Work Text:
One thing leads to another, that’s what they always say, don’t they? It’s been a whole lot of things, but if Daz is honest with himself, he doesn’t know how they lead to this.
The first choice they don’t have is to stay at the Temple to recover.
No, the second the countdown is averted Marked Men swarm the place.
Daz pistol-whips the nearest into submission, panic and sweat clouding his vision, whirls around and shoots at the one trying to get past him. Three swarm him while he still takes aim. The rush is fuelling him, heart boiling in his blood. He’s run on nothing but adrenalin since the High Road, and the crash is gonna come soon. He fights like a man knowing the bell will toll soon and he’ll make damn sure it’ll ring for someone else.
Ulysses, silent as the grave and patient as the Grim Reaper, fights like a man who’s come to like the sound of his own tolling. He uses Old Glory like an extension of his body, motions fluid and powerful, and Daz could have watched him for days if he wasn’t trying to fight for their survival. Because that he’s fighting for both of them is clear. One of the Marked Men gets close to Ulysses, shrieks and throws himself at him and off comes the mask, the rubber bands ripping with a sharp thwack, plastic shattering under inhumanly strong hands, the last and only defence Ulysses had against permanent disfiguration. His face, when it is properly revealed, shows an expression twisted into bitter determination. It’s his body, his instincts, that do the fighting for him. That, and maybe the lingering effect of Daz’s words.
As long as he lives the Twisted Hairs live, and the Divide, and all the other people only he now remembers. That doesn’t change that whatever Ulysses is fighting for, it’s not himself.
Daz has to shoot two Marked Men Ulysses could have gotten if he spent more time staying alive and less trying to bring down the whole world with him.
They have to leave. He can’t watch his own back and Ulysses’ at the same time, not in a place like this, not with a whole army swarming them.
He zigzags through the hail of bullets and swinging knives towards Ulysses, grabs his arm – and jumps back into a group of Marked Men when Ulysses takes a swing at him.
For a moment their eyes meet, mutual shock, then a moment of regret.
That’s all Daz sees before the Marked Men pile on him, faces contorted in pain, rage – it’s the same thing really – and they grab at Daz, tear off clothes and strips of skin as he fights back. No ground under his feet, no place to brace himself.
He loses sight of Ulysses as one of them jumps onto his head, shadows darken his vision, hands around his neck, twisting and it’s all Daz can do to dig his fingernails into the ghoul’s hands and pull with all his might.
The world turns into an undulating mass of burned limbs and knives the colour of Divide skies. He tries to bring his gun up, but one of them bears down on his arm, Daz feels the bones in his arm moving, scraping against muscle and ligament. He cries out, rears up, gets maybe an inch up before the weight of the group pushes him down again.
From somewhere close by comes a garbled cut-off shout – a sound of pain and even as they try to rip him limb from limb Daz feels bad for hoping the sound came from one of the Marked Men. That it wasn’t Ulysses crying out like someone broke him in half.
Daz hits the ground when the ghoul below him shoves him off, it gives him some breathing room, but not enough to think, barely enough to look and see a hand pushing through the throng of bodies, not burned by Divide fire. Not anymore, at least.
Ulysses pulls him up and out, the world turns bright and cold as Daz is freed from the mass of bodies covering him whole, submachine gun hailing bullets. One grazes Daz, nips a hole in his jacket, but the Marked Men already did a number on it, so he’s not mad. His arm stings where one of them dug his nails in and when he looks there’s a stripe of red flesh where his skin has come clean off. Another mark on his body. Perhaps this one will heal without any help.
“Let’s go,” he says, urges Ulysses along without touching him.
Luckily Ulysses follows without further prompting. He runs ahead, guides Daz deeper into the complex, down a set of nearly caved-in stairs, down and down and Daz has only time to think – hope to hell Ulysses knows where he’s going – when they reach the tunnels. The Marked Men are right behind them, the gibbering swarms of mad ghouls, demanding their pound of flesh for their trespass.
Doors still work, Ulysses’s fingers fly over the keypad as he opens them up, Daz bursts through first feeling the Marked Men trying to trip him up, keep him there, Ulysses fires into the crowd, surrounded by grabbing hands, leaden pipes flying against his arms, his legs, he stumbles and nearly falls, keeps going. The hordes are upon them, and the doors slam shut.
The clanging of the metal doors echo loud and lonesome through the empty tunnel, but other than that, Daz only hears their laboured breathing, slightly out of sync, and the muffled sound of Marked Men pounding on the blast door, screaming at the prey that got away. They are alone.
Half a dozen steps into the tunnel the emergency lighting gives up. He turns on his pip-boy light to give himself an idea of what they’re dealing with. Spots a torn down wall and behind it a natural cave formation before Ulysses pushes his arm down, covers the light with his hand until Daz shuts it off.
“Tunneler territory,” Ulysses says simply.
He looks around, eyes focusing on something in the middle distance as he thinks. Daz, who’s been trying to get his map to stop showing static, startles when Ulysses speaks again: “Will need my help to find the way.”
Daz nods grimly. Out of the fire, into the lizard-infested frying pan. He reloads his revolver and ducks into the half-sprint that keeps his core protected and his senses peeled – used to run this way in the Sierra Madre, back then out of injury. Now whenever he ducks just like so he finds himself more awake, more alert to his surroundings. He picks up a brisk but not overly fast pace, not knowing how far these tunnels extend, and hears Ulysses following after.
When Daz left the Temple with Ulysses, he thought himself at the end of his rope. Now he looks back on their initial escape and mourns that brief time between then and now when his muscles weren’t burning under their load. Still, they’re making progress.
Daz tries not to enjoy Ulysses’ laboured breaths against his neck too much – considering the man’s in pain and all – and blinks the tiredness away. Hours since they left the Temple and his adrenalin reserves have run out for good. With every hallway they cross Ulysses gets heavier in his arms, and they still have a ways to go.
Through this place patrolled by yet more crazed robots, one of the places he missed his first time through, then climb back out onto the highway. Could rest at the Crow’s Nest if it’s still standing, but Daz won’t count on it. Divide doesn’t leave things alone, especially if it can make them more dangerous. Probably overrun by Marked Men by now, with the satchel charges gone. Got to go all the way to Hopeville if it is. With a ninety kilo guy plus equipment in his arms, might be more than he can handle. Might be Ulysses will get his wish after all, and have the Divide claim them both.
It probably says something about Daz that he’s still, kind of, enjoying this. Has to think his way through this, not just go in blindly and shoot. When he comes upon a patrol of two eyebots he doubles back, leans against the wall and listens. Eyebots are almost silent, except for the slight whirring of their motors. By sound alone he makes an estimate of their patrol route, guesses at the length of the hallway, the number of doors he can duck into should their route be shorter than expected.
