Fallout Kink Meme Part II: Closed to prompts, open for fills.
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"There shouldn't be a seven in the morning without the benefit of coffee. I’m saying there shouldn't even be a seven in the morning.”
Arcade held the door to the Lucky 38 open and bowed grandly as Veronica blearily swept past him, rubbing at her eyes and gently kvetching about the earliness of the hour, her desire to be back in bed and the general gentle cruelty of early mornings in general. A sardonic after you, madam echoed into the the deserted New Vegas Strip as Arcade let the door slam shut and trotted down to join her on the footpath.
“Oh my. So much complaining from such a pretty face.” He pointed her at the gate into Freeside and gently pushed her shoulder until she took a reluctant step forward. It took a slightly harder shove to actually got her moving.
"We wouldn't even be awake if women would stop finding you so gosh-darn irresistable, Arcade."
"It's true. Women want me. Men want to me to want them." Arcade motioned for the nearest Securitron to open the gates, the screech of metal offensive to sleepy morning ears. He pressed a hand theatrically to his heart. "I promise you that it's so hard to be me, Veronica."
It was lucky he was agile and more awake than she was. Ducking a punch from a Power Fist is not something a half-awake man should ever attempt.
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"Hey. Look. I have a quick question."
Arcade shuffled his satchel to his opposite shoulder and made a vague go on gesture, neatly sidestepping the cluster of Securitrons around the gate and - oh, delightful - the scattered parts of whoever last attempted to mug someone for their casino winnings.
Veronica hesitated.
"Oh please, don't go quiet on me now. Between Boone's silence, Cass's relentless drive to keep me drunk and your loquaciousness, I need a happy medium to keep me on the level."
It was true. Having Veronica around the apartment kept him sane, her bright chattiness a salve against Boone's… well, Boone's everything, and she was a perfect foil for when Cass bore down on him with liquor in hand and a faintly libidinous look in her eye. Try as he might to deflect her onto Boone - if only to lay more dust over another possible dalliance, of course - nothing ever seemed to work save Veronica appearing in the doorway with a pack of cards in hand, casually asking if today was the day Arcade was finally going to man up and beat her at Hearts.
Only last night he'd offered up a silent cry of thanks when Veronica had appeared in the nick of time and produced a deck of cards with a wink and a flourish, fighting back a snicker at Cass's hand already firmly on his knee and tracing higher. Arcade made some pithy remark about tonight being the first time he'd ever get to shoot Veronica's moon before making his exit with what almost passed for well-mannered haste.
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Maybe you'll be a little more understanding next time, Courier had said. You know she doesn't mean anything by it. Six belts of hooch and she kinda forgets about what you fancy. Can't help it if tall, blond and handsome turns the eye of anyone after a few drinks, right?
It perhaps would've been less awkward overall if Boone hadn't turned a brilliant shade of crimson and left the room fast enough to draw attention to himself. Arcade hadn’t known whether to smirk or feel like an unstoppable pillar of manliness. In the end he’d just blandly said that Boone was having a hot menopausal flush and hoped to hell that Courier - and Boone - wouldn’t think about his words too critically.
“…It’s not like I want to interrupt or anything.”
Arcade snapped back to the present. Veronica was waving a hand in front of his face, clicking her tongue like she was trying to get Rex's attention.
"Fine, fine," he said, batting her hand away whilst carefully avoiding the comically oversized punching device on her arm. "Go on."
"You with me? Not daydreaming of tall, dark and handsome?"
He rolled his eyes and resisted the urge to say I prefer short, terse and unbalanced. "I don't know. I've never thought of you as tall or handsome before, Veronica." He bumped her with his shoulder. "If random Latin didn't enrage you so much, I'd offer up an appropriate zippy line about a problem shared, etcetera etcetera."
"You know you're just showing off when you say th… you know what, now you're just distracting me. I wanted to ask you something."
She waited until they cleared the gate from the Strip and were well into the slightly rancid air of Freeside. Between the Securitrons at their back, the scattered Kings ahead of them and, more subtle but perhaps more protective, the Follower's logo emblazoned on Arcade's sleeve, they didn't really worry too much about gathering the attentions of the more dubious residents of Freeside.
Besides, what she couldn't punch, he could shoot. Or shout at. Or both.
"So." She smoothed down her tunic, obviously goading herself into spitting out whatever was on her mind. "What would you do if I said I was a member of the Brotherhood of Steel?"
