Chapter Text
They stumble into the job by accident. Well, sort of by accident; Cass is willing to put it up to the Courier’s crap luck, honestly, because it’s a pretty crap job. Barely a reward, no contract, just the vague mention of a missing person and the potential of a whole casino bringing the hammer down on the two of them.
But the Courier’s got a soft heart when it suits her, and Cass is, unenviably, stupid in love.
With all that said, of course they take it.
---
Cass knows enough about life on the road to know that you eat hot food when it’s put in front of you. It’s why she’s the one eating brahmin bits in gravy at the chow counter of the Grub n’ Gulp while the Courier’s the one talking water prices with Lupe in the next stall over.
Well, it’s one of the reasons. The other is somewhere between the soft curve of the Courier’s neck and the fluttering of her hands and the way Cass has been needing a little space to clear her head a lot more often lately.
Lupe laughs at something the Courier says, loud enough for Cass to hear them at the counter, and the unfortunate Freeside revelation rears its ugly head once more. Yeah, Cass is fucked.
“Food alright?” Fitz asks, probably because Cass is making some kind of face.
She takes another bite and nods. It really is—you don’t get brahmin that much out here, not like in California. It’s almost a stew, chunks of potato put through it to stretch the pot for a few more bowls. Fitz even uses salt and pepper when he’s got ‘em, and outside of Ruby Nash’s casseroles the Grub n’ Gulp’s got the best food this side of Vegas.
Makes sense, since all the NCR caravans stop through here, that they’re a little better supplied. Probably have a deal with the farms out by McCarran, or the folks trying to get things to grow from the lakeshore at Camp Golf. Cass is halfway through a hypothetical map of trade routes, resolutely ignoring both Lupe’s laughter and the fact that her own caravan’s smoking wreck is supposed to be less than a mile to the West.
If she asked, the Courier would find it. If she asked they’d both wander out in the desert for as many days as it would take, because the woman never lets anything go once she’s got ahold of it. She hasn’t asked yet. What good would it do, to find the ruins of her good name, maybe a couple raider bullets clinking their way across the ground? To see the Courier go still and drawn, the way she does when she’s delivering bad news?
The caravan’ll be an open wound for a very long time. No sense picking at the scab.
The Courier ambles her way over with half a dozen bottles of water and a smile, setting four of them at Cass’ elbow before swinging her pack around and digging out a handful of caps.
“Got any more of that?” she asks Fitz with a smile, and he nods and heads for the shack.
While he’s gone, the Courier packs away the other two bottles and gives Cass the look she gives when they’re about to get wrapped up in something. Well, whatever peace this meal came with is over.
“Lupe was telling me about a friend of hers,” the Courier starts, twisting her fingers together.
Cass opens one of the water bottles and takes a long drink, before passing it to the other woman. She blinks, a little flushed from the sun, and obediently takes a few swallows.
“Can it wait until we’re done eating?” Cass asks, eyes caught on the wet seam of the Courier’s mouth for a long second. It pulls into a frown.
“I was kinda thinking we’d ask Fitz about him,” she says, just a little bit of a pout coming through. Cass sighs, because, of course.
Fitz, either out of some sense of manners or, more likely, needing to offload the stew before it goes bad, brings two bowls out.
At Cass’ raised eyebrow, he grins. “Since you liked it so much, Miss Cassidy.”
It means Cass doesn’t have to contribute much to the Courier’s little interrogation, and they’ve got the caps for an extra serving, so she takes it with a tip of her head. Besides, it is good food.
“Fitz,” the Courier starts, one hand tapping a little rhythm on the countertop, the other stirring her food, “I was talking to Lupe about people we know—”
“Not about me, I hope,” he laughs, and she gives him a broad smile.
“Only the good things,” she teases.
Cass passes the open water back to her again, sees Fitz’s eye catch on it between the two of them. If anything, his smile gets wider. Ugh, someone save Cass from gossiping merchants.
“Anyway,” the Courier continues, “she was telling me about a guy you had come through here a couple weeks ago. Real spooked.”
“Oh, Carlyle,” Fitz says, levity fading a little. “Yeah, he was pretty unsettled. Didn’t stick around for more’n a night. Lupe told you about him?”
“She said he was all kinds of scared, but he talked to you about it for a while.” The Courier takes a drink, passes the last swallow of water to Cass.
Cass’ seen enough negotiations to know—the Courier’s letting Fitz stew a little, giving him time to think. Though what she wants to get out of it is anyone’s guess at this point.
“Said he’d been kidnapped,” Fitz says at last, and Cass feels anger stirring in her gut. Legion, probably, or some other variety of shithead.
“By who?” the Courier asks, leaning forward a little, pinning Fitz in place with her gaze.
“Why do you wanna know?”
“Because if somebody’s going around kidnapping people, I’m gonna do something about it,” she says, and Cass thinks of Nelson and crosses and the machete that’s still at the Courier’s waist. Yeah, she’s the type to do something about it.
