Chapter Text
The air is never cold, not in the Mojave, but it's heavy, weighty in a way strikingly different from the burning pressure of the Divide. There's a wetness to the air here, a humidity promising rainfall clean and clear and fresh like the tears of the sky. The Divide never rains- consumed by fire, dried up and wrung empty, thick clouds hoarding what water they can find.
The Mojave pours, pours freely, shares what meagre rain it can offer with those it carries below. A gift, to be sure, but tainted by the kiss of radiation, the touch of long-dead rulers. All ideologies fall in the end. Bear and Bull are merely the descendants of Eagle, of Stars and Stripes, of atomic age and nuclear annihilation. The Dark Horse is simply another in a long lineage of failed kings. Whether the Courier can survive this, he is not sure, but his hands have shaped history just as sure as any other, hooves clattering down a road whose furrows were dug by thousands of feet before it, entering a race it was never supposed to win.
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The Courier drops easily to all fours, moving in a loping grace up the twisted rubble of the Old World. There's something distinctly inhuman about the gait- more animal than man, more beast than bearer. Every loping step made with precision, a surefooted creature climbing with all the ease of a bighorner- or something that hunted them. What has the Mojave made him- or more accurately, what has he made himself?
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Ulysses hears it at night, the purring of old machinery. At first he thinks it the ghosts of the bunker, the whispers of the Old World still chasing him even now. Then one day he finds himself closer to the Courier and hears the sounds from within the body. Feels scars stretching up a spine too stiff and steel-cold, a heart too steady and precise, like a ticking clock, a metronome counting out the seconds until death.
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A part of the Courier had died on that fateful day, was left still buried in a shallow grave outside Goodsprings.
Other things had filled its space- the air of toxic vaults whose reactors overloaded and whose residents turned mad with mutation, the kiss of old chems and meds and damaged autodocs, the flesh of beasts and men alike fueling muscles mutated on a minute scale. The breath of the Sierra Madre, poisonous and leeching deep into his bones, the same air that had twisted the workmen into ghosts of their own past. The technology of Big Mountain, carving out room with bloody scalpels and impersonal carnage, steel replacing spine and red-hot reactor replacing heart, the experiments of the mad doctors leaving incurable scars on both mind and body.
And now the air of the Divide, the ashes of his past, pouring into the cracks in his body and changing what little left it could find. The Divide was dead, and the man who built it had died too. Now the carcass coiled around a dead man walking and hissed scraping over skin reborn. It sought solace in a soul so achingly familiar yet so strikingly a stranger it burned. Empty memories and shallow words barely scratching the vast hollow depths beneath the Courier's heart and bond with his now dead home, killed by his own hand just as sure as suicide.
The Courier was no longer a man. He was a symbol.
But his spirit remained, impossibly human