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"Sure."  He rummaged through desks and I followed Lucia upstairs to what I knew was going to be a very threatening talk.  
Once we were out of earshot, she rounded on me.  I expected hostility, but I got a more shrewd stare.  She was reevaluating me.  "I know you care about him."
That much was true.  I studied the room around us rather than meet her gaze; there was a repair robot in the corner and if I got it working, we would lose our pretense for waiting alone up here and she would lose her chance to talk to me.  She didn’t know the NCR had reason to want Arcade and me dead, she might not even realize that they had reason to kill me, and alone in the room that held the controls of the Archimedes I, the NCR outside was hardly a threat.  Arcade and I could take Lucia down in a fight and activate the weapon to clear our escape, if we needed to.  If I could avoid it, I had a safer idea to escape my bargain with her: I could reprogram Yes Man to trap her and if that failed, I knew where she slept.  I nodded and started bypassing the security protocols to activate the robot to repair the wire.  
"You had better not program that thing to attack, or I’ll kill him."
"I know."  Maybe it was how much I hated her or maybe I just hadn’t quite regained my sense of self-preservation, but I grinned and added, "What’s the matter, don’t you trust me?"
"Not with orbital lasers."  She stepped closer and grabbed me by the collar, forcing me to face her.  She was stronger than she looked and I didn’t bother to resist.  Lucia shoved her face right up to mine and snarled, "Listen, I want you to set this up so I can reroute the power remotely.  I want full control of this plant from the Lucky 38."
"I’m afraid that isn’t..."  She raised her rifle as I spoke and aimed pointedly towards the stairs.  "I know you could turn on that weapon, and I know the two of you might be able to kill me, but I’ve told Yes Man to seal Cass and Veronica inside the Lucky 38 if I’m not back in a week.  If you kill me, your only living family will die locked in a relic of Pre-War technology just like the rest of the Brotherhood."  
My mouth went dry.  I hadn’t even considered Veronica.  I tried to play it off, but I know she realized she’d won this fight.  "My brother—"
"Your brother’s been dead for years, you really think anybody survives to cross the country?"
I felt my face sink back into a defeated scowl.  "I can’t signal the mainframe directly, but I should be able to reprogram this robot so it can respond to a high-frequency signal and reroute the power."  And activate the Archimedes, if nessecary, but I didn’t say that aloud.  
I had to modify the Mr. Handy’s hardware a bit and attach an antenna so it could receive signals remotely, but the programming was effortless and even the modifications only took a few minutes.  In that time, Arcade followed us upstairs with the news that he’d, unsurprisingly, found nothing helpful in the desks except a bit of scrap metal.  He noticed me working and Lucia explained.  
"Oh, so you’ll be able to reroute the power if anything happens to the Dam, thus avoiding a major outage and sending the power to Freeside."
He was theorizing based on what she’d said last night and for once, Lucia’s perfect facade faltered.  "...Yes."  She paused just long enough to arouse suspicion and I could tell it was only because he trusted her so completely.  I doubt he even realized that she’d had no real reason to bring him on this mission except to control me; he certainly didn’t seem to have caught her threatening his life.  Frankly, I was embarrassed for him, for how absolutely completely she’d deceived him thanks to his need to believe that someone was changing things for the better.  I think he was the only person where I wouldn’t have minded if he’d put that kind of faith in me.  Maybe I wouldn’t disappoint him quite as badly if he still couldn’t see all her flaws after everything she’d been doing.  
"...Okay.  That was... a less confident answer than I’d expected.  You are planning to direct power to Freeside or the entire grid, right?  You’re not doing this so you can, say, activate the super weapon?"  And right when I thought she could never do anything to fracture his trust.  He might still follow her into the mouth of hell, but hey, at least he had the sense to recognize when even she was surprised he believed her.  Was he hopeful or worried?  I couldn’t decide.  As peaceful as the man could be, he still acted as, essentially, a bodyguard— he’d shot a lot of people— and he had as much reason to hate the NCR as I did.  He had to want the NCR out of this place, even if it wasn’t as personal as it was for me.  I finished programming the Handy as Lucia reassured him.  
