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The Courier was annoyed. He liked cohesion. He didn't like to see Cass drunk and angry (well, angry), or Boone looking as put out as he could behind his sunglasses by Cass's top-of-her-voice 'confiding'. Poor Boone just kept nodding and taking shots as she followed him around and around the pool table, enumerating all the ways in which Arcade was a jackass.
He opened the door of the guest quarters where Arcade was at one of the desks, books piled around him. the Courier crossed to the desk and closed the book in front of him.
Arcade looked up at the Courier. "What's up?" he asked, confused.
"Cass says you're being a jackass."
"What?" He thought for a moment. "She asked me about aerodynamics. It's not my fault she couldn't understand the answer."
"She asked if fish really flew underwater."
"Which --"
"-- is a question about aerodynamics. Okay. You didn't have to be a jerk about it."
Arcade put up a hand, frowning in irritation. "Message received."
"What's your problem?" the Courier demanded. Arcade's sudden storminess had put him on edge, and being on edge made him angry.
The set of Arcade's shoulders told the Courier to get lost. "Nothing. I've got work to do. See you around."
The Courier watched Arcade as he went about finding the page he had been scribbling on. When it was obvious that nothing more was going to be said, the Courier gave up and went away.
* * *
Arcade made it up with Cass by helping her brew another batch of moonshine and letting her get happily drunk. He helped her tweak a few of the ingredients, ran a few numbers related to distillation rates, and the results -- in her words -- nearly knocked her thong off. All was forgiven on her part, but Arcade’s agitation remained almost palpable. Cass and particularly Boone were content to stay well clear. the Courier gave him space easily enough, since he been drafted as messenger boy for business between the Embassy and McCarran. But by week's end, with Arcade still only showing his face to get a quick bite of food, the Courier was by turns worried and finding the tension intolerable. Even their weekly poker game was subdued as he, Boone, and Cass sat around the table, knowing that at any moment Arcade could sweep through the suite like a cold draft.
At about ten, Arcade came out of the guest room. He ignored the poker game, no surprise, but instead of his usual make-shift dinner and back to his books, he took a bottle of wine from the kitchen and headed into the elevator.
This was new. The Courier noted the floor number, excused himself from the hand, and followed.
***
The Courier got off the elevator and looked around the drinks lounge. Arcade was sitting on one of the ruined sofas near the windows, feet up on the accompanying scarred coffee table. He had the wine bottle in hand and was staring at the mountains to the west.
Arcade heard the elevator doors open. He didn't look away from the windows as the Courier came over and sat across from him on the opposite, beaten-up couch and stared at him over the table. Arcade sipped and seemed ready to go on ignoring him, so the Courier made the first move.
"What's going on?"
Arcade looked into the bottle he was holding. It wasn't very good wine. He'd never actually had good wine, but he was sure this wasn't it. It had been sitting on a shelf for 200 years in a building under the desert sun. No surprise that it was cooked. He took another mouthful regardless, and then he finally looked at the Courier. "It's nothing."
"Right. This is the part where I ask, thick with incredulity, just how stupid you think I am."
Arcade tilted the bottom of the bottle toward him in a mock salute and turned toward the windows again.
"I can help," the Courier promised. He looked out the windows, following Arcade's line of sight. The mountain tops were backlit by the setting sun.
Five minutes. Ten minutes. The silence ticked on and the Courier stayed quiet, giving Arcade ample time to say something. When the red glow slipped off the mountain peaks and Arcade still said nothing, silently asserting that no, he couldn't help, the Courier admitted defeat and moved to get up. This seemed to bring Arcade back, or at least his manners.
"Before you go." Arcade's voice almost halted, naturally reticent as he was, but he forced himself on. "I'm sorry I've been acting like ..."
"A jackass," the Courier supplied seriously, still seated on the couch and looking at Arcade closely.
"I was going to say ‘the ghost at the feast’, but, thanks." Arcade snorted in amusement. He waved at himself, at his feet on the table. "I've just tripped over some personal baggage. I'll be the life of the party again in no time."
"What's wrong?" The Courier saw the sudden exhaustion in his face.
"If I told you, it would dispel the alluring mystique that keeps you so enthralled." Arcade's voice was flat and sarcastic, warning the Courier away again.
