Datasets:
mickume
/
alt_nsfw

Dataset card Data Studio Files
xet
Community
text
stringlengths
0
61.7k
Fantastic shrugged and Ignacio spoke up, reminding all of us that he existed, "When were you here?  The NCR never sent any scientists and before them, this plant was occupied by the Brotherhood of Steel..."
Max’s silence suggested the answer.  I asked.  "Max, were you here with the Brotherhood?"  
He looked my way, but I couldn’t read his expression through his disguise and he quickly explained to the others, "Last time I was here, I was thirteen, and trust me, that did not fucking go well."
That must have been years ago... maybe he fled the NCR and wound up at Helios One before they reached the Mojave.  It seemed more likely than the idea that he might have infiltrated an organization with as much reason to kill him as the Brotherhood, although admittedly he didn’t seem to hate them as much as he hated the NCR.  
Ignacio seemed to process that statement and Fantastic exclaimed, "You were here as a kid?  How’d you get by the tin cans?"  Presumably, he meant the Brotherhood, which suggested he thought Max was considerably younger than I judged him to be or else the man just had no sense of time at all.  
Lucia frowned at Max, possibly trying to judge if Fantastic was right or if he’d been here before the Brotherhood.  He couldn’t be younger than twenty-five, he was just malnourished, like most of the wasteland, so he must have left long before the Brotherhood arrived.  "You remember anything about how to get this place working?"
Max laughed without much real humor, though he faked it.  "I never even went in that building; you know me.  I’m not cut out for combat.  I’d have just gotten myself killed."
We reconnected the mainframe to the rest of the system with a few seconds of clearing our way to the terminals and a few more seconds of Max hacking his way inside.  It was early evening when we finished, but Lucia opted to rest rather than fight the security system tonight.  
After we’d all eaten, she’d us shown to our cots and went off to do who knows what.  I presumed she had NCR business to deal with and I was more than happy to be left alone with Max.  The soldiers agreed, somewhat reluctantly, to guard the doors of this room and allow us some privacy inside.  Lucia would be sleeping on the room’s second cot because apparently she’d assumed we’d share a bed and I didn’t mind: at the very least sharing a bed with Max meant I might actually have a chance at sleeping despite being in the metaphorical lion’s den and he seemed like he might need me there for the same reason.  
I sat on the edge of the bed and took off my boots.  I was used to being on my feet for extended periods of time, but trekking halfway across the Mojave over the past few days had me a little more sore than usual.  As if taunting my aching feet, Max paced the dusty floorboards.  
"Just because you’re still moving doesn’t mean we’re getting out of here any faster."
Max sighed and joined me on the bed.  He slid his boots off and rubbed the blisters on his feet.  "Sorry.  I just... I don’t want to be here."
"That makes two of us."  I took off my lab coat and folded it on the floor beside the bed.  I hadn’t packed pajamas because I didn’t bother with them when we camped— I’d rather sleep in my normal clothes in case we were ambushed.  I didn’t need the people shooting at me to also be laughing at my choice of sleepwear.  Besides, folks dropped by to talk to Lucia at the most inopportune times.  
Max, presumably following my lead, stood back up and stripped.  He kept his bracers, his collar, and a pair of uncomfortably tight briefs— thankfully he’d worn normal underwear and not another sequined thong.  I hadn’t expected the man to sleep in spiked leather armor, but I’d figured he’d leave his shorts on.  Max turned around and found me staring.  He looked surprised.  For once, he hadn’t intentionally tried to make me uncomfortable.  "Tight denim isn’t good sleepwear," he explained, "and I wasn’t going to sleep in the armor.  I’ve got a winter coat, if you want me to look like a flasher..."
"No."  I was blushing.  "No, it’s fine."  I lay down and slid towards the wall to give him room to join me.  He did.  Even when he wasn’t trying to show off, it seemed that every inch of his body must have been stolen from a DaVinci sculpture except his face.  I tried to focus on his eyes.  It didn’t help.  He had no hint of his usual feigned happiness, right now everything was genuine.  He looked grateful and a little nervous, but mostly he had a gleam in his eyes that I’d only seen a few times before.  He had the look of a man who would stop at nothing to survive.  I knew that determination was the only reason he’d stayed alive as long as he had and I had to admit it was... captivating.  
