Work Text:
“My name is Cooper Howard.”
He's gone. He's too far gone. Seen too many westerns and absorbed too many rads.
His head cants to the side, neck straining, leathery skin pulling taught, and she jumps when it snaps to the other side with a pained hiss. She measures her steps carefully with his, making sure she gains no ground on him, nor loses any. He makes for an unsettling silhouette from behind.
“My name is Cooper Howard,” he insists to himself, the words spit through tight lips.
It sounds more sure, the name sitting easily and comfortable in his mouth, and her doubt wavers.
Cooper Howard is long dead. It's not possible. Despite the fact that the ghoul ahead of her wears the lone cowboy archetype like it was custom fit, ordered straight from a catalog, it's not possible.
He repeats himself, as though in his irradiated stupor he can hear her thoughts.
She studies him, brows drawn.
“My name is Cooper Howard.”
It should've been the shape of his mouth that did it, or the self-satisfied smirk that pulls at the corner of his mouth more often than not, but it isn't. It's the rasp of his voice, like fine-grit sandpaper, the low, sure quality to his southern drawl that demands compliance. Like he's the sheriff in this town.
Holy cow. He's actually–
“My name,” he pushes out tightly, teeth gnashing, “is Cooper Howard.”
It starts in the middle of nowhere, with the sun beating down on them.
He grunts behind her, seemingly for no reason. When she turns, he's working his jaw, stepping onward blindly with his eyes closed.
“You okay?”
His eyes snap open and find her, almost piercingly sharp.
He doesn't answer, waving her on. She learns quickly enough why he insists on her leading. Two miles later, he can no longer suppress his wheezing.
He's out of vials. They're still days away from a sure vendor.
He trails several paces behind her. He doesn't want an audience and she keeps her back to him with measured breaths.
She doesn't bother suggesting they stop, or force him to rest. The only cure is to get to town.
He coughs, his lungs sounding dry and empty and painfully hollow.
When the wheezing stops, she's relieved. Until she realizes how ominous the silence is.
He keeps walking when he remembers to. Every time he stops, her heart stops with him, waiting to see what he's going to do.
She stays behind him, like he insisted, tense.
“Cooper Howard,” he hisses. His head rocks and strains like it doesn't belong on his shoulders. When he shakes it off, hands lifted away like he's trying to settle back into a role, he repeats himself with almost comical confidence.
“Cooper Howard.”
She searches every building they pass. He walks on, his steps slow and far from effortless, so it's easy to catch up.
There's nothing, anywhere, every room long and well raided.
She searches her bag one more time in pure desperation, seeing the pain he's in and how slow their progress has become. There's a panicky kind of uselessness in her chest that has her checking every pocket, every crevice.
It pays off. Two capsules for her long lost tranquilizer at the very bottom of her pack, almost hidden by the torn lining.
That is a very small drop in a very, very large bucket of drugs.
It's something.
A shaky breath leaves her as she looks up. She's never seen anyone writhe on their feet before, but he's still dragging himself along, curiously silent now.
She doesn't know what to do.
It's a frightening, unfamiliar feeling.
“I can go on ahead,” she offers, “find something to help you and come back–”
“You do whatever the hell you want,” he grits out, hand braced on a beam – all that's left of the makeshift hospital they had been hoping to find here.
His body's burning alive.
He doesn't tell her that knowing she's two paces away – the purest flesh this wasteland has seen in years – is keeping him focused more than anything. He wants to tear her apart and his white-knuckle grip on his sense of self holds firmer knowing if he slips up, she pays the price.
“Or do I need to stay? What–”
“I'll get through it. I've done it before.”
“You need–”
“I know what I need,” he snaps. “You do what you need. But if you ain't leaving, you better fuckin’ listen to me.”
Her big eyes are wide, but she schools herself and nods dutifully and he's never seen her so compliant.
“Don't touch me. Stay behind me, outta my sight. Don't say a word.”
She nods, concern growing in her wide eyes. He nods towards her hip.
“If I turn around, you're not shooting to wound, you understand me? If I go, it's over and there ain't no coming back.”
Her face falters, brows drawing together, but they don't have time for this shit.
“Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” she says quickly. “Yes.”