But the Courier had heard a note of resignation, too, and he leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. "Arcade, come on."
Arcade put the bottle aside and tugged at his dirty sleeves. He straightened the folds of his cuffs and looked at his hands. A grown man's hands. Rough. Nails that were trimmed but dirty. He could remember how his father’s hands felt ruffling his hair.
"Thirty years ago..." It sounded like a long time. It was a long time, but there was something inside him that kept dwelling on it, kept the memory strong enough to hurt him no matter how many years went by. Thirty years ago to the day. He remembered how they had carted his father's armor out of the infirmary and given it to an aid to be cleaned up. The medic assistant had dropped a gauntlet, the left one, and Arcade had picked it up. Blood had smeared all over his palms. He had started crying. Daisy had taken him to the restroom, had scrubbed his hands and wiped his eyes, but it hadn't helped. Arcade took up the wine bottle again, pressing his fingers to the cool glass to erase the sensation of slick, warm red. "My father died."
"Today?" the Courier asked.
"Were you not listening? I just said, thirty years ago --"
"Arcade." Knock it off.
Arcade sighed. "Yes. Today." He wet his lips with more wine and licked them nervously. "The whole week is always just ... bad. I should have just walked off into the wastes for awhile."
"Or you could talk to me about it."
"I appreciate the offer, and I mean no offense, but that's not going to help." Arcade shrugged miserably. "The only person I want to talk to isn't here." He managed to smile, and the Courier saw the hint of tears in his eyes behind the lenses of his black-rimmed frames. Arcade put his hand up, obscuring his face, ostensibly to straighten his glasses. "Look ... thanks, but I really just want to be alone."
"All right. We're downstairs." the Courier got to his feet.
"Wait." Arcade held out the half-empty bottle of wine, face averted. "Here. I'm done with it. It’s stupid. It just makes things worse."
The Courier took the bottle. "Come find me if you need me."
Back downstairs the game continued, the Courier was dealt back in, and the evening passed in relative peace and quiet.
* * *
About midnight, with still no sign of Arcade, the Courier decided to go coax him down to bed. He went up to the cocktail lounge and found Arcade curled up asleep on the same sofa, on his side, arms hugging himself and his head buried against his shoulder. He didn't stir when the Courier approached and his skin felt cold under the Courier's touch, from sleeping without a blanket in the recycled air.
The Courier shook his shoulder. "Hey." And again when there wasn't any immediate reaction.
Arcade opened his eyes. "You again," he said groggily.
"Come downstairs."
"Only if you carry me," Arcade said, burrowing into the cushions. He was still feeling half a bottle of wine on an empty stomach and chilled besides.
"Okay," the Courier agreed easily.
Arcade looked at him over the rim of his glasses, which he hadn't bothered to take off. He hadn't been sleeping long. His eyes were bloodshot, the rims were still red from the tears he had shed. He made a throaty scoffing sound. "I'd like to see you try."
"You'd be surprised." The Courier wasn't smiling, but, okay, he was amused. Just a tiny bit. Concerned, but amused. He considered, then leaned down and tried to hook his arms around Arcade's body. Arcade stared in exhaustion at the interruption from this crazy person who was finding out that Arcade, despite looking slim, was actually quite compact. Fine-figured. Muscles that you wouldn't suspect he had, to look at him in his Follower doctor's coat.
The Courier tried to heft him, clumsily. Not going to work. Too awkward of a position. No leverage. He tried again, and Arcade finally lost patience.
"All right, all right," Arcade said testily, pushing himself more or less vertical and trying to untangle himself, "Get off." Then, as the room spun and tried to reach an even keel, "Whoa."
The Courier had to grin.
"Not funny," Arcade pronounced.
"I'm sorry. I know."
"Then stop smiling."
"Okay." The Courier, fighting to keep the smile off his lips, shifting his weight from his toes to his heels as he considered his next move.
Arcade looked up with a weary, thin kind of tolerance at the man standing over him. "Are we going round two?"
"Do you want to?"
"No." Arcade shook his head.
"Do you mean yes?"
"What is that, the 'Opposite Day' cipher? Well done. Better tell Bletchley Park you've cracked it."