Calculations stop dead in their tracks when Ulysses’ dry lips brush over the skin just above his collar.
“Was a fool to think that chip would slow you down.”
Daz shivers and knows Ulysses noticed it. Hopes he’ll chalk it up to Daz being surprised. Ulysses’ gone quiet in the last hour or so. He figured he’d try to rest, or else that the pain and blood loss knocked him out. Apparently he’s been doing some thinking himself.
Daz is still formulating an answer when Ulysses picks up.
“Carried nations in your pocket, fate of others. Mine’s not the first life you held in your hand, Courier. Comes easy to you.”
Too easy, is what Daz hears in the silence after. Ulysses’ voice is slow, almost drawls, exhaustion forcing on him what comes naturally to the people of the Mojave. Daz can’t say it suits him. He adjusts his grip.
“Not so easy as I make it look,” he assures. “Figured you were getting heavier with all that thinking going on in that big brain o’ yours. Might do with some lighter thoughts, how’s about it?”
Ulysses doesn’t answer immediately. Maybe he’s nodded off after all.
He gives himself a moment to rest. Leans against the wall, shifts his weight from his left leg to the prosthetic on his right, feels the knee click when it adjusts for the added weight, but it takes a load off his flesh and blood body. Metal leg might give out just the same, but at least it won’t hurt before it does. It’s a false rest, to be sure. Right now his body thanks him for it, but his arms are starting to get tired and his back won’t be too happy in an hour or so. Still, he can pretend, for a moment.
The change of breathing on his neck alerts Daz that Ulysses is gearing up for an answer.
“…”
Nothing but a huff, and Daz feels a hand digging harder into his shoulderblade. He wishes he had something to dull the pain at least.
“… Like what?” Ulysses finally manages.
Daz listens for the eyebot motors, finds them gone. Didn’t keep track of their route while they were chatting, but he has to risk it. Can’t continue sapping his strength by standing here, needs to get Ulysses somewhere safe.
“First meal you’re gonna have once we’re out of the Divide. Me, I’m gonna have myself some Deathclaw omelet. Could feed an entire family with one egg. Might not be enough.”
He thinks he can hear Ulysses chuckling. Might be his imagination, might have been a noise of pain. Daz chooses to pretend it was laughter.
“Don’t think I’m leaving the Divide,” Ulysses says softly.
Daz grips him tighter and keeps moving.
Tunnels, all the way down, Daz thinks numbly as they move from the tunnels close to the Temple through the tunnels below Sunstone Tower and the tunnels behind that. He has to feel his way forward more than see it, since Ulysses still won’t let him chance the pip-boy light. It was fine on his way here, Daz says multiple times but everytime Ulysses just looks at him as if he can’t believe he survived this long. He’s still behind him, following close to take advantage of the trails he’s leaving, mimicking his steps exactly.
They haven’t talked much since leaving the Temple. Occasionally Ulysses has called out directions, clipped and direct, but now that Daz is in familiar surroundings they have fallen into a not altogether uncomfortable silence.
Daz doesn’t try to break it. He has to put all his concentration into not taking a tumble down some rubble and breaking an ankle or something equally embarrassing.
Besides not knowing what he’d even talk about. He has questions for Ulysses but none of them are best asked in the territory of swarming lizardpeople prone to jump out at you at the slightest tremor.
They move through the darkness, keeping their steps light, trying not to move the earth. Every now and then the storms above shake loose something heavy. They hear it crash, sometimes far away, sometimes worryingly close.
Walls turned to ceilings, crumbling with age and the rage of a wasted world, mountains of old-world blues.
Daz is prone to it, always has been ever since he woke up, head aching, in a world that was at once familiar and painfully alien. Looks up at the skyscrapers, knows that people lived behind every single one of those windows, and aches for the things that were lost. The books he collects, missing pages, entries in a series. He still hasn’t found a readable copy of The Two Towers and wonders sometimes if there just aren’t any left.
Daz steps carefully down a hill – refuse, rubble, old world saying slow down a while , like it wants to tell him a story – and hears rock crunching. His feet are solid on the ground, but behind him begins the kind of movement that ends in an avalanche. A curse, something brief and sounding suspiciously Latin, rocks cascade past him, -
And then Ulysses comes crashing into him and Daz’s feet lose contact with the ground.
He hits the hill, rocks, metal dig into his back, rolls around, gets a face full of gravel and reaches out, without thinking, finds an arm, a back, pulls them close.
When they land, air punched out of their lungs, blinking against impossible lights in the total darkness, Daz lies on something he’s fairly sure is a bent metal pipe. He sends a brief prayer of thanks up to whoever’s watching out for him that between their momentum and luck, he didn’t land hard enough for the thing to go through his back. Another one for Ulysses to lie on top of him, hands fisted into his vest as he recovers from the shock of the fall.
Daz listens for expressions of pain, but doesn’t dare feel for an injury. He doubts Ulysses would tell him if there was one, and in the darkness he can’t see if everything’s still where it belongs. He can however very clearly see in his mind what this would look like if there was light and for a second and a half, he forces his brain to think of nothing at all, lest he make the situation even more awkward.
Ulysses is warm and heavy draped over his body. It surprises him a little, how real he feels, no more the disembodied voice prophesying an end to all things. On some level he’d figured that Ulysses would smell like the Divide, like rust and ash. But Daz smells sweat and gun oil and, for some reason, something fruity and fresh that reminds him of the Mojave.
Like home, and Daz has to do something before that thought runs away with him.
“Y’know, there are easier ways to get me underneath you.”
Ulysses does not answer. He does however stare at him so hard the heat of it melts his skin even in the dark.
He clears his throat, shuffles around and Ulysses gets the hint and gets up – it’s his imagination, surely, that Ulysses braces himself against him more than necessary, that he takes his time with the act as if he is just as reluctant.
Daz pats the dust out of his clothes, looks around, for all the good that will do. No way to tell which direction he’s looking. Knowing Ulysses is still staring at him with those immutable eyes, he nonetheless risks the pip-boy.
“Shield your eyes,” he says as he turns it on.
Blinding light flashes through the cavern, a dozen steps in every direction clear as under a noonday sun. Daz stares into the darkness behind, where lights blink back at him. Round, in pairs, a dozen, no two … more than that in each direction.
“Shit.”
“Would have used a stronger term, Courier.”
The Tunnelers fall upon them.
Deathclaws roam the Crow’s Nest when they arrive. Made it their home it seems. Daz has a curse on his tongue, but bites it back to keep quiet.
Ulysses’ head on his shoulder has gotten heavier a while ago, his arm slack around his shoulder. This isn’t something he can just sleep off, but the rest will do him good. Daz is looking forward to some of that himself.