She had Arcade convinced even before the robot reached the stairs.  It fixed the wire and seemed to shut down.  I felt Lucia’s gaze boring into my back.  "It’ll reactivate at the radio signal, don’t worry.  I didn’t think there was any sense in overriding its energy conservation protocol; besides, this way it’s less likely to run out of fuel while on standby."  
Lucia narrowed her eyes, but accepted that.  She knew she’d cowed me by threatening Vero.  
The mainframe itself proved much more secure.  Hacking the system and setting up a program to transfer power on a time delay, as I planned, took me well over an hour and left Arcade and Lucia playing twenty questions with each other.  I couldn’t work while listening to every word they said, but I caught enough to be amused at how drastically the game emphasized their vast differences.  Both of them frequently stumped each other, even when Arcade tried to choose things Lucia would be able to guess, and then he got irritated and chose intentionally obscure subjects like George Washington and the Titanic.  Lucia finally got fed up and ended the game.  She pulled out one of the issues of the Milsurp Review that she always carried with her and started rereading it and he came over to sit beside me.  I cast an amused glance his way.  
"Sorry.  I can...um... go over there, I guess, if I’m distracting you."
"You’re always distracting me," I chuckled, "but I’m nearly done, and I can still focus enough to finish this."  
He fell silent and let me work for a few more minutes.  When he spoke again, I could hear a frown in his tone.  "No offense, but I didn’t expect this to take hours.  What are you doing exactly?"  I raised an eyebrow and he cut off my sarcastic reply as soon as he heard the first syllable.  "I mean, I know you’re programming something, not just inputing a command, and you wouldn’t need to do that if you were just doing what the system was set up to do."  
Behind him, Lucia perked up and I realized that he’d just clued her in to the fact that no, the system was not meant to do what I was doing with it.  
"I’m rerouting the power more efficiently," I improvised, "a lot of the old grid is gone but the system is still trying to supply it, it’s also trying to power abandoned factories and places in Fiend territory.  I’m redefining the system’s regional maps so it can supply as much area as possible without wasting power on downed lines and empty buildings.  The `bot will be able to edit this as well, it’ll just be an interface, though I’ll have to be the one controlling it as I can only control its movements— the Handy doesn’t know how to use this terminal, the best I can do is allow myself remote access to its kinetic systems, overriding its standard programming to control its motions.  But I can’t transmit visual feeds by UHF signals, so I’ll need to rely on my memory of the code and terminal set-up.  I should be able to handle that easily enough, especially now, but no one else would be able to operate the Handy to adjust the system themselves and if anyone tried it would likely prevent my own efforts in the future."
Lucia narrowed her eyes.  She probably didn’t understand a word of that and even more than she knew she had me by the metaphorical balls, she knew I was much smarter than her.  It was a little ironic, I suppose: when I’d been constantly in pain and suicidal, I knew I was smart, but I’d only been a little more intelligent than average and I couldn’t clearly remember more than half of what I’d learned.  Now my mind was slowly clearing and I found I could recall everything as vividly as if I was reliving the memory itself.  I’d expected to die, and I think she’d expected me to kill myself either now or once the Mojave was lost, but she’d left Arcade in the suite where she kept me prisoner and now I was becoming dangerous to her.  
Arcade understood enough of my explanation even if he didn’t get that the first part was a lie (I really could control the robot, and it would function exactly as I explained, but my program only set up a series of delayed commands so the Archimedes would activate and power would reroute without needing my input.)  The power grid itself automatically shut down any downed sections and adjusted for them.  "Wait," he pondered, realizing the major flaw of my plan, "you’re saying you’ll be operating the robot blindly and you’re certain you’ll be able to remember your programing and the terminal layout and other factors like the position of the Handy relative to the terminal well enough to actually redirect power without being able to see what you’re doing?"
"Yes."  Arcade wasn’t going to just trust me on that and Lucia seemed even more skeptical, so I admitted, "I have an eidetic memory.  It... it isn’t always a good thing."
Lucia looked from me to Arcade, still completely lost while the doctor stared in amazement and sat back in his chair.  The courier sighed, "And what exactly does that mean?"