But buried in the acrimony, the Courier detected a certain overture. The gate wasn't up and Arcade hadn't manned the watchtowers, ready to pour boiling sarcasm on anyone foolish enough to lay siege. A few sharp volleys, because Arcade was Arcade, but nothing the Courier couldn't handle when he saw a hint of the desperate man inside peeking out.
The Courier invited himself to have a seat, now that Arcade was upright and there was room. He settled in between the arm of the sofa and his companion. Arcade turned toward him. His chin was propped on his hand and his elbow was in turn propped on his knee, giving him a listing, quizzical look as he eyed the Courier through his glasses. The Courier crossed his arms and the two men sat side by side for a long moment, watching each other.
Arcade felt the urge to babble rising. Something about the way those eyes waited for him, patient but always asking questions. He didn't want to babble, but -- "The older I get, and all right, I'm sure this sounds like a midlife crisis ... I'm not that old. It's just, when you're young, you dream. You know?" Annnd there he went. Babbling.
And the Courier nodded. He was never sure where Arcade was going, but he was willing to try to keep up. (His mind made so many connections every second of every day, opened so many paths, that Arcade rarely knew himself where the next thought would take him.) The Courier kept dogged pace, even when Arcade was at his most pedantic.
Arcade appreciated this. It was much more encouraging than the bovine incuriosity or pig-eyed annoyance that Arcade usually encountered. It brought so much out of him, having someone who was listening. Like Daisy, who sat for hours letting him ramble. The Courier, though ... Arcade found himself on the verge of voicing things he'd never been able to say aloud. Things that, for one reason and another, he hadn't told Daisy.
"When you’re young, there are possibilities," Arcade continued. He was off and running now, talking to the air, to himself more than to the Courier, finally putting words to things that had been tumbling around inside for a week … all his life. "You think ‘in five years, in ten years, where will I be? What will I do? What will I make of myself?’"
The Courier followed that. Most everyone had bigger dreams at seventeen than at thirty-seven. He shifted so he sat facing Arcade, one leg curled up under him. Arcade was beside him, almost in arm’s reach, but he felt very distant. There was a chasm of suffering between them that the Courier didn’t know how to bridge. He hung back and hoped that Arcade, when he was ready, would give him a sign.
"I wanted to do so much," Arcade said. "I know he would have wanted me to do all that I could. He was a good man. They all said so." They told him stories. A few. Very sanitized stories, Arcade had known that even as a child. That code of adult silence had been a source of real frustration, almost anger.
‘They’. The Courier knew who he meant. The Remnants. The Courier thought of them stashed in their bunker, ready to rise like a phoenix when the signal went up.
Arcade was playing with his shirt cuffs again, awkwardly. "His death hasn't hit me this hard in years."
"What changed?"
The corner of Arcade's mouth pulled up in a tired half-smirk. "It's your fault.”
The Courier was caught off guard by the bluntness in Arcade’s voice. His brow furrowed. "My fault?"
"The way you strolled in and shook things up. I know. Jealousy is unbecoming. But... it is in the character of very few men to honor without envy a friend who has prospered.1" He was using his quoting voice. It was slower, more meaningfully articulate. Sacred adages from times long gone, handle with care. The trappings fell away, leaving nothing but harsh, immediate honesty. "You're right in the middle of it all and I'm a … nothing. A failure."
That was what he had never told Daisy. He wouldn’t hurt her like that. He would never tell her that when he was feeling jealous and low, he was ... ungrateful. The Remnants, his father's people, they had done their best by him. And the way he repaid their love? He sometimes felt scared and ashamed of them, exhausted by his association with them. He’d been forced to always play the man without a past; vague, prickly, and distant. He hadn't even been able to tell the men he had loved who he was and where he came from.
Daisy would have pretended she understood, because she never spoke about her past either … but Daisy was a spartan soul, never sentimental. She didn’t understand how much Arcade hated being touched by someone, making love, but never sharing who he really was.
That charade made everything feel unreal, and Arcade didn’t trust the unreal. And where there was no trust, there was no intimacy. Not really. It had almost driven him insane, so somewhere along the line he had just stopped trying, had given up and buried himself in his work.