But first the deathclaws. They haven’t noticed him yet, at least. Shuffle around, dig a little in the stone, their claws raking over the ground like knives against whetstone. If he aims well, moves fast, he can take them out. With Ulysses in his arms he can do neither. Can’t just dump him somewhere either, if one of the critters find him he’s done for.
Daz wants to pace, jog his brain, but he has neither the energy nor the space for it.
Could go around. Risky, but possible, and find another place to rest. To high ground. Or double back, towards the tunnel entrance. No, they ran past that when they fled the Tunnelers. Junction 7 is out, too, place is overrun with Marked Men.
No, Crow’s Nest is the only way forward. He won’t make it far past that, Hopeville’s a far-off dream at this point. His arms feel like lead, his lungs scraped raw even with the breathing mask filtering out Divide dust. The joints in his artificial leg are starting to creak. If that gives out before he’s found a place to settle for the night, they’re both gonna be in trouble.
Nothing for it.
He jostles Ulysses awake, bears the brief but sharp heartache when his first noise upon being awakened is one of pain.
“Hey, buddy, gotta set you down for a spell.”
Ulysses blinks against the fading light, orients himself. Then he nods.
“Will keep the way clear.”
It sounds like a question, like Ulysses isn’t quite sure what’s expected of him now. Daz would love to tell him to just close his eyes and rest, but the truth is even in his current state he can’t afford him not to watch his back.
“Won’t come to that, I hope, but I appreciate you keeping an eye out.”
He sets Ulysses down as gently as he can, but he still jostles his leg, and Ulysses still hisses.
“Sorry.”
Ulysses shrugs it off, although Daz can see him having some snide banter lined up. He thinks Daz ought to be sorry for a lot of things. And if his leg’s hurting enough to shut him up, it has to be bad.
Daz wastes no more time. He leaps over and through the bus, revolver ready. It rests familiar in his hand and even in the fading light of what counts as dusk in the Divide – same shades of red and brown slightly less saturated – he has no trouble taking aim.
For a while the world’s small. There’s a border, at the edge of his vision, and beyond that there’s nothing. It’s just him, the deathclaws, all the cover he can spot and that small awareness at the back of his head that Ulysses is behind him. He makes sure nothing gets past him, takes out one, then the next. Their heads rear up, surprise that something usually so noisy could come up out of nowhere. One, two, pop, their skulls burst open with two taps of the trigger, he uses the good ammo, the last box he has left, and takes out three, then four.
Grazes a fifth, hits the ear. It roars, struggles to regain its balance, nearly takes a fall. Daz uses the time to reload and when he looks up, it’s gone.
Shit.
Daz stops, still in the small world that ends at the end of his effective range, and listens. Heart pounding, dust hissing in the wasting winds. Somewhere in the recesses of what counts for his conscious mind is fear, his old friend, knowing it’s unwelcome until the dust has settled.
Claws, raking over stone.
Around a corner, too close, moving towards Ulysses. Daz curses, loud, and takes off in the opposite direction. Fires into the air, once, and the bait takes. The deathclaw, disoriented from the shot, refocuses on him and sprints after Daz. He turns mid-run, fires. Hits the leg, bad shot. Can’t take a deathclaw out with shots to the body, not with his dinky little revolver. He’s slow, exhausted from the way to the Temple and more so the way back. Has maybe one shot left before it overtakes him.
Daz aims, squeezes the trigger. It hits the deathclaw in the jaw, its shriek echoes from the concrete wasteland all around them. But it doesn’t die. Limps forward, slow but still faster than Daz, and with one great leap it overwhelms him.
For the third time today Daz crashes to the ground, for the second time he fends off enemies raking at his skin. The creature’s claws catch on his vest and Daz has a ludicrous, half-mad moment to be disappointed that out of landing underneath someone three times today, Ulysses was the only one who didn’t try to tear off his clothes.
He laughs, anxiety and fear mingling, producing a nervous giggle that is swallowed up by a shout he can’t hold back. He hopes to all the Mojave ghosts that Ulysses hasn’t heard him and won’t play the hero.
He rolls away underneath a lethal swipe, feels his hair being pulled by dull claws and reaches for the knife at his boot, the one he doesn’t know how to use. He stabs up more or less at random, shoulder screeching in pain, as he forces it at an unnatural angle. He hits something, scrambles to his feet, drops the knife, puts both hands around his revolver, takes aim and shoots.
He kills the deathclaw point black. It crumples in a heap, brains sputter out, bits of bone and other tissue fly, hit Daz’s face, cover his clothes in foul smelling brain matter and blood. Ulysses will love being carried the rest of the way. The thought coaxes another helpless bout of laughter out of him and suddenly Daz can’t go another step.
He sinks down on the deathclaw’s carcass, out of breath and out of energy. He needs a minute. Just one minute, to catch his breath.
The world around him changes shape again, becomes bigger, more complete, but his hazy swimming vision can’t take it all in. Nothing he can do but stare at the ground, and focus on not throwing up. The tank’s empty, his body is eating itself up just to keep him conscious.
A faded label on a soda can flutters in the wind whipping up for a nighttime storm. Pale green or turquoise, almost illegible. He thinks he recognises the brand. Not Nuka Cola, something else. Something bitter? For some reason Daz has the taste of something bitter on his tongue. Could be an old memory asking to be jogged. Maybe it’s guilt over leaving Ulysses where he is.
Just one minute, he pleads with his conscience. It does not relent.
Groaning under his own weight Daz gets up. The Crow’s Nest looks impossibly far up, past a climb he barely made the first time around. He’ll just have to do his best and hope he won’t fall for a fourth and final time today.
Ulysses is still where he left him, leaning against the bus, eyes turned towards the way they came. When Daz’s shadow falls on him he looks up, startled.
“Came back,” he says, surprise written all over his face.
Daz shrugs.
“What, like a few deathclaws could kill me? Come on.”
As he slings his arms around Ulysses’ back and underneath his knees, he thinks that maybe that’s not what Ulysses meant. That he thought something else was happening when Daz set him down and took off.
But he doesn’t mention it, and neither does Ulysses.
They escape the Tunnelers by less than a hair’s breadth.
It’s a good thing, they came away with their lives, but between the Marked Men and the Tunnelers his equipment’s seen better days.
Daz is working through the various stages of grief over his jacket being irrevocably shredded, when Ulysses speaks up.
“Fitting we should walk this road again,” he says when they enter the Ashton Silo together.
Again, Daz thinks, as if he wasn’t alone the last time he passed through. Only ED-E for company. But no, Ulysses was there. Has always been there, walking by his side. They were in the Big MT together, too, and Ulysses’ warnings, his voice, followed him into the Sierra Madre.