Arcade opened his mouth to explain and I summarized much more plainly, "It just means I can remember things very, very vividly.  Much more vividly than is normal, to the point that I can picture, line for line, most of the programing I’ve ever done.  I will be able to operate this Handy and use it to redirect power even without seeing this room or the terminal."  I could tell that Arcade was processing the full significance of this revelation.  My memory meant I could picture various events in my past as if they were flip-books burned into my mind.  He had to be wondering if this included my mother’s death.  It did.  
With the program already running and Helios One’s currently minimal power output redirected to the entire grid, I stood up.  "Well, we still have to align the array, right?"
*       *      *
There wasn’t too much that happened on the way back to the Strip.  I kept an eye on Max but he had little trouble keeping up with us, despite his feet.  I knew some of it had to be his own stubborn refusal to acknowledge pain, and I made sure we stopped to rest more often than usual, but traveling through the desert didn’t leave many options for him to rest.  We still made better time than I’d expected.  
Max’s good humor hadn’t really returned and he spent most of the walk staring off into the distance, lost in thought.  As far as I could tell, my diagnosis had been right and he was completely recovered, or at least he had been eating regularly with no signs of sickness and seemed much stronger and less in pain, so this wasn’t medical— unless it was just his way of dealing with the pain in his feet, which I doubted.  He seemed like he had something on his mind.  Something about Helios One must have brought this on, but a lot had happened in those two days.  Was he just bothered by his mother’s death and revisiting his hatred of the NCR?  Hopefully he might reconsider it, but nothing that had happened recently suggested he had reason to do so.  Maybe he was pondering some way to improve the power output or build a solar array somewhere else to power the other settlements of the Mojave.  More likely he was considering some way to reproduce or commandeer the super weapon for use against the NCR.  That’s what Moreno would have been thinking about if he had Max’s level of engineering skills.  
Or maybe he was just wondering about us.  I mean, we hadn’t really had a chance to talk since that night and Lucia hadn’t left us alone for more than a few minutes since then.  I hadn’t asked or really thought about it at the time because I hadn’t wanted to force him to discuss or decide when he was dealing with such painful memories.  Besides, whatever we’d decided, he would have remembered where that decision took place and good or bad, that would have been disturbing.  I wasn’t really sure where we stood either.  He was nineteen, and even setting his age aside, he’d been in pain most of his life and a dozen different factors probably left him psychologically damaged and screwed with his brain chemistry.  Most and maybe all of those would be getting back to normal now and he would be returning to some more healthy mental state.  Even if he hadn’t been nineteen, neither of us had any way of knowing how much of his feelings were real and how much had been due to brain chemistry imbalances or even just a misguided form of gratitude for the fact that I’d happened to pick the right disease and alleviate his symptoms.  In any case, he certainly wasn’t in a rational state of mind and unless he could convince me otherwise, it just wasn’t ethical to have any sort of romantic relationship with him.  Hell, the sex we’d already had hadn’t been ethical.  
The night before we reached Vegas, we camped pretty much the same as we usually did.  I cooked and all of us talked about nothing in particular.  It wouldn’t have stood out at all except for one moment that stuck in my mind.  It was the way Max looked at Lucia one of the times she laughed.  We’d been chatting about how bad almost all wasteland food seemed to taste and Max made some joke that cracked her up.  I don’t even remember the joke, just that Lucia shut her eyes and had to catch her breath afterwards, and I chuckled, but when I glanced at Max, he had this absolutely chilling deadpan stare.  He’d feigned happiness with his usual smirk for most of the past few days, at least when we were talking, but for that instant, he let his face return to that haunted stare except that this time, whatever spark had reignited inside of him shown in his eyes.  The intensity of his gaze almost seemed incendiary; I just saw the cold, focused way he watched the courier and the laughter died in my throat.  This was the side of Max that seemed like he could do anything, the part of him who’d kept going by sheer force of will when pain and despair urged him to die, and he focused on Lucia with all the unyielding hatred he felt towards the NCR.  