Max snapped me out of my daze with a blink.  "Am I that distracting?"
He chuckled.  "I’m not trying to be distracting right now."
He frowned.  One hand slid off the bed behind him and Max remarked, "You know me well enough to realize that?"
"You’ve been pretty open with me, and it isn’t like we haven’t spent much time around each other."
He nodded thoughtfully.  "Most people can’t tell when I’m lying.  Or when I’m trying to distract them.  You can.  And thanks, by the way."
"Thanks for taking the time to understand you or for saying that you’re so distracting I find myself staring whether I want to or not?"
He chuckled and inched a little closer.  When his knee brushed my thigh, I tried to back away and found I was already pressed against the wall.  Somehow I decided not to point that out to him.  "I meant thanks for curing me.  Or, you know, diagnosing me and telling me how not to feel sick.  I don’t know how I can ever repay you."  
He had that look in his eyes again like some spark inside of him had been rekindled.  He’d looked almost dead before and now I don’t think I’d ever seen someone so alive.  How was this the same man?  The red-green spectrum of his eyes looked steely in the dark.  The exact shade actually called to mind power armor and reminded me exactly how much I had in common with this man.  Maybe I really could be even more open with him.  I’d hinted at my past for weeks and so had he, but neither of us had actually admitted that we’d been born in the Enclave.  Granted, an NCR power plant wasn’t necessarily the best place to tell him, but they couldn’t hear us in here...  
Max kissed me.  To be fair, I should really have expected that, but it caught me off-guard.  He made and wore a lip balm to keep his lips from cracking in the dry desert air; I remembered it from our previous kiss but this time the mutfruit flavoring mixed with the taste of the apples we’d both had for dinner.  His lips parted against my own and his tongue slipped into my mouth.  I lost track of time.  Max clearly had experience kissing— I’d guessed that after our first kiss even though his profession hadn’t been a guarantee.  Probably another reason the Gomorra had hired him despite his face, although that square, powerful countenance was starting to appeal to me.  Out of habit, I reached up to stroke his hair and changed plans when my fingers touched the stiff, dried ink.  The strap of the goggles had left an imprint in his skin and I traced that back from his brow before running my hand over the stubble on his jaw.  I hadn’t realized until that point that Max was only kissing.  He’d initiated the kiss but stopped as if he regretted it, or maybe he just couldn’t be sure I was interested, but now he raised his hand and tentatively mirrored what I was doing to him.  
*        *         *
I’d kissed him in the hope of distracting myself and it had worked.  After five years at the Gomorra, my body knew what it was doing and instinct kept urging me to act and I kept resisting it.  This was Arcade, I had to keep reminding myself of that fact.  He wasn’t some person who paid for my services and had to get off and get out, he wasn’t even one of my misguided customers who spent most of their time talking to me; he was a friend.  Maybe more than that.  I wanted to kiss him.  I wanted... more than that, I think.  I still wasn’t sure.  I’d never really considered romance, hell, I hadn’t even believed in it for years.  Love was just a product of hormones and misguided beliefs in something that wasn’t real— like tribals who thought the sun rose and set because their god-chief told it to.  I’d been too miserable and in pain to really trust those old stories and for a time I’d wondered if everyone was in this much pain and I was just a wuss, but now that wasn’t the case.  I felt so... alive, like everything was new and maybe, if I could feel happy, anything was possible.  And I did feel happy, especially right now.  If I focused on his mouth, and the sage-y smell of his clothes, and the softness of his hair, I could forget where we were and I was happy.  
And I did want sex, regardless of whether or not love existed or even played a part, I wanted to sleep with him, but was that what he wanted?  Would he ascribe some profound meaning to it, if we had sex?  Would he be understanding if I didn’t?  Did he even want that, or was this just hormones, and proximity, and the fact that I’d been very seductively messing around with him since we’d met just because it made him uncomfortable?  I didn’t want to force Arcade into this.  The kiss had been a mistake, I’d only respond to his advances from now on.
