been telling everyone for weeks that the balance won’t last much longer, and Stiles, Scott says, is damn near always right. He hadn’t looked so sure of himself while propping Derek up, mumbling promises that everything was going to be okay in between bouts of cursing and demanding to know how far the clinic was, but the kid’s generally spot-on in his declarations. The Legion is coming. The Boomers will help us. The NCR will help us. The Strip families will fight us tooth and nail and we need to keep one eye on them at all times. So on and so forth.
North Vegas is as busted-up as the rest of the city outside the Strip – full of half-crumbled buildings with one or two or three walls missing, intermittent piles of rubble being slowly worn down to dust, and a thousand and one corners and shadows and places to hide. Isaac doesn’t know this area as well as the south ruins, so he hates it. Hates it more, anyway. Vegas is one huge sniper’s nest nowadays.
Isaac closes a fist around the Shishkebab’s grip as he takes up a position that has his back pressed to the wall, facing south. The cover of the ruins makes that the most likely course of approach for attackers; best to be ready and waiting if anyone does come.
Nobody does.
Isaac watches the shadows shorten, shifts his weight occasionally to alleviate the twinge in his hamstrings, and splits a couple bloatfly sliders with Boyd once he wakes up, and the lifeless streets stay lifeless and the dust hangs in the air and the sun cooks the asphalt until waves of heat shimmer off it, and nothing even slightly dangerous happens.
Isaac starts pacing again.
They’re inching up on solar noon when the clinic door creaks open. Scott emerges, blinking, into the sunlight, blood spattered over his undershirt and smeared across his knuckles. He looks beyond exhausted.
“That bitchy old fuck gonna make it?” Boyd asks, climbing back to his feet when Scott nods. “Gotta go rankle his ass – welcome him back to the land of the living,” he joshes, and disappears into the clinic with a whoop that cuts off when the door swings shut behind him.
Isaac watches Scott. Scott is watching him right back with eyes sunk deep into the cavities of his skull until, in the space of a blink, his composure breaks.
The wasteland dirt does not forgive tears or screams, and Scott does not release any for it to swallow. He steps over to Isaac, comes up against him and sets his forehead against the plane of his shoulder, face pressed into the rough fabric, metal spikes skirting his cheek. His hands find purchase on the cloth and stiffened leather of Isaac’s armor, while Isaac splays his fingers over the back of Scott’s neck, and they both grip the other tight.
In the Fiends, they don’t teach you to cope with trauma. They don’t teach you anything. They hunker down next to you to get wired on Turbo and Jet and Psycho, sometimes share a shot of hard-brewed moonshine, rustle you awake in the middle of the night when a caravan’s coming through or the Kahns are in town, come howling out of the ruins beside you, all around you, and drop dead at a moment’s notice with bullets in the brain or blades in the gut or with entire limbs blown off. You are linked by addiction, by necessity, and you mourn by looting the corpses of allies and enemies alike and selling everything you can’t use.
In conventional terms, you do not mourn at all.
Isaac doesn’t know if he would be capable of mourning Derek, had the ranger succumbed. That sort of question comes with all sorts of barbs and thorns and tricky things attached, so he’s more than happy to leave it alone for the time being. It is enough, right now, to press his cheek against Scott’s hair while listening to him breathe.
“Don’t ever be a hero,” Scott mumbles.
***
“Don’t ever be a hero.” That’s something Scott likes to tell him.
Isaac’s never been a hero – certainly not the Old World definition of one. Most of his childhood memories consist of hiding and running, picking at scraps, jacking up his rad count with nights spent huddled on the edge of poisonous craters because his father was rarely enraged enough to follow him out that far. After the old man died, he rambled and wandered, and it’s hardly heroic to find yourself stealing alcohol to burn away your physical and psychological hurts, even less so when you realize that was the beginning of the slippery slope down into becoming a Fiend.
The most heroic thing he’s ever done was agree to take on a deathclaw, after he’d skidded out of the Fiends and into the fighting pits of the Thorn – and they all know how that story ended.
He reminds Scott of that while they’re shucking off armor in an upstairs room at the Atomic Wrangler (Derek will need days to heal up completely, maybe even a week – not that they have that kind of time, but Stiles insists) and Scott sighs.
“I don’t want you to be a hero. Heroes die.”
“And bad guys survive?” Isaac pulls off his undershirt. “Spare me the bullshit.”
Scott knows better than to argue, especially at a time like this, with what they’re about to do. This is a new thing, something Isaac barely finds worthwhile, something that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, but it’s okay – it’s not killing him, not like so many other things.
He drops down onto the bed, one knee hitched up slightly and his arms sort of out to the sides, while Scott hovers over him, studious as a doctor, and, hands light, kisses him.
Isaac has a control thing, you see. A very persistent nobody-else-in-charge-ever thing. And they’re working on that, trying to, somehow, because if there’s one person who Isaac will pretend to be human for, it’s Scott. So Scott kneels over Isaac and kisses him and tangles their fingers together, holds him loosely while his mouth moves from Isaac’s lips to his jaw, lingers all over his throat before pressing, open and hot, against his collarbone.
