Tags: Fallout: New Vegas, Dead Money DLC, Male Courier / God, medical treatment, Canon-Typical Violence, Hurt/Comfort, just talking
Cyrus and God are ambushed on their way to the Salida del Sol switching station. A moment of danger, however, makes way for the sun to rise on a tenuous, mutual understanding.
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Salida del Sol. It must have been beautiful back in its heyday. Right? No, not really. Not if what remained of the construction staff’s logs were to be believed. This town had always been built from tinder and left smoldering at its core from its inception. In some ways, the Cloud was probably the best thing that had ever happened to it. The hazy, red miasma that clung to the plaster walls and led the ghost people around by their nostrils, dragging them to their feet and propping them up with quivering stilts any time they stopped breathing for too long had done more for the villa’s long-term survivability than Sinclair ever had.
“Look out.”
God’s hiss of a whisper brought Cyrus back to the present. Sure enough, about two feet in front of them sat a rusty bear trap, mouth agape, wedged against a pile of rubble. It neatly blended in with the mix of scrap and debris. For all of the grief they caused him, Cyrus had to admit that the ghost people were ingenious hunters.
Before he could get out a word of thanks, however, a figure darted out from the shadows and began bearing down on them fast. The sharp glint of light off metal cutting through the deceptively warm gloom of the villa’s streets heralded the steel trap affixed to the figure’s arm.
Cyrus slipped the pistol from his jumpsuit pocket as God charged past him with a cry, engaging with the trapper and drawing its attention. They made for an efficient team, Cyrus mused, as he lined up a shot on the enemy’s arm. The ghost people were slippery foes, dancing and jerking about to unpredictable tempos, but two against one made for simple math. The courier's bullet found its mark, a spurt of neon green blood erupting where it pierced the monster's rubber suit.
As he aimed a second shot, this time to the head as the trapper reeled from one of God’s punches, a shiver of darkness in the distance caught the courier’s eye. A seeker, shimmying its way towards the commotion, was picking its way over to them around support columns and piles of collapsed walls. More concerning than its sudden appearance, however, was the canister it was dragging along at its side.
The solid impact of fist against skull coupled with the sound of dry-rotted rubber hitting the ground as God felled their initial foe reassured Cyrus that it was safe to shift his focus to the new threat on their horizon. However, a pistol was no replacement for a rifle, especially one with no scope, and while he’d finally found a pair of glasses that matched his needs closely enough, Cyrus’s shot found purchase in the seeker’s torso rather than the canister.
“Incoming!” was all he could manage as the ghost wound back its arm and hurled the improvised explosive. As he dashed for cover, he could only pray that God had seen it coming too.
A grinding shriek of metal on metal tore through the air as the gas bomb landed in the maw of the bear trap. As the trap’s teeth snapped closed and began to shred its hull, the cacophony was cut short by an explosion that threw Cyrus to the ground. After that, he couldn’t hear anything but a single, piercing tone that crowded his mind to the exclusion of all thought. He must have blacked out.
***
As he came to, his ears were still ringing, the pound of blood flowing through his skull his only immediate assurance that he had survived the blast and whatever had followed. Blinking to clear his vision, he watched a building, lying on its side, lope off towards the skyline.
No… It took him a moment to realize he was being dragged along through one of Salida del Sol’s desolate streets.
He kicked out at the grip on his leg, landing a solid blow, only to feel his captor grab him under the arms and raise him aloft before setting him down gently under one of the overhangs that lined the street. The shadow that loomed over him which lowered itself down gingerly against the wall next to him was far larger - and, judging by the pop and crack of plaster and groaning of support beams, far heavier - than any ghost person. When his ears and sight finally cleared, Cyrus found God obstinately scowling at one of the pillars that yet lined the walkway, as though it had, through inaction, caused all of this.
Cyrus pushed himself up slowly, cautiously testing every joint and tendon as he went, taking stock of each ache to ensure he was still in one piece or close enough to it. The worst, he concluded, was a short and very manageable list: he’d lost some skin on one arm from having his sleeves rolled up, some first-degree burns from the combustion, and what felt like a sprained ankle. Anything else was relatively minor, and none of it was anything a stimpak, some disinfectant, and bandages couldn’t mitigate.
With his own condition catalogued, he turned to God, who looked as though he’d taken a larger share of the blast. His good arm, the one not hobbled by a bear trap, was peppered with shrapnel, a mix of shredded metal from the canister rubble that had been kicked up by the blast. The rest of his body was also covered in fresh cuts, burns, bruises, and abrasions. Even from where he sat a few feet away, Cyrus could hear God’s labored breathing. It must have been a lot, but he was weathering it stoically.