I followed his lead and ran my fingers through his hair and down over less than a day’s growth of pale stubble.  His hair was softer than mine, and that was probably more due to genetics than the sort of chemical shampoo I used.  I’d never met anyone else with hair this soft and silky.  
One strong hand stroked the muscles of my shoulder and nudged me onto my back.  Without breaking the kiss, I took the suggestion.  Arcade’s other hand traced the contours of my clavicle and worked its way towards my waist, stroking across the shape of every muscle it passed.  I couldn’t resist.  I pressed my mouth against his to kiss him even more deeply and propped myself up on my elbows, intending to press our bodies together more completely.  After my time at the Gomorra, I’d become something of an expert at getting myself hard without needing to use my hands and I think he had yet to realize I was ready to go in that regard.  Arcade had still been lying on his side beside me, and I’d expected him to stay like that unless I suggested something different; I figured, because he’d rolled me onto my back, that he was just planning to give me a hand job, but either I’d changed his mind just now or he’d had something else in mind from the start.  To my surprise, Arcade rolled to kneel between my thighs.  I spread my legs instinctively, but the whole move demonstrated much more agility than I’d expected from him.  He broke the kiss for only a moment and didn’t glance down; he guided himself with the hand that had been on my cheek.  I felt it on my hip and then below that.  I wrapped my legs around his back and hauled myself forward until our crotches touched as soon as I felt his other hand sliding around to pull my hips towards him.  By this point, I still wore my briefs and he hadn’t taken off more than his coat; I didn’t expect that to change.  I ground my hips against his crotch, feeling that he was also already hard.  I would have kept going if he hadn’t stopped me.  
He broke the kiss to gasp, "Just... wait a moment..."  I nipped his earlobe but obeyed.  Rather than guess what he was planning, I felt him part my legs enough that he had room to pull his pants and briefs down to his thighs.  I guessed where this was going now and slid one hand off the bed to feel through my bag while he delved into my own drawers.  Nearly skin-tight cotton didn’t exactly hide anything, but he waited until he had my cock out and visible to remark.  "I guess Max really was an appropriate stage name."
"It is my real name, you know."
"But not your first name."  He kissed my neck and rocked his hips against mine.  One hand explored the length and shape of my dick, holding his own so the two rubbed together.  
I got the sense that he wanted to leave the name discussion for later, but some part of me hoped he’d figure out who I was.  I felt guilty having sex with him if we might be enemies later on; I was almost afraid to breathe in case I would moan, but I managed to gasp a hint, "Max isn’t my first name, it’s— it’s part of my surname."
Arcade either didn’t notice or hadn’t heard of my family.  He nipped my shoulder.  I passed a small metal jar behind his back so I could use two hands to open it.  The Gomorra had gotten me in the habit of carrying lube at all times and I’d brought some with me on a whim.  I’d been right to think that sex distracted him more than most people; I had the jar back in my bag in under a minute and Arcade flinched when I suddenly wrapped a very slippery hand around our cocks.  
"Of course you brought lube on this trip."
"I never go anywhere without it."  I kissed him again and that kiss lasted until we both finished.  
My heart was pounding by that point and I broke the kiss to breathe.  Arcade pulled his pants up and lay beside me on his stomach with his head on my shoulder.  He seemed concerned until I felt like I could breathe again.  I hoped his concern was medical and he wasn’t about to ask what there was between us.  I banked on the former and admitted, "I know, my heart sometimes... objects to this sort of activity."  
"I’d say intermittent cardiac arrhythmia is a little more than a simple `objection’."  He gave up on the subtlety of simply listening to my chest and slid a hand under my collar to check my pulse.  His fingers brushed the scab on my throat and he pushed the leather out of the way to examine it.  "Max, what happened?"
I caught his hand and pushed it away.  "It’s a long story."  He narrowed his eyes.  He knew it was a fairly recent wound, but I wasn’t going to explain.  I’d rather dwell on the awkwardness of my current feelings than distract myself by contemplating my situation with Lucia.  Sex had only distracted me while it was happening and now I just felt more uncomfortable and exposed.  I grabbed the coat out of my bag and used it as a blanket although I knew it wasn’t really going to help.  At least if a soldier came inside for some reason, I’d be a little further from nude.  I sighed and closed my eyes.  I didn’t want to deal with Arcade right now because I didn’t want to tell him— about Lucia or about why I disliked Helios 1— but he picked up on my mood.  