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She caught his arm and dragged him to a halt. "I'm serious. What would you do?"
"I would suggest that you pick a more congenial spot to unburden yourself. There's a man urinating on that car and it's not adding to the confessional experience." He pushed up his glasses a little, pinching the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. "So I'm going to take a flying leap of logic and guess this isn't some hypothetical you're teasing me with."
When she hesitantly nodded, Arcade did exactly what he felt the situation warranted: he gave a Gaelic shrug, said well, can't pick your family and made to keep walking through Freeside.
If you were going to rank Secret Affiliations With Dubious Organisations on a scale of benign to terrible, Arcade was reasonably confident that being born and bred Enclave outranked being a disenfranchised member of the Brotherhood of Steel. One might've destroyed a lot of gold, upset an entire economy and otherwise been somewhat of a dangerous nuisance, but the other one had FEV-based mass genocidal plans in their agitprop playbook. That trumped just about everything short of Veronica confessing to pushing the Big Red Button herself 200 years ago.
"I don't think you quite got the full flavour," she said, darting in front of him to turn on her heel and walk backwards. "Brotherhood of Steel. Technolust. Fading into irrelevancy in holes in the ground all over the Core Region."
Arcade shrugged again and patted the beaten and worn plasma pistol on his hip. "Are you planning on mugging me for this?"
She frowned. "Of course not."
"Then I don't care." He gently steered her around an obstacle before she tripped over it. Her disbelieving look indicated that she suspected Arcade actually felt otherwise about her unexpected revelation.
"Honestly. Abeunt studia in mores, right? Excuse the Latin, you can berate me for it later. We are not the sum total of our backgrounds. Unless I wake up in the middle of the night with you pressing that nightmarish fist thing of yours to my throat and demanding access to my gauss rifle, I'm going to continue to be completely blasé about it."
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Fucking LOL. I love the way you write Arcade. Never stop. :D
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He didn't bother hiding his smirk. "Oh, ha ha. From stammered confessions to bawdiness in less than a minute. For the record I know you're not into rifles the same way I'm not into…"
"Power fists?"
"This analogy gets worse and worse. Yes. I am not into fists, powered or not. Please tell me that's not your euphemism of choice."
Veronica waved her hands in a gesture that seemed to mean are you kidding and ewwwww all at the same time. "Ha! Listen buddy, I think my favourite term for that particular garden of delight would make your ears melt off."
"To be totally honest I think you lost me at 'garden of delight'."
She snorted with laughter. "You're a smooth one, Arcade."
"I know, I know. Thank you for not making a fisting joke."
To her credit Veronica managed to hold back the explosion of shoulder-shaking laughter until they passed through Freeside's north gate, doing her best to not draw too much attention from the gang of armed mercs iding under the shade of the massive barriers that kept the wasteland out and the slums in.
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Veronica hefted a flour sack of hooch over her shoulder and pushed the door to Westside open with her foot, blinking against the sudden bright flood of daylight. “Always with the complaining, you.”
“I’m not complaining. I’m lodging a health and safety complaint with the Followers. I am not cheap labour. I am expensive labour. I am a man, not a pack Brahmin.” Arcade juggled his own bag of liquor into a more or less comfortable position and followed her out into the street, nodding cordially at the Super Mutant who - and it was hard to tell with a Super Mutant - he assumed had just smiled cheerfully at him.
“Complaints, complaints, complaints. Let’s go before I turn into a Sweaty Betty out here.” Veronica shot an arch look over her shoulder, eyes bright despite the shadows cast by her hood. “If you say ‘too late’ I’ll punch you into next week, just so you know.”
“A gentleman wouldn’t dream of it, Sweaty Betty.”
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“I only wear the uniform because it’s so flattering.” Arcade nudged the bag of spirits more securely between his feet. “Seriously though, yes. Ten years now.”
Veronica shifted from foot to foot. Her own bag of bottles had been neatly dropped by the brick wall Arcade leaned against, his vocal complaints having earned him a short respite in the shade of a run down building.
“Thinking of a career change?”
“Something like that. A trader told me a while back you guys have a pretty swanky university back in California.” She spread her hands and mimed typing. “I’m not too bad at tech. Things repaired, items improved. I don’t know if that’s a thing though.”
Arcade rolled his neck, grinning when she winced at the loud crack his cervical vertebrae made. “It’s definitely a thing. You’d fit in well with the Followers. Well, you’ll fit in better than I can. You can hold a civil conversation without the benefit of coffee for one thing. I just get rude. Ruder.”