And then she had opened her eyes and his smile was back, submissive, seductive, content as ever, and she had no idea the way he’d looked at her less than a second before.  I saw that moment in my nightmares for the next several weeks.  I couldn’t imagine what she might have done or what deranged reasoning might have provoked such loathing, but I knew beyond a doubt that Max was planning to kill her.  
*       *       *
I needed to get Veronica out of the Lucky 38 before I had any hope of dealing with Lucia.  I’d planned to warn Arcade on the way back to Vegas, but the courier must have realized that I was no longer the apathetic, suicidal man she’d tried to use.  She didn’t give me more than a single moment alone with him and I knew that once I told him, he’d have too many questions for me to explain that quickly.  If I had tried and she caught me, not only would it cement any desire she had to kill me, but he would likely ask her for the truth.  In all probability, we’d both wind up dead.  
I’d suspected that Lucia had installed security cameras in the suite after Arcade nearly shot me and a quick and subtle check of the rooms when we returned had confirmed my suspicion.  I couldn’t risk telling him in the suite and I couldn’t risk leaving, that would probably lead Lucia to believe I’d found outside help in which case she’d be even more driven to kill me.  I had to keep her thinking I was valuable enough to justify the threat I posed.  She wanted to control me; the more dangerous I seemed, the more she’d enjoy that as long as she didn’t realize I had the upper hand.  
I had to get Veronica out of here and I had an idea of how to do it.  My thoughts had continued to clear especially now that we were away from Helios One and my feet were on the mend; I knew I’d need to be careful and I had enough confidence in my intellect right now that I felt I could manage to get my point across safely.  Lucia might figure out a reference to literature or a cipher, but she didn’t know the history between Vero and I.  I might be able to use those memories to communicate.  Talking to her directly raised more suspicion than leaving a note in her stash of scrap beside my own chemistry supplies, and writing let me use the cipher we’d had as kids.  There wasn’t much to do in the bunker and there weren’t too many kids even then; neither of us had really fit in, so we’d been good friends.  We used a simple Caesar cipher with the writer’s age as a right shift, because we were children and more complex encryption lost our interest.  I kept the shift as it had been, adjusting to my current age.  It didn’t matter that the code itself might be easy to crack; I kept the message vague so hopefully only Vero would understand it.  
We got back to the suite late at night, so late that Arcade went straight to bed after Lucia closed herself in her room, and I’d figured out what I would say on the walk, so I stayed awake to write it.  
UTVD MH MAX UKBTKL- MAX VATBG MATM UBGWL
I hadn’t realized until I enciphered it that the nineteen-letter shift made the word "the" into my name, and it made me chuckle as I wrote it down.  If it came to it, I might be able to use a more complex cipher to warn Arcade, but I still worried that he’d confront Lucia directly, forcing the fight I sought to avoid.  With Vero, I used the same old code we’d had as kids and added a Brotherhood doctrine as my signature, hoping she’d understand.  When we’d passed coded notes as children, we took phrases from children’s books and fables.  For the most part, we adapted their meaning for our lives, but some were more tied to the story.  It was mostly stuff like codes for hide-and-seek and messing with the scribe’s notes and warnings about Knight Hardin looking for us, but I hoped she’d figure out what I meant.  We’d used the phrase "back to the briars" when we had to go find our parents so they would punish us and we’d avoid the harsher punishments imposed by our teachers or the knights and paladins.  Hopefully she’d take that as a warning to face the Brotherhood rather than something worse.  I’d chosen my signature to enforce the urgency.
The next morning, I knew she’d found the note when I emerged for breakfast and saw the stare she gave me when I entered the kitchen.  Arcade was there, but Lucia either hadn’t left her room or had gone out alone, so it was just Vero and Arcade at the table.  I dug a mutfruit out of the fridge as Vero wondered, "You left me a note?"
"Yes."  I hadn’t started smiling yet, it was too early and my feet still hurt, but I didn’t grin as she asked; instead, I took on a very serious expression.  If I tried to pass it off as nothing, she might think I was joking or teasing her somehow, but if I acted serious maybe she’d realize what it meant.  