His good eye swiveled to regard Cyrus distantly.
“Give me the bag,” he growled through wheezes, voice hoarser than Cyrus had heard yet.
His duffle bag was right next to him, on the side he always carried it on. God must have dragged it here as well. Reaching in, he grabbed the brown physician’s tote he had been holding onto for just such an occasion. Sliding it over, he began tending to his own wounds in the meantime. It was their last stimpak at the moment, but he would need both ankles to get to a vending machine for a resupply; there was no helping it. He winced as he jabbed the needle into the joint, then sighed with relief as the pain vanished and the swelling began to abate. Grabbing some gauze and bandages from the open bag between them, he went to work on his arm, taking what he hoped were a couple of surreptitious swigs from the bottle of vodka he was using to sterilize as he went.
All was silent, save for their occasional grunts of pain as the pair tended separately to their wounds, the eerie, dead air of the villa settling back into the space they had so rudely disturbed.
When he finished, Cyrus tossed what remained of the supplies he’d borrowed back into the bag and glanced over to see how his companion was faring. At the sight, he had to suppress an involuntary laugh that he knew would have come off as condescension.
God hadn’t even bothered with removing the majority of the shrapnel from his arm, instead crudely strapping it in with bandages straight overtop the metal, and he now appeared to be struggling to line up a strip of medical tape over a comically undersized gauze near his right eye.
Suddenly, that eye flicked over to Cyrus, seething with a hatred that he couldn’t decide whether or not he deserved.
“Enjoying the show?” It hadn’t even been a threat, but for the first time since they had met, the tone of God’s voice made Crus feel genuinely unsafe. Even as his voice shook with effort, pauses punctuated by rasping gasps and pained swallows, his resentment was palpable. It certainly wasn’t the biting yet ultimately sarcastic chastisement Cyrus had been expecting.
“What?” he said stupidly, caught off-guard. He blinked for a moment before realizing he’d been staring again. He knew better with nightkin - he’d learned much from Keen, Doc Henry, and even sweet Lily - but for some reason, everything he’d learned seemed to be blanked from his mind whenever he caught sight of God like a tape swiped by a magnet. Averting his eyes, he knocked his head back against the pillar he’d been resting on.
‘This is the worst possible time for this,’ he thought to himself with bitter shame. ’I need to not...do this, again. Please, just let me-’
“Are you fascinated,” God’s rumbling baritone voice interrupted his thoughts in unintended sabotage, “or disgusted?”
“What?” Cyrus caught himself halfway to glancing over at him again and instead smacked his head back against the pillar once more, though a bit too indelicately this time. “Ow…”
“A doctor who won’t even look after a wound. Pathetic.”
“Excuse me!?” This insult to his modest honor roused his anger at last, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to carry on their conversation while addressing a wall instead of his companion. “First off, not a doctor. I don’t have a doctorate. I don’t know how to impress the distinction on you. Second off, I thought you were implying you didn’t want me staring just now.”
Whatever sound God tried to make was mangled by his labored breaths.
“I was referring to your unwillingness to so much as lift a finger to assist, and after you made such a production of offering to ply your trade at the police station.”
That was the final straw. Cyrus swivelled his head almost mechanically to lock eyes with God, catching him by surprise.
“You threatened to rip my arms off if I touched you again.”
God sneered and weakly waved a hand through the air dismissively.
“That was days ago.”
Cyrus lifted his arm and checked his Pip-Boy’s display.
“It was 16 hours ago.”
“Time is compressed here!” God all but roared, spit flying from his mouth as a purplish hue crept up his neck, past bulging veins, and into his face. “It is nearly useless to measure it in hours and days for a town that knows neither night nor day save street signs promising the rise of a sun that never comes. Would you hold the ferryman of Hades to some equally inane schedule, expecting him to know the year, let alone respect the hour!?”
Cyrus merely stared at him through his rant; unamused, unimpressed, and unresponsive. It was a tantrum, and he refused to play into it.
“Fah!” God threw the roll of bandages he had been brandishing, hitting Cyrus in the leg and finally succeeding in making him flinch. “Fine! You may touch me as absolutely necessary, and I now deem it necessary!” As the rage subsided, God sank back against the creaking wall more heavily, taking a minute to catch his breath as the pain claimed his attention once more. “Unless you wish to rescind your offer and admit that you merely desired my struggle for your entertainment.”
