Chapter Text
From the moment the desert sun finally set, the night had a strange feel. The air was less dry than usual and even as the skies lit with shades of red and orange, clouds gathered above New Vegas. Arcade Gannon, along with most of the Followers, were fully aware of the abnormality of clouds, especially dark clouds, and all of them anticipated that rain likely meant flash floods.
As the first drops started to fall, everyone in Freeside sought whatever shelter they could find, many rushing into the Mormon Fort to spend the night under the Follower’s tents. That light rain quickly swelled to a near biblical downpour. The water fell so thick that sight was limited to about ten feet outside the tents. The white canvas sagged with the weight of water pooling on the roofs and holes were punched through some tents to drain the weight. In others, the canvas simply ripped when action was not taken in time, unleashing a deluge upon the hoards sheltering within. The parched ground fast turned to mud and deep puddles. Someone rushed out to open the great wooden doors and leave them open, lest the Fort become a pool as the water rose to ankle-height.
Over the deafening susurration of the rain, Arcade vaguely heard Julie Farkas calling people into the tower of the Fort where she slept and he started helping to shepherd people towards her. The mud clung to their feet and many people stumbled or fell as they rushed inside. By the time all but the doctors themselves had been sheltered in the upper floor and stairwell of Julie’s living quarters, the Followers were too caked with mud to recognize each other.
As it happened, Arcade was the last Follower to head inside to wait out the storm. Trudging carefully through the thick and slippery mud below the rising knee-high waters, he paused halfway to the door, glimpsing a dark shape barely visible to his right.
Looming like a horseman of the apocalypse, a dark figure sat hunched atop what looked impossibly like a stallion. The figure shifted, looking towards Arcade and the steed, misinterpreting the shift in weight, paced heavily through the muck towards him. As it approached, the great black shape came into clear view and Arcade realized that it was indeed a horse. The animal was far bigger than he had ever expected them to be from the pictures he’d seen. It was strong, but it was also soaked to the bone. The dark eyes of the long black face were wide with fear and exhaustion and the animal shivered violently where is stopped, that huge, soft nose cautiously sniffing Arcade. The horse had its head lowered, but its back was nearly eye-level to him, Arcade estimated. His focus was torn from the somewhat intimidating stallion as the rider abruptly slid to the ground.
His foot caught in the stirrup and the horse spooked, shrieking only to be drowned out by the rain. It leapt into the air, narrowly missing its rider when it splashed its hooves back into the mud. Arcade stumbled aside as the stallion nearly collided with him as it broke into a panicked gallop. The animal bolted wildly, dragging the rider through the deep water until the slick and semi-solid ground caused it to slip and careen into a pile of crates at the back of the fort. Arcade rushed after it, barely keeping his balance in the slush, and so he saw that when the horse rolled to its feet, soaking Arcade with the splash, it was alone. The rider was somewhere in the mud. With the rising waters and having been dragged by a horse, Arcade knew that the man was probably dead, but as long as he was careful, he trusted that he would be safe in the rain, and he wouldn’t leave the stranger out here, unconscious, beneath the rising water if he could avoid it. Even so, with visibility so low and his glasses smeared with mud and rain, Arcade doubted that he would be able to find the man in time.
But luck was with him. An arm in a muddy black sleeve had been impaled on the splintered remains of a crate, which floated above the water, and beside it rose the long and slender barrel of an anti-material rifle. Arcade stooped to haul the man out of the water and separate the piece of wood that impaled his arm from the rest of the crate. He fell twice in the process, the second time plunging completely into the water, but finally he managed to lift the man so that his face was above the water. With such terrible footing, Arcade couldn’t risk pulling the stranger farther into the air, even if he could manage it- from the feel of him, the horeseman was weighed down with at least half his weight in gear. He started to drag the man toward the other sheltering people when he heard a voice call out.
Julie had come looking for him.
Between the two of them, they hauled the stranger inside and laid him out on the crowded bed. They got the water out of his lungs and, amazingly, he started breathing on his own. It took over an hour to clean him enough to tend his wounds. The man was young, very young. He looked twenty, almost half Arcade’s age, but he was also incredibly good looking. He wore a long and heavy black coat with a hood that had been up, no doubt against the rain. His hair was so long that they nearly mistook it for a second hood once the mud in it had dried. He was oddly barefoot. As strong as he looked, it quickly became evident that he was starving and severely dehydrated. His body was nearly armored with the leather straps that held his bulging backpack and array of weapons. The man was an arsenal. Neither Arcade nor Julie counted, but there must have been six different types of guns alone.
Beneath the weapons and the heavy coat, the stranger wore loose and heavy black denim jeans with a thick, metal-studded belt. The buckle had been carefully shaped to resemble a horned reptilian face with tiny red gems set into the eyes. The glaring steel buckle was an effigy of the creature that Arcade suspected had once formed the leather of the rest of the belt: a deathclaw. Who the hell wore a deathclaw-leather belt? Ignoring the belt, he unbuttoned the man’s filthy and blood-soaked white shirt. Amid an array of brutal-looking scars, the man’s lean and muscular chest was marred with fresher wounds, some scabbed over, but most oozing blood and pus. Some were bites and scratches, Arcade guessed they’d been inflicted by nightstalkers, but the deeper wounds were burns from plasma and lasers. Most of the scars looked similar to those wounds, the doctor noted with a twinge of curiosity.
Arcade cleaned and tended to the now infected burns, gradually working towards the scabbed and cleaner ones, and then the man’s arm. The splintered wood had narrowly missed the man’s artery, and it took a great deal of care to remove it without causing the stranger to bleed out. Arcade was glad for the need to focus; the handsome horseman’s leg had not only been broken, but shattered when he’d been dragged and Julie had to strip him almost completely to set and mend the bones. She didn’t notice the other leg until hours later, when a bulge below the knee caught her eye. At first, she mistook it for a tumor, but instead, she identified the mass as scar tissue. She was amazed that the joint could still move and wondered what had possibly happened to do that to the young man, although she noticed three long thin scars near the lump and suspected they might be related.
By the time all the man’s wounds were bandaged, the sun was rising and the rain had stopped. The flood had receded a little, leaving three feet of water on the ground, but even that was gradually drying and soaking in. Everyone in the room and stairwell was packed in, most leaning against each other to try and sleep because there was no room to sit down. Arcade and Julie alone were seated, having practically collapsed in the narrow space beside the bed. Julie glanced once more at the patient, briefly making sure that all his wounds had been bandaged. She hadn’t bothered to try and dress him again, concerned that in her exhaustion she might not be careful enough with his shattered leg. It was better to let it heal a while until she was rested. She leaned back against her bed and closed her eyes, keeping her legs held tightly to her chest to avoid getting stepped on.
Arcade studied the man carefully, reviewing his own work to make sure that he hadn’t messed up somewhere. Looking at the bandaged arm draped over the pillow beneath the man’s head, he noticed that the stranger had a small black earring set behind a mangled scar on his ear lobe where another piercing had clearly been torn out. Arcade had positioned the man’s injured arm above his head like that partly to avoid laying it across his injured chest and partly to avoid resting it so near the edge of the bed, where he was afraid he might bump into it. It seemed like it would hurt less this way, not that he hadn’t also given the man a massive amount of Med-X for all the pain. Continuing his examination a bit more hastily, he happened to see the silver chain of a necklace that had fallen behind the man’s head. Idly curious, Arcade considered pulling the necklace forward to get a better look at it, but he decided against that. He was too tired right now.