"...Was it bad?"  He sounded so dejected.  
I opened my eyes to answer and found he looked even more dejected than he sounded.  Did he think I hadn’t wanted this or did he just think he was really bad in bed?  "No."  I shook my head and picked at the ink caked in my hair.  "No, I just... I was looking for a distraction and this shouldn’t have been my method."
"So you don’t—?"
"No, it has nothing to do with you."  He thought I wasn’t interested in him or he had some similar concern and that wasn’t it at all.  "I... I shouldn’t have done this here.  With anyone.  It’s just...  I was trying not to think about where we are, and sex distracted me for a while but now... now it just feels wrong that... here..."  I sighed and stared at the ceiling.  "I’m not making any sense, am I?"  The ceilings in this plant all looked the fucking same and that didn’t help.  Looking straight up, I couldn’t tell any different between this room and the room where...  I gagged and stood up, putting my coat on properly and pacing.  
Arcade propped himself up and watched me tread a path across the dusty floor.  I kept my distance from the doors and the cot, which limited me to an awkwardly small space where I trekked a random shape and left painful footprints in the dust.  At least one of my blisters had burst and I’d rather appreciate the pain and risk infection than bandage the wound; it seemed like some small penance for having sex in this place.  
"You’re... making some sense..."  He nodded towards the door.  "NCR soldiers hardly create the ideal mood."
*       *       *
Max glared at the door with a level of hatred I’d only ever seen from Moreno.  I was almost surprised that he didn’t start a rampage through the building and it seemed a testament to his renewed desire to live that he merely snarled and balled his hands into fists.  "If I had any choice in the matter, those fuckers wouldn’t be here."
After his previous apathy, outright loathing proved that he cared about something, but it was hardly ideal.  I tried to be understanding.  My mother had died in her sleep and granted, the NCR hadn’t helped and I wasn’t fond of them, but he’d seen them shoot his mother, and it had probably scarred him for life.  He might be justified in hating them, but considering he’d be the one Lucia trusted to operate the terminal which controlled the Archimedes laser, I felt a little less accepting of his animosity.  
"Max—"  A dog outside heard my voice and barked, possibly because it shared his name, and the bark precipitated a stream of stifled curses.  Max half-heartedly stomped one foot and turned on his heel to pace the other way, but the motion made him wince and he hopped back over to the cot.  He dropped onto the bed beside me, cradling that foot and I saw that the skin had torn completely open.  "Shit.  Max, stay still."  He grumbled something that seemed to be broken Russian and dug into his bag.  I stopped struggling to leave the cot without forcing him to move when he placed a medical kit on the bed beside him.  
I think he meant to tend the wound himself, but I grabbed tweezers and tried to help.  The several hundred year old wood had left his foot bristling with splinters, but there was only one pair of tweezers, and he didn’t protest.  Perching on the bed with his right ankle on his left knee left Max uncomfortably off-balance so I wasn’t surprised that he was soon leaning back against my chest while I rested my chin on his shoulder so I could see what I was doing.  Between the dead wood and the near-complete lack of calluses on his feet, it ended up being minor surgery to get his foot back to the point where it would heal well.  I thought about asking if he wanted painkillers, but he hadn’t brought any out of his bag and I couldn’t easily get around him to reach my own medical kit.  More importantly, he’d mentioned earlier that he couldn’t take painkillers; some did use wheat gluten as a bonding agent, so he would have a reaction to them and after reaching the point where he wanted to kill himself to end the pain, I fully expected that a man with his skill as a chemist had already developed high resistance to virtually all of them.  