Daz is so used to Ulysses’ presence by now, he doesn’t even have to look, knows he’ll be there. Physically as well, and that’s a nice change, current circumstances notwithstanding.
“Place is crawling with bots,” Daz says, staring at his pip-boy display.
Red lights blink in and out as they enter the range on the radar. Some of them move like Marked Men, but could just as easily be bots with their patrol routines screwed up. Just what they needed, more crazies attempting to murder them.
No use crying about it. They move on, past the halls and blinking machines. Past the spot where the rocket used to be.
Daz still doesn’t know why he fired it. He could have just gone around, it would have been an easy climb. Not like there was some insurmountable waist-height fence stopping him from just heading down the piles of rubble.
But he is kind of glad now. Who knows what would have happened if the doors had been closed to them, running from the Tunnelers. They’re not in here at least, but they spot a few of their corpses. Automatic defences must have engaged sometime after Daz left. Activated the robots who cleaned house.
Ulysses, thankfully, is quiet on his feet, although he still makes more noise than Daz is strictly comfortable with. He hisses an admonition over his shoulder and Ulysses grunts and acquiesces, but it means they have to slow down further. Feels strange, to think that Ulysses just might not be that good at sneaking. He always thought Ulysses was good at everything, had to be to survive what he did. Then again, maybe Ulysses thought the same about him.
“Hey, Ulysses?”
“Courier.”
Ulysses sounds pained, like he dreads whatever conversation they’re about to have. Arcade sounds like that sometimes, too, although with him it’s laced with fond exasperation.
“Call me Daz, seriously. Was wondering if your opinion’s of me changed at all. Now that we got to talk face to face.”
For a moment it looks like Ulysses won’t give an answer. They clear two more hallways, close to the lift now, before he does.
“Won’t like the answer, Courier.”
He doesn’t even like this answer. Apparently walking the length and breadth of the Divide wasn’t enough to change his mind. Then again, it must have, at least a little.
“Well, so long as we ain’t trying to kill one another.”
And then everything goes pear-shaped.
The steady hissing of flames approach, the booming voice of a Mr Gutsy rings through the hallway. Not entirely unexpected, not entirely a catastrophe just yet, but in the strange echo Daz can’t pinpoint its location, charges ahead to find cover at the far wall. The sound changes direction, he has his gun ready, but can’t see from where it’s coming. Turns his head, to check where Ulysses’ gone off to. The Mr Gutsy hovers directly behind Ulysses and he noticed it too late.
Everything slows down. Daz is trapped in a bubble of time, watches the Mr Gutsy raise its gun and take aim at Ulysses who is still in the process of turning around, angling his body away from the fight but too slow, too slow by half.
Daz doesn’t so much break into a run as he makes the distance disappear by sheer willpower alone. Submachine gun fire rattles through his ears, he thinks he sees Ulysses faltering, falling but maybe that’s just his own world going off-kilter. He ducks mid-run, one arm around Ulysses’ back and pushes into a turn.
He has only a vague idea of what he’s doing, beyond the ever present thought of shit, and do something, but what he imagines is that Ulysses will adjust, throw himself out with the motion that Daz is starting for him while being safely protected by Daz’s body, will be mid-air by the time they’re half around, and land with his feet first and gun levelled at their enemies.
But Ulysses is a lot heavier than he thought – all packed muscle and a frown that has its own gravitational pull.
So what does end up happening is that the Courier is now carrying Ulysses bridal style.
Even the Mr Gutsy stops to stare.
A noise escapes Ulysses, a punched out little something that Daz will never to anyone admit was a squeak. But it is a squeak. A small noise of all human surprise, no history, no weight, just a man’s instinctual reaction to being swept off his feet.
He doesn’t stop to think. Flames lick at his cheek even as Daz sets off at the highest speed he can manage. His biological leg struggles to keep up as its mechanical counterpart propels him down the hall in an uneven gallop, the Mr Gutsy close behind.
“Stop, you Communist Scum!” the bot yells and Daz wants to laugh because this is all too familiar, even with his former arch-nemesis in his arms.
He bursts through the hallway and onto the lift, punches the code in without letting go of Ulysses, and for a few seconds he does nothing but close his eyes and hope. The Mr Gutsy reaches the end of the hallway, makes for the lift. The lift’s motors whirr in a half-hearted attempt, the dusty technology unused for so long groaning like an old man sorting his joints out in the morning.
Please, please, move, Daz begs, heart hammering in his chest so hard he is convinced Ulysses must be jostled by it. The bot gets closer, faster than he should be, at least it seems that way to Daz. He doesn’t have time to set Ulysses down and grab his gun, he’s helpless, they’re both helpless.
Rumbling, stopping the machine stutters to life.
The lift begins to move and the Mr Gutsy is too slow. It stops, hovering mechanism clicking into a lower gear as it attempts to find a way onto the slowly ascending platform. It does not yet think to use its ranged weapons. Daz barely dares to breathe. Ulysses jerks in his arms but he doesn’t let go of him.
He doesn’t really know why, except that with the bot down there, searching for a way to the communist insurgents, and the warm wet fluid running down his wrist and into his sleeve, right where he holds onto Ulysses’ leg, he wants nothing less than to be apart.
And then the Mr Gutsy protocols tell it that the threat is out of range, and it gears down while the lift rumbles steadily upwards.
The danger is over.
The far-off whirring of bots and the constant howling of the Divide’s storms resume their status as the dominant background noise. The foreground is occupied by Daz trying to get his ragged breathing under control and the suspicious lack of Ulysses raising a hue and a cry about being let down.
When Daz looks down he meets brown eyes, blinking owlishly. Only now he notices the arm Ulysses has thrown reflexively around him, a thin sheen of sweat building where it rests around his shoulder, fingertips tickling his skin. Ulysses looks stunned, he’s questioning this turn of events, the choice Daz made that sounded so sensible in his head when nothing but him and a second and a half stood between Ulysses and his untimely death. Now he has a man in his arms who’s comfortably warm and uncomfortably likely to ask pointed questions in the near future.
“Uh … I’ll just … uh-”
Daz makes a vague motion downward. Ulysses nods curtly.
“Yes. Please.”
Daz bends down, waits for Ulysses to get his feet under him.
He never does. Tries, but the second he puts weight on his leg – blood, Daz knew that was blood he felt he knew, soaking his sleeves – he buckles and Daz quickly scoops him up again.
“You’re hurt!” he says in a tone that has no right to be this accusatory.
“Leave me be.”
Ulysses struggles now, nearly throws himself out of Daz’ grip, but Daz holds tight.
“Settle down. You’re gonna hurt yourself.”