“I’m not fuckin’ around here, MacLean. If I lose it, you're dead.”
“I understand,” she says more calmly. “I understand.”
“Cooper.”
The name feels so strange on her tongue.
He freezes. So does she.
The dry wind flutters his duster as she waits. The sun cuts a sharp angle across the desert, blindingly bright but deepening every shadow. It's the most still he's been for hours.
After a couple of agitated, aborted attempts, he turns his head, angled down toward his shoulder.
He doesn't make a sound but she takes it as an acknowledgement. She approaches carefully and stops at his side. The urge to lay her hand on his arm is difficult to suppress – his breaths are heaving dramatically, his face twisted with pain. His eyes are bright, lit from within like he's burning from the inside, hyper-focused on her.
“I found these.” She holds out the capsules. “Will they help?”
He glances at them, then snatches them from her palm so fast that she startles.
He plunges both needles in his chest right as the thought occurs that she maybe should've kept one to ration.
It's small, the change in him – a mere relaxing of the muscles of one cheek, tempering his snarl.
There's something a little more recognizable in his eyes again, but she knows it won't be enough to last long. He looks her over, then shoves her away, back behind him, almost enough force to send her into the sand. She stumbles into her place five paces back, relieved.
When he drops, her feet turn to stone.
He twists in the sand, but it's a slow, controlled movement and she doesn't know what to do. He was supposed to either make it or turn and try to kill her. There was no contingency for this, for him collapsing–
She scrambles over and drops to her knees next to him.
”Cooper,” she says. “Cooper, look at me–”
It’s everything he told her not to do.
He arches against the dunes, then curls on his side snarling and near screaming.
“Cooper! Cooper–”
His eyes fix on hers and there's no recognition in them. Nothing.
“We're close. It's just over an hour, you can make it–”
Make it to town, where any well-traveled person in this wasteland would take one look at his snarling face and foaming mouth and put a bullet in his head without asking questions.
“Fudge,” she whispers harshly. “Fudge, fudge, fudge.”
He strains toward her, a guttural noise coming from deep inside him, and she swallows back the urge to flinch away.
“I'm gonna go,” she says firmly. “I'm gonna go and find you something and I'll come back, I'll–”
She clears her throat, glancing around for the ruined home she searched in the last half hour, little more than a sitting room and a bathroom left standing.
“Get yourself over to that house, stay there, and I'll be back in– in three hours, as soon as I can–”
The war in him nearly splits his irises, his face twitching, baring teeth, but something holds him back with a slippery grip.
“You hearing me? Cooper?”
He does. He does, because he grabs her arm and doesn't rip it from its socket and put it in his mouth, he shoves her away from him hard.
She lands in the sand, watching him twist and writhe, but she has to go, she doesn't have enough time as it is.
She runs. She's faster on her own and she doesn't care who or what the settlement in the distance is, she's coming back with chems.
She comes upon the spot with heaving lungs and burning legs. The temperature is dropping, the sun, nearly set, perched low on the horizon and casting the world in amber.
The winds have already shifted the dunes, altering the landscape and she spins, eyes searching for the little building, for his writhing form, footsteps, a trail, something.
Her Pip-Boy confirms it's the spot she marked. She spins again, trying to calm down and focus with so much adrenaline racing through her system from her stolen Buffout.
She doesn't think he'll mind. Unless he's already lost his mind.
A corner of a structure peeks over a dune and she races that way, stumbling over sand, desperate to keep hold of the bloodied bundled handkerchief full of vials.
She only shot to wound. It was the right thing to do.
“Cooper?”
The wind eats her words as she meets with the bones of the house. It's deathly quiet inside the only sealed room, furnished with rotting furniture and long decayed hardwoods. Every grain of sand that collides with the walls outside makes a tiny noise, like the very air is crackling.
“Coop?” Her voice is hoarse, her throat torn up from such exertion in the dry air.
She steps toward the small bathroom slowly, stepping over the broken door. A missing corner of the wall illuminates him bright gold, sat with his knees to his chest in a bathtub. Ominously still.
His stillness is more menacing than his biting, writhing, snarling. She takes a careful step closer and then freezes when she makes him out in the sharp relief of the setting sun.