Isaac gasps, and Scott waits, swipes a thumb over the curve of his wrist before moving on.
He makes it down to the left side of Isaac’s ribcage – where the scars from the deathclaw start – before Isaac’s heart climbs into his throat and he seizes up with barely enough time to snarl out “Stop.”
Scott rears back like the most well-trained of dogs, doesn’t fight at all when Isaac rolls him over, pins him to the mattress to drag aching teeth down his chest. It makes Isaac feel wild, having someone ready and willing, open to whatever he wants, so it’s always difficult not to peel Scott open and shove himself inside. There would be blood and unfair amounts of pain, but Scott would still take him, he thinks, because Scott has always done so; against the combined forces of odds and logic, he’s here, letting Isaac savage his mouth and body without a motion of protest, going easily when Isaac fists one hand in his hair and the other around his dick and rasps semi-threats in his ear, half-promises, twisted thoughts Isaac wishes he had the self-control to carry out, because yeah, he’d like to work Scott open someday with spit and tongue and maybe a bit of teeth, crawl up deep inside, take him apart and put him back together in such a way only Isaac would be able to see the cracks.
He has to go away, after, because otherwise he’d really do it. He pulls on his clothes and walks laps of the upstairs – doesn’t want to go down, where there are other people – until he’s breathing normally again, isn’t hard anymore, isn’t any more crazed than usual, and then he goes back to the room where Scott has barely moved, has only crawled under the blankets, but he makes a happy, sleepy sound when Isaac slips in behind him.
Scott likes him. Isaac has trouble with this idea. Scott wants to spend time with him; wants him for more than his mouth or his dick or the Shishkebab guided by his scarred-up hands, and that’s not something Isaac can think about for too long without shaking all over and wanting to run, and he can’t do that. He can’t leave Scott. So he fits their bodies together instead, hides his face in the back of Scott’s neck while he waits for the sunrise.
***
They barely see Derek or Stiles for three days – they stay in their room with only an impressive consumption of food and alcohol as proof of continued survival. In the meantime, Erica from the Kahns arrives, as does Allison, co-owner of Lydia’s caravan. Nobody goes onto the Strip. They slink around Freeside, Westside, all of North Vegas, the Kahns making deals with druggies and Fiends, Allison picking up a contract for a weapons shipment here, water and whiskey there. Isaac lurks around Mick and Ralph’s to keep himself away from the Thorn. Scott spends a lot of time with the Followers.
Isaac pretends like that doesn’t bother him – it’s Scott’s mother, after all, the only family he has left – but it’s time that he’s out of Isaac’s sight because Isaac won’t be around hospitals than he has to, won’t feel helpless without reason, and Scott comes back to the Wrangler late at night and covered in other people’s blood, looking exhausted. And even now Isaac doesn’t know how much of Scott’s attention is just wanting to fix him. He thinks that’s all it is, sometimes. Let me fix you, oh broken body, broken mind. Let me fix you. And that’s it.
After three days, Derek stalks into the main room of the Wrangler, tells them all to clean up their tabs, they’re leaving. Stiles is a step behind, obviously unhappy, but he repeats the order, and they clear out to head east to Camp Golf – that’s not where they were going in the first place; they were coming down from Nellis to meet Allison’s caravan at the Mojave Outpost, trying to skirt the worst of the Fiends’ territory. Now that there are Legion troops striking within sight of Vegas’ wall, the NCR Rangers need to get on their feet. They’ll do that best if confronted with an envoy of survivors.
So Stiles claims, anyway. Isaac thinks he’s just trying to minimize the amount of travel Derek has to undergo. He knows better than to say that aloud.
***
Camp Golf is stuffed the brim with NCR semi-washouts. Their whole crew gets a lot of sideways glances and pointed whispers – some of the ones directed at Derek are even tinged with respect – but Isaac gets a disproportional amount of them. That doesn’t bother him; it’s nothing new. But they disturb Scott, because these kids don’t have the same half-dignity of a merc or a caravan guard or bored outpost soldier. These kids are failures, and they know it, and they’re desperate to change somebody’s mind about that, and dropping a Fiend into their midst is like pointing a flamethrower at a wooden house and expecting it not to set it alight.
Even the Kahns had the good sense to split off before they got here – they cut down to Boulder City, where they’re cooking up chems, waiting for Stiles’ call. Not Isaac. He’s not leaving Scott. And Scott, now, isn’t leaving him; as a complete reversal from the past few days, he’s hesitant to so much as let him walk outside alone.
“You better watch out,” Isaac tells him. “Or they’re gonna start to think you’re a Fiend too.”
“You shouldn’t encourage them,” is Scott’s response. “I see it in your face; you like baiting them, playing the freak, daring them to come after you. Just because you could rip them apart doesn’t mean… if enough of them get it into their heads to gang up on you, they might have a chance.”
Isaac yanks the spiked plate off his shoulder, stands, arms out, in the middle of the tent. “You’re better at hand-to-hand than half of them put together. Try and take me.”
