Chapter Text
Courier Six stands just under feet tall and has six fingers on her left hand. She sleeps six hours a night if she can sleep at all. She has six scars and six regrets, but only one tattoo.
"666" is embedded in her forearm, patchy and faded and ugly, gothic script blotting out two of her six scars.
She was fourteen when she got it - six years of sunlight and wind and sand and life have warped it, but it is unmistakeable.
The number of the beast.
SixSixSix.
--
Her aviators slide down her button nose and her brows furrow as she travels alone down the road. The Mojave sun is merciless and her blazing hazel eyes are no match for high noon. Her lips are plump and cracked and her tongue darts out to wet them.
The sounds of Radio New Vegas float out of her PipBoy and hang in the air, and she can almost see the music mixing with the haze reflecting off the asphalt. She can feel her feet swelling in her combat boots, and she veers off the pavement to take a well-deserved break.
She sinks into the shade with a groan and leans forward to untie her boots. She attempts to whistle along to the radio, but her throat is ravaged by the wind and the only thing that comes out is hot air. "Fuck." Her voice is as raspy and scratched as a ghoul's and she is seized with a coughing fit.
She thinks back to the day she left Freeside.
She skipped town about 5 or 6 years back at 16 and not a moment too soon. She spent the two years before dancing at the Wrangler and dancing for her boyfriend in the dead of night, after he'd sit at the bar and drink with the boys until he could walk her back to his place from work. He was one of the Kings and she was his Queen, but that was another lifetime ago. She didn't go by Six then, and she only had two of her scars - a cigar burn on the back of her right hand and a smear on her hip from an errant bullet. The bullet didn't get her right in the meat, but it came close enough to teach her a good lesson about pissing off the Khans.
God, how she used to laugh with her man, Johnny. A smile tugs at her lips at the memory of him but she stamps the impulse down quick. She thinks back to the day she left Freeside and she realizes that she doesn’t regret it.
Freeside was another name ago. Six doesn't know that girl anymore. Six left Johnny alone in the dark and she left that girl in the city she thought she would live and die in.
But for all the ghosts that walked Freeside, at least there was water and shelter and chems. The Mojave usually doesn't offer such luxuries.
She shakes her head and ties her thick black hair up off the sweat-sticky nape of her neck, and pulls her boots back on. She undoes two buttons on her button-up and hikes her pants up, reluctant to get back to work, but she won't accept payment for sitting on her ass doing jack shit. Besides, she has a personal errand to run. Some slick-talking fuck in an ugly checker jacket tried to put her in the ground two months ago, and he had her package.
She has to remember to change her bandages at the next test stop. She forgot once, after stepping into a bear trap, and the infection hit her hard and fast. She nearly lost her foot. She gained some valuable information - the Mojave doesn’t care if you live or die. The Mojave doesn’t give a shit about your moral compass, or who you’re running from, or who’s waiting up for you at home. It is immense and dry and relentless and you will tire out far, far faster than the desert ever would.
She manages to get to a rest stop a few miles down the road. She’s grateful for the reprieve and sits in the abandoned, wide open garage of a truck stop, unwinding the dirty, dried-blood-brown bandages from her forearm. A coyote jumped at her in the middle of a fight and sank its teeth in, but that was three weeks ago, and there wasn’t much of a wound left. She grimaces as she splashes vodka on it to sterilize it - the pain burns her, but she’s never been a stranger to fire.
She pops a couple Mentats from their tarnished little tin and washes them down with a nip of whiskey. It made her want to vomit when she first started drinking it, but after a few months, she could barely taste it. She could barely feel a thing.
She lights up a cigarette and puts a marker over Nipton in her PipBoy. It’ll be nearly sundown when she hits the city and she needs a warm bed and a warm body to soothe the ache in her bones.
She sets out on the road, making a mental note to avoid a column of smoke rising from the horizon.
--
It’s a quarter to seven when she realizes that the column of smoke has a name. Nipton’s been reduced to a smudge in the dust and it fucking stinks. She pulls her neckerchief to her nose and pushes her aviators to rest on her head, gagging on the cloying stench of rotten meat with a hint of cheap perfume.
Her hand flies to her pistol as a man comes scrambling out of the town’s gates, a shrimpy, rat-faced man with wire framed glasses and a tacky bowl cut. “Smell that air!” He laughs maniacally, stopping a few meters short of Six. “Couldn’t ya just drink it like booze?” He waves a slip of paper in the air smugly, and Six decides that this man, while nuttier than squirrel shit, isn’t a threat.
“Are you okay?” She says, taking a step forward.
“Are you fuckin’ serious? Never better! I won the lottery!”
“The...what? What lottery?” She keeps her hand on her 9mm pistol as he moves towards her.
“You fuckin’ dense er somethin’? The only lottery that matters! EAT IT, NIPTON!” He rushes past her, in such a hurry that he stumbles and eats shit not thirty yards away. She keeps her eyes on him until he’s a speck in the distance, and looks towards the city.