I couldn’t quantify the pain he’d been in all his life, but the man barely reacted to surgery without any kind of analgesic, he just gritted his teeth and scowled at the wall.  His eyes watered and his breathing hitched occasionally, but I had no idea if that was due to physical pain or his emotions.  Most people would be screaming right now and he just sat there like he’d stubbed his toe.  It was more than a little impressive, but also sad to think what he must have been dealing with before.  Nobody taught me how much pain celiac caused because as far as I knew, Max was the only case in living history.  People with genetic conditions didn’t usually survive to reproduce, and with the Enclave all but gone, Max was probably the only person alive who carried the gene.  Actually, that might be wrong.  I found myself wondering if he had any kids.  He’d worked as a prostitute for at least a few years, if he’d serviced female clients, was there a chance a few might have gotten pregnant?  For all I knew, the Mojave would have an outbreak of celiac in a few months, which might be good if it became independent, considering most wheat products were either pre-war or shipped in from the NCR.  Still, I’m not sure what I thought of that possibility.  It bothered me a little that the man might have dozens of kids without his knowledge, or that those kids might never see their increasingly amazing father.  On the other hand, if he was gay, it might be nice that he had already had kids.  
"My mother died here," Max blurted out.  
I stared at him, completely forgetting the surgery I hadn’t yet finished.  "Uh... what?"
*       *      *
Either he’d been focused on the surgery, or he’d been distracted by the fact that he was more or less straddling me to reach my foot with both hands, or he was just too shocked to process that.  
"My mother died here," I repeated.  "Not here specifically, but downstairs, in that hallway before the big open room.  I was with her when it happened.  I... I thought sex would..." I scowled at my leg and resisted the urge to punch the cot beneath me.  I’d been such an idiot about this!  I couldn’t not tell Arcade, or he’d blame himself, as always, or else he’d just worry about me, also as always, but I hated having to talk about this.  I didn’t want to lie to him, and not just because he might be able to tell I was lying.  I’d never intended to deceive him about anything.  "I was trying to distract myself."
"Oh...shit ..."  He sat back, leaning against the wall behind me and completely forgetting about my foot.  Rather than let the wound keep bleeding while I dwelled on my past, I scowled at the incisions.  I’d never been very good at judging whether or not a wound needed stitching and stims probably wouldn’t work well on my extremities, especially in a room this cold.  I grabbed a swab and a bottle of alcohol intending to fix it myself but that snapped Arcade out of his daze.  I leaned back against his chest as he took them from me and let him tend to it instead.  I’d never been good with wounds, even my own.  
I didn’t welcome the loss of such a painful distraction as tending the wound myself, but I focused on my pain while he cleaned and stitched the cuts.  I could feel my other foot scabbing against the floor, but it wasn’t as bad.  Luckily, I guess, Arcade revived the conversation.  
"Max...  Do you want to talk about it?"
He hesitated.  I could tell, whatever I’d said, he wanted to talk about it.  He had some question like scorpion in a bag and as much as he didn’t want to ask for my sake, I could tell it was going to bother him for days if I didn’t just get it over with.  
He got that look like he planned to brush it off and I scowled, so he asked sheepishly, "You were here, at Helios One, when your mother was shot by NCR soldiers?"
He frowned down at my foot, bandaging it so I could hopefully walk tomorrow and we wouldn’t be stuck here for another night.  He had a very distinct set to his jaw and I could tell he was figuring something out.  Worst case scenario, he’d realized who I was.  Best case...  Well, it was more likely that he’d realized I was Brotherhood, I’m pretty sure I had him under the impression that we’d both been born in the Enclave.  With his looks, knowledge, and that battered old plasma defender he carried, along with his skill at deflection and the topics that made him evasive, it hadn’t been difficult to figure out.  He was lucky Veronica and Boone either didn’t know or didn’t care, and Lucia seemed to dismiss him as just an ordinary Follower.  I guess he was also fortunate that unlike most of the Brotherhood, I’d never cared about old grudges.  I held grudges for things I had witnessed; I didn’t care about the Enclave and I wouldn’t have cared about the NCR if it wasn’t personal.  I didn’t hold with the idiotic idea that the solution to unethical experimentation was to lock up all technology and hide in our bunkers like dragons guarding a hoard, but I’d stopped caring about the rest of the Brotherhood long ago, at least that’s what I told myself.  Hopefully Arcade would recognize that I’d left the Brotherhood and my heritage was no more important than his.  But maybe he hated the Brotherhood the same way I hated the NCR.  