“That’s a lie,” Scott grumbles, but he comes at Isaac anyway, barely qualifying even as half-hearted, low, going for the knees.
Isaac leaps over the blow, slams a foot into Scott’s ribs to get him off balance and then takes out his legs, tackles him into the dirt, holds his face in both hands and kisses him. “Let them come after me,” he growls. “I’ll just kill all of them.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Scott protests, but Isaac starts nosing at his neck and tugging at his pants, and that shuts him up pretty quick.
***
Washouts they may be, but even the residents of Camp Golf aren’t quite dumb enough to come after Isaac during the day. They wait until sunset, when Stiles, Derek, and Allison are all up in the resort being wined and dined by the Rangers – no Fiends invited, of course – and he’s halfway between the mess tent and his bed. Scott’s supposed to be only a moment behind him, so he hears the running footsteps and turns carelessly, gets a fist to the gut and a blow – shit, was that a blackjack? – to the head.
He has the presence of mind to turn his collapse into a roll, pushes off the ground because that’s the only thing to tell him which way is up, and leaps off and away. His vision is swimming in circles, so he shuts his eyes to keep it from distracting him, sinks into a crouch.
“Fuckin’ Fiend.” Sniggers all around. “Thought you were supposed to be game for a fight. How you like bleeding?” There is something warm and wet snaking down his face. Three guesses as to what – like that’s not a regular thing.
“Spoken like someone who’s never raided a Van Graffs caravan.” Isaac snaps his head side-to-side, cracking his neck, then opens his eyes. There are vague shapes and silhouettes to be seen, some features hidden by the dark, though he can track their motions just fine courtesy of the spotlights. But, oh, there are a lot of them. Ten or eleven, all around, bulky in armor, staring him down. There is real hatred in some of those eyes. He smirks.
“Whatcha laughin’ at, Fiend?” The one closest on his left is twirling a blackjack in small circles; a couple others pull theirs out to copy the motion. Cute.
“What the – Isaac! What the hell’s going on?” Ah, there’s Scott – voice caught between fury and panic, only feet from the edge of the circle. “What are you doing?”
“Teaching a Fiend to stick to its own turf and not tread on ours.” The voice is female, behind him to the right.
Something whistles at Isaac’s ear; he rolls forward, comes up, and gets elbowed in the jaw hard enough to rattle his teeth. He retreats to the center of the circle, which closes in on him as he goes. He spits red onto the boots of the trooper who hit him. “Your tactics leave something to be desired. Legion’d have me up on a cross by now.”
“Maybe we should,” somebody says.
“Yeah, why don’t we?”
“We’re not Legion,” the woman snarls. “We’re NCR, and I’m not going to let a gutter junkie dictate to me about what his punishment should be.” She nails him in the kidneys with a steel-toed boot, punches a grunt from his lungs, and that’s when Scott barges into the circle.
He catches Isaac as he staggers, splaying a hand across his chest to help hold him up, for all that that hand shakes as he turns to face the troopers. “This is ridiculous – we’re here to help-”
“Tell that to Corporal Betsy – you know her, she’s one who got raped by Cook-cook. Your little pet probably fucking sat there and got off on it. Don’t make him out like a human, McCall. He ain’t. Whatever shit he’s feeding you, talk to people who really know Fiends – who’ve lost families and dreams and lives to ‘em. That thing next to you’s a monster.”
The arm bracing Isaac shudders. “Because you clearly know so much about him.”
“What’s to know? He’s a Fiend, and you’re fuckin’ him. That practically makes you a Fiend too, to our minds.” Isaac flinches. He’d told Scott, this is how people think, how they’ll connect them, he’s running a risk by making himself part of Isaac’s mess…
Goddamn fool.
“Why are we still talking? Let’s just kill them.”
“We’ll lose Stilinski if we kill McCall,” says the woman. “But you can have at the Fiend. Get him.”
“No,” Scott says. “No, no, no.”
Isaac shoves him away as the troopers close in. The first strike lands between his shoulder blades, the second behind his left knee, making him stagger as the third busts open his cheekbone and a boot slams into his back. He goes down. The troopers encircle him, blackjacks and clubs and steel-toes and even bare, raw-knuckled fists, and he tucks his head under his arms, barely feeling the pain – until a hand clenches in his hair, hauling up, and his throat is bare, a hundred kinds of exposed, and that’s a wicked little knife the woman is pulling from her waistband.
Somewhere out of sight, Scott is screaming for them to get away, get away from him, they don’t know a damn thing about him – oh, Scott. Get out of here, Scott.
Isaac makes himself go limp until the only thing keeping him up is the hand in his hair, and the trooper holding him staggers, suddenly yanked forward. Isaac’s spine curves, his shoulders smack into the dirt, and he twists, scalp blazing red, until the man lets go and he can scramble into the open space between blows and find his feet.