“...mercy…” She whispers and does the sign of the cross, a habit she picked up from her Mother. Her footsteps are slow and unsteady, and nothing, nothing in this world could prepare her for the sight before her.
“Oh…” She gags and leans against a sign post. “Oh, oh, oh no, nooo…” She croaks.
At the end of the street, there is a smoking pile of tires, corpses scattered on top and around it. The street is lined with people - strung up, crucified, and dying.
She rushes to turn off her PipBoy and hears the unlucky living groaning, begging, praying for mercy to a God they never met.
She recognizes a few from her last stay in Nipton - but one in particular stands out. A girl, about 14, with blood running down her thighs, is sobbing so loudly Six can barely hear herself think.
Heads mounted on pikes watch like voyeurs and her skin is crawling.
She can't imagine being that young and going through this kind of hell. A hell, yes, but not this hell. And the child still screams. She cries for her mother, but her mother is probably dead, and her voice is laden with ear splitting agony. A bullet is a more effective silencer than soothing words, and Six bites her lip so hard she breaks the skin as she aims her gun between the girl’s eyes, contemplating the meaning of mercy. Who is she to take a life? Is there much life left to take? “I’m doing you a favour.” She mutters and wipes away dust and tears from her face.
She’s locked in a staredown, Six and this girl, and Six is disturbed - it feels like she’s looking into a mirror. "Please stop crying." But the girl wails on, and there's nothing Six can do.
It scares her, and before she can doubt her actions, she squeezes the trigger and now blood is spattered on her face and she staggers back.
“A mercy kill?” A slimy hiss of a voice rings out, echoing down the main drag, and Six nearly shits herself right there. She’s shaking in her boots, trembling so hard she can barely aim the gun, so she holsters it and backs away. He advances. “I didn’t think a profligate whore would have the stomach for bloodshed. Perhaps you don’t. You look ill.” A man almost as tall as she is moves toward her steady and slow, wearing some old-timey war uniform, a wolf’s head crown, and shades so thick she can’t see his eyes. She sobs. He smiles, and she gags.
“Please, please don’t--”
“Don’t worry. I won’t have you lashed to a cross like your fellow degenerates.” He purrs. “It’s useful you happened to pass by.” He grins now with his fangs - no, his teeth bared. “Bear witness to the fate of Nipton. Memorize every detail.” He’s so close now he could brush her collarbone with his fingertips if he wanted to. She couldn’t stop him if she tried. “And then? When you move on? I want you to teach everyone the lesson Caesar’s Legion taught here.” He butchers the pronunciation of the name, KAI-zar, but she doesn’t dare correct him. “Especially to any NCR troops you come across.”
“I d-don’t--”
“Hush.” His voice is stern and her protests die in her throat. “...well?” He snaps, and she cringes.
“I don’t...I don’t understand, what lesson?” She breaths in gasps, short and pitchy.
“Perhaps that they are weak and we are strong?” His voice is like a serpent’s and she wishes she could see his eyes. “This much was known already. But the depths of their moral sickness? Their...dissolution?” The grin slides off his face. “Nipton served as the perfect object lesson. A wicked place, debase and corrupt, serving all as long as they paid. A town of whores. Perhaps not unlike yourself.” He chuckles and the men lining the street behind him followed suit. She is paralyzed and hopelessly outmatched. “For a pittance, the town agreed to trap those it had sheltered. Only when I sprang it did they realize they were tangled, too.”
“Everyone?”
“Every living soul.” His voice is perverse, and she feels like she would have to bathe for days to get the sound of him off of her.
“Innocent people?”
“Innocent in comparison to whom?” He narrows his eyes and steps forward, yanking her neckerchief down. His hand wraps around her jaw almost tenderly as he tilts her head down to get a better look at her. “Hear my commands, woman, and obey.” He sneers, and drags a calloused thumb across her lips. He only releases her when she nods, and he pushes hard, sending her flying back into the ground. “Legionnaires! March!” He commands, and she stays there, shivering in the dirt until the sounds of the men and their snarling hounds sound like a fever dream.
The dead and dying stare at her accusingly, as if to wordlessly place blame. “I…” She gets up and swallows another sob. These strangers were weak. They sold out their own. That didn’t make their deaths right...but it wasn’t such a bitter pill to swallow. Nipton had a reputation, of course they would try to cut a deal. Everyone wants to get in bed with the Devil, and the Devil just touched her face so sweetly she could have died right there.
It bothers her that it makes so much sense to raze the place. It bothers her that she's not that bothered by the crying, not as much as she was before.
--
She creeps into one of the ransacked homes, pistol drawn, and when she’s certain the house is clear, she drags an armchair in front of the door, puts on Radio New Vegas, and cracks open her medicine bag. Med-X soothes her stiff muscles and the rest of the whiskey finally, finally pulls her under for the night.
She dreams of a desert fox following her, nipping at her ankles, whispering to her with a serpent's tongue, telling her all the dirty secrets she can stand, and then some.
She should have stopped dreaming years ago.