“Hey. Hey.” She narrowed her eyes. “You’ve had coffee this morning?”
“Two cups,” he said cheerfully. Boone had silently slipped into the guest room not long after six and shaken him awake with a grunted promise of coffee on the stove and hot water in the tub. Courier’s rare appearance back at the suite had usurped Arcade from the master bedroom and sent him back to bunking in with Veronica. Seeing as she repeatedly managed to kick him in her sleep, Arcade felt that withholding delicious caffeine was only fair.
“Remind me to take revenge on you later.” Veronica stuck out her hand and hauled Arcade to his feet, his protests falling on deaf ears.
“Take revenge and I won’t take you in to see Julie. I mean, I’d take you in there but I’m fairly sure strolling into a compound full of drunks with two overflowing sacks of booze isn’t the wisest idea. Julie tends to not appreciate irony before ten in the morning.”
“Oh, I know. She’s worse before coffee in the morning than I am.” Veronica clapped a hand over her mouth almost before the last word hit the air.
Arcade squawked with laughter, the sound matching perfectly with the click of glass bottles settling against his back. “Well that explains an awful lot then. It certainly explains Julie’s good mood lately. What other secrets have you been hiding, Femme Fatale?”
“It’s been a morning of revelations,” Veronica muttered, her cheeks fetchingly pink. “You’re going to have to reveal some secret affair to even up the balance.”
Well my friend, this good hair and stately bearing are all thanks to my genetically pure upbringing in a post-Fascist shadow society. My relatives probably wiped out half your family and vice versa. There’s a suit of power armour hidden away a couple of blocks from here with a rather fetching E on the breast and if anyone with half a clue sees me wearing it, I’ll spend the rest of my life languishing in the basement of a high security lock-up. Never mind that if our mutual friend Boone ever catches wind of this, he’ll probably execute me himself.
Oh, and speaking of Boone, you hair would curl if you knew what I did to him on the kitchen table when you were all out last week. Try not to think of it when you’re eating lunch today.
Instead he just smiled beatifically, declared that he was an angel with nothing to hide, and that they should get this liquor back to the Lucky 38 before someone tried to liberate it from them with brute force and much rudeness.
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“Just a quick question,” he said, looking serious for the first time all morning. “Have you discussed your Brotherhood… issue with anyone else?”
‘Don’t feel flattered or anything, but just you.” Veronica stared him down, shrugging as much as the heavy sack across her shoulder would allow. “It’s been eating at me for a bit but, y’know, it’s not something I can really shout out from the rooftops.” She sighed a little and smiled wanly. “This probably doesn’t mean anything to you. Feel free to forget about it.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” He paused, wondering if there was a way to say I know exactly what you’re going through without explicitly saying as such. “Just promise me you’ll be careful who you decide to discuss this with. You might want to keep it well out of Boone’s attention. I much prefer you without a decorative pattern of bullet holes.”
She gave an indelicate half-snort, half-laugh. “Oh, trust me, I won’t. He’s already bailed me up and given me the third degree, starting with grilling me about where I got my hat.”
“And?”
She affected a cartoonish simper, a note perfect imitation of the fey maidens he’d seen in holotapes when he was a little boy. “'Oh sir, but I am a poor scavenger!’ He doesn’t need to know any more than that.”
The elevator door wheezed open and they awkwardly shuffled into the tiny space, heavy bags at their feet. He bumped her shoulder with his in a silent gesture of solidarity and she bumped him back.
‘I’ll be careful, Big Brother Arcade.” She reached past him to push the button for the suites before leaning back against the smoky mirrored wall and wolfishly grinning at his reflection. “So. Power fists and gauss rifles, huh? We need to work on this analogy over some coffee.”
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I went through the Veronica fic tags and pulled out lots of little nods to her filled stories. If you think something sounds like a lampshade to your fill, then it most likely is :D
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BRB LOLLIN FOREVER
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I've been hoping someone would tackle something with these two *_* and hooray again, this was a really fun read.
I really dig the way you write Veronica :3 The only issue I see is that you don't do it enough. tsk!
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Veronica is goddamn hard, mang. Like, this ain't no finely crafted tale or anything - it's been tapped out on a phone through a series of airports, so that's kinda to be expected! - but I totally missed the mark on her voice. I need that character primer and I need it now D:
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