Fitz sighs. “He thought maybe someone from his family—the St. Clairs are big out California way, and he’s not in their good books—but I’m not sure he was right about it.”
Cass frowns, setting her spoon down, and the Courier instantly looks to her.
“I’ve heard of them,” she says, and the Courier’s hanging onto every word. “They’re... big is the right word to use. The St. Clairs are the kind of big that means they’re the ones calling the meetings with whoever their senator is, not the other way around.”
“Yeah,” Fitz agrees, “and if they were out here, we’d know about it.”
“Carlyle’s out here,” the Courier points out, but Fitz waves a dismissive hand.
“Like I said, not in their good books. He told me he was up at the Strip, getting chewed up at the tables, then he was locked up somewhere underground. Then he got out and started running.”
“Do you think I could talk to him?” she asks, eyes alight, burning with conviction. She’s got one hand tapping her spoon, now, and the other is on the hilt of the machete, completely still.
“I—he was in a tough spot,” Fitz says. “I offered him a place to stay for a while, to get his feet back under him, maybe pitch in around here. He didn’t take it. Told me he was heading north, if that helps.”
The Courier tilts her head to the side, evaluating. A cardinal direction isn’t much of a guide to Cass, who’s used to landmarks and roads and common stops along the way, but the Courier’s got a knack for finding things. Must’ve made her a pretty good courier before, well, everything.
“If you wanted me to take him a letter,” she says slowly, the furrow in her brow that means she’s solving a puzzle clear to Cass, at least, “I could do it. I’m a courier.”
“I don’t—we didn’t know each other for long,” Fitz tries, but a man like Fitz doesn’t offer somebody a place to stay on a whim. He sees too many come and go, too many brokenhearted gamblers trickling out of the Strip, to do a thing like that.
“And I might not be able to find him,” the Courier says, conciliatory. “I’ll do it for cheap, then.”
“How cheap?”
The Courier gestures at their bowls. “Free meal?”
Fitz goes to get some paper.
“Lupe told me he liked the guy,” the Courier says, low, leaning closer to Cass. Their shoulders brush. “Said she’d give us four free bottles if we could get him to stop moping.”
“Is that where...?” Cass nods to the water at her elbow.
“No, I got those for you,” the Courier says easily. “She said next time we came back. And she’d owe us one.”
A favor from half the Grub n’ Gulp is... not much, in the grand scheme of things. But at the scale the Courier likes to work, running errands all around Freeside and all through the Mojave, Cass can see the value in a water merchant liking you. It’s not nothing. It’s just... well. Cass isn’t sticking around to get rich, at least. Their partnership is steady and profitable enough that they stop for hot food once in a while, and if it’s good enough that Cass doesn’t wanna fuck it up by leaning over and kissing the Courier right on the mouth, it’s good enough that she’s not gonna ditch the woman for taking small-time jobs.
---
It takes for-fucking-ever to find Carlyle St. Clair’s house, even with the map in the Pip-Boy and the Courier’s sense of direction. That’s probably the point of setting up a shack way out here, Cass knows, but it’s still annoying as all hell.
She’s not all the way unsympathetic to the guy’s plight. Getting snatched up is already a nightmare that a lot of people out here have, more since the Legion started really showing up in force, and getting snatched up while on the Strip is probably a whole extra layer of bad. People believe the Strip is safe, really believe it, and to have that shattered would probably be pretty rough. Cass thinks it’s pretty stupid to put all that trust in the robot soldiers who answer to a boss nobody’s met in two-hundred years, but still. She can see how it’d be a grim experience.
The Courier is nothing if not determined; she takes them looping up around Freeside, past Doctor Usanagi’s place, and they wander around the shacks for the better part of a day looking for the guy.
He’s not happy to see them.
“Keep your distance,” he says, squinting at them through his sunglasses. “Who are you, and what do you want?”
“You Carlyle?” the Courier asks, while Cass keeps a hand on her shotgun, just in case it breaks bad.
“Who’s asking?”
“Fitz, down at the Grub n’ Gulp. I’m with the Mojave Express, got a letter for you.”
There’s something in those words, when the Courier pulls them out, that makes people trust her. I’m with the Mojave Express, she could say, gun pointed at their faces, and they’d still trust her just a little bit more. It’s a real tangible thing out here in the desert, where a cut supply line means your town dies an agonizing death.
(It should’ve been enough to protect her from that snake in the checkered coat, if you ask Cass, but some people have too much power and not enough sense not to fuck with the mail.)
The words and the letter are enough for the three of them to sit out behind the shack, in the relatively cool shadow it casts. Carlyle reads the letter twice through, frowning.
“You got this from Fitz? Not from anybody else?” He’s smart to be wearing those sunglasses, Cass thinks, but in the shadow she can see his eyes dart around, paranoid. She’s got her shotgun across her lap, just in case something sets him off.