I think Vero had expected this to be a joke, or some innocent reminder of how we’d been practically best friends growing up.  When I looked at her like that, she took it seriously.  Arcade realized something was up and glanced back and forth between us for a few seconds before voicing his own question.  "Is there something going on?"
"It’s nothing."  I set the fruit on the table and started moving a large amount of my more mechanically related supplies towards the far end of the table.  Arcade and Veronica both watched in confusion and I explained simply, "I want to put up my feet and figured I’d be more out of the way back there than at this end of the table."  Never mind that the back end of the table was a blindspot for Lucia’s cameras.  
 Veronica took my explanation at face value, but Arcade asked.  "And what exactly are you planning to do with..." he gestured at the wide range of scrap electrical and metallic components and tools, "...this?"
"Oh, a bit of this, a bit of that."
Arcade must have figured that whatever I was building was somehow tied to the note I’d left for Veronica, because he watched in silent contemplation as I set up my work station and breakfast.  Veronica, on the other hand, frowned.  She thought over what I’d said for maybe a minute and remarked, "I thought you gave that up?"
"I may have to reconsider."  I expected her to leave right then if she understood me, but instead she sat back down across from Arcade.  Speaking covertly was difficult, especially when I couldn’t risk letting Arcade know what we were saying; I took Veronica’s last question to mean that she thought I’d given up my rank in the Brotherhood, and I had.  I hadn’t planned to return and I didn’t really want to, but if Lucia actively tried to kill me— assuming I survived the attempt— I may need to return to the Brotherhood in order to survive.  And if I did, I’d still hold some sway over them, even if I wasn’t a paladin or an elder, I’d at least outrank Veronica.  With both of us outside the Brotherhood now, I figured she’d catch my drift and take the note as an order when I signed it "The Chain that Binds."
*       *      *
Even after I gave up trying to determine what Max intended to build, I found myself staring at him.  For nearly a week I’d seen more and more of his serious side and today he’d been serious since he woke up.  He’d slept in, but he wasn’t sad; he had an edge to him, like there was some urgency to his work and that made him more serious, even if I did see a brief, genuinely playful smile when he’d dodged my questions.  It had been nice to see some honest happiness from the man, but that wasn’t so captivating as his... intensity.  
I’d seen it at Helios One, masked by pain and fear, but now he was calm and his feet had healed enough that I guess they didn’t bother him.  Just the way he talked to Veronica had some regal tone to it; right now, coupled with his very severe brow, the guy looked and sounded like a general.  The fact that he wore a very dapper suit rather than his raider gear or stripper uniform added to this.  I’d figured out how he could live without pain and now he’d... he’d metamorphosed.  
It didn’t help that I had a real weakness for generals, princes, knights and that sort of thing— he’d just been this stunningly attractive kid desperate for my help, and then he’d started acting more... well, more like this.  I think that was what had really gotten me interested in him aside from his body; even before, there had been those fleeting moments when he seemed absolutely in his element like nothing, come hell or high water, could stop him.  Now it was all the time.  His baritone just took on this quality I’d only heard from generals and military commanders— not that I had much experience with any other position of authority.  The man was a leader, even if he hadn’t seemed like it until now, even if he’d been so beaten down by pain and sickness... and if people really had pressured him his entire life, what would have happened if he’d been born healthy?  Somehow I got the sense that the whole Mojave would have turned out very different.  
Now I guess he was trying to make up for that.  I didn’t remember when he’d come to bed last night and he hadn’t woken me up; he must have been up late, maybe writing this note for Veronica, maybe working on one of his secret projects.  I didn’t expect him to have been with Lucia because I’d seen her alive and well when she left her room this morning before retreating with breakfast.  I didn’t know why he wanted her dead.  Maybe it was his grudge against the NCR, maybe he was just power-hungry.  I didn’t want to believe the latter, so I assumed the former.  He hadn’t activated the Archimedes and Lucia had Yes Man guarding the controls for the Helios maintenance droid, so he couldn’t activate it now without her permission.  I trusted that she had done this sufficiently well and with how much Max hated the NCR, I didn’t expect him to have passed up the opportunity while we’d been there, Moreno certainly wouldn’t have let that go, so I took comfort in the fact that, however he felt towards the courier, at least Max had enough morality to leave the super-weapon alone.  