Disgust at his own cowardice had given rise to resentment. He would never tell Daisy how small and pathetic he was. How he sometimes wondered if it hadn't been for them, the Enclave, whether he might have been more, might have done more. His wasn't the worst cosmic hand that anyone had ever been dealt. But this man next to him, so effortlessly great, bound for glory ... it burned Arcade up, even as he was grateful for a front-row seat. He tweaked Arcade's pride and yet Arcade was eager to serve, to play his part now that one had been offered, even as he chafed at how small it was. If he had tried harder, done more good, been a better man … the insecure, unflattering, sometimes-jealous part of him believed it could have been him.
That’s what he was, then. It was no wonder he was such a bit player in all of this. He was weak, he was selfish, he was pathetic, and fortuna viros magnos amat. He was sure the Courier knew all this, too, could see his weakness and jealousy, and Arcade was afraid to look at him.
"So, the mystique. Has it dissipated yet?" Arcade noticed his hands were shaking. He folded his arms protectively. "In vino --"
"Veritas, I know that one."
Arcade smiled bitterly. "I'm not even a novelty. What's left?"
The Courier reached out. He didn't know if Arcade would stand for being touched when he sounded so raw and vulnerable. This wasn't about his father anymore. They had eclipsed that topic long ago, and now Arcade was just flailing, drowning in misery. The Courier understood the helplessness when things just weren't right, and he decided, the hell with it. He touched Arcade’s shoulder, very lightly.
Arcade stiffened and raised his head. For a few seconds he just looked stupidly at the
hand running down his arm, like it was something alien and strange. Then pulled his body around to face him. “Do you think -- we could just --”
He didn’t finish. The Courier pulled him close, sinking back against the arm rest so he was holding Arcade to him. Arcade was a little taller, but folded up he felt small. The Courier ran a hand down the hard ridge of Arcade’s spine, feeling the series of little shudders that followed his palm down Arcade’s back.
Arcade closed his eyes as the Courier’s body heat started to warm him. "La Nausée2,” he muttered.
"Feeling sick?" the Courier asked.
"No." Well... now that he thought about it. “A bit.”
Arcade wasn’t worried about it. The storm was quieting and he was, if anything, wryly disappointed. That was all it took? Someone holding him? Really cheap as existential crises went, if a hug made it all better.
Not just … a hug. Not just from someone. From the Courier who had wandered in, flashed him a smile and thrown him a line. Destiny calling. Flirting. Whatever. On the face of it, it might have looked like a dick move, dropping everything like he had. His presence at the criminally-understaffed Mission. His... useless research. What a sacrifice that had been. He hadn’t been helping anyone, not really. He hadn’t even been treating people, except when they needed an extra pair of hands to hold somebody down. He had managed to get himself sidelined when he was at the absolute epicenter.
It was sublimely ridiculous. It was irony worthy of Homer, it meant he had some tragic flaw worthy of Shakespeare. Right on the front lines, witness to constant skirmishes between rich and poor, good and evil, plenty of wounds to tend, causes to fight for … and he’d been sitting in a tent at the back, day after day, staring at cactus sap.
Humiliating. But the embarrassment wasn’t a match for the arms around him. They’d done more in the last few weeks than Arcade had managed in the last two years. It felt good. Leaving had been the right decision. With him, I have no fears of obscurity; if there is a revolution I am certain of a leading role for him …3 Beside him, Arcade could make his father proud. He could make up for all the wasted years hoping for much but accomplishing little.
There were the dead, and there were the living.. The living, breathing man holding him deserved
an apology, too. “Listen. Everything I said ... It’s not that I resent you. I’m glad to know you.”
The Courier smiled into Arcade’s hair. “I’m glad to know you. Do you think I’d have gotten this far without you?”
Arcade uncrossed his arms and they got more comfortable, stretching out together, Arcade quite contentedly draped over the Courier’s body. They were crossing some fuzzily-drawn frontier together with this new intimacy, but Arcade’s brain was shot through with guilt and sleeplessness and his body was drifting numbly behind it.