Mulishly, angry at Daz for daring to question his health even as a fine trickle of blood warms Daz’s arm, he pushes at his chest. It’s like trying to set a cat down.
“Leave me-”
“Not gonna-”
“Courier!”
“Just, hold on, just a sec-”
The lift has no proper surface but the ground, but he manages to get Ulysses carefully down on it with only minor cursing on both sides. Ulysses glares, murderous intent in every inch of furrowed brow. Daz searches his backpack for the medkit, and studiously avoids eye contact until he gets up. He doesn’t have any stimpaks left. Kit is barely fitted enough to slap a band-aid on.
“Lose the pants.”
“Bite me.”
It’s Daz’s turn to blink in stunned silence. Ulysses ducks his head, lips pressed together in embarrassment, but he doesn’t retract his words.
“Give me the medkit.”
Daz, too tired to argue or even come up with any good arguments in the first place, hands it over.
He turns his back, crossing his arms and staring at the far wall while he hears Ulysses rummage around. Body armour clicks open, canvas rustles and Daz wonders if it makes him a pervert that this conjures a vivid mental image of Ulysses not wearing any pants.
Pervert or not, the pained moan, bitten off and swallowed like a suspicious meat pie – that is, quickly and with eyes closed – drives the image and associated thoughts out of his head.
“Got shot,” Ulysses says. Daz hears tape being pulled off the roll. “Fixing it now. …”
He’s hesitating. Daz frowns, waits for him to continue.
“Leg’s broken.”
He whirls around.
“What! How did that happen? Oh. Uh …”
Ulysses looks at him blankly, motions briefly that he’d like his privacy back now please. Daz, face getting hotter by the minute, turns around again.
Ulysses has a scar on his right thigh, on the inside. About as long as his thumb and half as thick. And they don’t know each other nearly well enough to be seeing each other’s thigh scars, but he’s seen it alright.
Bullet maybe, if he had to dig it out. Could have been a knife. Daz does not think of shrapnel and debris, thrown up into flesh and bone as earth broke open from below. He thinks of other things, things he can influence, now that everything else is over.
“How did your leg break?”
“Mr Gutsy got me.”
He’s lying. Daz knows although he can’t say how he knows. But Ulysses is lying and if it wasn’t the Mr Gutsy …
He turns around again, this time ignoring Ulysses’ pointed looks and bare skin.
“It was broken before, wasn’t it? Why didn’t you say anything? When?”
“Leave me be.”
“Like hell I will. When? With the Tunnelers? Earlier? Not in the Temple, Ulysses, fucking hell …”
Ulysses doesn’t say anything which is answer enough. He pretends to be fully engrossed in the care of his leg.
The bullet wound bandaged, and the bleeding stopped, Ulysses fixes up a makeshift splint and, as much as Daz would have preferred to help, he has to admit that it looks better than what he could have come up with.
His misaimed anger dissipates. It’s not really Ulysses he’s cross with anyway. Daz should have noticed it. Can’t begin to imagine the pain Ulysses must be in.
He was meant to take it away.
Walked through high storm and deep abyss to find Ulysses, and still he’s blind to what’s causing him discomfort.
Determined to at least not make it worse, he crosses the distance between them, kneels, lays his palms flat on the ground, head ducked down to catch Ulysses’ eye.
“I’d have carried you,” he says softly.
Ulysses blinks, looks away. Blinks twice more.
“Not a burden to you. Or anyone. Would have stayed behind, but …”
“But?”
Ulysses tugs the tourniquet tighter than it has to be. Loosens it up again, hands giving away what his face stonily hides.
“Needed my help to find the way.”
Like it’s that simple. Like it’s nothing more than Ulysses marking a path and Daz following it to the end. Perhaps it is.
“Still do.”
He puts away their things, tidies up the medkit. The lift has almost reached the top.
“Know the way now.”
“Might get lost.”
“… Don’t know how much longer I can walk.”
“Don’t have to. Come on.”
He offers. They have the time right now, he can afford to ask. Holds out his arms, waits for Ulysses to meet him halfway. Ulysses shakes his head.
“Too heavy.”
“Barely even felt the weight,” Daz lies smoothly.
“Can’t hold a gun. Too dangerous.”
“So we’ll sneak our way around.”
“Might die anyway.”
“Might yet live.”
Ulysses casts his gaze around, looks for another excuse.
“If I say no …”
Daz, who’s had the creeping suspicion for a while that he likes Ulysses being alive more than Ulysses does, says: “Then we stay here. No problem.”
It’s a bit of a dick move. Blackmail in everything but name. He puts it out there, either they both leave or neither does. Maybe Ulysses likes Daz being alive more than Daz does, too.
“We …?” Ulysses echoes, an airy whisper not meant to be heard.
His last feeble attempt at argument doesn’t even include the no anymore: “More efficient ways to carry a man.”
“Not if y’have to keep an eye on an injury.”
Which is true, if not remotely the reason why Daz isn’t slinging Ulysses over his back like a satchel of express parcels. He can handle it. He has the muscle weave, and the reinforced spine, it’s fine. It’s going to be fine.
Ulysses shakes his head, Daz’s heart skips a few beats.
But then he deflates and slings his arms around Daz’s neck.
Ulysses grunts when Daz sets him down on the sleeping bag, breathing very deliberately for someone who hasn’t just climbed a good ten stories up debris and steel beams with a fully grown man in his arms.
But he has the presence of mind to swat a book out of Daz’s hands he means to use for kindling.
“Not that one,” he says and Daz stares at him incredulously.
“Seriously? You’re going to be picky about which of your old junk I use to keep us warm?”
Instead of answering Ulysses simply pushes another book into his hand. Something by a guy named Pinker that’s already missing a few pages.
Daz leafs through it just to be contrary, spots two flawed arguments in the first paragraph he reads and admits that it’s probably a better choice than the equally bad but at least more entertaining dime novel he was about to burn.
By the time the fire’s roaring Ulysses has passed out cold. Daz checks his leg, but there’s nothing he can do about it until he’s found medical supplies. And that’s not happening tonight, much as he wants to.
Instead he turns his attention to his own limbs. About the flesh and blood ones he can’t do much but allow them rest. The mechanical one could use a tune-up. He felt it creaking suspiciously on the way up, and starts taking it apart.
It’s slow and long work. His leg is a piecemeal amalgam of his history. Plastic slots into metal, screws into bone. Deathclaw leather mimics sinew in broad strokes, Yao Guai fur wrapped around the joints keeps the dust out. Most of it anyway. Batteries are almost run dry, no wonder it felt so heavy.
The solar charger’s no good in the Divide, night or day, so he raids the few fusion cells he has left and hooks them up with the emergency kit Raul put together for him months ago.