As long as he didn’t actually kill anyone, I didn’t feel so bad that his charm kept taking me in.  He made it really difficult to keep the promise I’d made to myself— and broken, and remade— not to get involved with him.  Even now that I knew how young he was, he just... he didn’t act it.  He’d probably endured more than half the men I’d dated in the past and he had this... this force of will like he could build a nation.  And watching him work, he was probably a genius.  
Max stared at each circuit and screw like his gaze could weld them; I could practically see his mind planning out a blueprint for whatever he was making.  He frowned habitually when he worked and the expression really added to the sense that he was a very important, very busy man.  Even when the device he focused so intently upon soon turned out to be a holotape projector.  Which he built from scrap that had most certainly never been a projector in the past.  The man was brilliant.  
I couldn’t decide if I was more amazed by the result because I’d seen what he’d started with, or because he hadn’t built a weapon.  The way he worked so quickly and so serious, it had seemed like he was preparing for war or some similarly drastic, desperate move, and here he’d just made a source of entertainment that hadn’t been readily available in hundreds of years.  
Veronica had been watching Max almost as intently as I had— although for obviously different reasons— and when he finally closed the chassis and set it aside, she gave him a curious look.  "...you’re starting to remind me of your father."
Max laughed, "I know.  It’s a little concerning, isn’t it?"  He glanced up and ate some of his mutfruit.  "Don’t worry: I won’t start sleeping with everyone who’ll have me."
We both stared at him.  "Aren’t you already doing that?"
"Well..." Max looked shrugged evasively, "I’m planning to stop."
I couldn’t resist being devil’s advocate.  "How soon, exactly?"  Veronica gave me a look and I backpedaled, misinterpreting it, "Not that I’m... interested, or anything."
Max chuckled and then got more serious.  He shrugged again.  "As soon as possible?"
What the hell did that mean?  "There’s... resistance to that?"  Veronica stared at me.  "I’m not resisting this!"
Lucia strode into the kitchen at that point, seeking lunch.  Max’s expression lost even the last trace of good humor for the barest instant before she turned towards him and his eerily convincing fake smirk returned.  "Good morning, Lucia."  Looking back towards the courier, I realized that Veronica must have caught that death-glare, because she suddenly seemed pensive.  
"Hey, Lucia."  
The courier picked up on my nervous tone, but must have just figured she’d walked in on an awkward conversation.  It wouldn’t be completely unexpected that Max might have brought up his sex life to deter Veronica from some line of questioning, although he hadn’t seemed interested in distracting anyone with sex lately.  "Hey, Arcade."  Lucia turned towards Max and her eyes scanned over the scrap and the finished holotape player in front of him.  She beamed, "Morning, Max, I’m glad you’ve taken to heart our little discussion."  
His left eyebrow twitched ever so slightly and if they hadn’t been separated by so much of the table, I would have expected a murder.  "Yeah, I did."  He had such a level of cold acrimony in his voice that I had to wonder what they’d talked about.  It seemed like a lot of emotion if she’d just asked him to make a holotape player.  I frowned at each of them as they maintained silent eye contact for a full minute.  It was like two feral dogs, sizing each other up.  
Veronica gathered the remains of the breakfast she’d finished hours ago and stood up, breaking the tension.  "Well, I’m going to go check if Mick and Ralph have finally gotten any nice dresses..."  She paused for a second as Lucia turned that aggressive smile towards her, "You want to come with?"
Whatever was going on with her and Max, Lucia relaxed.  She grinned at Veronica, back to her usual self.  "No, thanks.  You have fun, I’ve got a lot to do around here today."  She turned back and gave Max one long stare which, as he’d already gone back to tinkering with bits of scrap electronics and wire, he didn’t even see.  Lucia huffed silently and stormed out.  I heard her take the elevator upstairs after Veronica left.  
