#tombout

Anyway, tagged by @mechanicalism, thank you! Not gonna tag anyone but if you see this and want to share your own, @ me!

CW for blood/medical procedures under the cut

A firm cot embraces her with all the warmth of a tomb.

“Isn’t this disrespectful?”

“To who?” Hancock asks, adjusting a string of plastic beads around a skelly’s clavicle. He adds a touch of thanergy, the necromantic theorems tickling his prefrontal cortex. It doesn’t even break a sweat these days, blood or otherwise. Not like it would have back when he was human.

“The dead.”

“You asked ‘em?”

Danse blanches, so Hancock guesses that the Brotherhood doesn’t go for ghost-talkers. Spirits are tricky things, all raw emotions stripped from flesh. They don’t line up and follow orders. The Brotherhood probably preferred obedient automatons.

Hancock shrugs. “I have. None of ‘em seem to mind much—the divide between body and soul turns into a chasm once you’re dead, apparently. And the way I see it, they’re still part of the community. We all pitch in.”

“And the beads?”

“Is it really any different from tending some manicured grave?”

You get MORE than one line, you get a WHOLE SNIP because I am excited for worldbuilding and characterization!!!!

It’s a bleak and hideous morning, so early that it’s not yet dawn. Just the end of another long night. Hancock adjusts his coat, but the breeze finds its way through his broken seams and patches. Their so-called Survivor always brings trouble when she calls. Good trouble, but still trouble.

“He’s ex-Brotherhood, but made a good cav. He wants to be useful,” Carmen says. Her fangs flash yellow-ivory in the flickering light of the watch fires. She sounds tired. Looks it, too; her eyes are hollow pits, and the veins on her face are showing black and blue. She must be running dry, rattling around inside that mobile coffin she calls power armor.

I answered this here, but decided to extend the snip since it was asked again. :')

Haylen stands at attention as a matter of habit, but Hancock turns ‘fashionably louche’ into a mode of being. It makes her awkwardly attempt to adjust her own posture, to slouch just-so and to bend her elbows so that she looks less like the soldier she used to be.

Danse looks—well, he looks good. Inflated, which she rejects as the wrong word as soon as it crosses her mind. He looks like he’s had a chance to breathe, to finally inhale after a decade held underwater. Less sun-starved and etiolated.

Which means that she’s even more sorry to have to share the bad news.

She takes a deep breath, so deep it strains the muscles of her chest, so that her diaphragm has to stretch itself to capacity and her intercostals retract with relief when she finally speaks. “The squires on board the Prydwen have all died.”

This means nothing to Hancock, she can tell by his lack of reaction. But Danse blanches, all the color drained from his face as he whispers, “All of them?”

“All two hundred of them,” Haylen confirms. Her chest squirms, and even now it’s difficult not to feel like an accessory after the fact. She hadn’t known—none of them had known—but there are two hundred dead children, and that cries for justice.

“You have got to be kidding me. Can someone get this fucking undead horse put away, please?"

From this weird western Locked Tomb/Fallout New Vegas AU aakdlsj

"I was taught that a Caviler was to a Necromancer a closed fist." Veronica displays her hand with her fingers curled, knuckles white. She studies her fist with a curious sort of wonder. "I was wrong."

Cait's heart is in her throat. Veronica speaks almost to herself, a little frown creasing between her dark brows.

"They were wrong," Cait says. "He was wrong, love. He did you so wrong." Cait resists the urge to spit on the ground at the mere mention of dear departed Father Elijah.

Cait takes Veronica's fist and with the gentleness reserved for holding a kitten she unfolds her fingers and presses her palm to her Caviler's. There is blood caked under both their nails, cuticles ragged and bitten to the quick. Their knuckles swollen. Their ugly, deadly, violent hands, Cait's fingers long, Veronica's thick and square. Both have fingers crooked from uneven breaks.

Veronica makes a soft little sound, an oh of surprise, or understanding, or both. Her look of wonder shifts from their hands, to Cait's eyes.

When their fingers touch, when their palms meet, there is no magic. No theorem or reaching for a bloom of thanergy.

Just them, hand to hand, skin to skin.

Major spoilers for The Locked Tomb trilogy (Gideon the Ninth/Harrow the Ninth). Sorry if this makes like zero sense, just working through some stuff for a crossover fallout/tlt thinggy.

[No Excuses Writing Meme]