The woman grabs for him, knife in her hand an open threat; Isaac ducks, slams an elbow into her ribs, falls to one knee when a blackjack whams home against the top of his spine. His vision whites out as he goes. He plants one hand in the dirt and whips the Shishkebab from its scabbard with the other, lunges back to his full height, onto his toes, and buries the blade in the woman’s shoulder. Bright red arterial blood splatters over everyone within range.
The troopers freeze.
“Mags,” one of them says. “Mags.”
The woman collapses.
“Shit! Medic – we need a medic!”
Isaac closes his eyes.
“The Fiend killed her!”
“Get Doc!”
“Someone grab the Fiend!”
“Get Sawbones!”
Hands slap down on his chest – not shoving, holding. Keeping him upright. Scott has a broken nose, blood leaking from the corner of his mouth, and his jaw is swollen like it’s going to bruise later, but he’s alive. Panting, “You idiot; you fucking idiot” in perhaps the most hypocritical role reversal ever, smoothing his thumb over Isaac’s jaw, breathing into the curve of his throat, half-sobbing, “You idiot.”
Isaac grunts. “Told you I’d be fine.”
“Fine? Do you even – how many fingers am I holding up?”
Isaac blinks. The floodgates restraining the pain groan and burst off their hinges. People are still shouting in the background – more, louder. “The Rangers are coming,” he says, and blacks out.
***
The first thing the doc tells him once he wakes up is that ‘Mags’ was Squad Leader Corporal Magdalena Stewarts from New Reno, some starry-eyed wannabe who joined up a couple years back and was real pissed that she never got farther than being a foot soldier.
The second thing he’s told is that he’s only alive because “that fuckin’ McCall kid pulled every string he could get his hands on, and then some.” Sawbones wipes his hands on a blood-speckled rag and points accusingly at Isaac. “Don’t think I haven’t considered slitting your throat a couple dozen times; it’s been hell and a half just keeping out the knuckleheads who want to do you in.”
“I’ll cut out of here and spare you the trouble, then,” Isaac says, voice hoarse from disuse. He sits up gingerly; any parts of him that aren’t stiff are throbbing. He breathes a little easier upon spotting the spiked armor piled in the corner, with a familiar scabbard sitting next to it.
Sawbones spits off to the side. “Cool your jets. I paged Stilinski – he’s on his way down.”
“Actually, he’s here.” Stiles bows his head to come through the tent door, straightens up without a smile. “Can I get a minute alone with him, Doc?”
“Fine, fine.” Sawbones rustles a few instruments and cracks his knuckles, then ducks out.
Stiles settles himself gingerly on the edge of a table near Isaac’s bed. He sighs. “How are you feeling?”
“Where’s Scott?”
Stiles’ expression doesn’t flicker. “Up at the resort, where he’s been for the last day and a half, defending you to anyone who comes within earshot because he hasn’t been allowed back into the camp. For his good and yours.”
Isaac studies the wall across from his bed, piecing together a smirk. “I have the funniest feeling that you don’t want me near him anymore.”
“I think Scott’s a good person,” Stiles says. “And I think he’s got a pretty decent reputation, and that he’s happiest when he’s helping people. And I think that persuading you to come with us was the most self-destructive thing he’s ever done. Which is not to say that you are not an intelligent person, or are not incredibly capable of handling yourself in a fight – though the latter quality, by the way, doesn’t make it very easy to argue your innocence after you took a beatdown from almost a dozen troopers and were still capable of wielding a sword and killing a woman…” He stops, clasps his hands together, recollects his thoughts. “If you are still here twenty-four hours from now, you are going to be put on trial for murder. With extreme prejudice, no doubt.”
Stiles is damn near always right.
“And you still need the NCR.” There is a rancid, sour taste in his mouth.
“Yes. Very much so. And considering how my time is going to be distributed between here, Hoover Dam, and various Ranger stations for the foreseeable future-”
“Are the Kahns still in Boulder City?”
“Of course.”
“You’re going to send them down to the Mojave Outpost with Allison to meet her caravan. I’ll go with them.”
Stiles appears startled. “How did you know that?”
Isaac rolls his eyes, because that hurts less than shrugging. “You need to get the caravan up to Vegas somehow, you’ve got a bunch of bloodthirsty semi-mercs bought and paid for down in Boulder City who would relish fending off the unusually-high number of attacks this caravan will undergo – and that will happen, because you have the attention of everyone from the Legion to hillside molerats, and the roving tribals are notorious for the violence of their curiosity. Not to mention, you have one of the owners of said caravan with you now, no doubt hammering out the final details of your agreement, and she’ll be keeping the Kahns in line so that they don’t go off pillaging and burning without reason.”
“Not bad for a man who’s been dead to the world for a day and a half.”
“You mean not bad for a Fiend.”
Stiles smiles a little. “I always did think we had a rather good understanding of each other.”
“Perhaps.”
“I’m glad you can recognize the best move for Scott’s well-being.”
I’m glad I can pretend to save my own sanity in the process. Isaac sits up straighter, rubs at a scar ridged across the outside of his right forearm. His undershirt is sticking to his chest. “What time is it?”
“Almost noon.”