I found myself watching Max again after she was gone.  At first, I was pondering that baffling exchange between him and Lucia.  Obviously, he was the one who’d started this, so maybe she’d somehow convinced him that he owed her, so he needed to do what he could to help.  From what I’d seen, he couldn’t really defend himself in the wasteland, so he needed somebody looking out for him and she had let him stay here, so it made sense, even if Lucia wasn’t really the type to insist upon a quid-pro-quo.  She helped everyone for free, but I guess Max had been a bit prickly towards her.  Or maybe she was just pissed off that he’d slept with me, if they really had had some kind of relationship.  Even if she’d just been interested in him, that could be bothering her.  Although, if that was the case, it seemed a little odd that she hadn’t even been annoyed with me.  She still acted as friendly as ever, and if I’d basically slept with her boyfriend... even if she realized that I had never really known whether or not they were a couple, it didn’t quite make sense that she’d just let me off the hook completely.  
But that was all speculation, so soon I was just wondering what he was building and then that progressed and before long I found myself fantasizing about who he was becoming and how things might have been if he hadn’t been sick and if he was maybe five years older.  Who was I kidding; if Max had always been like this, he’d be running something important and if we’d ever even met, he wouldn’t have given me a second glance.  Hell, if he hadn’t been sick, for all I know he might have rebuilt the Enclave, hopefully as something at least a little better than what it was.  The idea entertained me more than I cared to realize and I had to admit that if he had really done that I would have followed him into anything.  
I hadn’t realized Max was looking at me until he made a show of licking mutfruit juice of his fingers as he finished his breakfast.  I turned away blushing.  Damn it, Arcade, he was nineteen.  I wasn’t getting involved with a nineteen-year-old... or at least, not again.  That was stopping.  That was stopping right now.  
Max chuckled.  "Come on, we’re not at Helios One anymore..."  He trailed off when I just frowned into the bowl of dry cereal I’d forgotten about hours ago.  
*       *      *
"What is it?" My first worry was that he might have continued with sex at the time, but had now deciphered my cryptic explanation about who I was.  If he realized I was Brotherhood, at the very least, it would be bad.  That was an understatement.  I trusted that he’d be able to forgive me for that, considering he was in a similar position, but if he figured out who I was there was still that chance he might shoot me.  
"You’re... a lot younger than I’d realized." he admitted.  
This couldn’t be it.  I shook my head in disbelief, "Arcade, yes, I’m nineteen, but I’ve been in battle.  I’m not some innocent child, I’m generally smarter than most people I’ve ever met, I’ve had to kill people, I’ve lived mostly on my own for six years and I’ve gotten by, I’m not some coddled teenager.  Hell, I’ve probably had more sex than all the courier’s friends combined."  I’d listed the traits most people seemed to associate with maturity and when I saw how much everything I’d said had bothered him, I thought more about who I was dealing with.  "Arcade," I sighed, "I’ve made mistakes and I regret them.  I’ve probably had to deal with the consequences of my actions more than a lot of people my age, and I’ve lived in the wasteland.  Nineteen on your own in a world like this isn’t the same as nineteen in a bunker or a base or a vault.  I can’t say I know when you ended up out in the world, but personally I’ve had a lot of time to adapt so I may only be nineteen, but I’m pretty damn sure I qualify as an adult."  
I’d never cared about differences in age.  I read old books and had watched holotapes where that was a big deal, but it didn’t matter any more.  Age difference only really mattered when it came to women having kids and as we were both guys that didn’t come into it.  The archaic generation gaps weren’t relevant if they even still existed; Arcade and I had lived more similar lives than the vast majority of men our own ages.  I didn’t have a way to research the disease I had, but for a lot of reasons, I didn’t expect that I would have the same life expectancy as the average person, so age didn’t matter if he was afraid he’d die long before me.  He didn’t look old and I didn’t look too young, so that wasn’t the reason either.  It had to be due to life experience and the wasteland never really changed.  
*       *       *
That argument nearly convinced me.  He looked about thirty, and he made points I’d been trying not to make to myself, despite what he’d admitted initially.  He must have been on his own since his mother died, I guess that had done even more to ensure that he grew up fast.  But he was still in the process of returning to some more normal mental state, even if his disease and alcohol, and probably drug use, hadn’t screwed with his emotions, bouncing back from chronic pain could lead him to pursue me romantically when he was really only grateful that I’d helped him.  And I didn’t really know what he was like when he wasn’t sick, this Max was practically a new man, and a new man I’d only known for a few days.  I had no idea how much he might have changed.  