Sighing in resignation, Cyrus grabbed the roll of bandages and pushed himself up from the pillar. Dragging the duffle bag behind him, he kneeled beside God and began undoing what harm had been done.
Retrieving a syringe, he cleaned a spot on God’s shoulder with a vodka-soaked rag to begin.
“You still don’t believe a word out of my mouth, do you? Little pinch,” he warned, though he was unsurprised when his patient failed to react to the injection at all. For a super mutant, it was probably milder than a splinter. He set a timer on his Pip-Boy as he mused on what the world must feel like with such thick skin.
God let out a bitter laugh at his comment. Being so close for the first time, Cyrus could see the sag of his skin over his form, which was nonetheless impressively built, but also clearly dangerously malnourished. He must have been even bigger at one time. Cyrus had to wonder if this was at all Elijah’s doing or if the host people were just the nutritional equivalent of jellyfish.
“Forgive me for being cautious,” God finally said, with enough bitter sarcasm to make up for the minutes it had taken him to gather the strength to speak again. “If you hadn’t noticed, everything in this resort either wants one dead or couldn’t care less whether one lived or died.”
Cyrus kept his annoyance in his mouth and not his hands as he worked, consciously treating God’s wounds with so gentle a touch that he would be unable to find fault with it. A few more minutes passed in silence as Cyrus carefully taped down a gauze over the laceration near God’s eye, an eye whose color he still couldn’t pin down, adding an unnecessary tinge of wonder to his frustration.
“One would do well not to generalize so broadly that one blinds themself to the line between friend and foe.”
This time, it was God’s turn to catch him by surprise, turning his head and looking Cyrus in the eye with an expression of honesty that froze him completely, his hands hovering just over God’s skin.
“It’s been far too long for me to remember what a ‘friend’ would even look like.”
Cyrus let out the breath he’d held slowly through nose, praying that it sounded like a sigh.
“Oh, you know,” he began in a teasingly sing-song tone, “fighting side-by-side, protecting one another, providing for one another, hey, maybe even tending to one another’s wounds if one of them happens to have medical training.”
God snorted, and Cyrus couldn’t help but smirk to himself in satisfaction as he pulled more supplies from the duffle bag he had stolen from the police station, when this entire mess had really gotten rolling.
“Hrn. As if all of those cannot be equally self-serving.”
“If I was being self-serving,” Cyrus muttered in retort quietly enough that, had they not been so close, it might have been to himself, “I wouldn’t have bothered with the Med-X.”
God glanced down at the small pile of discarded supplies that had been accruing, with the empty Med-X syringe neatly tucked into a nest of rags for later sterilization and reuse. The pair fell silent, God side-eyeing the courier briefly before relaxing back against the wall that was somehow still supporting his girth.
They both jumped in unison when the alarm on Cyrus’s Pip-Boy began to beep, and he hastily switched it off.
“Sorry, that was for the Med-X. I’ll finish this up and then start on your forearm.” True to his word, as soon as he had finished treating a burn on God’s leg, he turned his attention to what would take the bulk of their time here.
Carefully, he went about removing all of the shrapnel, a mix of the shredded husk of the bomb itself and debris that had been scattered by the explosion. Thanks to God’s thick hide, only a few pieces had gotten very deep, and all of it eventually yielded to a sturdy pair of tweezers. Still, removing them without causing any further damage took time. As the operation stretched on, God didn’t complain or ask any questions, simply rested his head on the wall and stared off at nothing. It was possibly the first truly peaceful silence they had shared.
When all of the foreign material had finally been removed, Cyrus moved on to sanitizing before he started in on stitches. God’s talk of “insusceptibility” be damned; he refused to skip a single step of the procedure.
“How’s your pain?” he asked casually as he neared the end of his sewing.
God’s face contorted into a look of confusion.
“It is manageable,” he settled on.
Cyrus nodded. It was more than he had expected to get, in all honesty.
“What does manageable look like for you?” he heard himself ask on autopilot and breathed an internal sigh of relief when God simply gave a straightforward yet exhausted answer.
“It means what it means. It’s back to its usual levels. Hrn, possibly...slightly better, even,” he added in such a low voice that Cyrus barely caught it.
Cyrus’s eyes momentarily darted to the bear trap, still tightly chained to the man’s arm, but he kept his mouth shut as he dressed the area he had just finished working on.
