Fallout New Vegas: A Rose Among The Ashes

Chapter 3

A Rose Among The Ashes

3: Heartaches By The Firelight

[April 2015: Revised and new chapters coming soon.]

We must have stood there in the middle of the room for a good few minutes before the girl's tired sobs ceased, and I couldn't help but feel immensely sorry for her. Her Legion slave collar carried an obvious message. That, coupled with her ragged old clothes and 'delicate' temperament meant that she would have been through hell on earth for however long she had been in captivity.

This made rage curdle inside me. The Legion has no qualms about taking whomever they can as a slave, and they're far from hospitable. Unrelenting, painful hard labour, corporal punishment whenever the Legionaries are bored, and if anyone shows even a hint of defiance, they may well be executed on the spot. Women are frequently saved for marriage to high-ranking Generals, and it was likely that was what had already happened to this girl.

I didn't even know who she was, or what she was like, but I couldn't just abandon her. I've heard many a tale on my travels of sly, deceitful women who have pulled similar tricks on unsuspecting Samaritans before quite literally stabbing them in the back, but this girl was different. There was a look of tired, helpless desperation in her eyes that told me she wasn't pulling a fast one.

She just needed a friend, and a guardian, and I decided I would be both.

The room was silent except for her intermittent sniffling after having calmed down.

"We should move, you know. It's not safe here." I said.

She loosened her embrace to look at me with her gold eyes, still sparkling from the tears, before wordlessly nodding, and letting go.

I turned and made my way into the lobby, avoiding the raider's corpses as I went. I heard a short, shocked gasp from the girl as she saw them, before quickening her pace to catch up with me. I rolled up my bedroll and retrieved my gas lamp, which now sported a sizeable dent from where it had been knocked out of the raider's thieving hands and struck the floor, but it still worked normally. I pushed open the door and stepped outside, allowing the girl through before letting it swing shut again. The last sliver of sun was just poking out above the horizon, casting long shadows over the ground.

We set off in the direction I'd been travelling that day, with no words between us. She held onto my arm for most of the way, clearly still shaken from what she had just witnessed.

For the years that I've been a lone wolf out here, I've tried to keep it such. Other people are commonly a liability, and she was unquestionably the biggest liability I'd ever had; vulnerable and dependent through and through.

But I couldn't just ditch her because of that. It wouldn't be fair. The slave collar was evidence enough for me. It almost felt like I had an obligation to remove any trace of Legion cruelty from her, so her life wouldn't be blemished by them as mine had.

Eventually, as it started to get dangerously dark, we happened upon an old gas station. For some reason, animals tend to steer clear of them, but nobody seems to have any idea why. The actual building was boarded totally up, and peering in through a broken window, I could see little but rubble and refuse inside. We'd have to make do with the roof over the pumps, but I'd done it many a time before without incident, so I decided we'd set up camp here.

—

A short while later, I'd restarted a campfire from a pile of old logs that someone prior had left, and dragged an old broken wooden beam over to use as a bench. The flames practically danced in the dark, bathing the gas station in warm orange light, and the girl, who was now sitting quietly on the beam, looked at it, presumably deep in thought, her arms tucked by her sides for warmth. The light glistened off of her eyes as it had earlier on, and I couldn't help but be captivated by them. It's one thing to say that someone is beautiful, and another thing entirely to know it. There was no other way to put it; she was mesmerising to look at.