He looks down at it, the soldered scrap of his body. It’s been a long few years since he was in one shiny piece.
Patting his leg, he casts around for a book to read while he recharges. Wants to sleep but he’ll have to switch out the fusion cells in an hour if he wants to get a full charge. What he finds among the heap of Ulysses’ old collection, is … everything.
He always thought Ulysses’ primary interest was history, but it seems he’s just sweeping up knowledge from everywhere. He finds several books on physics, marked and annotated in the same looping block letters, spaced tightly together to fit in the margins. Daz entertains himself for a few minutes trying to decipher the equations, then gives up and looks for something a little more accessible. A fiction book, even one of the classics, would be welcome right about now.
But between the tomes of history both ancient and (comparatively) modern, the treatise on potato farming and several books on political science he might hate-read later, Daz only finds one sorry fiction book – the copy he was about to throw into the fire, a racy retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, missing most of its pages except for a few in the middle.
Often dog-eared by its likely long dead previous owner it’s a particularly saucy scene and provides another few minutes of fun as Daz tries to imagine Ulysses’ face when he first read this.
Because that he’s read it is out of the question. Most of the books are in bad shape but they all look carefully picked out, if a bit random in their selection. He wonders what Ulysses made of the romance novel. How a story about a handsome and perpetually shirtless hunk of meat walking the lengths of the abyss to save his one true love through the power of ravishing lovemaking fits into his vision of what America used to be, that sleeping giant he seems to admire so much.
Old World Blues, but it isn’t that, not really. Ulysses doesn’t mourn a world he’s never known, he wants to revive it, build a nation in its image. Does his vision have space for sexy pulp fiction versions of ancient myths? Maybe it belonged to someone he knew once, that’s why he didn’t want to cast it into the flames.
He puts the novel away and meets Ulysses’ eyes staring holes into him.
“Awake again?”
Ulysses’ face remains carefully unmoved.
“No.”
His voice is so deadpan that it takes Daz a good moment or so to realise he just heard a joke. Laughs, hoarsely through the Divide dust, and rolls a bottle of water over. Ulysses stops it and drinks, keeps up the intense eye contact the entire time.
When he sets the water bottle down – a droplet runs down his chin reflecting the firelight which Daz is definitely not staring at – he frowns.
Always frowns, Daz amends, but it’s deeper now.
“You’re barely human, Courier.”
It’s a sore spot. Ulysses doesn’t know, can’t know, how could he? But Daz turns his shoulders up, makes up a frown of his own.
“Human enough not to leave you behind.”
“Inhuman enough to bring me along,” Ulysses counters but his tone isn’t angry. Not all the way. Daz tries to read his face but even though he lost the mask, it betrays nothing.
“Got a problem just say so.”
Ulysses sits up, stops him with a sharp gesture when he makes to push him down again.
Daz plops back down, one worried eye on Ulysses’ leg.
“Could never have won,” Ulysses says quietly. “Only alive because you took pity on me.”
His eyes are as intense as they were in the silo when Daz used every trick, every argument he could think of and was sure it wouldn’t be enough.
“Won’t owe you, Courier. Never asked for this. Never should have happened.”
“None of this.” Daz gestures at himself. “Should have happened. But it did, and some good came of it. Can’t something good come out of this, too?”
Ulysses scoffs.
“Always denying your choices. Made yourself half into a machine, to become stronger, to kill better, and tell yourself you didn’t have a choice.”
Something shorts out in Daz then.
He’s carried this guy, carried him in his own trembling arms, halfway across the Divide. His leg is lying in pieces recharging on the dinkiest little batteries he can cram into his pack because he plans on carrying him even farther. He walked into this hellhole to get Ulysses out of it, he sacrificed ED-E just so Ulysses wouldn’t have the death of a nation on his conscience, just so they’d both get to walk away. And now he has the nerve, to make assumptions.
He sweeps his tools aside hard enough to startle Ulysses. He flinches, watches Daz’s hands, follows their path, expecting a weapon and getting answers instead.
Daz knocks against his head, lets Ulysses hear the clanging reverb.
“Metal dome from where that piece of shit Benny shot me in the head for the chip you hoped would kill me.”
He pats his chest.
“Artificial lungs and muscle weave after that poison in the Sierra Madre dissolved me like acid. That I had to breathe because that bastard Elijah just had to get into the vault you told him about.”
He pushes down his trousers and for a moment Ulysses looks startled, pulls the sleeping bag further up his chest. Any other day, it’d be funny but Daz is too keyed up to find the humour in it. He only raps his knuckles against his hip.
“Artificial hip from when Graham shot it to pieces because he didn’t want me making peace with the White Legs. Artificial skin because your buddy Salt-Upon-Wounds tore it out again with his bare hands.”
Undresses nearly fully now, gets rid of the remains of his jacket, the vest, his shirt and turns around. The scars will be visible even in the low light, fat and ropey as they are.
“Artificial spine from where the Think Tank pulled me apart and put me back together again, just to see what I was made of, because they had to see if I was real after you put the idea in their heads that there’s something beyond the crater, someone like me.”
His voice cracks on the last word and he hopes Ulysses hasn’t heard. The wind tears at his skin, whole and scarred both, but he stays still, makes no move to cover up. Back turned he tries to compose himself. Ulysses gives him the time or else he doesn’t know what to say.
“I bled for you,” Daz says when he trusts his voice again. He turns to look at Ulysses, but finds nothing in his face he recognises. He simply waits for Daz to get out whatever he needs to say. “I didn’t get these things so I could become stronger, I got them so I could keep going. So I could keep looking for you, come here and drag you out of this shithole. That was my choice. And I’m not done making it.”
He pulls his clothes back up and sits down with more force than he intends.
The silence that follows is awkward by threat of being broken. Daz can’t handle whatever Ulysses is about to say, whatever argument he’s about to make. Worse if he says sorry, although he doesn’t think he will.
Ulysses lies down, careful not to jostle his leg too much. It takes longer and gives them both a moment of quiet. Daz looks into the flames to avoid seeing anything he might not like.
He already regrets telling him about it all. Made it sound like it’s Ulysses’ fault that he came away from his adventures thirty percent artificial. It’s not. He couldn’t have known and even if he did, Daz would have gone anyway. Elijah needed stopping. The Think Tank needed new purpose. Salt-Upon-Wounds was never going to be satisfied with Graham and the people who chose to protect him.
He would have gone anyway, in search of the man who claimed Daz’s history.
He speaks up, tests the waters. To see if Ulysses is receptive to changing topics.
“If I go lookin’ for some stimpaks tomorrow, are you gonna give me the Legion spiel about how they’re the devil’s work?”
They share a brief look. Something unspoken passes between them and Ulysses shrugs near imperceptibly. Silent agreement. He won’t press the point.