I’d gone back to staring at the wall and trying to keep my thoughts far away from here when Arcade finally voiced his realization.  "Were you telling the truth when you said you were eighteen?"
I nodded.  "Nineteen now, but I was."
He gave me a long, disconcerted stare.  Unwilling to deal with the ethical arguments I’d heard far too often, I nodded at my foot.  "Just hand me the bandages and let me finish that myself so I can do the other one."
"The other one?"
"It’s not as bad."  I wrapped my right foot a few more times and taped it in place, stretching that leg along the cot to get at my other foot.  With Arcade still sitting behind me, I nearly ended up stretched across his lap, but he realized this and quickly retreated to lying on his side against the wall behind me.  I leaned backwards teasingly out of habit.  He nudged me off of him and sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose.  
*       *       *
It did occur to me, briefly, that Max might have been part of the Brotherhood of Steel, but I dismissed that.  I felt so certain that he was Enclave.  In retrospect, that had probably been my own wishful thinking to be so blind to all the signs of who he was, but at the time I sought any other possible explanation.  If the NCR had been stupid enough to hire an idiot like Fantastic, it wasn’t so impossible that they might have hired an ex-Enclave scientist, who may have brought her son with her.  Maybe they’d been found out, and that was when she’d been shot.  I tried not to dwell on the reasons he might have been here; his age seemed much more important at the time.  
It didn’t sound like he’d joined the Gomorra recently, so he’d been a prostitute as a teenager, maybe even since he’d been thirteen.  Also, he’d had a birthday somewhere in the past few weeks and not even mentioned it, and I’d just slept with a nineteen-year-old.  What the hell was wrong with me?  And how did he wind up looking thirty?
I found myself staring at his face while he cleaned and bandaged his other foot.  He was right, this one wasn’t serious, although anything could get infected in the wasteland.  I trusted him to handle it himself while I tried to sort through everything I’d just discovered.  
Both of us stayed silent for nearly an hour.  Max bandaged his foot and then sat perfectly still, one leg stretched along the edge of the bed and the other folded mostly beneath him.  He hunched over on the cot and stared blankly at the floor.  Lost in thought was my most optimistic theory; between his memories of this place, his hatred of the NCR, and our conversation, he could have been contemplating suicide or a massacre.  My reaction to his age probably didn’t help.  
Studying his face, I realized his bone structure and dark hair made him look older than he was and the lines and hollow look that came from everything he’d been through added to the effect.  He wasn’t thirty and he hadn’t been lying; he really was nineteen.  I felt like an idiot that I hadn’t noticed sooner and I was still feeling that way when Lucia strode through the door.  Even though both of us were still fully clothed— or I was and Max’s winter coat covered him up— we looked fairly disheveled and given the rumors circulating the Lucky 38, I figured that Lucia realized we’d had sex.  I still ran my hands through my hair in an effort to get it back into a somewhat presentable style and I lay on my stomach in case she planned to talk to us; this was Lucia, I never knew when she was going to mention some errand she wanted to run or some cave or vault she wanted to investigate after we finished our current goal.  
Rather than suggest that we drop by Repconn and then visit the Gun Runners on the way back, or something similarly involved, Lucia had a question.  She eyed Max, who didn’t seem to have noticed her as he hadn’t moved in the past twenty minutes.  "Did you two have another fight?"
Max spoke up before I could deflect, "Do we look like we had a fight?"
I could feel myself blushing as I frowned at him.  Ignoring my expression, Max flopped onto his back on the cot and rolled towards me until he couldn’t get any closer.  He snuggled against me and closed his eyes.  I turned my stare on Lucia because I knew if I looked at Max, I’d cave.  Lucia couldn’t see his face now that he had it buried between me and the upturned sheepskin collar of his coat, so he would have dropped his facade and I’d see that he was in pain, and terrified of the NCR right outside this room, and remembering that he watched his mother die downstairs.  I didn’t want to push him out of the bed either way, but I didn’t trust myself to stick to my plan of not letting this become a romantic relationship if I saw how much he needed someone.  I hadn’t planned to have sex with him to begin with, however amazing he looked, but the man just had away of thwarting my better judgement.  Or I just had no self control.  There was that.  