“Sure did,” the Courier says. “I was there when he wrote it. He’s real worried about you, you know.”
Carlyle twitches, not guilty—nervous. Even out here in the hardest house to find in the desert, he’s nervous.
Cass doesn’t exactly like him, definitely doesn’t trust him, but it doesn’t sit right to have a person looking like this.
“I—” he stops, chews on his lip.
The Courier looks like she wants to reach out her hand. Cass absolutely does not want to see if that’s a safe thing to do.
“He told us what happened to you,” she says, and the man’s eyes swing around to her. “Told us somebody grabbed you. Legion?”
“What? No,” he shakes his head. “It was one of those creeps at the Strip. The ones with the masks.”
“The White Glove Society,” the Courier says, mouth tight the way it gets when she thinks about Vegas. “You were kidnapped from the Ultra-Luxe?”
“Kidnapped by the Ultra-Luxe,” he corrects, scrubbing a hand through his hair. “I heard the guy talking about, about eating me.”
Cass recoils, just a little, and the Courier does the same. It... of course there are stories about cannibals. Old Ben in Freeside apparently knew one in his youth. But it’s another thing entirely to imagine being alone in a casino, under the thumb of all the power a family can bring to bear, and hearing that you might be dinner.
“Well, shit,” she says, and he nods emphatically.
The Courier digs around in her pack for a minute and offers him a cigarette. Her hands are almost still after he takes it, barely twitching—Cass knows that twitch, the weapon-wanting of it.
“It’d be suicidal to try and kill the whole White Glove Society,” she says, and the Courier glares at the ground. “Even if you went in at night, the place is never all the way asleep. None of the casinos are.”
“Do you know who took you?” the Courier asks, once Carlyle’s taken a few shaky puffs.
He shakes his head, clinging to the cigarette like a lifeline, watching the smoke rise like it’s proof of his own breath. “A tall man? They really do all wear masks, and I didn’t hear anybody’s name.”
The Courier looks at Cass. Cass looks at the Courier, gives a minute shake of her head. The Courier frowns, gives her own shake, and Cass tries to say we’ll fight about this later with her eyes alone. It must work, because the Courier turns back to the unsettled man.
“Carlyle,” she says, something ferociously gentle in her voice—Cass wonders if this is how she talked to the boys in Nelson, the one rambling about angels and twisters, the ones who didn’t speak at all—
“Carlyle,” she says, “do you have anywhere to go home to?”
“What? I, listen, there’s not many places I can go. And they might send somebody after me.”
“I won’t let that happen,” the Courier says, and she says it like she says I’m with the Mojave Express. Like it’s immoveable, like it’s the truest thing in the world. “We’re gonna help you, Carlyle,” and she does reach out, pats his shoulder.
He looks at her like she’s just shot him in the gut. Cass wonders how long he’s been out here, hiding. It’d been weeks since Fitz had seen him, and it takes days to walk this far from there. Probably a little too long, by anyone’s standards. Definitely a little too long by hers, as used to having another person around as she’s gotten.
“Fitz offered to let you stay,” Cass says, abrupt. She’s not practiced at comforting, and her gun is still across her lap. But she’s not lying, either.
“Did he write about it?” the Courier asks, once again withdrawing, folding back into her own space. Cass’ shoulders relax, just a little, when she’s back out of immediate stabbing range.
“I... yeah. He said if I still needed a place, I could stay for a while.” He looks almost dazed with the idea. “I have this place now, though.”
“It doesn’t seem good, if you’re out here all alone. Fitz and Lupe could help protect you,” the Courier tries, careful, but he starts shaking his head.
“They got me on the Strip,” he says. “They could get the two of them, easy—”
“Fitz and Lupe are NCR citizens,” Cass interjects, sharp. “It wasn't worth much for you, but they’re NCR citizens that are currently supplying patrols. Soldiers check in there every day. Bad as NCR response time is out here, the two of them aren’t about to disappear.”
“Besides, they’re my friends,” the Courier says, in a vast overstatement of their relationship to the Grub n’ Gulp. They’re decent customers, but Fitz and Lupe aren’t about to die for her.
“At some point, you have to let people help you,” Cass says, eyes catching on the machete at the Courier’s side. “Or else nobody’s gonna get anywhere.”
---
It takes four days to reach the Grub n’ Gulp this time, and the Courier spends most of her evenings in hushed arguments with Cass about the feasibility of killing an entire casino full of cannibals. She spends her days formulating outlandish strategies to torment Cass with when the nights roll around and Carlyle’s asleep.
They get back to the collection of stalls and Fitz looks like he’s been given a present he doesn’t know what to do with. Lupe passes the Courier four bottles of water with an impressed look.
Cass thinks about the days to come, the stupid, ridiculous danger of it all, and the Courier smiles, a sunbeam caught in it, because Cass has agreed to another one of her asinine plans.
At least she won’t be going in alone, this time.