“Get me something to eat and I’ll be gone within the hour.”
Stiles cocks his head to the side. “No farewell to Scott?” There’s a test hidden in there – he can hear it.
“Tell him I snuck out of here of my own free will. Tell him I blame him. Tell him I said he could go fuck himself, if he’s so desperate for it.” Isaac clenches his fists until the tendons creak. “Tell him whatever you need to tell him so that he doesn’t follow me.”
“So you do have a conscience,” Stiles muses.
Isaac swings his legs over the edge of the bed, rolling his shoulders and looking Stiles in the eye. “If he dies, I’ll come after you, and I’ll find you, and I’ll make you wish that the bastard child of Cesar and Cook-cook had gotten to you first.”
Stiles inclines his head. “I’m glad we could come to an agreement, then.”
***
The Kahns are more than happy to have him, for all that he’s hollow-eyed and sore when he walks into Boulder City beside Allison. They slap him on the back and call him ‘Fiend’ without remorse, as they always have, and by the time they reach Novac they’ve expanded on his story about the troopers to set the odds at fifty-to-one, with every trooper bearing a rocket launcher, and he took down half of them. On his own. Without a scratch.
They also lose a solid chunk of their recent earnings to him over games of Caravan as they’re extrapolating the tale.
Allison spends a lot of time sitting in the background hunched over a book of figures, or staring into the middle distance. She isn’t a quiet woman, per se, but Boyd and Erica pack a manic aura that makes the characteristics of others seem diminished by comparison. Also, she’s fond of Scott. Quite so.
Isaac wonders if she resents him. It wouldn’t surprise him.
But she doesn’t say anything antagonistic, and they don’t kill anyone who doesn’t attack them first, and they all share a moment of silence when they pass through the smoking shell that was once Nipton. The bodies on their crucifixes are weeks old, rotting even in the desert heat, and there are still some fires flickering amongst the ruins. Everything except the town hall is charred rubble.
“Legion,” Allison remarks without surprise.
They don’t linger there.
Word of Mags’ death reaches the Mojave Outpost before they do, but they’re only staying long enough for Allison to fill out her share of the caravan papers and for the guards to get one final night of decent sleep, so Ranger Jackson (distinct from Jackson of the Brotherhood, who’s bargaining with his superiors in Stiles’ name over in their bunker in Hidden Valley) doesn’t care as long as Isaac keeps his nose clean, and Major Knight still has the right parts to touch up the Shishkebab in exchange for the appropriate number of caps, and Lacey the bartender still slides a shot of whiskey over the counter in his direction, and her lack of smile isn’t new.
***
He keeps expecting to see Scott coming around corners or stretched out on his bedroll. It’s disconcerting to lie down at night without a warm weight settled against his chest, to wake up with Erica rattling his shoulder (which is still sore) instead of Scott’s face being pressed into his neck.
He’s an amalgamation of hurts that he’s not telling anybody about, a mix of the old and new, because they’re fading with time, as they always have, as he builds his walls back up again.
They head north along the Long 15, trying to move under the radar as much as possible. But it’s difficult for half a dozen Brahmin loaded with weapons and armor to be subtle or sneaky. Every day, there are Jackals and Powder Gangers slinking out from behind billboards, setting minds, sniping at them from the roofs of abandoned gas stations. It’s nothing unmanageable, but it’s only a taste of what’s to come.
At Sloan, there are tales of Quarry Junction being overrun by deathclaws, and Isaac’s gut goes tight. Their crew sits at the table with faces drawn and meals untouched, though alcohol disappears steadily enough as they wait for Allison and Lydia to make their call.
“Deathclaws on the road or cazadores in the mountains,” Lydia points out. “It’s going to be one or the other, and we’ll lose time backtracking to go through Goodsprings.”
“There are Super Mutants at Black Mountain, though,” says Boyd.
Erica swigs down her scotch. “And if we go through Goodsprings, we’ll cross into Kahn territory, so no more raiders.”
“Until we hit South Vegas and the Fiends, you mean.”
Allison sighs. “Let’s look a map, shall we?” She pulls out a chart of the entire New Vegas region, from Camp Searchlight in the south to Nellis in the north, with all the routes and roads marked clearly in black ink. She taps the nameless road that passes through Goodsprings and goes on to split into two routes, one running east towards Repconn, the other snaking north into the tangle of streets that is South Vegas. “If we go through Goodsprings and cut east past Vault 19 and Repconn, we can hook into Highway 95 a little beyond the 188, miss the Fiends.”
“Powder Gangers, though.”
“We’ve been killing Gangers since we left the Outpost; I’d rather fight them than deathclaws.” One of the guards fingers his rifle nervously.
Don’t be a hero. “I’ll pull for Goodsprings,” Isaac says.
Mumbles of agreement come from all around.
Lydia claps her hands. “Goodsprings it is. I’ll send a note to Stiles that we’ll be a few days late, but we should still get in with plenty of time.”
***
“Is there a reason you left Scott behind?”