His mind turned to the future. They were fighting for the NCR at the Dam. It wasn’t his first choice: Arcade would rather see Vegas remain independent, let the people be masters of their own destiny for a change. The NCR, though, wouldn’t halt their expansion, not even with a horde of robots in their way. They would continue pushing east, reliving the Manifest Destiny of old. More and more citizen-settlers would come, and more troops with them. This was the moment to hand over the Mojave peacefully. If they didn’t, next year or the next the NCR would take it by force. Arcade was enough of a realist to see the wisdom in the Courier’s choice, and to see that any dreams of independence were living on time borrowed from the implacable and inevitable. The NCR weren’t all bad. There were much worse fates for the people of the Mojave.
His mouth was at the Courier’s ear. “When we go to the Dam.”
“Yeah?”
“Someone might see the armor. You know the NCR’s stance on the Enclave.” His voice dropped on the word, even though they were alone, even though there was implicit trust between them.
The Courier felt like someone had doused him in cold water. “I won’t let them do anything to you.”
“Hard as this may be to believe, they might not care so much what you think.” Arcade’s smile was thin.
“Then don’t go. Stay in Freeside. They’ll need you.” They had been through this before, and the Courier hadn’t thought -- why hadn’t he fucking thought? Jesus.
Arcade shook his head. “They’ll need me at the Dam. I’m going. I’ve been on the sidelines too long. Anyway, you convinced me it was time to stand and fight, remember?” he finished with faux-cheerfulness.
“Arcade --”
The Courier had been going tense under him; now he sounded worried and Arcade tightened the arms that were his waist. Arcade kept talking. “You did. This is something I have to do, you made me see that. The Legion is a danger to every man, woman, and child east or west of the Colorado. They represents the old ways, even more than the Enclave. They’re the incarnation of what got us here in the first place. The least in all of us. Right from might, infantile, unthinking devotion, tribalism. We have to stop them. We will.”
The Courier nodded his head a fraction. There was iron in Arcade’s eyes.
“During the battle, anyway, I’m sure the NCR will just be grateful for any extra hands, whatever
blood they’re stained in. The enemy of my enemy. Caesar unites us: the NCR, the vestiges of the Enclave, you, me.”
“Caesar unites us, huh?” the Courier asked quietly. “That’s all? I’m your ticket to the front lines.”
Arcade felt the warmth between them growing cooler. He had said a lot of uncomplimentary things earlier. Of course the Courier had felt them. He wasn’t insensate, a black hole to pour words into. Arcade pushed himself up on one elbow to see the Courier’s face. He was usually so stoic, and now he looked apprehensive and … unhappy.
“It’s not like that,” Arcade said.
“What is it, then?” the Courier asked. He needed to know before the finish.
Arcade paused. What was it? Definite attraction. They were both aware, as one is aware of a low, almost subsonic sound, but Arcade hadn’t put a foot forward and the Courier was a busy man. There was always the unspoken sense of later, and now they were almost at the end.
Telling the Courier of his past had been a watershed moment. It hadn’t been a grand romantic gesture, not exactly, but it had been a pledge of faith. To their cause … and, yes, to the Courier as well. Arcade trusted this man. He trusted his smile, his grey eyes that were, as ever, watching and trying to anticipate him. Somewhere between friend and lover. Both, if Arcade wanted him to be. This was a first for Arcade, who had never had an abundance of either.
Arcade ran the tip of his tongue over his lips, and the Courier’s eyes followed the delicate movement. They were dark, the pupils wide and black. Such a little thing, but excitement stung Arcade’s body and he leaned down and pressed the Courier’s mouth with his own. The Courier inhaled, smiled against Arcade, and the warmth flooded back.
The sofa wasn’t the place for gymnastics, but Arcade explored every inch of him. The first time with a new body, tasting the saltiness of sweat, getting to know the smell of work and play. The more intimate, particular scent of him, strong and warm, as the Courier was finally completely naked and Arcade could use his his fingers, his nose and his tongue, memorizing it all. It made Arcade’s head swim as he ran his lips along the Courier’s length, drawing down the fold of skin, burying his face in the musky, wiry hairs at the base. He moved back up with a swipe of his tongue, and collected the clear bead at the tip. Someone new. New hands on his own body, finding the spots that made Arcade shiver. The Courier found the spot at the base of Arcade’s spine that was ticklish and made him harder, and the Courier smiled as Arcade tensed. He pulled Arcade closer, wrapping around him as best he could on the narrow cushions. He danced his fingers over the spot again and he grinned as Arcade shuddered and thrust involuntarily.