Max sighed and went back to his work.  After a while, I guess the silence became stifling and he asked me, "Where’d that soldier guy run off to?  Not that I’m not glad he’s gone, he’d probably have shot me, but it seems a little sudden."
"Boone?"  I thought back and he was right, it had seemed a bit odd.  The sniper never really opened up to anyone and I think I’d been a little too pushy when Lucia’s exploits often left us as each other’s only company.  Cass had been worse when she’d been there instead of me.  He had just seemed like someone who needed a friend, and I admit I’d had a slight crush on him, but he’d sort of caught me on the rebound from... well, from a very abruptly ended relationship.  I shrugged, "We— er— weren’t the most welcoming.  I think he liked to keep to himself and you know how nosy most of us can be."
Max raised an eyebrow, grinning up at me despite the fact that he was in the process of wrapping uninsulated copper wire around a metal rod.  I had no idea if it was live or not, but knowing him, it might have been.  "You?" he chuckled, "Knowing you, I’m surprised the guy had any secrets left by the time he went away."  I had no idea if that was sarcasm or not, considering I’d been unexpectedly successful at getting Max to open up; nobody else responded to my questions, although admittedly I’d never thought Boone’s life was on the line.  Max had upped the ante.  
"Interrogation: just another area in which I excel."  I added more seriously, "But you’re right, it was fairly abrupt."  I watched him connect that rod to a bit of circuitry and he began wrapping a second rod.  "You are at least taking some safety precautions, right?"
"Some."  Max grazed the wire with his bare thumb rather than the insulated pliers he’d been using.  Sparks flew and he recoiled with a curse and a burn.  
I narrowed my eyes.  "I feel so reassured."
"I haven’t electrocuted myself yet."
"But clearly not for lack of trying."
He laughed and examined the burn.  "Relax, it’s just a low voltage system right now.  I haven’t hooked up the main power supply yet."  
I sighed and examined the amalgamation of wires and circuitry in front of him.  "What exactly is it, or are you not going to tell me?"
"It’s a terminal," Max explained, "Or it will be, eventually.  Mostly, I’m hoping to record some holotapes just to jot some information down and otherwise keep notes in a way that is a bit more condensed and more clear than physical note-taking, especially with my hand-writing."  
"Apparently Veronica could read your handwriting."
"Veronica’s been reading my handwriting for years," he replied, avoiding my real question.  For the first time in a while, he decided to try and distract me.  This time I let him.  If he’d told Veronica something and didn’t want me to know, either it was innocent or it involved their past.  If he refused to tell me, for all I knew, he might have just been asking her for relationship advice; she was practically his older sister and knowing Veronica, she wouldn’t be involved in anything too dangerous or unethical.  
"Speaking of notes, have you got notes of your research for the Followers?  Can I see them?"  Sometimes his redirections were about as subtle as a baseball home run, but this was less drastic by comparison.  
"Yeah, I have notes.  I actually have them in my bag just in case, by some miracle, I have some inspiration.  In case you’re wondering, I don’t think that’s ever going to happen.  If you really want to look at them..."
He nodded.  I brought him the hundred or so pages of notes— which mostly consisted of different plant species followed by the words "no medicinal properties" or occasionally "toxic."  "You know, there are less pointless ways to distract me."
"Like sex?"  He laughed at my expression, but he relented.  He set aside the terminal-in-progress and paged through my notes.  "I want to help you.  Two heads are better than one, and all that.  Besides, I owe you."
"For diagnosing you?  You don’t owe me, I just made a lucky guess."  
"It was more than that," Max insisted.  I gave him a skeptical look and his brow creased, taking on that stunningly regal expression.  The guy looked like he should be leading an army and he’d wound up hiding in this gloomy old suite.  "Guess or not, it was at the very least an educated guess.  We both know if you hadn’t suggested I stop eating grain, I’d be dead."