as we turn to the tide

by LyriumTainted

Summary:

María almost didn’t come back from Zion- almost.
But her life was made of ‘almost’s, she wasn’t going to add her friendship with a certain quiet sniper to that list, not yet.

It was a long walk back from Zion with no caravan company to walk with her; that was alright, María had always enjoyed the silence of the desert. With a rifle in her hands and the police vest of an ex-Malpais Legate pulled snug against her chest, there was plenty of time for her to get lost in the maze of her mind like she was so prone to doing.
Let her eyes wander the empty sands, the occasional group of geckos left her alone, but she never fully dropped her guard, even as she let her thoughts wander-- back to New Canaan, back to Novac, back to the weight of her pack against her spine.

 

She wasn’t sure how long she’d been gone, if she was honest.
María’d woke up one morning with the familiar burning sensation to leave, pack her bag and run until her legs couldn’t carry her anymore.

That happened every once in a while; she doesn’t remember if she was like this before the bullet, but when things piled up and she got overwhelmed, she would run. And run, and run.
Till her lungs wouldn’t fill and her legs wouldn’t move.

 

So she did. 

 

María packed her usual bag, her usual rifle and knife, and left before Boone could wake and ask her when the hell they could get out of Novac-- she was selfish like that, leaving her friend in a town of his ghosts just so she could ditch hers.

She was on foot, just walking aimlessly into the desert- it wasn’t the first time, it wouldn’t be the last, surely. María never knew what she was looking for; an adventure, a sign, maybe just a few moments without the ghosts of her murky past dogging her heels.

She wasn’t intentionally looking for a job, she’d just been scanning frequencies- That’s when she’d found the Happy Trails Caravan Company; a stray radio signal picked up by her PipBoy had directed her to their camp, and it seemed as good an opportunity as any other, though she didn’t like having to stash so much of her gear in a locker when she was told she had too many items to carry with them. She grumbled the entire time, wanting to pick up every plant and rummage through every corpse they left in their wake, and several times they told her to leave perfectly good weapons behind.
María had always been a hoarder, she thinks. Stashing guns and ammo and BlamCo mac-n-cheese until her companion couldn’t carry any more. Boone never complained, though. Just silently accepted the boxes of ammo and instamash, or picked them up on his own if he spotted them first. They’d worked well together, both quiet and uninterested in the other’s secrets; María didn’t want to know about his service or his wife, and Boone didn’t want to know about her before she found him in Novac-- it worked. They were almost nice to each other.

 

She almost started feeling guilty for leaving him behind.
Almost.

That seemed to be the word that showed up most in her life, haunted her as much as any ghost ever did.

‘almost’ feeling something, ‘almost’ alive, ‘almost’ surviving.

almost.

María had just started to really think about her choice- and Boone’s lack of -when the caravan group was attacked.
Nobody else had time to react; Stella and Ricky were dead, and then Jed, and then it was her against more people than she had time to count and if there hadn’t been that stupid fucking carry limit, María would have more ammo and more weapons than just her knife and rifle, and maybe everyone else wouldn’t be coloring the sand red with their blood, glassy eyes turned to the sky in a collection of shocked faces.
The fight was a haze- it always was. One moment she was with the caravan, being attacked, the next, she was standing over several bodies, heaving in giant gulping breaths of air and wiping her blood-soaked knife on her pants, ignoring the sting in her left arm where a lucky man had grazed her with a tomahawk.

She didn’t recognise the assailants as she looted their bodies, other than the fact that they were clearly tribals-- María almost shot Follows-Chalk when he first rushed towards her to talk to her, her brain trying to do too many things to process any of the Tribal language he’d used before he switched, leaving her to try and piece together his sentences.

Did she look like someone who spoke English? Did she look like a city woman now? Did she lose all of her tribal roots, chasing Benny across the Mojave?
It had been so long since she’d seen her own face.

 

She didn’t ask Follows-Chalk these questions; there weren’t any answers he could give.

She almost didn’t leave Zion.

After destroying the White Legs, after talking so much to the Burned Man, after running around and doing completely unnecessary things for the Sorrows tribe— if there was a heart in her and if it beat, it would miss the canyon walls and cavern ceilings more than it had ever missed home.

It was a piece of her, the scenery and the sand and the blood, no matter how short or long the time she spent there was.

At night, when she wasn’t running supply drops, when the Sorrows let her have a moment to breathe, she’d talk to Joshua Graham. The Burned Man, the ex-Legionnaire. It was often philosophical in nature, talks of a god Maria didn’t believe in, talks of a man Joshua used to worship as God— the kind of conversation that Maria didn’t get to have back in the Mojave, trudging through sand with her silent sniper.

His anger was righteous, hatred veiled by justice— her anger was just that. Anger. Blinding. They were surprisingly similar. Joshua was said to be everything she hated, and now was everything she was turning out to be.

 

María almost didn’t leave Zion.

 

But she did. She pulled the Burned Man’s ruined lips to her own, ignoring his hiss of pain at the bruising force of her kiss, and set off on her lonesome once again, dragged herself back to the desert she called home, back to the little nowhere town, back to the giant dinosaur, broken-bodied and a mind not much better than her bones and bruises.

 

It was late when she finally pushed past the gates of Novac’s motel. The ghost of Jeannie May glared at her from the motel doors, and Maria ignored her as she always did; Benny’s spirit lingered not far behind, as it always did. All of the skeletons in her closet were waiting for her with open arms when she came back, a cold embrace they tried to usher over her. There was no desk clerk when she entered the dinosaur after being away for so long, nobody to try and sell her dinosaurs she didn’t want or need, or to play the radio a few notches too loud. 

The only noises were her footsteps on the stairs, and then the opening and closing of the door.

 

Boone didn’t even look back at her- he’d long grown accustomed to her footsteps, the slight drag of her left foot, a lasting effect of having lead in her brain. The heavy, solid THUMP of her canvas bag being dropped by the doorframe, the softer thump of her sitting down next to him.

 

“I wasn’t sure you were coming back.” He said, monotonous, gazing out into the desert night, his face betraying no emotions, if he felt any at her sudden arrival.

 

“I wasn’t, either,” María admitted, her voice equally emotionless, her eyes searching his face, looking for what hid behind his sunglasses.

Sometimes it frustrated her to not see his eyes- she didn’t know what he was thinking, and it bothered her to not know.

She didn’t deserve to know.

But she wanted to.

 

They sat in silence again- it was always silent between them. A sea of words neither knew how to say always surrounded them, filled their lungs, but it was always a silent drowning.

“I came back.” for you.

 

“You did.” i missed you too.

 

“Wanna get out of here?”

 

Boone made a noncommittal noise, still peering through his scope, before finally- finally -lowering his rifle.

“... Yeah.”

They weren’t people of many words, but there was the tiniest tug at the corner of his mouth, and María knew it was alright. He didn’t smile- she doubted she’d ever see him look truly happy, -but sometimes it felt like maybe they were a little more normal in moments like these, even when they did their hardest to screw things up.