Arcade was throbbing, aching, but it was a bad angle. Swirls of cold air around them as their bodies moved. Not good enough. Arcade yanked the Courier’s hands off his back and twisted their fingers together. He could taste the Courier’s tongue, playing gently with his in an infuriating, dizzying game of meet and retreat.
Arcade pushed up onto his hands and knees and the Courier wrest one hand away, took hold of Arcade, and guided him between his legs.
They settled back together with Arcade locked between the Courier’s strong thighs, thrusting along the sensitive, stretched skin below the Courier’s balls. The Courier was doing his best to move under Arcade’s weight, kissing and groaning as his thick, hard length rolled and slid between their heaving, sweat-slick abdomens. Arcade’s hips worked in a fast, urgent roll, moaning as the Courier squeezed him between his thighs, and the Courier pushed up to meet him, to build the delicious, hot friction, winding the sensation in the small of his belly tighter and tighter and tighter. He closed his eyes, his hands kneading Arcade’s shoulders, lost to the sense of pressure below: not like being taken, but insistent, hard, intimate, and wonderful, and the smell of Arcade’s breath and sweat. Arcade’s heavy body grinding against his, pumping, not kissing him any more but his lips pressed against the Courier’s mouth, his breath coming in hot, short bursts. Arcade had one hand tangled in his hair and the other hand at the Courier’s chest, playing with his nipple between two fingers -- Arcade pulled at the hard bud, squeezed his knuckles together as he rocked on top of him, and the sudden shoot of pleasure-pain his chest down to his groin and his release flooded hot between their bodies.
Arcade felt it too. He arched against the Courier and came with a soft, strangled sound, and the Courier felt himself almost laugh with the sheer joy of hearing it. Arcade had a quote for every occasion but that little, breathy groan -- that was better than all the Latin he let spill off his tongue. The Courier squeezed him tight.
They cleaned up with what they had to hand. Stray socks. Arcade laughed as he wiped at their stomachs. “Ah, amour.”
The Courier chuckled as Arcade hurriedly tossed it away and moved close.
Arcade dragged their shirts and pants over them in the most pathetic sort of make-shift blankets, but in each other’s arms it was warm enough. Arcade wasn’t discontent. There had been less comfortable nights in not-too-distant memory, and many more to come. Drifting in a post-sex glow, on soft cushions, with a warm, sturdy body grasping his was not actually very high on Arcade’s list of worst ways to kip down.
There was only one sticking point, cold and unpleasant, in Arcade’s head. It might not last. He wasn’t paralyzed anymore, not since he had been swept up in the Courier’s wake, and he didn’t lack courage. He wouldn’t have kissed him if he lacked courage. But Arcade was a student of history as well as legend (which was history in a truer light, history stripped of politicking), and the ancients had much to say about times like these and love founded in them. Arcade was brave and scared, and it was no contradiction of character to be both at once. Happiness was far from immutable.
The Courier could feel Arcade thinking. Hard. “Any regrets?” the Courier asked.
“We’d be here all night,” Arcade said. His forehead was against the Courier’s, his serious eyes
staring into the other man’s. “None about you.” Arcade looked for the right words. He thought of the Enclave, his father’s armor that he’d wear with pride, and the danger of it all. They would be happy after the Dam, si qua fata sinant4, but he wasn’t naif. “If you don’t see me after, I’ll be thinking of you.”
“I’m not easy to shake.”
Arcade heard the easy conviction in the Courier’s voice. He admired it. He... hell, he even believed it. The Courier had that effect on people. He said “Follow me” and you followed, he said “We can do this” and they always did. Poetic warnings were nothing compared to his confident smile and the energy in his eyes. He was hesitant to hope for too much, but if anyone could tempt fate and win, it would be this man.
1 Aeschylus: fortuna viros magnos amat: fortune loves great men
2 Sartre
3The Red and the Black, Stendhal
4 Virgil: si qua fata sinant: if somehow the fates allow it