As he secured the bandage’s end, his eyes wandered up to the stained fabric tightly cinched above God’s bicep.
“Do you mind if I check on that old one while I’m here?” he asked offhandedly.
God huffed in reply.
“Do as you please. I am feeling indulgent. Perhaps it’s the narcotics.”
“Not my intention, but I’ll take it.” Cyrus couldn’t help but smile as he tossed his needle and thread with one hand into the pile of spent materials he had collected, his other hand still resting on his companion’s arm. Though he could be intense and unpredictable, God wasn’t without humor. It was a treat to get a glimpse of it.
“Don’t push your luck,” God suddenly snarled, and Cyrus’s attention snapped back. “Patronize me again and you’ll see how little pain can slow me down.”
Without realizing it, Cyrus had begun rubbing small circles over the man’s skin with his thumb. Retracting it quickly, he turned instead to untying the older bandage. Eventually, he had to concede and use his knife to cut it off instead; it seemed even an awkward angle couldn’t temper God’s strength.
“Sorry, I...it’s just an old habit. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
Pulling off the dressing, he stared at the exposed portion of skin in surprise.
“Huh. It’s almost completely healed. You could have just said so.”
God shrugged the opposite shoulder.
“Everything hurts constantly. Though, I heal quickly. I cannot keep track of every new wound I find whenever I manage to claw my way out of the basement. So I simply try to ignore them. Sisyphean though it may be in the wake of Dog’s efforts to silence me.”
Cyrus’s heart sank every time God mentioned Dog. Though they hadn’t had a chance to meet yet, and Cyrus refused to betray God’s tenuous trust by calling Dog out, he sounded sweet. Cyrus wanted to tell him all of the things God tried to do for him, that he was trying to protect him, wanted to mediate between the two somehow so that Dog wouldn’t have to fear God’s voice any longer. God wasn’t so bad, after all.
He quietly ran a finger along the base of the long, still soft scar and felt God squirm restrainedly.
“Sorry,” he said hastily, pulling his hand back an inch. “Does it still sting?”
“No,” God insisted unconvincingly, breathing heavily again. “It must have been a phantom pain.”
Cyrus looked at the scar with uncertainty, checking for swelling or discoloration, but it did indeed seem to have closed well without complication. Just in case, he pulled the penultimate fresh roll of bandages from the doctor’s bag.
“In any case, keeping it covered a while longer won’t hurt as long as you keep it clean.” He paused his wrapping to wave his hand and roll his eyes dismissively on God’s behalf. “Right, right, you don’t have to worry about infections.” With a fond smirk, he added, “Lucky bastard.”
God chuckled briefly, and Cyrus could have sworn he caught a hint of a smile before the man turned his head away.
“That may be taking it a bit far.”
“Do you know how many people we lose to infection each year?” he asked as he tied off the bandage.
“No, and I don’t care.”
“Well, if you knew, you’d appreciate your luck on that front, trust me.”
With a groan, Cyrus sat back down, his knees crying for a reprieve. He missed his hat, he thought, as he wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand, but not having to worry about the sun was one of the Cloud’s few benefits. Though it had been less than a day he’d been trapped there, he didn’t suspect he was at any risk of sunburn for once in his life.
Reaching over, he pulled the duffle bag to his side and dug around for a bottle of purified water. Surgery had built up his thirst, but he knew they didn’t have many bottles of clean water left. After he’d taken a few refreshing sips, he replaced the cap loosely and held it out to his companion. God glanced at it briefly before giving him a blank stare.
“What? You’re not afraid of catching anything from me anyway, right?”
Cautiously, God accepted the bottle. Though it looked comically small in proportion to his hands, he found the cap came off easily and stared at it uncomprehendingly.
“I don’t understand you,” he said before downing the rest of the bottle.
“Hydration is important,” Cyrus said with cheek, raising his eyebrows in mock surprise.
“Fascinating,” God retorted, pushing himself up off of the crumbling wall and grunting with effort as he stood.
“You should rest,” Cyrus advised, but God had already turned his back on him.
“No. Let’s get this over with before the morphine wears off.”
Though not without complaint, Cyrus capitulated, hefting himself off the ground and hoisting his bag over his shoulder with a whine that was as much from mental exhaustion as from physical. As God took an early lead towards the switching station, Cyrus scooped their used medical supplies back into the doctor’s bag for the time being, treating himself to one last swig of the vodka to polish it off before jogging to follow in the footsteps of God.