The courier had the nerve to giggle.  "You two couldn’t resist the charm of a dusty pre-war power plant?  People have died here, you know."
Max coughed against my chest.  He seemed to curl up as if he was cold, bringing his hands up to his face.  He seemed to shiver.  Glancing down, I saw he’d shut his eyes and bit his knuckle to keep quiet.  Either he was crying, or he was forcing himself not to scream.  Lucia didn’t seem to notice.  
*       *       *
It took every ounce of my self control to force my breathing back into a steady rhythm.  That fucking bitch would say that.  She talked to Veronica all the time, I’d heard that the two were good friends and even though she didn’t know the truth of who I was, she knew I was Brotherhood and she knew about my mother.  She knew my mother had died here and she probably knew about my brother; anything Veronica knew of my life was now fuel for Lucia’s torture.  I hadn’t cared enough to fight back.  
For years, I’d stopped caring about that; before Lucia, there had been Nero.  In the Mojave, it had seemed natural that I would either have to defend myself against all the armies that were after me or I’d need to accept protection from someone with the power to make my life more miserable than it already was.  For years, I’d accepted the least misery I could find while hiding from my past and for years I hadn’t bothered to seek anything else both because it seemed hopeless and because I had fully expected to be dead soon.  But I was still alive.  Not only that, but I wasn’t in pain, at least not constant, unexplained pain, this pain was my own damn fault.  My feet would heal.  Lucia, however, would not go away so easily.  I couldn’t defend myself alone, I couldn’t ask my friends to put their lives on the line for me— that was part of why I left the Brotherhood— but Lucia had given me access to the safest place in the Mojave, if not the safest place in the world.  And I understood how it worked better than she did.  
*       *       *
"Yeah."  I tried to pass off my tone as simple discomfort at that realization.  "You know, this should be obvious, but I’d appreciate it if you send the power to Freeside tomorrow."  
Lucia took off her armor but kept on the shirt and leggings she wore beneath it as she flopped onto her cot facing me.  "Why not the whole region equally?"
"Uh, McCarran and the Strip already have Hoover Dam.  You think they need more power?"
She retorted with what I took to be patience.  "If the Legion takes the dam, they’d lose all power."  Before I could accept her point and agree, she added, "Besides, I’m going to see if Max can set it up so the power can be redirected from the Lucky 38."
"That’s fair."  It was unlikely, unless this system had some way receiving input remotely, which I doubted, but if it could be done, that would let us power Freeside and redirect to the entire region if something happened to the Dam.  Lucia hadn’t addressed Max directly and as he seemed to be feigning sleep that was probably for the best.  He’d stopped shaking, but hadn’t opened his eyes and I could feel the very forced steadiness of his breathing.  He’d broken the skin on his knuckle again and I could see tears gleaming in the dim light.  Outside, the dog barked again and he flinched.  
Lucia stretched luxuriously, oblivious to the state Max was in.  "Well, I guess I’ll ask him about that tomorrow, good night."
"Good night," I replied automatically, looking back at Max as she turned off the lantern.  I ran a hand over his bristly, ink-caked hair and waited.  Some time after my eyes adjusted to the darkness, he finally relaxed.  He didn’t meet my gaze, he just lay very still, tracing the bite on his knuckle with the fingers of his other hand.  It wasn’t deep enough to really need medical attention, but a bandage could help.  I wanted to comfort him but recognized that he didn’t want Lucia to know about his history with Helios One, or at least not the full depth of it.  I wrapped an arm around him and hoped we’d both be able to relax enough to get some rest while we were here or else tomorrow would be even more miserable.  Somehow he fell asleep before I did.  
*       *       *
Between Arcade and Lucia and their respective gauss and anti-material rifles, getting to the mainframe wasn’t a problem.  It bothered me more deeply than I’d expected to hear the report of a gauss rifle in these Old World halls— or at all— but I kept my expression neutral and if Arcade noticed my discomfort, he must have attributed it to my mother’s death and nothing more.  