“Yeah.” Isaac pulls one of the straps of his pack tighter. “I like to pretend to have a conscience, sometimes. Hang around with a Fiend long enough, some bounty hunter’s going to shoot the wrong person.”
“So you walked out on him?”
“It’s a hell of a lot better to have a clean break than a compound fracture.”
“You are going to see him again, you know.”
“Someday. Not for a while. Clean break, more or less.”
Allison digs out a crooked cigarette, lights it, takes a drag. “You do this sort of thing a lot? Ditching people?”
Isaac snorts. “You know many people who fuck Fiends?”
A patch of road at the head of the caravan explodes into dust and grit before she can respond, and they have better things to do than talk.
***
Goodsprings is as much as ghost town as it’s ever been. The residents are delighted at any sign of trade, and the guards split between the saloon and general store as soon as the last of the Brahmin are barricaded away in the corral. For his part, Isaac goes poking around the town, sticking his head into numerous abandoned houses, checking out the gas station up on the hill, trying to find places where one might hide. There’s evidence of someone staying in the gas station, but it’s old, and he knows Stiles’ story of the merchant who was fleeing from the Powder Gangers.
The broken fence around the schoolhouse catches his eye, so he goes to investigate that. The yard is infested with giant mantises, and there are more inside, so clearly nobody’s been staying here. He feels… silly, almost. Paranoid. Not something he’s accustomed to.
He shakes off the nonsense of it and goes for a look around the interior of the schoolhouse. It’s full of toppled student desks, benches, and mantis egg sacks, with lockers along the walls and a sturdier counter at the front of the room, with a terminal atop it and a safe on the floor behind it.
He’s in the middle of picking open the lock of the safe when the schoolhouse door creaks open and he freezes.
Footsteps tread across the floor. “I know you’re in here, Isaac.”
Scott.
Isaac drops the lockpick and screwdriver, rising to his feet in one smooth motion. “How did you get here?” How did you find me?
“I walked.” And that is Scott coming towards him now, grim and tired, but all healed up, better than when Isaac last saw him. “Stiles said you went back to the Thorn, because there they’d pay you to get the shit kicked out of you.” Closer. “He wasn’t happy when I left. And then they hadn’t seen you in over a year at the Thorn, so I went back to Stiles, and he said you must have picked up with some merc band, that you thought I was a piece of shit anyway, supposedly he hadn’t wanted to tell me before – best friends and all.” Closer. “So I hit up South Vegas and McCarran instead. And while I was doing that, I heard about the radio call from the caravan with the weapons shipment – the one with Kahns and a Fiend guarding it.” Closer. “And they were backtracking from Sloan because of the deathclaws, coming up through Goodsprings instead. You guys move slow. I got here yesterday morning.” There’s only the counter separating them now. Scott’s hands are clenched into fists at his sides. He’s shaking, and he barely sounds like Scott – sounds more like Isaac normally feels, thinks, and that’s not Scott at all.
Fitting, because Isaac doesn’t feel like Isaac. “Scott,” he says to make it real. Scott’s real. He’s here.
“I believed him at first, you know. Stiles. I can’t believe I did, but I did. If there was one place I thought you’d go it was back to the Thorn. And I was so dumb, because you – you, who’s always gotta be in charge – you’d never go back there. Not anymore.”
“Scott.”
“You’re a friggin’ machine sometimes, but you’re not dumb; you’ve never been dumb.” Scott blinks at him, confused and lost. “So why did you leave?”
“It couldn’t have had anything to do with the murder charge being laid against me, surely.” Isaac sounds cold and cruel even to his own ears. Good.
“You didn’t bring me with you.”
“That would have been… inadvisable.”
“Because Stiles said so?”
Isaac draws breath, lets it go, says nothing.
Scott sets his jaw. “I thought so.” He’s still shaking.
“Get out of here, Scott,” Isaac says. “Before somebody else comes after the Fiend and you get caught in the middle of it again.”
Scott’s laugh is wild, forced. “Because you’ve suddenly got a super-fragile conscience, is that it? Dude.” His hands unclench to slap down onto the counter. “You once blew me on the side of the road with Derek sitting watch ten feet away. We’ve seen each other covered in guts and gore, I… why is this suddenly… what am I missing?”
“Normally, it’s not specifically because of me.”
“And that’s…” Scott pauses, studying his face. “…bad?”
“It’s not good, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“So? What is? And you said – you said I’m the person who’d go looking for the sun after the apocalypse. What’s so different about this? One time that’s happened in a year and a half. Another eighteen months, and the whole Mojave’s going to be a different place.”
Isaac doesn’t have an answer for that, which is a wholly terrifying notion, so he stares down at the counter instead of answering. His hands are a patchwork mess compared to Scott’s.
“I don’t care if you’re broken,” Scott says, with his mastery of tactical emotional ambushes. “I don’t know what weird shit is going on in your head right now, either, but I do know that I hate wondering where you are and if you’re still alive, so we don’t have to… just don’t leave again? Please?”
