SIX FEET DEEP

DON'T FUCK WITH THE ONE WHO BRINGS YOU YOUR MAIL.

a study in: an arm and a leg, femme fatale, anonymity, the ace, and an insane amount of luck.

indie COURIER SIX of fallout: new vegas. WILD CARD alignment. honors all dlc's as canon except for lonesome road. accepting of other courier rpers. *this blog contains mature themes including addiction, alcohol abuse, cannibalism, violence, and death. 21+ only, minors dni.

originally established in 2016 & written by hannah. she/her. 31.

@radiaking | [ stirring the pot starters ]

"Yeah, well . . . so 're you." It's a classic western standoff, if you've ever had the pleasure of seeing those old world movies. The Courier peers down her own barrel, readily holding her position as a Mojave breeze blows a tumbleweed somewhere past their ankles. And somewhere in the wind is some whistling that no one else would get the reference to.

She's already thought over her options here: one, stand down. (That's basically surrendering. Next!) Two, just start blasting. (Bad plan, obviously. He's a ghoul, and all he's going to do is eat up her ammo and probably not go down as fast as she'd need him to. And she really didn't feel like having a whole shootout, y'know? He doesn't seem like some trigger-happy fiend and wasn't brandishing Legion-ware, after all. That's the bare minimum for mercy.) Three: talk him down from it. (...probably also a bad plan, but not as bad as the first two.) Four . . . there was no fourth option.

Three it is!

@hisdouble [ injury / injured prompts ]

She can't tell in the moment, if it's a gesture of comfort or curiosity. It's hard to read his face, admittedly. Plenty of men are keen to lay their hands where they don't belong, and she's surprised that House had found the very spot where the bullet had been lodged into her skull. Her neck responds, attempting to jerk itself away, but she finds herself stuck in place anyway. She feels like some specimen, another one of his unwilling foot soldiers, even though all this time she had already been doing the dirty work.

Her situation was quite unique, after all. She wasn't expected to survive that whole spat with Mr. Gecko, but she did. She wasn't expected to recover what was stolen from her, but she did. She wasn't expected to complete the job -- you get it. A woman who has no disregard for the odds is an interesting woman indeed.

Fingers graze the precise point of contact atop her skull, and she locks eyes with him. She's been asked a lot of stupid questions about it since leaving Goodsprings, and she's half-expecting him to do the very same now. Though she's pretty sure the man is at least a bit more intelligent than say, some fiend, she decides to humor the idea. Maybe knock him down a peg.

“And hey, if people wanna think that I’m fuckin’ immortal or undead, let ‘em! It’ll weed out any cowards who wanna try to come after me, make people more inclined to ask for my help ‘cause I’m damn good at how I conduct business, maybe even give me a good challenge to those who wanna push my buttons.”

(To the cannibal who ate her leg) "Nah, you’re not givin’ a fuck when it comes t’ who’s goin’ down, as long as th’ pain in your stomach goes away. But it never does, ‘cause you’re a goddamn disgusting waste of air."

     “There’s plenty of groups around here who are doin’ an awfully shitty job at keepin’ any sort of peace. What we got is a damn circus. The juggling bear and tauromaquia. These people don’t know how to handle anything without stepping on whatever toes they need to. Goddamn sick of seeing people suffer around here. We gotta be able to do things for ourselves. ‘S not just me tryin’ to sit on top y’know. Vegas needs guidance, but she can run this shit herself.”

“Lookin’ to kill my man with it, so. Want it to be the last good looking thing he sees.”

“You don’t owe me shit. Fucking forget it. Take what I did as a kindness. Go be useless somewhere else for a while.”

“Go home, get your dick wet, then maybe think about what y’ wanna do with your life.”

"We shouldn’t be far from where we were going, unless you decide to go piss behind a rock and leave me to some deathclaws or some shit.”

@pathetiiic [ injury / injured prompts ]

It's like a deja vu or some shit, but somehow it's less worse.

"Will you get -- your god damn hands offa-- "

Maybe more annoying. At least she doesn't have to crawl like a worm out of this one. And at least the limb is still attached this time.

The Courier is well used to becoming essentially some big target practice dummy, but it's only once in a while she's caught up in a scrawl that actually knocks her clean on her ass. The gal gets out if she knows she'll be outmatched, but the addition of a second party changes her approach. More often than not lately, she'll catch some poor sap caught in crossfire, and of course that's what happened here.

She didn't even know who these assholes were at first, but they were the ones who started blowing off firearms. Bunch of morons wasting their time and ammo on someone who'd easily put them down and sleep well that night, but again, it'd be a fat waste of her time.

"Let me -- " she winced. " -- do it!"

The woman might be more than willing to take a bullet for someone at times, but it's no reason to draw up a debt. Gal hates a debt, whether it's owed or not, and she's not about to owe it to some farm boy for saving her from completely bleeding out. But she was pretty fresh out of stimpaks - having been just on the way to the closest trading post to restock - and it would've been a long drag on one bad leg. At the very least, he's helping her save a little bit of time by getting a jump on the first aid.

At some point, she threw her hands up and just let him have at it. Pulled some liquor bottle from her bag and took a swig, watching in judgement of a half-assed job that she probably could've done better, but the pain's got her biting her tongue while waiting for the alcohol to numb it. She'll still have to get up and get walking at some point.

At least the other leg is steadily reliable, being metal and all.