I couldn’t hide the pain of my feet so easily.  In the morning, I hobbled out of bed when we ate and continued to limp whenever I had to move.  I felt like I was walking on glass, which made a pleasant enough change from feeling like I’d eaten it.  At least this was less likely to lead to embarrassing consequences, and that included the way Arcade kept checking on me when I’d lag behind.  I still hated feeling helpless, even though I knew he meant well.  I certainly wouldn’t be frolicking about on the way back like the Mojave was the set for an elaborate dance routine.  Although, once my feet healed, I toyed with the idea of replicating the dance scene from "Singing in the Rain."  Despite the utter lack of rain.  
I was debating where I might do this (once my feet healed) when we finally reached the main frame.  Lucia waved me towards the terminal while Arcade couldn’t help but look around.  He was trying to surreptitiously find the controls of the weapon, no doubt.  He had as much reason to hate the NCR as I did; Lucia might be working with them, and Arcade probably didn’t want to kill her, he was too nice, but the NCR had dogged us all our lives.  At the very least, if I were him, I’d want to know how to activate the weapon so I could come back to do it if they won.  After we helped Lucia, the NCR might even let him in willingly, not that I planned to waste this chance myself.  I’d already known about the Archimedes I and II before Lucia had brought me here; after yesterday I knew even more about them.  The coding was simple enough even if the system prevented remote control of the plant or laser.  If Lucia just asked me to send power to the entire grid, she knew too little about the technology to realize what I was doing, she could only see results.  As such, I knew I could program the plant to power the whole grid initially and redirect to Freeside after a week, when Lucia would be far away.  I could set the Archimedes I to activate on a similar delay, and that might even prevent Lucia from returning to alter my system.  Her point about avoiding an outage was moot, by my reasoning: if the Lucky 38’s generator had been activated (I hadn’t checked while inside and had no idea if the tower’s extra systems would restart automatically or had simply been shut off or broken) the Strip would handle an outage and probably wouldn’t lose power at all, only McCarran would suffer the loss if the Legion took the dam.  And, by my predictions, they would— Lucia hadn’t done enough to give the NCR the advantage.  So long as no one found or attacked the Brotherhood, McNamara would have an easy win taking the Mojave from the battle-weary remnants of the Legion.  Hopefully, if that happened, they wouldn’t screw it up.  
I’d had the idea last night, but I paused to consider how I’d do it and Lucia waved impatiently towards the terminal again.  "Well?  Go on."  She had this look like someone trying badly to train their dog and that made it all the more satisfying to stare at her like she was an idiot.  
Lucia waited by the stairs to the balcony which left Arcade between me and her.  He looked over at me, failing to notice my expression beneath the goggles I’d donned again, but he noticed the ruined power cable behind me.  Lucia reacted to my defiance before he could speak.  
Without a word, she glared and raised her massive rifle to point at the back of Arcade’s head.  She’d been doing this for the past three days, whenever I resisted her, and I had yet to decide if I dared call her bluff.  This time the dispute was settled without me having to cave.  
Arcade nodded to the generator, "The terminal doesn’t have enough power to function.  We’ll need to fix that wire before we can do anything."   He noticed that I was standing perfectly still and staring over his shoulder.  Lucia had lowered the gun before he turned around.  "What?"
She beckoned me over and feigned ignorance.  "Upstairs looks like it might have stuff to fix that.  Max, would you come help me out?  You know how to fix this wire, right?"  I still hated how she played the naive schoolgirl so well.  I’d known a lot of girls like her at the Gomorra, but none of them had ever been quite so dangerous.  They’d done things like spread lies about me and talk behind my back, worst I’d ever had from them was psycho-laced vodka— I’d gotten a bad nosebleed, collapsed, and Nero found out who was responsible so I never saw them again.  Lucia was less the yappy dog in sheep’s clothing and more the deathclaw.  If I really turned her against me, I’d wind up dead and framed for murder, but I didn’t expect that she’d ever kill Arcade, him being the one person whose idyllic perception of her left him virtually blind to anything she might do.  
"I’m no Raul, but I can probably figure it out, it should just take some conductive metal and insulation."  I looked the wire over while Lucia continued.  
"Arcade, this place seems to be just desks and office stuff, but do you want to check around and see if you find anything down here?"