Isaac doesn’t know anything except that he wants to make Scott stop shaking, so he climbs over the counter, shoves him into the nearest wall and kisses him, rough, with one hand on the back of his neck and the other curved around his skull, pinning him. Scott makes a half-wounded sound, but opens up immediately, so Isaac works a leg between his to make it dirty, drags his mouth down Scott’s throat and bites, just a little, to make it real.
“Shit.” Scott’s nails are scrabbling at his back. “Shit, Isaac, just fuck me.”
A snarl gets torn out of Isaac as he comes up to maul Scott’s mouth again. “Don’t tempt me.” Scott groans, warm and willing and here, pliable in the best way possible, and Isaac pushes him a little further into the wall, talking in between working him over, working him open. “You can’t imagine what I’d do to you.” Tugging at the first of the buckles binding together Scott’s armor. “I’d eat you alive.” He bites the sharp jut of Scott’s collarbone.
Scott’s hands are suddenly tangled up in Isaac’s, helping him, pulling at the armor until the shell of leather comes loose. He pushes Isaac away long enough to yank off his undershirt, and then there is a lot of bare skin for Isaac to cover. “C’mon, c’mon.” Hands fluttering over Isaac’s torso, and Scott’s got this desperate look in his eye like there’s a clock running on them.
Fiend armor’s a mess to get off, compiled from a dozen kinds of scraps as it is, and, while Isaac’s always been aware of that, he never feels quite so clumsy as he does when Scott’s half-stripped and waiting for him. It’s even harder to work with Scott kissing him, pulling him close while Isaac tries not to rip him open with a wayward spike or rusted edge – not like it’d matter, not to Scott, not now; they’re in an ancient schoolhouse with rough surfaces and jabbing splinters all around , for crying out loud, but he doesn’t want to hurt Scott, still. He’s never been so aware of not wanting to hurt someone in his life.
He corrals Scott against the wall and lets him ride his thigh as he hauls off his shirt, and pretends like he knows what the hell good judgment it. “I’m not gonna fuck you,” he says, jerks his leg up higher while Scott whines and claws at his shoulders. “Not now. I’d rip you apart.”
Scott tries to grind down and haul him in at the same time, flushed all over, shuddering when Isaac’s palms ghost over his sides. “Soon,” he pleads. “Before one of us gets shot in the head.” He bucks frantically into the light touch of Isaac’s fingers to his belt buckle. “Isaac.”
He’s rutting up against Scott’s hip now, unashamed, pitching composure to the wind in favor of sucking bruises along Scott’s jugular and cupping the ridge of him, giving him something better to ride. He’s vaguely aware of muttering under his breath about the taste of Scott’s skin, his completely berserk mentality, sturdy, willing, god, what even is he, can’t take a hint to save his own skin, fucking around with a Fiend, and Scott’s kissing him to swallow the self-loathing babble of it and suck the disbelief from Isaac’s lungs, hands at Isaac’s hips, jacking him, pulling them closer; he’s thumbing along the sharp line of Scott’s hipbone, and Scott’s grunting pain-pleasure, grip tightening, not minding at all when Isaac tears at his mouth with the shocky release of his coming, jaw open so wide it aches, teeth clipping, and Isaac barely sounds human between the snarls and gasps, doesn’t feel human at all. When he ducks his head to nip at the underside of Scott’s jaw, just because he can, and rolls his palm against the heavy weight of Scott in his hand, Scott stiffens and keens, jerks against Isaac, rasping his name as he goes over the edge.
Isaac shudders. He holds Scott up until the last of the overflowing tension frissons out of his limbs, kissing him as softly as he can manage, with one hand curled loose around his neck. “Don’t hurt yourself,” he murmurs.
Scott groans “Shut up” against his lips and shifts a little, taking his own weight. He’s still caught between Isaac and the wall, penned in. Isaac likes having him here. He kisses him with a bit of tongue this time, but leaves out the semi-panic of before. He feels loose – displaced. Out of his own skin. Orgasms do that to him.
“We should go back to the saloon, get some dinner.”
“Mmgh.” Scott lets his head loll back to meet Isaac’s gaze. “You gonna promise not to ditch me again?”
“That was for your own good, you know.”
“Isaaaaaac,” Scott whines, slumping down a little.
Isaac smirks, traces a hand down Scott’s ribs and enjoys the abortive jerk of his hips. “No promises.”
Scott goes to protest that, then stops, changes tactics. “I was a wreck without you, you know.” Isaac gives him a severe look he as straightens up off the wall; Scott’s hair a rumpled mess, the top third of his body still flushed and bitten, marked up in a dozen different places, and all anyone would have to do is check out his mouth to know what had happened. Scott scrunches up his nose. “I meant mentally, you asshole.”
Sighing, Isaac kisses him. “You have terrible judgment.”
“You’ve told me that before.”
“It’s still true.” Isaac lets his teeth catch on Scott’s lower lip. “C’mon. Let’s go eat.”
***
They walk into the saloon, and Boyd elbows Erica in the ribs. She slaps him, then digs out a couple of NCR bills and shoves them across the table.