“Prefer healing by other means. Won’t argue with what you find. No Med-X.”
Daz nods. With a bit of good luck he won’t have to carry Ulysses all the way out of the Divide. Or is it bad luck? Can’t deny that he liked having him like this. There’s a phantom weight against his neck where Ulysses’ arm lay, where his fingers curled into the fine baby hairs at his nape, brushed his thumb again and again over the tip of the scar along his spine. Warmth where he laid his head, unsure as if he didn’t know how to actually make contact with another human being.
He’s been wondering when the last time was Ulysses touched someone. Big Empty with Christine is a fair bet. He carried her out of that facility, that was contact. Did she pat his shoulder in thanks, maybe even hugged him? Daz doubts it. Christine is not the hugging type. And besides, if his reticence and continued surprise at Daz sticking around is any indication, Ulysses is far more used to helping others than having the favour returned.
Before that? Maybe with the White Legs, before they tried to remake themselves in his image. He pictures Ulysses around a fire much larger than this one, sharing a blanket maybe, at least sharing space. The image won’t quite stick.
Wolfhorn farm? There’s a grave up on that hill, could be they were the last person to have embraced him. If so, Ulysses buried more than just a home. Could ask. But the image of how that would go does stick.
Instead he replaces the fusion cells with fresh ones and settles down, across from Ulysses and the fire.
“I’ll go looking tomorrow.”
He set up mines and noisemakers. They won’t need to keep a watch tonight. Tomorrow he’ll go and find a stimpak and then he and Ulysses can finally leave this cursed place behind.
When he gets up the next morning Ulysses is still asleep. Remembering his surprise at Daz’s return the previous day, Daz leaves a note where he’ll spot it. Be back soon, food’s in the pack. Chuckles at the domesticity of it, like he’s the little wife out on an errand while her husband sleeps. Like the propaganda videos from before the war.
He’s almost forgotten what it’s like to move freely, without weight attached. He feels at once freer and lonelier than he has in a while. Not even ED-E is here with him. He slips past the waking dangers of the Divide, the groups of Marked Men, the deathclaws hunting alone or in small groups.
It takes him three stops before he finds a first aid kit that hasn’t been emptied. There’s three stimpaks. He takes two, although he doubts wasteland courtesy applies here. No one else is likely to come through again. He scrounges together something approaching medical supplies and thinks Arcade would be proud of his improvisational talent.
Arcade. Daz smiles to himself as he makes his way back. He looks forward to seeing his friends again. Boone’ll throw a fit about him having been gone so long. He doesn’t like to be separated from his family any more than Daz does. How long has it been? Less than a week in the Divide, but he headed out earlier than that, needed to gather his resolve to actually step through those gates.
By the time he’s back, Ulysses is awake and munching on an MRE. Making no face, which speaks to his superior constitution. He does however acknowledge Daz with a brief nod. Daz throws him one of the stimpaks and he jams it into his thigh without looking – fully in until he hits bone, then pulls back to reach the muscle, the easiest if painful way to administer intramuscular – and a question which must have been burning on his tongue since yesterday.
“Never told me about the leg.”
Daz sits by his side, stretches out the leg of which he has not spoken. Declines Ulysses’ offer of another MRE – he’d rather eat two hundred year old Salisbury steak than touch one of those – but offers him some agave fruit from the secret compartment in his pack.
Ulysses makes a noise that could have been delight, if expressed by someone who has never experienced the emotion before and is approximating it from second-hand experience.
“Lost it as a kid. Cancer.”
Daz watches as Ulysses all but devours the fresh fruit, then smiles and lets him have his piece as well and takes one of the MREs after all. Ulysses has nothing to say to his story, but then again it is a very mundane one.
“Not the answer you were looking for?”
“Didn’t ask.”
Well, technically he didn’t – and oh right, Ulysses meant the other question. The one that hangs between them, did since Ulysses’ voice first came tinny and far-away through ED-E’s speakers.
Daz wonders if he’ll be able to vocalise it before they move on. The bullet wound is knitting itself together as they speak and from the way he moves Daz figures the fracture is feeling better, too. Still shouldn’t make a trek like the one they have before them, but he doubts he’ll get Ulysses to agree to a piggyback ride.
After their breakfast they rest. Ulysses stretches out on the sleeping bag and Daz pulls his over next to him, so they can both watch the Divide sky. Cloudgazing, although there are no friendly shapes to be found. Ulysses doesn’t object. Together they lie, a hand’s width apart, and for a few precious moments, the world is alright.
“Why?”
The question comes out of nowhere, even though Daz was expecting it. Has, in fact, searched for an answer he’s comfortable giving. The truth is not an option, they still have to make the trek back, and even then … no, some things are best left alone.
Daz tries out something less compromising.
“Got history, said it yourself. You don’t walk out, I don’t walk out.”
Ulysses isn’t buying it. He turns around, braces his cheek on his hand. Waits expectantly for Daz to give in.
He has to give him something of substance. Ulysses isn’t the kind of man satisfied with half answers.
For a moment he simply looks Ulysses over, wonders how much he can get away with. He still has no idea what they are. Enemies sharing a fragile truce is the safe answer, but he doesn’t know for sure. Not unless he asks and Ulysses is right, he’s afraid of the answer.
“You saved my life in the Sierra Madre,” is what he settles on.
Ulysses’ brows rise nearly into his hairline. One of his locs falls into his face and Daz’s fingers twitch until Ulysses pushes it out of the way.
“Was never there. Left no signs.”
“Kinda brought one of them with me.” Daz breathes in deep. He’s never told this to anyone. It’s kind of sappy. He’d be embarrassed with anyone. Anyone but Ulysses, who will appreciate the significance of what happened. Who won’t laugh, if only because he’s forgotten how.
“When Elijah caught me, he took my gear. Clothes, pack, gun, everythin’, even the tapes. Except the pip-boy, because he needed it to get me to do his dirty work. He didn’t check if I still had a tape in the slot. ... One o’ yours.”
Ulysses thinks a moment.
“From the Big Empty.”
“Yeah. Was still in the tapedeck when I woke up with a headache and a bomb collar around my neck. You were right, the Madre’s a special kind of hell. Have to dismember the people attacking you, so’s they don’t get up again.
Poison in the air, and the silence. That damn silence. Get close to a radio, bomb collar will go off. That beeping will be the last thing you hear.
And in that mess all you got is yourself and three people half out of their minds with panic. Kill you as soon as help you, like animals in a trap, lashing out at everything close. Thought I’d lose it, constantly on the run, feelin’ naked and helpless and escaping death by a hair’s breadth everytime I turn a corner.