There's blood on his mouth. He’s staring at his finger – or, rather, the bloodied stump where his index finger used to be, the one his thumb is rubbing over in something like a caress, smearing blood all over his hand.
She takes a shaky breath that draws his attention. He looks up sharply and in a split second she knows, just by the lifeless sheen of his eyes, that she's either just in time, or just too late. She moves before him, thankfully, because he screeches and tries to lunge, but she lands on him, keeping him contained in the tub, her heart thumping in her chest. He's strong though, stronger than her, and much more uninhibited.
She unsheathes her knife from her ankle and sinks it into his chest.
He howls, writhing harder, but she plants her foot on the handle and it keeps him in place as she grabs for one of the vials now scattered over them, her hands shaking violently, mouth running without any thought.
“It's okay, just stop- we can fix this, I can fix you, and then I don't have to shoot you, because I don't really want to shoot you, but I really don't want you to kill me and I don't know if you can make me like you somehow, but I really don't want to be like this–”
She dumps a vial into his open, screeching mouth, then fumbles open another, and another, and another.
She loses count at seventeen. Still he fights her, wailing and kicking and clawing, jostling her on top of him.
She hunts for another vial to dump into his mouth, each one she picks up already spent, or shattered from their struggle. She huffs, looking around them in the tub, on the floor next to them. She sees one glimmer against the dirty tile and stretches for it, unsettling her weight, and in an instant she knows it was a mistake.
He flips them, slamming her into the bottom of the tub with a triumph screech, and she panics, shoving the knife even deeper, feeling blood spurt over her hand, all over her abdomen, and then in the next moment the fighting weakens, then slows, then stops.
He relaxes.
She watches his chest heave against the knife as he goes slack against her, and there's no way she's killed him, ghouls don't just die from a knife to the chest–
He slumps against her, breathing hard, but still breathing. The handle of the knife digs into her abdomen as she tries to catch her breath. She shifts to the side, pushing him until they've traded places again. His gaze is hooded as he looks up at her, still not altogether there, but watching as she pulls the knife from his middle.
She lets it fall to the floor and collapses back into the other end of the tub.
The last three days hit her all at once, in a tsunami of exhaustion. She lets her head tip into the tiled corner.
His only movement is the slow blink of his eyelids, but it's enough. She brought him back from that cliff's edge – just barely, by the mere tips of their fingers, but she did it.
When he relaxes completely, she does too.
She doesn't bother moving. Her legs hurt in ways she's never experienced, her head foggy and throbbing. The morning light is a pale sickly yellow, hazy as it drifts in through the hole in the wall.
He's curled against her legs, still but breathing, presumably asleep.
She kicks at him crowding the tub and he grunts. It takes another couple kicks, but he rouses, slowly pushing to sit up opposite her.
He groans, rubbing his hands over his face and the skin of his head. He blinks heavily, finding her with his eyes and letting out a deep, heavy sigh.
His attention turns to his abdomen.
“What the fuck’d you do?” he grumbles, voice hoarse.
“I…”
He fingers the bloody slit in his vest, then starts to unbutton it.
“I shot to wound, I guess,” she muses.
He looks up, leveling an unimpressed look at her.
“You didn't do a goddamn thing I said, did you?”
“I did! I did until…”
She gestures vaguely, her gaze split between his face and his parting vest.
The shirt beneath is dingy and stained but mostly intact, save for the new slice. It's deep navy blue with tarnished gold details and she can see it, shining and pristine on the pages of a magazine.
He was a movie star. He had a big, full life before all of this, before any of this. It's hard to fathom.
“You really are Cooper Howard,” she muses, embarrassed at how starstruck she sounds.
His head snaps up, his eyes much more alert now as they absorb that. He doesn't respond directly.
“You ruined my shirt,” he mumbles. “You know how long I've had this shirt?”
“Two hundred years?” is the guess she ventures.
He only shoots her another flat look as he clumsily unbuttons his shirt with his incomplete hand. The rest of him is exactly as she could've guessed, all raw tender skin, and she shivers to think of existing that way. She wonders if his nerves are deadened by now or if he constantly feels the stinging brush of the world, all far too close for comfort.
He pokes at the wound at his center – it looks far more shallow than she would've guessed, but she still doesn't know how he survives the things he does.