Isaac stares down every pair of eyes that meet his.
***
“That the Fiend that killed the kid down at Golf?”
“You want your weapons?” Lydia slaps a sheaf of forms down on the desk. “Build a bridge and get over it.” Her head turns. “Hale.”
Derek stalks over to the table, gives her a nod and skims the papers with only the most cursory of glances before nailing a glare into Isaac. “Stiles wants you. He’s in the back.” He doesn’t move when Isaac rolls his eyes and steps around him, but he throws out an arm when Scott goes to follow. “You’re coming with me, McCall. We need a talk.”
Never turning around, Isaac lets a hand drop to the Shishkebab’s grip as he swaggers through the airport’s husk, into the office where Stiles has set up shop. He doesn’t feign ignorance when he walks in. “I do hope you’re intelligent enough to separate my actions from your horrible lying skills.”
“I do hope you know that I’m here instead of at the Dam for the sole purpose of putting an end to this. Shut the door.”
Isaac kicks it shut, lingering beside it while Stiles comes around to sit atop his desk, hands clasped in his lap. “What’s your plan this time? Kill me?”
No change in Stiles’ expression. “What would it take for you to go back to the Thorn?”
Isaac barks a laugh. “Nothing. I’m not going.”
“Scott seems to hold the same logic; that’s why I’m asking.” Stiles mouth twitches at the corner. "Can you think of anyplace you’d be willing to go that he wouldn’t follow?”
“You presume a lot about my skills at non-violent matters.”
“Perhaps.” Closing his eyes, Stiles sighs. “You can let go of the sword, by the way. Everyone else on the planet may thank me for killing you, but Scott’s the sort to hold a grudge. So.” He taps a pen against his leg. “You’re safe.”
Isaac loosens his grip, but only fractionally. “You’ve got Derek talking to him now, I saw. Might change his mind.”
“More likely hardened his resolve; if I know anything about them, one has shoved the other into a wall by now, but I had to try.” Stiles pulls off the pen’s cap to toy with it. “What if you went East? Scouting beyond the Colorado?”
“Is this something to tell Scott or something you actually want me to do?”
“North America’s a big place,” Stiles says. “His chances of finding you would be slim. Better to stay here, look after his mother, rebuild New Vegas.”
“That doesn’t answer the question.”
Stiles shrugs. “I want you gone from Scott’s life. If you’re still interested in helping us against the Legion, that’s great – I’m sure we can find some covert way to put your talents for gratuitous slaughter to use. If you’d rather disappear into the wastes to commit massacres on your own time until some lawful entity catches up to you, that’s your prerogative. But if Scott’s gonna get his skull split open, it’s not going to be because someone got trigger-happy coming after a Fiend. I can give you two thousand caps to get you wherever you want to go, but you’re going to be gone tomorrow by first light, and when I tell Scott I have no goddamn idea where you are, it’s going to be the truth.”
Isaac longs for a shot of whiskey. “Where’s the money?”
***
He’s barely out of sight of McCarren’s watchtowers when Scott slips out of an alleyway, face pinched and angry. He punches Isaac in the ribs, and Isaac lets him. “I thought we said no more ditching me.”
“Never promised. Got two thousand caps for pretending like I was going to, though.”
“Shit.” Scott punches him again, then grabs his shoulder, yanking him to a halt. “You’re not leaving me.”
“Apparently.” Isaac spits off to the side. “We’re laying low, then, if you’re coming. No being a big man and running around and helping people. No Hoover Dam, no NCR anything. I wouldn’t put it past Stiles to send Derek after me at this point.”
“No being a hero,” Scott says. “Okay. What about the Kahns?”
Don’t be a hero. The words jam and stick in Isaac’s head, in his throat. He looks at Scott for a long, long moment – long enough for Scott to blush and duck his head. No being a hero. Jesus Christ.
Scott’s scuffing his feet in the dirt like a fool, blushing hard. “Or, you know, whatever,” he’s saying, cut off by Isaac’s nod.
“The Kahn’s would take us.”
Scott’s head shoots up. “Really? Y’think?”
Isaac shrugs. “I’m good for killing, you’re good for healing, and there’s still enough animosity between them and the NCR that we’ll be off the radar for a while. Boyd and Erica will be heading back to Red Rock soon anyway. We can meet up with them.”
“And you’re not gonna sneak off to the middle of nowhere sometime between then and now?”
“Like I could do that without you following me.” Isaac sighs. “Fuck, McCall, you’re turning me into a human.” When all that does is make Scott beam, Isaac slaps his chest. “That wasn’t a compliment. C’mon.” He turns away and starts walking. Four steps, then Scott’s back at his side again, grin stupidly, hopelessly happy, like he doesn’t even care that he’s probably going to bleed out in a patch of red dirt because of Isaac, the noble idiot, the hypocrite, telling Isaac not to be a hero when that’s all that Scott’s ever been. And he’s going to die being a hero, and it’s going to be Isaac’s fault. He’s in charge of this relationship. It’ll be his fault.
He should have run sooner.