So I’d … well I’d curl up somewhere, and replay that log. Drove away all that nasty groaning, the buildings creaking under the weight of two hundred years of corrosion and ruin. The entire place is screaming at you, quietly, just enough to scrape your nerves raw.
Was the only thing that kept me sane, your voice and you promising we’d have an ending to things. Had to make it out of there if you said it was gonna happen, right? Practically fated.
For a couple moments there your voice drowned out the sounds of the Madre, all the shrieking and creaking. Must have played it a dozen times or so, but I made it out in the end. Thanks to you.
So you saved my life then, and now I’m saving yours. Only fair.”
“Only fair,” Ulysses echoes and then he is quiet for a long time.
Daz lets him have his thinking silence, stays on his back, watches the red sky moving above.
Even in the Divide, Ulysses’ voice provided comfort. When he was spitting venom, claiming it wasn’t about vengeance while bleeding pain out of every syllable, rage out of every letter, Daz hung on his lips.
Red sky above, crumbling earth below, and tethered with history and guilt and loss so deep it resembles oceans Daz pulled himself forward by this cord of misery until he reached Ulysses.
It was a natural progression to pull him out of the Temple, and to catch him in his arms when his legs wouldn’t hold him anymore. From the moment Johnson Nash relayed his words to him, Let Courier 6 carry the package, Daz has been carrying Ulysses’ voice. Only the vessels changed.
It’s not morning anymore when Ulysses speaks up again.
Although he doesn’t really speak. Gets his message across all the same. One moment Daz is looking up at undulating clouds, the next he has Ulysses hover over him, face so close his locs are framing both their faces.
“Give me something else,” he demands. Thinks, then adds: “Your name. What does it mean?”
“Means bureaucracy fucked me worse than my first girlfriend,” Daz says automatically, because that’s the answer he always gives. Then he relents, because Ulysses has not removed himself, is still painfully close, arms braced to Daz’s left and right, waiting to be given something else for ... what? Daz doesn’t dare hope.
“NCR came into town, way back when,” Daz says, speaking softly. “Still a kid, before the leg even. They brought paperwork, IDs, and computers, couldn’t figure out the settings. When the guy typed out my name he mixed up the y and z keys. Out of day became daz. Kids used to tease me, the name stuck. My full name’s Wednesday.”
Ulysses gasps like Daz has shown him a revelation of rapture. His eyes move in little jackrabbit motions across Daz’s face, searching him for a lie.
“You are Wednesday?”
There is something in the tone of his voice that Daz can’t figure out. It makes him think that if he were to rear up and kiss him right now only two things could happen. Either he gets kissed back or shot in the head. There’s no grey area, not in the fire burning between them.
“Yeah,” Daz says, finding he’s gone hoarse from something that hasn’t even happened. “Call me Daz, though. Last person to call me Wednesday was my mother.” He hesitates. “Hey, Ulysses?”
“Yes?”
Ulysses’ voice sounds just as raspy as his.
“There a reason you’re so close?”
Daz wants to give him the chance to pull back, feels that this thing between them is at once too fragile and too set in stone to disturb. They will always orbit around each other it seems, and Daz doesn’t want that to be as enemies.
So he gives Ulysses a chance to rethink this, become aware of what this looks like, what it makes Daz want.
But the thing is, he didn’t actually expect Ulysses to move away.
The air is cold where he used to be and Daz keeps lying on his back, staring up at the sky and wondering if he could have gotten away with stealing a kiss before he had to play the gentleman.
Lost chances, who knows if another will ever come. Daz risks a glance over at Ulysses, who’s back on his own bedroll, healthy leg pulled up against his chest, face hidden by his hair. Impossible to tell what he’s thinking, and Daz thinks he must have misinterpreted the whole thing, that Ulysses was just being his usual self and didn’t mean anything by it, when he catches his fingers twitching.
Curling into the fabric of his coat, then letting go. Ulysses raises them to his lips, brushes over them with the pad of his thumb.
Then, as if only now realising what he’s doing, he tears his hand away and stuffs it into his pockets, jaw tensing in frustration.
Deciding he can’t let it be, Daz chooses to poke the sleeping yao guai a bit.
“Been a while, huh?”
“Huh?”
Ulysses’ confusion hangs in the air right up until he gets his meaning, and turns away. Not angry though, or offended. Just trying to think of something to say. Right then Daz decides that he loves Ulysses speechless. There is something so open about him when he reveals the least, when the words he uses to shield himself fall away. His dark eyes blink back at him, sweet in a way that belie the sorrow underneath.
It was like that when Daz first swept him up, when Ulysses could not draw some connection, some meaning from the act, and had to rely on his rusty social skills instead. Now he swallows, adam’s apple bobbing with the motion and Daz lingers, lets Ulysses know he likes the sight of him. And he does.
It’s come as a bit of a surprise, after getting attached to Ulysses through his voice, his trail signs, his footsteps in history’s sand. He’s imagined what his mystery friend looked like, to be sure, indulged in idle daydreams decades ago when they first crossed paths, when he learned there is a man who can match him pound for pound on his best day. But he didn’t really think he’d be handsome. What are the odds? That a man can be brilliant, adventurous, resourceful, and beautiful? With a voice like that, making Daz hang on every word even as they promised him the death of a nation. He had to try hard to make up another image, of a yellow-toothed hunchback, with thin hair combed over a bald spot, and hair growing out of his ears in thick waxy bushels. Just so he wouldn’t get his hopes up.
So when they met, face to face, at the Temple, Ulysses waiting like an avenging angel, eyes burning and hands hot with his need to get them on Daz, he’s been blindsided. Barely got a word out and wouldn’t that have been something, if Ulysses had won this conflict because his nemesis kept tripping over his own tongue over the sight of a pretty man.
He shares none of that with Ulysses. Doesn’t think he’d be appreciative. A single long gaze is enough to let him know the gist of it, and by the looks of him, Ulysses understands all too well. Doesn’t say anything, but there’s something tugging at his face that could almost be a smile. So maybe he won’t mind so much after all, if they manage to leave the Divide. Maybe he’ll let Daz coax another one of those nearly-smiles out of him, will suffer a little flirtation.
Daz doesn’t try his luck again today. Instead he gets to his feet, casting around for his things left strewn around their camp the night before.
“How’s your leg feel?”
Ulysses hums, pats down the limb while Daz looks around for the smutty novel he found yesterday, searching for pain and apparently finding none, because next thing he knows, he’s by his side.
He looks at Daz, long and deep, face unreadable, especially when he puts his mask back on.
“Ready to move on?”
It’s a layered question, no doubt about it. Daz avoids eye contact, prepared to give Ulysses time to ponder the implications. It takes him by surprise then when after the span of a single breath Ulysses answers.
“Yes,” he says.
So they move on.