“I suppose you didn't kill me,” he concedes dramatically, relaxing back again.
“And heck if I know how,” she says. "There's no way I didn't hit any organs."
He lets out a low, tired laugh.
"You think I got that many functioning organs? I'm so chock full o' tumors, honey, you probably couldn't hit anything vital if you tried.”
It sounds like a challenge, one she's too wrung out to meet.
“And where the hell is my finger?” he mutters, rubbing at his face again.
“You ate it,” she supplies flatly.
He lifts his head, amusement twinkling bright and lively in his eyes.
“That's what it looked like, anyway,” she adds, barely getting it out before he lets out a laugh – a real, honest, bellowing laugh that almost makes her jump in surprise. She can't help but smile at the sound though, despite her confusion.
“Why…is it so funny that you ate your own finger?”
He shakes his head and she's startled to detect a modicum of fondness in his expression.
He plants his palms and pushes to stand, leaning closer as he rises to inform her, “It wasn't my finger.”
She cranes her neck to look up at him, feeling flushed from the Buffout comedown. He smirks down at her, offering a hand, unexpectedly gentlemanly.
She takes it, pulling to her feet. The room rocks around them and she wavers, unintentionally gripping his fingers to steady herself.
He merely waits, studying her.
“I, uh, I took a Buffout,” she explains. “So I could make it back before– quicker.”
He tilts his head, lips smirking.
“Best be careful with those, Miss MacLean. Don't wanna end up waking in a bathtub with one less finger and a hole in your middle.”
She nods dutifully, but glances down to the gaping split between his visible ribs and has the horrific and thankfully repressable thought to feel for herself exactly how deep she gutted him.
“Does it hurt?” she asks without thinking.
“Why don't I sink an 8-inch knife in you and you can find out?”
She suddenly feels the tightness of the healed wound in her side, the one she'd almost forgotten about.
“Been there, done that, thank you.”
He hums in response, his eyes carrying something new, something almost conspiratorial.
“First time’s always the worst.”
She opens her mouth, but no response, no insistence that it would be the only time ever comes out.
“Well, come on, now,” he says, stepping over the tub and handing her out after him. “We best be on our way.”
“Who's finger was it?” she blurts out.
He pauses with a tilted grin, letting out a low chuckle.
“I think you know the answer to that,” he says with glittering amusement. He releases her hand, stepping away from her with a wink as he begins to right his shirt, leaving her in the bathroom. She stares down at her hand, still hovering in the air, her decayed finger a noxious indigo.
She blinks, shaking this flustered feeling off as she catches her breath. That Buffout did a number on her.
“Wait,” she calls out, jogging to catch up.
He's as she knows him best once more, a dark obelisk in the pale sand. Only missing one minor – maybe major – detail.
“I ain't takin’ off without you, I'm just looking for my–”
He stops when he turns and spies his hat in her hands.
“Ah.”
“Was caught in the brush down there.” She gestures down the steep dune as he settles the hat back on his head, then hands him the rest of her offering. “Here.”
He takes the small kerchief sack, weighed down by the last few full vials she could scavenge from the bathroom, opening it in his palm. He tips his head, smirk still in place, and she can't comprehend why he's got such an easy smile today, after all that.
“And this,” he says, lifting a corner of the bloodstained fabric, “belonged to…?”
“That belonged to a, uh…a very ungenerous and apathetic drug dealer,” she says, nodding firmly. “Who I did not kill, I'll have you know.”
“No?” He has that goading look in his eye that she knows is just to work her up, but she can't help rising to it.
“No,” she asserts.
“Hmm.”
“Though, we, um, probably would do best to stick to the east side of town, when we…when we get there.”
“Right,” he grins, holding her eyes as he pockets the vials and, unexpectedly, tucks the evidence of her misdeeds inside his jacket.
She turns when he does, pointing their steps towards the unimpressive settlement in the distance. After days of rushing and pushing, their unhurried pace feels odd, but he's himself again, and she's not waiting with shaking hands on the butt of her gun for him to lose all sense of himself.
All that visibly remains on him from the trials of the last few days is a small hunch of his shoulders, as though favoring his abdominal wound, a hollow digit in his glove, and a permanent, satisfied lift at the far corner of his mouth.